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Riffle Editor's Choice: Essential Picture Books for May 2015  ›

Looking for some new picture books? Check out our list of awesome new releases for May 2015! Whether school stories or interspace adventures, we've got you covered with picture books your kids - and you! - will enjoy.
by Riffle Children's
1013 views
5 books

Riffle Editor's Choice: Essential Horror Books for November 2017  ›

Check out these essential November 2017 releases.
by Riffle Horror
3814 views
11 books
  • see all 11 →
  • "Into the Drowning Deep" by Mira Grant. This sequel to "Rolling in the Deep" picks up seven years after the loss of the ship "Atargatis." The crew of the "Atargatis" intended to film a "mockumentary" about legendary sea creatures. A new ship and crew assembled to determine what happened to the lost ship. Among the crew is a scientist named Victoria Stewart who lost her sister seven years ago.

  • "Deadknobs and Doomsticks" written and illustrated by Joe Pasquale. This collection of twelve short stories exhibit a range of humorous horror stories from the surreal to the dark and bizarre. Wit and a sense of dark, biting humor suffuse every story. Joe Pasquale is one of UK's popular stand-up comedians and entertainers who is now turning his talents to writing.

  • "After the End of the World" (Carter & Lovecraft #2) by Jonathan L. Howard. Daniel Carter and Emily Lovecraft live and work in the Unfolded World where the Soviet Union never rose to power and Germany is the premier superpower. Dan must investigate a scientific project which leads him and Lovecraft into the grip of a conspiracy that just may cost Emily her sanity.

  • "The Devil's Engine: Hellwalkers" (The Devil's Engine Trilogy #3) by Alexander Gordon Smith. Marlow followed Pan into Hell to save her. There, he makes a final deal with the Devil to take Pan home. But home is about to be invaded by Hell and its many strange and powerful demons. The surviving members of the Hellraisers must band together -- but without super-powers or weapons, how can they possibly save Earth?

  • "Black Goat Blues" (The Mythos War #2) by Levi Black. Charlie Tristan Moore was once an unwilling acolyte of The Man In Black, a diabolical Elder God who taught her to use her dark magic. He had a plan to use her to slay the other Elder Gods. She broke free of his control and now she is hunting him down. This is dark fantasy with a decidedly Lovecraftian twist.

Riffle Editor's Choice: Essential Horror Books for September 2017  ›

Check out these essential September 2017 releases.
by Riffle Horror
3850 views
12 books
  • see all 12 →
  • "Sleeping Beauties: A Novel" by Stephen King and Owen King. Father and son collaborate in this story of a sickness that causes all women to fall asleep & cocoon themselves from which they must not be awakened. Only "Eve Black" seems to resist the sleep. However, this anomaly drives some men to try to destroy her while others want to save her. Others still want to use that conflict to drive their own agendas.

  • "The Twilight Pariah" by Jeffrey Ford. It's Summer and for this last vacation, college students Maggie, Russell, and Henry want to drink themselves blind and use their mad archaeologist skills on the old house in the woods. What they find is a skeleton of a horned child and a bottle of red liquid which turns their lives into a nightmare.

  • BONUS BOOK: "Horror Literature through History [2 volumes]: An Encyclopedia of the Stories That Speak to Our Deepest Fears" edited by Matt Cardin. Discover the history of horror fiction in this two volume set. Matt Cardin presents essays that outlines the history of horror, surveys the ever changing themes of the genre, and explores the major and many of the minor authors and more.

  • "The Last to See Me: A Novel" by M Dressler. One hundred years ago, Emma Rose Finnis lived and died in northern California. Now she haunts Lambry mansion as a ghost. She exists there in peace with her memories. Now a hunter has been called to cast the ghost out of the mansion. Emma's idyllic afterlife is about to come crashing to a horrific end -- unless she fights back. A literate ghost story.

  • "I Am Behind You" by John Ajvide Lindqvist and translated by Marlaine Delargy. The author of "Let the Right One In" returns... The notice for this book has disappeared which makes me think publication is about to be postponed. I'll update this list when I find out something concrete.

Riffle Editor's Choice: Essential Horror Books for October 2017  ›

Check out these essential October 2017 releases.
by Riffle Horror
5001 views
12 books
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  • "Strange Weather: Four Short Novels" by Joe Hill. One of the best horror writers today, especially in short form stories, returns with a book of four horror novellas: "Snapshot", "Aloft", "Rain" and "Loaded".

  • "Deadlands: Boneyard" by Seanan McGuire. This novel is based on the hit Weird West tabletop role-playing game called 'Deadlands'. The Blackstone Family Circus and Travelling Wonder Show sets up in The Clearing, a community in the Oregon wilderness, in hopes of reaping enough profit to get through the winter. But the Clearing has secrets as does circus performer Annie Pearl, the mistress of monsters.

  • BONUS BOOK: "Clive Barker's Hellraiser Omnibus" (volume #1) by Clive Barker and Mark Miller. Collects Clive Barker’s Hellraiser #1-20 and Hellraiser Annual #1 for over 500 pages of illustrated Cenobite horror.

  • "The Handyman" by Bentley Little. Years ago, when Daniel Martin was a child, his family retained a handyman named Frank Watkins who built the Martin family a Summer home. Even in adulthood, Daniel remembered Frank Watkins' eyes...his unnatural eyes that searched for understanding in the incomprehensible human behavior they observed. Daniel did not know what Frank was, nor did he suspect there were more of them.

  • "What the Hell Did I Just Read: A Novel of Cosmic Horror" (John Dies at the End #3) by David Wong. Humorist, Cracked.com editor and novelist David Wong (not his real name) has made millions (not really) off the 'John Dies at the End' series (If David wrote this story under a fake name, does that make this a fake horror novel?) about Dave, John and Amy (not real people) who return here (which may not be a real book).

Riffle Editor's Choice: Essential Horror Books for August 2017  ›

Check out these essential August 2017 releases.
by Riffle Horror
4435 views
12 books
  • see all 12 →
  • "The Dark Net" by Benjamin Percy. Wherever you have humans, you have black markets and areas of criminal activity and the Internet is no exception. Called the Dark Net, it's a place of anonymity where you can get almost anything you want, legal or otherwise. Four very different people discover that an ancient evil has infiltrated the Dark Net in a bid to extend its reach to everyone.

  • "The Wolves of El Diablo" (The Men Who Walk Like Wolves #2) by Eric Red. In this weird Western sequel to "The Guns of Santa Sangre", The sister to one of the lycanthropes who died in the first book, leads a pack of fifty werewolves against the three outlaws just when they attempt to rob a train of a fortune in silver bars.

  • BONUS BOOK: "The New Annotated Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley, edited with notes by Leslie S. Klinger, with 200 illustrations and over one thousand annotations. This annotated Frankenstein not only looks at the original 1818 edition but also traces the change made in the revisions of 1823 and 1831. Ideal for any serious study of one of horror's most famous novels.

  • BONUS BOOK: "Edgar Allan Poe Short Stories" (Gothic Fantasy Series) by Edgar Allan Poe and edited by the editors at Flame Tree Publishing. The latest edition to Flame Tree Studio's Gothic Fantasy series of deluxe edition short story compilations. This tome is 480 pages (nearly 280,000 words) of short stories by Poe. Also includes illustrations.

  • "Dark Light: Dawn" by Jon Land and created by the CEO & Chairman of the Board of Directors of King Midas World Entertainment Inc., Fabrizio Boccardi. Max Younger is a survivor and a Navy SEAL. Victoria Tanoury is a scientist working for the World Health Organization to stop an infectious disease from becoming a pandemic in this supernatural and scientific apocalyptic thriller.

Riffle Editor's Choice: Essential Horror Books for July 2017  ›

Check out these essential July 2017 releases.
by Riffle Horror
3282 views
11 books
  • see all 11 →
  • "The Best Horror of the Year Volume Nine" edited by Ellen Datlow. Each year two collections of the best horror short stories and novellas from the previous year are published and both are keepers. Ellen Datlow has been bring you the best horror for over thirty years and this collection, her latest incarnation, presents her selection of the best from 2015. Includes her evaluation of horror last year.

  • "The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2017 Edition" edited by Paula Guran. Each year two collections of the best horror short stories and novellas from the previous year are published and both are keepers. Paula Guran's remit covers horror and dark fantasy -- close cousins but not exactly the same thing. Also included is a brief introduction and a list of additional great dark fantasy and horror stories.

  • "The Process (is a Process All Its Own)" by Peter Straub. Straub's popular serial killer Tillman Hayward -- aka the Ladykiller -- returns in this hardcover novella. Last seen in the stories "The Skylark" and "A Special Place", he cuts up a swath of women in the American Midwest, circa 1950's, Tillman's story will haunt for a long time after you've finished.

  • "Final Girls: A Novel" by Riley Sager. Quincy Carpenter lost five friends in a vacation massacre which only she survived. This put her in an exclusive "clue" of final girls. Two others also survived their attackers when others dies: Lisa and Sam. Ten years later, Lisa is dead and Sam appears at Quincy's door for help. But what she really seems to want is to make Sam relive her painful memories of the massacre.

  • BONUS BOOK: "Talon of God: A Novel" by Wesley Snipes and Ray Norman. Talon Hunter is a holy warrior. Lauryn Jefferson is a skeptical doctor who sees Chicago's problem as merely a drug epidemic and not a demonic ploy to possess and enslave the souls of the windy city. Talon must train Lauryn to be a holy warrior or else millions will die and the blood will flow in rivers.

Riffle Editor's Choice: Essential Horror Books for March 2017  ›

Check out these essential March 2017 releases.
by Riffle Horror
3702 views
12 books
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  • "Dear Sweet Filthy World" by Caitlín R. Kiernan. This book of short stories by premier horror author Caitlín R. Kiernan contains the rare, hard-to-find stories mostly published by the author in her subscription website called "Sirenia Digest". A must-have for fans of Caitlin or of horror in general. Expect a lot of creative horror stories here.

  • "The Rage of Cthulhu" by Gary Fry. When George Cox learned he had a brain tumor, he and his wife, Christine, decide to travel around the world before it's too late. In England they encounter a severely damaged foghorn station and George wonders what was big enough do that. Soon the clues he unearths point to an ancient creature, massive in size. But are the clues real or a product of his tumor?

  • "The Night Ocean" by Paul La Farge. Before his apparent suicide, Charlie Willett became obsessed with H. P. Lovecraft and his mysterious relationship with a young gay teenager, Robert Barlow. Marina Willett, is a psychiatrist and doesn't believe Charlie killed himself. She moves through Charlie's research, trying to reconstruct the mindset of her husband leading up to his disappearance.

  • "Nightmare's Realm: New Tales of the Weird and Fantastic" edited by S. T. Joshi. This wonderfully ethereal anthology contains 17 original short stories and two poems of horror and the weird in the dream lands and nightmare landscapes of the human mind. The anthology also contains a introduction by Lovecraftian scholar S. T. Joshi on the nature of dreams in weird literature.

  • "The Mammoth Book of the Mummy: 19 Tales of the Immortal Dead" edited by Paula Guran. Guran brings together 16 previously published stories and acquiring three more about the iconic mummy, with the intent to "explore, subvert, and reinvent the mummy mythos" within each tale. We need to reclaim the mummy trope and expand it -- it doesn't have to be bandaged Egyptians anymore.

Riffle Editor's Choice: Essential Horror Books for April 2017  ›

Check out these essential April 2017 releases.
by Riffle Horror
3426 views
12 books
  • see all 12 →
  • "Borne: A Novel" by Jeff VanderMeer. Rachel is a scavenger in a half destroyed city. She finds and brings home Borne, a plant-like, squid-like creature and against all her instincts for survival, she "adopts" it. But the Company, which may or may not have made Borne and might have had a hand in the city's ruin, is not as dead as believed and they will have Borne, even over Rachel's dead body.

  • "Thirteen Views of the Suicide Woods" by Bracken MacLeod. This is the author's first short story collection featuring 19 tales of -- as Christopher Golden puts it -- "horror and modern noir". His stories skirt a knife edged line between genre and literary, to bring to the reader a gift of darkness and loss among other emotions that he cares to evoke.

  • "The Corpse and the Girl from Miami" by John Urbancik. He woke up in a grave with three bullets in his chest and no heart beat. He's dead and he can't remember who he is. The tombstone and his driver's license say he's Armando Luis Salazar. He doesn't know for sure but he does know that he must find his killer in a town where no one can be trusted. Horror, noir crime fiction, pulp and magic -- a must-read.

  • "Between the Tracks: Tales from the Ghost Train" (Things in the Well #1) edited by Steve Dillon. This anthology of horror stories about trains, carries 24 stories including Clive Barker's "The Midnight Meat Train", as well as an introduction to Clive's story by Mark Alan Miller and an essay "Aboard the Midnight Meat Train -- Clive Barker's Urban Nightmare" by Sorcha NI Fhlainn. All aboard!

  • "Ararat: A Novel" by Christopher Golden. An earthquake opens up a cave in Mount Ararat in Turkey leading to wild biblical speculation and a rush to get there and explore. What they find is the cave is a massive ship and inside is a coffin with a hideous, horned creature. Then the explorers get snowed in with it . . .

Riffle Editor's Choice: Essential Horror Books for May 2017  ›

Check out these essential May 2017 releases.
by Riffle Horror
2720 views
13 books
  • see all 13 →
  • "The White Road" by Sarah Lotz. Simon Newman seeks to save his website "Journey to the Dark Side" by indulging in dangerous adventures sure to gain clicks to his site. After a harrowing trip to the Cwm Pot caves, he decides to climb Mount Everest. However, when he finally reaches "the Death Zone" above the 8,000 foot mark, he discovers the truth behind a decades old tragedy that may spell his end.

  • "Mormama" by Kit Reed. Lane moves her son Theo, into her ancestor's crumbling home where her three widowed aunts live. However, they are not alone for in the basement is a squatter -- a man with no memory only the house address in his pocket and the long dead family matriarch Mormama who tries to warn Theo of the dangers of living in the house.

  • "The Only Child: A Novel" by Andrew Pyper. Dr. Lily Dominick is a New York forensic psychiatrist who has finally encountered a psychotic that stymies even her. Accused of a heinous crime, this inmate with no name claims to be over two hundred years old and the inspiration for the monsters written about by Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker and Robert Louis Stevenson -- and that he is Lily's father.

  • "Gwendy's Button Box" by Stephen King and Richard Chizmar. It is 1974 in Castle Rock, Maine and heavyset Gwendy finishes climbing a long staircase when a stranger named Richard Farris offers her a box with two levers and buttons on it. The levers give her chocolates which slim her down and add o her confidence...but what do the buttons do? It's doubtful they'll do anything good in this novella by King and Chizmar.

  • "Dark Cities" edited by Christopher Golden. Twenty authors contribute nineteen brand new tales of horror and dread in the big cities anywhere and everywhere. Here are terrors beyond the common tropes of vampires and werewolves -- here a monsters that lurk in the places every city dweller passes or spends time in. And not everyone in the big city will get out alive. . . .

Riffle Editor's Choice: Essential Horror Books for June 2017  ›

Check out these essential June 2017 releases.
by Riffle Horror
3493 views
9 books
  • see all 9 →
  • "Supernatural Horror Short Stories" (Gothic Fantasy Series) edited by the editors at Flame Tree Publishing. The latest edition to Flame Tree Studio's Gothic Fantasy series of deluxe edition short story compilations. This tome is 480 pages (280,000 words) of short stories, both classic and new by authors from the United States, England and Canada. Also includes illustrations.

  • "The Changeling: A Novel" by Victor LaValle. Apollo Kagwa meets and marries Emma Valentine, and they have a son named Brian. Apollo vows to be the best father he can. But as Emma slides deeper into what appears to be postpartum depression and claims that Brain isn't their child. Then Emma does the unthinkable and disappears, leaving Apollo injured and desperate to find her even if he must travel to Hell itself.

  • "The Forgotten Girl: A Thriller" by Rio Youers. Actually a supernatural thriller, Harvey Anderson comes to the attention of "Spider" who is looking for Harvey's girlfriend named Sally Starling. Unfortunately, Harvey has no memory of Sally. This is because she can erase herself from people's memories. Harvey realizes that despite his memory loss, he has feelings for her -- and he'll have to race "Spider" to find her.

  • "The Kill Society" (A Sandman Slim Novel #9) by Richard Kadrey. Recently, Sandman Slim tried to open up Heaven with disastrous consequences for the afterlife. Now he is in Tenebrae, the realm of the lost dead, and joined a mysterious caravan of myriad entities including deserters from Hell and escaped angels. However, Heaven has placed a bounty on Sandman's head and not all the members of the caravan can be trusted.

  • "In the Valley of the Sun: A Novel" by Andy Davidson. In 1980's West Texas, Travis Stillwell, is a serial killer who preys on women. One night he stalks a pale young woman and wakes up bloody with no memory and no girl. He has a new hunger, one that drives him to drink blood. As Travis deals with his new existence and worms his way into Annabelle Gaskin and her son's life, a Texas Ranger closes in on him.