5 Spooky Books To Read Over the Holidays
And then there is Jiwon, the boy’s mother, a bad mother, Mira thinks—or so Jiwon tells herself she must not be.
But as Mira spends more time in the family’s sprawling home, she begins to suspect Yuchan is not the culprit she’s after. Someone else in the family has been pulling the strings. Someone with a deviant plan she can’t begin to imagine.
Structured around four different letters and journal entries: Mira’s, Jiwon’s reply, Yuchan’s younger brother’s diary entry and, finally, Mira’s own written recollection. Each new section brings us deeper into a web of cruelty, consequence, and closer to the truth.
This is my last love letter to you, though some would call it a confession. . . Saved from the brink of death by a mysterious stranger, Constanta is transformed from a medieval peasant into a bride fit for an undying king. But when Dracula draws a cunning aristocrat and a starving artist into his web of passion and deceit, Constanta realizes that her beloved is capable of terrible things. Finding comfort in the arms of her rival consorts, she begins to unravel their husband’s dark secrets. With the lives of everyone she loves on the line, Constanta will have to choose between her own freedom and her love for her husband. But bonds forged by blood can only be broken by death.
At the edge of the Salton Sea, in the blistering borderlands, something is out hunting…
Malamar Veracruz has never left the dust-choked town of El Valle. Here, Mal has done her best to build a good life: She’s raised two children, worked hard, and tried to forget the painful, unexplained disappearance of her sister, Elena. When another local girl goes missing, Mal plunges into a fresh yet familiar nightmare. As a desperate Mal hunts for answers, her search becomes increasingly tangled with inscrutable visions of a horse-headed woman, a local legend who Mal feels compelled to follow. Mal’s perspective is joined by the voices of her two daughters, all three of whom must work to uncover the truth about the missing girls in their community before it’s too late.
Combining elements of Latina and Indigenous culture, family drama, mystery, horror, and magical realism in a spellbinding mix, Salt Bones lays bare the realities of environmental catastrophe, family secrets, and the unrelenting bond between mothers and daughters.
Feral with grief, Bimbo has become unrecognizable, taking no prisoners in his search for names. Soon, they learn Maria was gunned down by guys working for the drug kingpin of Puerto Rico. No one has ever gone up against him and survived. As the boys strategize, a storm gathers far from the coast. Hurricanes are known to carry evil spirits in their currents and bring them ashore, spirits which impose their own order.
Blurring the boundaries between myth, mysticism, and the grim realities of our world, House of Bone and Rain is a harrowing coming of age story; a doomed tale of devotion, the afterlife of violence, and what rolls in on the tide.
A fabled lost movie. An increasing body count. How much do you risk for art?
Paloma has been watching the Grand Vespertilio Show her entire life. Grand, America’s most beloved horror host, showcases classic, low-budget and cult horror movies with a flourish, wearing his black tuxedo and hat—but Paloma has noticed something strange about Grand.
After Paloma’s husband, a homicide detective, discovers an obscure movie poster pinned on a mutilated corpse, she knows that the only person that can help solve this mystery is Grand. When another body appears at an abandoned historic movie palace, the deaths prove to be connected to a silent film, lost to the ages, but somehow at the center of countless tragedies in Chicago. Paloma soon becomes trapped between protecting a silent movie that’s contributed to so much death in her city and the life of her young son.
With The Shoemaker’s Magician, Cynthia Pelayo continues to establish herself as one of the most powerful voices in riveting, thought-provoking dark fiction.
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