Fiction 5: New mysterious & chilling reads
Fittingly October's top five new fiction are mysterious and chilling. Bestselling authors Cassandra Khaw and Richard Kadrey teamed up to create a dark story with magic, monsters and mayhem – The Dead Take the A Train. Starling House is a gorgeously modern gothic fantasy from the New York Times bestselling author of The Ten Thousand Doors of January. A 4-year-old Mi’kmaq girl goes missing, sparking a mystery that will haunt the survivors, unravel a family and remain unsolved for nearly 50 years in The Berry Pickers. Syd Walker uncovers clues about a string of missing indigenous women cases going back decades in Blood Sisters. Instead of presents this Christmas, a true crime podcaster is opening up a cold case in Christmas Presents.
1. The Dead Take the A Train by Cassandra Khaw & Richard Kadrey
New York is a helluva town. Julie is a coke-up, burnt-out 30-year-old whose only retirement plan is dying early. She's not getting ahead on the NYC magic scene even though she's working gruesome gigs, exorcising nasty demons and making deals with the cruelest gods.
Julie's best friend Sarah shows up at her door needing help. She is desperate for a quick fix to break the dead-end grind and save Sarah. Unfortunately, Julie's efforts set off a deadly chain of events that puts the entire world in the path of annihilation.
“An addictive, sprawling yarn. This city brims with underhanded dealings and odd magic, and every corner writhes with fresh horrors and delights.” ―Hailey Piper, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of No Gods for Drowning
“This is lush gore, a bloody fantastic ride where people with metaphorical demons fight literal ones, and the lost are saved not by grace but by barbed wire and love. Hop on this train now.” ―Kevin Hearne, New York Times bestselling author
2. Starling House by Alix E. Harrow
Starling House is a
Opal is a lot of things ― orphan, high school dropout, full-time cynic and part-time cashier ― but above all, she's determined to find a better life for her younger brother Jasper. One that gets them out of Eden, Kentucky, a town remarkable for only two things: bad luck and E. Starling, the reclusive nineteenth century author of The Underland, who disappeared more than 100 years ago.
All she left behind were dark rumors and her home. Everyone agrees it’s best to ignore the uncanny mansion and its misanthropic heir, Arthur. Almost everyone, anyway.
Opal has been obsessed with The Underland since she was a child. When she gets the chance to step inside Starling House and make some extra cash for her brother's escape fund she can't resist.
But sinister forces are digging deeper into the buried secrets of Starling House, and Arthur’s own nightmares have become far too real. As Eden itself seems to be drowning in its own ghosts, Opal realizes she might finally have found a reason to stick around.
"As knife-edged and sharp as its protagonist...A smart, spectacular contemporary Gothic that will leave its roots in you and linger in your dreams." ―Kat Howard, Alex Award-winning author of An Unkindness of Magicians
3. The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters
In July 1962 a Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia arrives in Maine to pick blueberries for the summer. Weeks later, 4-year-old Ruthie, the family’s youngest child, vanishes. Her 6-year-old brother, Joe, was the last to see her sitting at the edge of a berry field. Joe remains distraught by his sister’s disappearance for years to come.
In Maine, a young girl named Norma grows up as the only child of an affluent family. Her father is emotionally distant and her mother is frustratingly overprotective. Norma is troubled by recurring dreams and visions that seem more like memories than imagination. As she grows older, Norma slowly realizes there is something her parents aren’t telling her. Unwilling to abandon her intuition, she spends decades trying to uncover this family secret.
"One family’s secret is the source of another family’s pain in this poignant debut that reads like a modern literary classic. Moving, heartbreaking, and hopeful, The Berry Pickers is a powerful tale of haunting regret, bonds that will never be broken, and unrelenting love. Amanda Peters’s skilled storytelling evokes all the sensations of summer in Maine, singing around a fire, and the horror that takes hold when a child goes missing." —Nick Medina, author of Sisters of the Lost Nation
4. Blood Sisters by Vanessa Lillie
As an archeologist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Syd Walker spends her days in Rhode Island trying to protect the land's indigenous past, even as she’s escaping her own.
Syd is haunted by a night of violence she barely escaped in her Oklahoma hometown 15 years ago. Though she swore she’d never go back, the past comes calling.
Syd must return home when authorities find a skull near the crime scene of her youth and her sister, Emma Lou, has vanished. She refuses to let her sister's disappearance, or the remains, go ignored as so often happens in cases of missing Native women.
Syd feels the crosshairs on her when she returns home. The deeper Syd digs, the more she uncovers about a string of missing indigenous women cases going back decades. To save her sister, she must expose a darkness in the town.
"A critically important and riveting story of sisterhood, love, kinship and the search for justice in a federal system that has long ignored the epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and Two-Spirit People. Lillie illuminates Native women's simultaneous erasure and inhuman treatment with sensitivity, ingenuity and passion, powerfully elucidating all the ways that MMIWG2S are not missing by any fault of their own." –Chelsea T. Hicks, author of A Calm & Normal Heart
5. Christmas Presents by Lisa Unger
Madeline Martin is the young owner of a thriving business, The Next Chapter Bookshop, despite her tragic childhood and now caring for her infirm father. Harley Granger, a failed novelist turned true crime podcaster shows up at her shop days before Christmas. He is intent on digging up events Madeline would much rather forget.
She's the only surviving victim of Evan Handy, the man who was convicted of murdering her best friend Steph, and is suspected in the disappearance of two sisters, also good friends of Madeline's, who have been missing for nearly a decade. It's an investigation that has obsessed her father Sheriff James Martin right up until his stroke took his faculties.
"The perfect mix of thrills and chills to delight any suspense reader." –Bestselling author Lisa Gardner
