Accidentally trapped in an underground bunker, a teen girl must navigate the bizarre secrets within. This astonishing indie-horror graphic novel will keep readers guessing—and turning pages! Mary had a bad feeling even before they arrived at dead Aunt Pearl’s house. Dragged to a remote mining town so her mom and stepdad can settle Pearl’s estate, Mary can't wait to escape from her wreck of a family—but she’s stuck with them in the middle of nowhere. After a vicious fight, Mary runs off to hide in an abandoned gold mine. Her escape plan backfires when she realizes she’s trapped inside. Even more terrifying… she’s not alone.

Area X has been cut off from the rest of the world for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; the second expedition ended in mass suicide, the third in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another. The members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within weeks, all had died of cancer. In Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, we join the twelfth expedition. The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one another, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself. They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers—but it’s the surprises that came across the border with them and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another that change everything.

Zhao Yunlan is Chief of the Special Investigations Department: a secret group of uniquely skilled individuals who investigate strange happenings in modern-day Dragon City. Although laid-back and cheeky to those who don't know him, this tenacious and cunning man fits well into his role of the Guardian. While investigating a mysterious death at a local university, Zhao Yunlan meets Shen Wei, a calm and cold professor who proves as intriguing as the case itself. Something about this reserved man feels strangely familiar. Zhao Yunlan can't help but notice the intensity of the professor's gaze, and wonders why their lives begin to intertwine—as if by fate.

THE SLEEPING GOD STIRS As snow quietly covers Dragon City in the final days of the lunar year, patients writhing in pain flock to the hospital. Baffled doctors call upon Zhao Yunlan and his team for help. As the case unfolds, Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan discover that one of the Four Hallowed Artifacts, the Merit Brush, has appeared in the Mortal Realm. In the wrong hands, its power can be transformative. While each step toward the artifact only pulls the pair deeper into a vortex of mysteries, Zhao Yunlan keeps stumbling upon a name: Kunlun. Who is Kunlun, and what is his connection to the Merit Brush? As Zhao Yunlan closes in on the answer, will he also uncover the truth behind Shen Wei’s knowing gaze?

The first love of a teenage girl is a powerful thing, particularly when the object of that desire is her best friend, also a girl. It's the kind of power that could implode a family, a friendship, a life. On a quiet summer night in Newcastle, 1972, a choice must be to act upon these desires, or suppress them? To live an openly queer life, or to try desperately not to?Over the following three decades, these two lives almost intersect in pivotal moments, the distance between them at times drawing so thin they nearly collide. Against the backdrop of an era including Australia's first Mardi Gras and the AIDS pandemic, we see these two lives ebb and flow, with joy and grief and loss and desire, until at last they come together in the most beautiful and surprising of fashions.A Language of Limbs is about love and how it's policed, friendship and how it transcends, and hilarity in the face of heartbreak - the jokes you tell as you're dying and the ways laughing at a funeral softens the edges of our grief. An unashamed celebration of queer life in all its vibrancy and colour, this story finds the humanity in all of us, and demands we claim our futures for ourselves.

Two teen vigilantes set off on an action-packed investigation to expose corruption and deliver justice in Valiant Ladies, Melissa Grey's YA historical fiction novel inspired by real seventeenth century Latinx teenagers known as the Valiant Ladies of Potosí. By day Eustaquia “Kiki” de Sonza and Ana Lezama de Urinza are proper young seventeeth century ladies. But when night falls, they trade in their silks and lace for swords and muskets, venturing out into the vibrant, bustling, crime-ridden streets of Potosí, in the Spanish Empire's Viceroyalty of Peru. They pass their time fighting, gambling, and falling desperately in love with one another. Then, on the night Kiki's engagement to the Viceroy's son is announced, her older brother―heir to her family’s fortune―is murdered. The girls immediately embark on a whirlwind investigation that takes them from the lowliest brothels of Potosí to the highest echelons of the Spanish aristocracy.

Too many popular histories seek to establish heroes, pioneers and martyrs but as Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller argue, the past is filled with queer people whose sexualities and dastardly deeds have been overlooked. We all remember Oscar Wilde, but who speaks for Bosie? What about those ‘bad gays’ whose unexemplary lives reveals more than we might expect? Part revisionist history, part historical biography and based on the hugely popular podcast series, Bad Gays subverts the notion of gay icons and queer heroes and asks what we can learn about LGBTQ history, sexuality and identity through its villains and baddies. From the Emperor Hadrian to notorious gangster Ronnie Kray, the authors excavate the buried history of queer lives. This includes fascist thugs, famous artists, austere puritans and debauched bon viveurs, imperialists, G-men and architects. Together these amazing life stories expand and challenge the mainstream assumptions of sexual identity. They show that homosexuality itself was an idea that emerged in the nineteenth century and that its interpretation has been central to major historical moments of conflict from the ruptures of Weimar Republic to red-baiting in Cold War America. Amusing, disturbing and fascinating, Bad Gays puts centre stage the queer villains and evil twinks in history.

Fried Green Tomatoes and Steel Magnolias meet Dracula in this Southern-flavored supernatural thriller set in the '90s about a women's book club that must protect its suburban community from a mysterious and handsome stranger who turns out to be a blood-sucking fiend. Patricia Campbell had always planned for a big life, but after giving up her career as a nurse to marry an ambitious doctor and become a mother, Patricia's life has never felt smaller. The days are long, her kids are ungrateful, her husband is distant, and her to-do list is never really done. The one thing she has to look forward to is her book club, a group of Charleston mothers united only by their love for true-crime and suspenseful fiction. In these meetings, they're more likely to discuss the FBI's recent siege of Waco as much as the ups and downs of marriage and motherhood. But when an artistic and sensitive stranger moves into the neighborhood, the book club's meetings turn into speculation about the newcomer. Patricia is initially attracted to him, but when some local children go missing, she starts to suspect the newcomer is involved. She begins her own investigation, assuming that he's a Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy. What she uncovers is far more terrifying, and soon she—and her book club—are the only people standing between the monster they've invited into their homes and their unsuspecting community.

Before Dracula, there were The Brides. . . 1903. Sir John Seward, survivor of Count Dracula’s murderous campaign ten years before, takes up a post as a psychiatric doctor at an Oxford public asylum. There, a new patient arrives whose traumatic experiences resurrect horrors John has spent a decade trying to forget. 1884. Mafalda Lowell journeys from London to Budapest to care for her recently widowed aunt Reka. She uncovers the chilling truth about her uncle’s death, and writes to her secret love Lucy North for comfort. Chaperoned by former schoolfriend Eliza and lady’s maid Alice, Lucy travels across the continent to be with her beloved. Only Alice, beset by nightmares and terrifying visions, notices the strange black-clad man who seems to follow them wherever they go. When Eliza is struck down with a mysterious wasting illness, her doctor orders her to take the healing waters of Transylvania, a journey with devastating consequences. There was meant to be four . . . A dual timeline novel, told through letters, diary entries, psychiatric reports, that places women at the centre of literature's most famous vampire story.

Author of sales sensation If We Were Villains returns with a story about a ragtag group of night shift workers who meet in the local cemetery to unearth the secrets lurking in an open grave. Every night, in the college’s ancient cemetery, five people cross paths as they work the late shift: a bartender, a rideshare driver, a hotel receptionist, the steward of the derelict church that looms over them, and the editor-in-chief of the college paper, always in search of a story. One dark October evening in the defunct churchyard, they find a hole that wasn’t there before. A fresh, open grave where no grave should be. But who dug it, and for whom? Before they go their separate ways, the gravedigger returns. As they trail him through the night, they realize he may be the key to a string of strange happenings around town that have made headlines for the last few weeks—and that they may be closer to the mystery than they thought. Atmospheric and eerie, with the ensemble cast her fans love and a delightfully familiar academic backdrop, Graveyard Shift is a modern Gothic tale in If We Were Villains author M. L. Rio’s inimitable style.