Caregiving has taken over Therre's entire life, eclipsing his own small fame as a costumier. When his father dies, the funeral affairs are complicated by the long shadow of his late father's internationally renowned career as an actor. To honor the man who made him, Therre tailors himself a stunning mourning coat as he navigates the forgotten shores of the man he used to be.

Snow Kidama speaks to ghosts amongst the local gangs of Charybdis Precinct, isolated from the rest of New Arcadia by the city’s ancient walls. But when his old lover, Gem—a man he thought dead—shows up in need of his services, Snow is forced to reevaluate everything. Snow and Gem must navigate not only a city on the edge of collapse, but also their feelings for each other.

"This bite-size tale packs an outsize punch." ―Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) When the Southern Tier Strangler, a serial killer taking victims across the Rust Belt, winds up dead on Bina Morton's autoliner, she finds herself caught in a murder mystery in This murderer is an estranged man from her rural New York hometown and the mother that abandoned her might have been one of his early victims. The events that follow force Bina to confront buried memories of home, the woman her mother truly was, and everything Bina herself left behind. Part of the 2023 Neon Hemlock Novella Series

After receiving a letter telling him with terrible news, Doctor Lawrence Cooper visits the small harbor-town Osmund in search of answers. Though something is clearly wrong there, Lawrence keeps finding reasons to the sake of a young girl he meets, and to get to the bottom of his one-time lover's suspicious death. And the longer he stays, the more Lawrence is drawn into Osmund's peculiar mysteries. Cover Illustration by JJ Epping. PRAISE "Rich with shadows both ominous and melancholy, The Dreaming of Man mixes Innsmouth with Dunsinane, and sends a reluctant investigator to lift a curse and-perhaps-avert a tragedy. Moody, claustrophobic, and strangely hopeful about our ability to transform ourselves and transcend the uses that others find for our identities." -Ruthanna Emrys, author of Winter Tide and Deep Roots "An eerie, anxious read, crawling with tentacles of loss, regret, and uncanny coincidence. Nikoline Kaiser's voice recalls the timbre of a rotting, bygone place and time while remaining fresh and crisp. A true joy for lovers of the weird!" -A.Z. Louise, author of Off-Time Jive

In the tradition of Saw and Eli Roth’s Hostel, but with the evil supernatural twists of Stephen King, Alma Katsu, and Christopher Golden, two strangers unwittingly volunteer for the ultimate haunted house challenge in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter. Nine rooms. Nine tests. One chance to get out alive. Bestselling author Jeremy Bates invites you to spend the night in The No-End House. Where the nightmares begin as soon as you enter—and the terror never ends . . . It’s the ultimate haunted house challenge. A crumbling stone mansion nestled in the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona, it may be the best-kept secret in Europe—a little-known attraction featuring nine escape rooms to explore, nine puzzles to solve, and a large cash prize for anyone who makes it to the end. There’s just one catch: no one makes it to the end of The No-End House. . . . When Joe Hadfield hears about the house from a pair of backpackers, he’s intrigued but not interested. He’s trying to escape a nightmare of his own: the trauma of witnessing his wife’s grisly death. Traveling the world to ease his pain and grief, he meets a beautiful stranger named Helen who convinces him to try The No-End challenge together. Joe reluctantly agrees. But as soon as they enter its walls, meet its mysterious host—and sign an ominous contract—Joe begins to understand the seductive power of The No-End House . . . It knows his darkest secrets. It feeds his greatest fears. It makes him do things he would never do. And there is no end to what he will do . . . to make it out alive.

Crypt of the Moon Spider is a dark and dreamy tale of horror, corruption, and identity spun into the stickiest of webs. Years ago, in a cave beneath the dense forests and streams on the surface of the moon, a gargantuan spider once lived. Its silk granted its first worshippers immense faculties of power and awe. It’s now 1923 and Veronica Brinkley is touching down on the moon for her intake at the Barrowfield Home for Treatment of the Melancholy. A renowned facility, Dr. Barrington Cull’s invasive and highly successful treatments have been lauded by many. And they’re so simple! All it takes is a little spider silk in the amygdala, maybe a strand or two in the prefrontal cortex, and perhaps an inch in the hippocampus for near evisceration of those troublesome thoughts and ideas. But trouble lurks in many a mind at this facility and although the spider’s been dead for years, its denizens are not. Someone or something is up to no good, and Veronica just might be the cause.

Jaws with wasps. By the time Scarlett Sutton arrives at her dad’s cabin in the Smoky Mountains, two locals have already been eaten alive by wasps. Of course, she doesn’t know this yet. All Scarlett knows is her mom finally checked herself into a hospital to take care of her mental health, leaving Scarlett alone with her dad all summer. After he insists that she get a job, Scarlett accepts a position at nearby Stovetop Outfitters, hoping to spend as much time away from him as possible. She doesn’t expect to trip over a skeletonized corpse beneath the zip-line during one of her shifts—and definitely doesn’t expect to be thrown into a Netflix-style true crime investigation. The local sheriff’s department is so overwhelmed by these unsolved deaths that when one of the Stovetop Outfitters employees disappears next, Scarlett and her co-workers set out to find him on their own. They discover something much more horrifying: a swarm of yellow jackets stripping the meat off his body. Scarlett never signed up to solve a disgusting mystery, but in order to protect her friends and family, she must defeat the mountain’s darkness and all these godforsaken wasps.

Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise meets Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity in a Black woman’s coming-of-age story, chronicling a life-changing friendship, the interplay between music fandom and identity, and the slipperiness of sanity Set in the suburbs of Los Angeles and New York City, I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both is an immersive journey into the life and mind of Khaki Oliver, who’s perennially trying to disappear into something: a codependent friendship, an ill-advised boyfriend, the punk scene, or simply, the ether. These days it’s a meaningless job and a comfortingly empty apartment. Then, after a decade of estrangement, she receives a letter from her former best friend. Fiona’s throwing a party for her newly adopted daughter and wants Khaki to join the celebration. Khaki is equal parts terrified and tempted to reconnect. Their platonic love was confusing, all-consuming, and encouraged their worst impulses. While stalling her RSVP, Khaki starts crafting the perfect mixtape—revisiting memories of formative shows, failed romances, and the ups and downs of desire and denial—while weighing the risks and rewards of saying yes to Fiona again. One song at a time, from 1980s hardcore to 2010s emo, the shared and separate contours of each woman’s mind come into focus. Will listening to the same old songs on repeat doom Khaki to a lonely life of arrested development? Or will hindsight help her regain her sense of self and pave a healthy path for the future, with or without Fiona?

Resonant with the emotional power of the bestselling novels of David Nicholls and Jojo Moyes, a rich and poignant debut about lies, loss, and a transcendent love at the heart of a troubled marriage.A lifetime together. Six months of silence. One last chance. By all appearances, Frank and Maggie share a happy, loving marriage. But for the past six months, they have not spoken. Not a sentence, not a single word. Maggie isn’t sure what, exactly, provoked Frank’s silence, though she has a few ideas. Day after day, they have eaten meals together and slept in the same bed in an increasingly uncomfortable silence that has become, for Maggie, deafening. Then Frank finds Maggie collapsed in the kitchen, unconscious, an empty package of sleeping pills on the table. Rushed to the hospital, she is placed in a medically induced coma while the doctors assess the damage. If she regains consciousness, Maggie may never be the same. Though he is overwhelmed at the thought of losing his wife, will Frank be able to find his voice once again—and explain his withdrawal—or is it too late?

A love story set in 1845 Nantucket, between a female astronomer and the unusual man who understands her dreams. It is 1845, and Hannah Gardner Price has lived all twenty-four years of her life according to the principles of the Nantucket Quaker community in which she was raised, where simplicity and restraint are valued above all, and a woman’s path is expected to lead to marriage and motherhood. But up on the rooftop each night, Hannah pursues a very different—and elusive—goal: discovering a comet and thereby winning a gold medal awarded by the King of Denmark, something unheard of for a woman. And then she meets Isaac Martin, a young, dark-skinned whaler from the Azores who, like herself, has ambitions beyond his expected station in life. Drawn to his intellectual curiosity and honest manner, Hannah agrees to take Isaac on as a student. but when their shared interest in the stars develops into something deeper, Hannah’s standing in the community begins to unravel, challenging her most fundamental beliefs about work and love, and ultimately changing the course of her life forever. Inspired by the work of Maria Mitchell, the first professional female astronomer in America, The Movement of Stars is a richly drawn portrait of desire and ambition in the face of adversity.

A moving, funny, triumphant novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous among us. We are in the center of Paris, in an elegant apartment building inhabited by bourgeois families. Renée, the concierge, is witness to the lavish but vacuous lives of her numerous employers. Outwardly she conforms to every stereotype of the concierge: fat, cantankerous, addicted to television. Yet, unbeknownst to her employers, Renée is a cultured autodidact who adores art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. With humor and intelligence she scrutinizes the lives of the building's tenants, who for their part are barely aware of her existence. Then there's Paloma, a twelve-year-old genius. She is the daughter of a tedious parliamentarian, a talented and startlingly lucid child who has decided to end her life on the sixteenth of June, her thirteenth birthday. Until then she will continue behaving as everyone expects her to behave: a mediocre pre-teen high on adolescent subculture, a good but not an outstanding student, an obedient if obstinate daughter. Paloma and Renée hide both their true talents and their finest qualities from a world they suspect cannot or will not appreciate them. They discover their kindred souls when a wealthy Japanese man named Ozu arrives in the building. Only he is able to gain Paloma's trust and to see through Renée's timeworn disguise to the secret that haunts her. This is a moving, funny, triumphant novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous among us.

Berlin. 11 July 1986. They meet by chance on a bus. She is a young student, he is older and married. Theirs is an intense and sudden attraction, fuelled by a shared passion for music and art, and heightened by the secrecy they must maintain. But when she strays for a single night he cannot forgive her and a dangerous crack forms between them, opening up a space for cruelty, punishment and the exertion of power. And the world around them is changing as the GDR begins to crumble, so too do all the old certainties and the old loyalties, ushering in a new era whose great gains also involve profound loss. From a prize-winning German writer, this is the intimate and devastating story of the path of two lovers through the ruins of a relationship, set against the backdrop of a seismic period in European history.

Before the hospital, we had often raised our hands towards each other as we’d gone through life together. A man sits in a cafe, sipping a green juice and watching the world go by. A white butterfly flutters through the air; a calico cat jumps onto a wall; cherry blossom petals fall, softly, to the ground. Life, momentarily, stands still. Our unnamed narrator is preparing to visit his terminally ill wife in hospital. A prize-winning bestseller in Japan, Beautiful Distance is a profoundly affecting and intimate story that looks with honesty and tenderness at the journey towards the end of a life. It explores what family means, how we think about death, and the power of quiet acts of love.

Few first novels garner the kind of powerful praise awarded this epic story that takes place on the dusty, remorseless Oklahoma frontier, where two brothers are deadlocked in a furious rivalry. Fayette is an enterprising schemer hoping to cash in on his brother's talents as a gunsmith. John, determined not to repeat the crime that forced both families to flee their Kentucky homes, doggedly follows his tenacious brother west, while he watches his own family disintegrate. Wondrously told through the wary eyes of John's ten-year-old daughter, Mattie, whose gift of premonition proves to be both a blessing and a curse, The Mercy Seat resounds with the rhythms of the Old Testament even as it explores the mysteries of the Native American spirit world. Sharing Faulkner's understanding of the inescapable pull of family and history, and Cormac McCarthy's appreciation of the stark beauty of the American wilderness, Rilla Askew imbues this momentous work with her tremendous energy and emotional range. It is an extraordinary novel from a prodigious new talent.Strange Business, a collection of linked stories that won the 1993 Oklahoma Book Award, is available from Penguin.