Inverarity is not a Scottish village

Berkley, 2025, 482 pages

There’s power in a book…

They call them wayward girls. Loose girls. Girls who grew up too fast. And they’re sent to Wellwood House in St. Augustine, Florida, where unwed mothers are hidden by their families to have their babies in secret, to give them up for adoption, and most important of all, to forget any of it ever happened.

Fifteen-year-old Fern arrives at the home in the sweltering summer of 1970, pregnant, terrified and alone. Under the watchful eye of the stern Miss Wellwood, she meets a dozen other girls in the same predicament. There’s Rose, a hippie who insists she’s going to find a way to keep her baby and escape to a commune. And Zinnia, a budding musician who plans to marry her baby’s father. And Holly, a wisp of a girl, barely fourteen, mute and pregnant by no-one-knows-who.

Everything the girls eat, every moment of their waking day, and everything they’re allowed to talk about is strictly controlled by adults who claim they know what’s best for them. Then Fern meets a librarian who gives her an occult book about witchcraft, and power is in the hands of the girls for the first time in their lives. But power can destroy as easily as it creates, and it’s never given freely. There’s always a price to be paid...and it’s usually paid in blood.

Titan Books, 2024, 400 pages

Maybe this is a ghost story . . .

Andrew Larimer has left his past behind. Rising up the ranks in a New York law firm, and with a heavily pregnant wife, he is settling into a new life far from Kingsport, the town in which he grew up. But when he receives a late-night phone call from an old friend, he has no choice but to return home.

Coming home means returning to his late father's house, which has seen better days. It means lying to his wife. But it also means reuniting with his friends: Eric, now the town's sheriff; Dale, a real-estate mogul living in the shadow of a failed career; his childhood sweetheart Tig who never could escape town; and poor Meach, whose ravings about a curse upon the group have driven him to drugs and alcohol.

Together, the five friends will have to confront the memories—and the horror—of a night, years ago, that changed everything for them.

Because Andrew and his friends have a secret. A thing they have kept to themselves for twenty years. Something no one else should know. But the past is not dead, and Kingsport is a town with secrets of its own.

One dark secret . . .

One small-town horror . . .

Tor Books, 1986, 368 pages

Isolated on the moors of northern England, the town of Moonwell has remained faithful to their Druid traditions and kept their old rituals alive, where for generations the townspeople have have decorated a cave to appease an ancient druidic custom.

However the village has been taken over by authoritarian fundamentalists, led by right-wing evangelist Godwin Mann, who preaches his intolerant brand of fundamentalism. He converts many of the people and brings a stop to the pagan ceremony. The charismatic leader rallies all but a few into fanatics who hang on his every word. Turns out, there was a good reason for the druidic ceremony of the cave. It kept an ancient, powerful entity from emerging.

But Mann goes too far when he descends into the pit where the ancient being who’s been worshipped by the Druids for centuries is said to dwell. He rouses the Druids' moon god to rise from his cave. What emerges is a demon in Mann’s shape, and the dark entity from the cave rapidly transforms Moonwell into a Hell on Earth. Some of the people are turned into sub-human creatures, and only the town’s outcasts can see that something is horribly wrong. As the evil spreads and heads toward a modern missile base to wreak havoc on the human race, Moonwell becomes cut off from the rest of the world…

Soho Press, 2003, 168 pages

A recurrent, unidentifiable noise in her apartment. A memo to her boss that's replaced by obscene insults. Amanda - a successful architect in a happy marriage - finds her life going off kilter by degrees. She starts smoking again, and one night for no reason, without even the knowledge that she's doing it, she burns her husband with a cigarette. At night she dreams of a beautiful woman with pointed teeth on the shore of a blood-red sea.

The new voice in Amanda's head, the one that tells her to steal things and talk to strange men in bars, is strange and frightening, and Amanda struggles to wrest back control of her life. Is she possessed by a demon, or is she simply insane?

Apex Publications, 2010, 330 pages

2010 Stoker Award Winner for Superior Achievement in Nonfiction

Explore the world of writing horror from a Bram Stoker and International Horror Guild award-winning author's point of view. Gary Braunbeck uses film, fiction, and life experience to elucidate the finer points of storytelling, both in and out of genre. This part-autobiographical, always analytical book looks at how stories develop and what makes them work--or not work--when they're told.

Be warned: reality is as brutal as fiction. Rob Zombie, police shootings, William Goldman, and human misery are all teachers to the horror neophyte, and Braunbeck uses their lessons to make To Each Their Darkness a whirlwind of horror and hope for the aspiring writer.

ILT Publishing, 2003, 284 pages

Three veterans of different wars, their lives once saved by magic, find themselves brought together in one of the most strange, remote, and cruel parts of the California desert. As serial killers ply their deadly trade, a young woman, abducted and endangered, seeks her own brand of justice for those who threatened her, and an ancient evil sprouts from beneath desert sands, these three war veterans must learn to embrace the terrifying bond they share. Written in powerful prose as dry and dangerous as its desert setting, The Slab, for all its horrors, is ultimately an epic tale of hope and redemption.

Night Shade, 2006, 284 pages

Clark Ashton Smith’s unique take on science fiction, fantasy, and horror is given life by a chorus of voices, performing 25 of his earliest works, including "The Abominations of Yondo", "The Monster of the Prophecy", "The Last Incantation", and the title story. This first of five volumes of edited and curated "preferred texts" of Smith’s work serves as justification for a re-appreciation of this master of speculative fiction, the third member of the Weird Tales unholy horror trinity, the other two being H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. Smith’s appreciation for human sexuality, fondness for ribald humor, and strong female characters are all on display in mind-engaging, goose bump-inspiring short and unsettling stories.

Katherine Tegen Books, 2022, 416 pages

When Springville residents—at least the ones still alive—are questioned about what happened on prom night, they all have the same explanation . . . Maddy did it.

An outcast at her small-town Georgia high school, Madison Washington has always been a teasing target for bullies. And she's dealt with it because she has more pressing problems to manage. Until the morning a surprise rainstorm reveals her most closely kept secret: Maddy is biracial. She has been passing for white her entire life at the behest of her fanatical white father, Thomas Washington.

After a viral bullying video pulls back the curtain on Springville High's racist roots, student leaders come up with a plan to change their image: host the school's first integrated prom as a show of unity. The popular white class president convinces her Black superstar quarterback boyfriend to ask Maddy to be his date, leaving Maddy wondering if it's possible to have a normal life.

But some of her classmates aren't done with her just yet. And what they don't know is that Maddy still has another secret . . . one that will cost them all their lives.

Inkshares, 2017, 421 pages

An AI cannot lie. An AI must obey human commands. An AI cannot kill. These are the laws SCARAB has broken, and only Mary knows.

The Tantalus 13 survey expedition went off the rails as soon as Mary Ketch and the crew of the Diamelen learned that the thing beneath their feet wasn’t a planet. An impossibly vast and ancient artificial structure lies below, hidden from the universe under a façade of cratered stone.

SCARAB arrived on Tantalus 13 two years ago. An artificially intelligent, self-constructing factory, it was supposed to aid the crew in their mission, to meet their every need. But when erratic behavior in the AI coincides with a series of deadly accidents among the crew, Mary faces the horrifying possibility that SCARAB has gone rogue.

With the AI watching her every move, any attempt to warn the crew could be disastrous. But SCARAB knows far more about the Tantalus 13 enigma than it lets on, and the secrets it’s willing to kill for may have dire implications for all humankind.

Scribner, 2022, 608 pages

Charlie Reade looks like a regular high school kid, great at baseball and football, a decent student. But he carries a heavy load. His mom was killed in a hit-and-run accident when he was ten, and grief drove his dad to drink. Charlie learned how to take care of himself—and his dad. When Charlie is seventeen, he meets a dog named Radar and her aging master, Howard Bowditch, a recluse in a big house at the top of a big hill, with a locked shed in the backyard. Sometimes strange sounds emerge from it.

Charlie starts doing jobs for Mr. Bowditch and loses his heart to Radar. Then, when Bowditch dies, he leaves Charlie a cassette tape telling a story no one would believe. What Bowditch knows, and has kept secret all his long life, is that inside the shed is a portal to another world.

King’s storytelling in Fairy Tale soars. This is a magnificent and terrifying tale in which good is pitted against overwhelming evil, and a heroic boy—and his dog—must lead the battle.