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James Kennedy’s Five Midwestern Horror Novel Picks
I grew up in Michigan and I’ve spent most of my life in the Midwest. When I began writing my horror novel Bride of the Tornado, one of the things I had in my mind was an October night in the 1990s, when my wife-to-be Heather and I headed out to rural Indiana to visit a “haunted house.”
It was farther away from town than we thought. When we arrived, we found just a few train cars in a desolate field. No other visitors. A creepy girl played with some dolls in the grass. After a minute, she got up and gravely led us through the train cars. A family sat around a table, greeting us indifferently as we passed. Did they live here? Who knew? These train cars were full of homemade oddities, more quirky than spooky. A bucket of plastic body parts. A cheesy mechanical doll. It was awkward and low-rent, not scary.
Then a maniac jumped out of nowhere with a chainsaw.
Posted by James Kennedy
This Wretched Valley
Four ambitious climbers hike into the Kentucky wilderness. Seven months later, three mangled bodies are discovered. Were their deaths simple accidents or the result of something more sinister?
This nail-biting, bone-chilling survival horror novel is inspired by the infamous Dyatlov Pass incident, and is perfect for fans of Alma Katsu and Showtime’s Yellowjackets.
This is going to be Dylan’s big break. Her friend Clay, a geology student, has discovered an untouched cliff face in the Kentucky wilderness, and she is going to be the first person to climb it. Together with Clay, his research assistant Sylvia, and Dylan’s boyfriend Luke, she is going to document her achievement on Instagram and finally cement her place as the next rising star in rock climbing.
Seven months later, three bodies are discovered in the trees just off the highway. All are in various states of decay: one body a stark, white skeleton; the second emptied of its organs; and the third a mutilated corpse with the tongue, eyes, ears, and fingers removed.
But Dylan is still missing. Followers of her Instagram account report seeing disturbing livestreams, and some even claim to have caught glimpses of her vanishing into the thick woods, but no trace of her—dead or alive—has been discovered.
Were the climbers murdered? Did they succumb to cannibalism? Or are their impossible bodies the work of an even more sinister force? Is Dylan still alive, and does she hold the answers?
This page-turning debut will have you racing towards the inevitable conclusion.
Posted by Christina Schillaci
Holiday Gift Guide 2022: Horror for the Holidays
The holidays are the best time to read horror, in our opinion. Whether you’re looking for fiction or nonfiction, we have your one-stop-shop for horror fans below.
Posted by Quirk Books Staff
Cruisin’ for Cryptids: J. W. Ocker’s Road Trip Tips for The United States of Cryptids
Maybe you’re lucky enough to live in a town where bigfoot is sighted so often you need bigfoot crossing signs. Or a town with a lake so well-stocked that every cast yields reptilian monsters. Or one where midnight visits from flashlight-headed pterodactyls and woman-faced wolves are common. But chances are you don’t. Cryptids—those beasts that science doesn’t (yet) acknowledge but so many eye-witnesses do—don’t always come to you. Sometimes you gotta go to them.
And that means a road trip.
Posted by J. W. Ocker
Wanna Get Haunted?: A Look at Clay McLeod Chapman’s Inspiration for Ghost Eaters
We’ve all got our ghosts. Some of them simply stick around a lot longer than others. For my new novel, Ghost Eaters, the idea had been haunting the back of my brain for years.
Five-ish, to be (kind of) exact.
Posted by Clay McLeod Chapman
Bride of the Tornado
A young woman’s secretive midwestern town is engulfed by a mysterious plague of tornadoes every generation–and she must escape it before it claims her.
Stephen King’s The Mist meets David Lynch’s Twin Peaks in this inventive, mind-bending horror-thriller.
In a small town tucked away in the midwestern corn fields, the adults whisper about Tornado Day. Our narrator, a high school sophomore, has never heard this phrase but she soon discovers its terrible meaning: a plague of sentient tornadoes is coming to destroy them.
The only thing that stands between the town and total annihilation is a teen boy known as the tornado killer. Drawn to this enigmatic boy, our narrator senses an unnatural connection between them. But the adults are hiding a secret about the origins of the tornadoes and the true nature of the tornado killer—and our narrator must escape before the primeval power that binds them all comes to claim her.
Audaciously conceived and steeped in existential dread, this genre-defying novel reveals the mythbound madness at the heart of American life.
Posted by Christina Schillaci
