Tag: Horror


Oct
2025

Horror Blends for Halloween

categories: Featured Blend, New Releases

Happy Halloween! This is the perfect time of year to read a book that gives you a taste of the scary goodness that the horror genre has in spades. But what if you always thought you didn’t like horror? Sometimes an easier entry point is a blend of horror and another genre. Here are a handful of recent horror blends to put you in a spooky mood.

 

Horror + Historical Fiction

Cover for book Buffalo Hunter Hunter, with a large image of a buffalo head taking up most of the cover with red text over it.

Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones

This novel of a Blackfeet man seeking revenge in early 20th century Montana has won accolades and starred reviews from all over the publishing world for good reason. While still housing the blood-soaked heart of a horror novel, it also examines the deeper horror of injustices against native peoples and violence against the land itself. Oh, and vampires.

 

Horror + Science Fiction

Cover image for book Cold Eternity with a blue toned image of a cryogenic chamber in the center with a shadow of a strange hand appearing over it. There is a caption "No one gets out alive" and the title in red lettering at the bottom.

Cold Eternity by S. A. Barnes

Running from a political scandal, a woman decides a job on a  barge storing the cryogenic bodies of the wealthy elite is the perfect hideout. But there is something or someone else hiding among the frozen almost-dead. Barnes excels at space-based horror and this one has plenty of twists along with its scares.

 

Horror + Fantasy + Historical

The cover for the book The Bewitching is a dark green with sillouetted vines bordering the image of a feminine hand. Above the hand is a golden bird pinned in place. In the center, the book title is also in gold.

The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

A grad student in horror literature has focused her studies on Beatrice Tremblay, an obscure writer who attended her university. It seems Tremblay based her most famous novel on her time at the school, and on her strange roommate. Another critical and popular hit from the always reliable Moreno-Garcia.

 

Horror + Mystery

Cover for the book Strange Pictures. It consists of 4 hand-drawn images on a bright green background. The title is in black letters at the top and there is a box at the lower right that says "The Japanese Mystery-Horror sensation".

Strange Pictures by Uketsu

A collection of drawings seem innocent, but contain clues to mysteries old and new. More eerie than flat-out scary, the author presents the pictures in short vignettes that have the reader puzzle not only the meaning of each set, but how they all might be connected.

 

Horror + Romance

Cover image for the title ZomRomCom. On a purple background, there are two figures, a man in black and a woman in bright pink overalls. He is wielding a sword, she has a cleaver. There are green zombie hands reaching in from the sides of the book. The title is in green, with a dripping blood effect.

Zomromcom by Olivia Dade

This is classed as a paranormal romance, and that’s fair: in horror the characters are fighting the monsters and in paranormal romance, the characters are usually having sexy times with the monsters. But Dade combines the two as  her sunshine heroine teams up with a grumpy vampire to fight off a zombie infestation.

 

Want more horror blends? Visit the blender!


Mar
2015

Horror with Humor

categories: Featured Blend

Are you watching iZombie?  The new show about a girl infected with a zombie virus who works in a morgue and solves crime? On the CW on Tuesday nights?  Well you should be.  It’s one of the most promsiing combinations of witty, banter-y humor and horror that I’ve seen in a while.

It also made me realize that while I’m a fan of horror in general I really love horror that knows how to laugh at itself.  Because I’m more sensitive to visual scares than written ones, I actually refused to watch any horror movies until Evil Dead came along. There’s something so cathartic about laughing in the middle of something terrifying. While there are a lot of horror (novels and films both) with moments of unexpected humor, I’m talking here about laugh-out-loud funny stuff, rather than the dark-as-night black humor of something like Bret Easton Ellis.  Some of my favorites are genuinely scary horror with comic relief, some are more comedies that adopt horror scenery, but they all combine that desire to bring you to an uncomfortable place through a scary or gross set-up and then make you laugh. This kind of push-pull of maintaining tension and then releasing it through humor is actually incredibly impressive, so if you like to laugh-scream, here are some picks for you. (more…)


Oct
2014

Horror for Beginners

categories: Featured Blend

I am sure there are many readers who would swear on a stack on bibles that they don’t read horror, but who might read certain horror that sneaks onto the bestseller lists or gets literary love.  I thought, in honor of Halloween and All Hallow’s Read (you know– the super-fantastic tradition that Neil Gaiman invented where everyone gives someone a scary book for Halloween?), I would highlight some books that are fantastic horror novels that for one reason or another are read far beyond the normal genre audience for horror.  Sometimes these are books by well-respected literary novelists who are dabbling in a darker hue; sometimes they are subtle horror novels that skirts the edges of the genre. They might be as scary as anything Stephen King ever penned, but they sit on our “literature” shelves rather than in the horror ghetto.  These scary books have gotten a lot of critical love and might be just the thing to give someone who doesn’t think they read horror. (more…)


Oct
2014

The Troupe by Robert Jackson Bennett

categories: Review

troupe

FANTASY/HORROR/HISTORICAL FICTION

TITLE: The Troupe
AUTHOR: Robert Jackson Bennett
PUBLISHER: Orbit, 2011

THE BOOK: In an undefined turn-of-the-last-century time when vaudeville was still going strong, we meet young George Carole, a piano player at a small Vaudeville theatre in the middle of America somewhere/nowhere. Sixteen-year-old George is working at Otterman’s theatre for only one reason:  he hopes his father will play there someday so he can finally meet the man. But when he does finally track down his father’s vaudevillian troupe, nothing goes as planned.  His father, Hieronymus Silenus, is involved in something bigger and scarier than a simple entertainment and when George see the Silenus troupe play, his life is changed forever. Between the creepy puppet act, the tantalising dancing of the beautiful Colette, and the mesmerizing song that ends the act, George is fascinated.  But it is his encounter after the show with a spooky gray man who sucks all the light out of the world around him that decides George to sign on with the Troupe. Because Silenus is somehow using his show to battle back all the evil of the world.  Or is he? (more…)


Jun
2014

Restorer by Amanda Stevens

categories: Review

FANTASY/HORROR/MYSTERY/ROMANCE

Title: Restorer
Author: Amanda Stevens
Publisher: Mira, 2011
Series: Graveyard Queen, Book 1

THE BOOK: Amelia Gray is a young woman with an unusual job: she restores cemeteries for a living. Working in and around her home base of Charleston, she has built up a reputation as an expert in meticulous restorations of historic burial places. She learned the trade from her father, and grew up watching him work as a caretaker at a local cemetery. But it appears she inherited more than a professional aptitude from her father. (more…)


Jun
2014

The Burning Dark by Adam Christopher

categories: Review

SCIENCE FICTION/HORROR

Title: The Burning Dark
Author: Adam Christopher
Publisher: Tor, 2014
Series: Spider Wars, Book 1

THE BOOK: From the moment decorated war hero Captain Idaho Cleveland arrives on the U-Star Coast City he knows something is not right. No one on board seems to have heard of him. Ego aside, the battle that he survived should have been known to anyone in the military, as it was the only successful fleet action against the Spiders. Ida is being eased out of the military, and this posting to the station is his final assignment. (more…)


May
2014

The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

categories: Review

SF/THRILLER/HORROR
Title: The Shining Girls
Author: Lauren Beukes
Publisher: Mulholland Books, 2013

THE BOOK: Harper Curtis is a time traveling serial killer.  How about that for a one-sentence pitch? Harper discovers purely by chance a key to a very creepy house whose doors open on different times.  The catch is that the house wants Harper to find and kill certain girls —  girls that shine. (more…)