Victor LaValle0.0
Ricky Rice is a middling hustler with a lingering junk habit, a bum knee, and a haunted mind. A survivor of a suicide cult, he scrapes by as a porter at a bus depot in Utica, New York, until one day a mysterious letter arrives, summoning him to enlist in a band of paranormal investigators comprised of former addicts and petty criminals, all of whom had at some point in their wasted lives heard what may have been the voice of God.
Infused with the wonder of a disquieting dream and laced with Victor LaValle’s fiendish comic sensibility, Big Machine is a mind-rattling mystery about doubt, faith, and the monsters we carry within us.
Brian Evenson3.4 Intense and profoundly unsettling, Brian Evenson’s Last Days is a down-the-rabbit-hole detective novel set in an underground religious cult. The story follows Kline, a brutally dismembered detective forcibly recruited to solve a murder inside the cult. As Kline becomes more deeply involved with the group, he begins to realize the stakes are higher than he previously thought. Attempting to find his way through a maze of lies, threats, and misinformation, Kline discovers that his survival depends on an act of sheer will. Last Days was first published in 2003 as a limited edition novella titled The Brotherhood of Mutilation. Its success led Evenson to expand the story into a full-length novel. In doing so, he has created a work that’s disturbing, deeply satisfying, and completely original.
Сара Уотерс3.7 Эта история с привидениями, в которой слышны отголоски классических книг Диккенса и Эдгара По, Генри Джеймса и Ширли Джексон, Агаты Кристи и Дафны Дюморье, разворачивается в обветшалой усадьбе Хандредс-Холл, претерпевающей не лучшие времена: изысканный парк зарос, половина комнат законсервирована, гостей приходится принимать в цокольном этаже, и вообще быть аристократом невыгодно. Что до действующих лиц, то предоставим слово автору: «Стареющая миссис Айрес, пленница ускользающего былого стиля жизни, ее почти безнадежно незамужняя дочь и израненный на войне сын. Я снабдила их юной служанкой по имени Бетти и мягким другом — доктором Фарадеем, который запутается в хитросплетениях их истории, набравшей жути и преобразившей его. В довершение я подселила к ним нечто вроде призрака...»
Karen Maitland4.2 England, 1321. Deep in the heart of countryside lies an isolated village governed by a sinister regime of Owl Masters - theirs is a pagan world of terror and blackmail, where neighbour denounces neighbour and sin is punishable by murder. This dark status quo is disturbed by the arrival of a house of religious women, who establish a community outside the village. Why do their crops succeed when village crops fail; their cattle survive despite the plague? But petty jealousy turns deadly when the women give refuge to a young martyr. For she dies a gruesome death after spitting the sacramental host into flames that can't burn it - what magic is this? Or is the martyr now a saint and the host a holy relic? Accusations of witchcraft and heresy run rife while the Owl Masters rain down hellfire and torment on the women, who must look to their faith to save them from the lengthening shadow of Evil ... a shadow with predatory, terrifying talons.
Caitlin R. Kiernan3.3 Sarah Crowe left Atlanta, and the remnants of a tumultuous relationship, to live alone in an old house in rural Rhode Island. Within its walls she discovers an unfinished manuscript written by the house's former tenant-a parapsychologist obsessed with the ancient oak growing on a desolate corner of the property. And as the gnarled tree takes root in her imagination, Sarah risks her health and her sanity to unearth a revelation planted centuries ago...
Helen Oyeyemi3.4 In a vast, mysterious house on the cliffs near Dover, the Silver family is reeling from the hole punched into its heart. Lily is gone and her twins, Miranda and Eliot, and her husband, the gentle Luc, mourn her absence with unspoken intensity. All is not well with the house, either, which creaks and grumbles and malignly confuses visitors in its mazy rooms, forcing winter apples in the garden when the branches should be bare. Generations of women inhabit its walls. And Miranda, with her new appetite for chalk and her keen sense for spirits, is more attuned to them than she is to her brother and father. She is leaving them slowly -
Slipping away from them -
And when one dark night she vanishes entirely, the survivors are left to tell her story.
"Miri I conjure you "
This is a spine-tingling tale that has Gothic roots but an utterly modern sensibility. Told by a quartet of crystalline voices, it is electrifying in its expression of myth and memory, loss and magic, fear and love.
Nick Antosca0.0 In the morning, Bram finds the bones of a murdered child. At noon, the murdered child begs for his help. And by nightfall, they have killed a man together and set off into the afterlife, where nothing is what it was, and death is only the beginning of punishment. An eerie story about the nature of death and the self, Midnight Picnic inhabits an American landscape made strange and unfamiliar. From the author of the cult novel Fires, Midnight Picnic is a haunting and disturbing experience.
Sarah Pinborough0.0 Tonight is a special, terrible night. A woman sits at her father's bedside watching the clock tick away the last hours of his life. Her brothers and sisters - all traumatised in their own ways, their bonds fragile - have been there for the past week, but now she is alone. And that's always when it comes. As the clock ticks in the darkness, she can only wait for it to find her...
Margo Lanagan0.0 'Why would I? People are uneasy enough with me - if I start bringing up sea-wives, they'll take against me good and proper.'
'It could be secret.'
'Could it?'
On remote Rollrock Island, the sea-witch Misskaella discovers she can draw a girl from the heart of a seal. So, for a price, any man might buy himself a bride; an irresistibly enchanting sea-wife. But what cost will be borne by the people of Rollrock - the men, the women, the children - once Misskaella sets her heart on doing such a thing?
Margo Lanagan weaves an extraordinary tale of desire and revenge, of loyalty, heartache and human weakness, and of the unforeseen consequences of all-consuming love.
Quentin S. Crisp0.0 Brett Stokes is already middle-aged and yet feels that his life has not begun. In an attempt to make sense of his existence he travels to the provincial town of Ôtani in Japan, hoping that, through his writing, he will obtain the insight that he lacks. But in Japan it is late autumn and, closeted within the garden of the lately widowed Mrs Kunisada, Stokes finds the motley
collection of arboreal reds and yellows working upon his imagination, until reality itself becomes spectral.
As the strange season unfolds, and Stokes meditates upon the meaning of life, death and literature, the
power of the Shrike gradually takes centre-stage.
In this startling novella Quentin S. Crisp fuses delicacy with darkness and pathos with terror, creating
a blend of Japanese and English literature that is as deeply moving as it is unique.
