Five recommendations for Halloween season

It’s spooooooky time, when crypt doors creak and the tombstones quake and spooks come out for a swinging wake… wait, that’s Disneyland. Here at Literary Underworld, we have some of the creepiest, crawliest horror around, so if you’re in the mood, check out these books!

John McFarland’s triumphant return to the horror genre has gotten strong reviews from Publisher’s Weekly and several others. Set in his fictional southern river down of Ste. Odile, he explores the darker side of the town’s history in The Dark Walk Forward.

The small town of Ste. Odile in America has experienced the Great War in ways that no one should ever have to endure. Doctors must tend to births and deaths that make their most difficult cases seem benign. An 1880s schoolteacher is faced with the worst blizzard of her time and must save the children under her charge. A young man searches for his father the abandoned orphanage the older man owns… and both know they will despair at what they find. A primitive woman experiences colonization and the stereotypes of men, yet finds her own method of retribution.

John S. McFarland has slogged through his characters’ woes and woven them into sweetly emotional yet acutely distressful tales. We as readers are forced to understand the pain, the despair, and sometimes the hope of his creations. We realize we are lucky to live in the era we do. We also realize anything can change to tear us apart. Is it fate? Destiny? Or do we bring about these changes on our own? McFarland will let us know.

 

There’s a monster coming to the small town of Pikeburn. In half an hour, it will begin feeding on the citizens, but no one will call the authorities for help. They are the ones who sent it to Pikeburn. They are the ones who are broadcasting the massacre live to the world. Every year, Red Diamond unleashes a new creation in a different town as a display of savage terror that is part warning and part celebration.
Only no one is celebrating in Pikeburn now. No one feels honored or patriotic. They feel like prey. Local Sheriff Yan Corban refuses to succumb to the fear, paranoia, and violence that suddenly grips his town. Stepping forward to battle this year’s lab-grown monster, Sheriff Corban must organize a defense against the impossible. His allies include an old art teacher, a shell-shocked mechanic, a hateful millionaire, a fearless sharpshooter, a local meth kingpin, and a monster groupie. Old grudges, distrust, and terror will be the monster’s allies in a game of wits and savagery, ambushes and treachery.
As the conflict escalates and the bodies pile up, it becomes clear this creature is unlike anything Red Diamond has unleashed before. No mercy will be asked for or given in this battle of man vs monster. It’s time to run, hide, or fight. It’s time for Red Diamond.

Horror isn’t just confined to the surface of the Earth. What we find out in space might be more terrifying than anything we’ve found in our own graveyards.
Commander Kate Daniels expected to find incompetency when sent to assess the terraforming progress on Primos. She didn’t expect a saboteur to force a crash landing, stranding them at the mercy of the hungry creatures roaming the planet.
If she and her crew can’t find a way off Primos, they will die there… and rise again.
Do you like a little western in your horror? Then Steven L. Shrewsbury’s Weird West novels are definitely for you.
Outside El Paso in 1899, Chief Blackthorn enlists the aide of aging Confederate Joel Stuart to retrieve a lost tome of evil. Sent into Juarez, the one-armed former guerrilla soon meets Adam Von Juntz, the nephew of the Black Bible’s author. The two search for the book stolen by notorious bad-man Jesus Bravo. But Bravo is just a puppet of the mysterious Preacherman and realizes he’s been duped and the promise of great riches was just a lie. Now he must join Stuart, and find The Preacherman.
The Preacherman is the conduit for a greater force seeking a return to the world, a female satyr called Shub-Niggurath. The Preacherman plots to bring an apocalyptic change to the world, ushering in a new era of the old gods. Surrounded by dire forces seeking a foot hold on this world, Joel and his companions battle walking nightmares and their own fears. Can Joel overcome the ruthless denizens of Juarez and foil the Preacherman and Shub-Niggurath’s horrifying plot which is already taking hold in the wombs of the Jaurez women?
A tale of action, courage and terror, LAST MAN SCREAMING will appeal of readers of Lovecraftian lore, tough westerns and horror. It teaches that survival isn’t always pretty.
Elizabeth Donald’s Twilight Zone-style brand of creepy horror led author and editor Michael Knost to call her “the George R.R. Martin of horror,” and at least one reviewer declared she had “a storytelling ability to rival that of Stephen King.”
In Moonlight Sonata, Donald returns to the creepy short stories that made Setting Suns an award-winning favorite. Imagine a haunted church, where the ground has turned sour and something walks in the shadows to the mournful hymns. A silent covered bridge that no one dares to cross. Angry spirits that cry out from beneath the ground of a cemetery that will not lie still. An ageless man bound in love to a mortal woman, forever moving, forever haunted.
A voice that can speak only through a radio, a voice from beyond death itself. A man haunted by an ageless face that brings tragedy to his life whenever it appears. A girl whose imagination carries her beyond the point of no return in a future where dreams become reality – and so do nightmares.
All these and many more are in stock and available now from the Literary Underworld! Click here to explore the scary titles as we wind onward… into the dark.