Lovecraft Country, an HBO® Series from J.J. Abrams (Executive Producer of Westworld), Misha Green (Creator of Underground) and Jordan Peele (Director of Get Out) based on the novel by Matt Ruff, premiered last weekend and has already captured the attention of viewers. If you are ready for more weird fiction now, I’ve got you covered!
If you’re interested in the source material, explore all the JCLC holdings for H.P. Lovecraft here.
Lovecraft
Country: A Novel by Matt Ruff
The critically acclaimed cult novelist makes visceral the
terrors of life in Jim Crow America and its lingering effects in this brilliant
and wondrous work of the imagination that melds historical fiction, pulp noir,
and Lovecraftian horror and fantasy.
The
Houseguest and Other Stories by Amparo Davila
The first collection in English of an endlessly surprising,
master storyteller
Like those of Kafka,
Poe,
Leonora
Carrington, or Shirley
Jackson, Amparo Dávila’s stories are terrifying, mesmerizing, and expertly
crafted―you’ll finish each one gasping for air. With acute psychological
insight, Dávila follows her characters to the limits of desire, paranoia,
insomnia, and fear. She is a writer obsessed with obsession, who makes
nightmares come to life through the everyday: loneliness sinks in easily like a
razor-sharp knife, some sort of evil lurks in every shadow, delusion takes the
form of strange and very real creatures. After reading The Houseguest―Dávila’s
debut collection in English―you’ll wonder how this secret was kept for so long.
Winter
Tide (The Innsmouth Legacy Book 1) by Ruthanna Emrys
"Winter Tide is a weird, lyrical mystery —
truly strange and compellingly grim. It's an innovative gem that turns
Lovecraft on his head with cleverness and heart" —Cherie Priest
After attacking Devil’s Reef in 1928, the U.S. government
rounded up the people of Innsmouth and took them to the desert, far from their
ocean, their Deep One ancestors, and their sleeping god Cthulhu. Only Aphra and
Caleb Marsh survived the camps, and they emerged without a past or a future.
The government that stole Aphra's life now needs her help. FBI agent Ron
Spector believes that Communist spies have stolen dangerous magical secrets
from Miskatonic University, secrets that could turn the Cold War hot in an
instant and hasten the end of the human race. Aphra must return to the ruins of
her home, gather scraps of her stolen history, and assemble a new family to
face the darkness of human nature.
Song
for the Unraveling of the World by Brian Evenson
A newborn’s absent face appears on the back of someone
else’s head, a filmmaker goes to gruesome lengths to achieve the silence he’s
after for his final scene, and a therapist begins, impossibly, to appear in a
troubled patient's room late at night. In these stories of doubt, delusion, and
paranoia, no belief, no claim to objectivity, is immune to the distortions of
human perception. Here, self-deception is a means of justifying our most
inhuman impulses―whether we know it or not.
Alice
Isn’t Dead by Joseph Fink
From the creator of the wildly popular Welcome to Night Vale
podcast comes a story about loving, about searching – and about the courage
you need when you find the unexpected.
For fans of Stephen
King, Serial, Twin
Peaks and of course the eponymous number one iTunes podcast itself.
In
the Shadow of Spindrift House by Mira Grant
Nature abhors a straight line. The natural world is a place
of curves and softened edges, of gentle mists and welcoming spirals. Nature
remembers deviation; nature does not forgive. For Harlowe Upton-Jones, life has
never been a straight line. Shipped off to live with her paternal grandparents
after a mysterious cult killed her mother and father, she has grown up chasing
the question behind the curve, becoming part of a tight-knit teen detective
agency. But “teen” is a limited time offer, and when her friends start looking
for adult professions, it's up to Harlowe to find them one last case so that
they can go out in a blaze of glory. Welcome to Spindrift House.
Uzumaki:
Spiral Into Horror by Junji Ito
Kurouzu-cho, a small fogbound town on the coast of Japan, is
cursed. According to Shuichi Saito, the withdrawn boyfriend of teenager Kirie
Goshima, their town is haunted not by a person or being but a pattern:
UZUMAKI, the spiral—the hypnotic secret shape of the world. The bizarre
masterpiece horror manga is now available all in a single volume. Fall into a
whirlpool of terror!
The
Vegetarian by Han Kang
A beautiful, unsettling novel about rebellion and taboo,
violence and eroticism, and the twisting metamorphosis of a soul…Before the
nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life.
But the dreams—invasive images of blood and brutality—torture her, driving
Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It’s a small
act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an
increasingly grotesque chain of events at home.
The
City We Became by N.K. Jemisin
Every great city has a soul. Some are ancient as myths, and
others are as new and destructive as children. New York? She's got six.
The
Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones
A tale of revenge, cultural identity, and the cost of
breaking from tradition in this latest novel from the Jordan Peele of horror
literature, Stephen
Graham Jones.
Seamlessly blending classic horror and a dramatic narrative with sharp social
commentary, The Only Good Indians follows four American Indian men
after a disturbing event from their youth puts them in a desperate struggle for
their lives. Tracked by an entity bent on revenge, these childhood friends are
helpless as the culture and traditions they left behind catch up to them in a
violent, vengeful way.
The
Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle
People move to New York looking for magic and nothing will
convince them it isn't there. Charles Thomas Tester hustles to put food on the
table, keep the roof over his father's head, from Harlem to Flushing Meadows to
Red Hook. He knows what magic a suit can cast, the invisibility a guitar case
can provide, and the curse written on his skin that attracts the eye of wealthy
white folks and their cops. But when he delivers an occult tome to a reclusive
sorceress in the heart of Queens, Tom opens a door to a deeper realm of magic,
and earns the attention of things best left sleeping.
Monstress:
Volume One by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda
The richly imagined world of MONSTRESS is an alternate
matriarchal 1900s Asia, with an art deco-infused steampunk aesthetic that's
brimming with arcane dangers. Within it, a teenage girl struggles to overcome
the trauma of war, a task that's made all the more difficult by her mysterious
psychic link to an eldritch monster of tremendous power―a connection that will
transform them both, and place them in the crosshairs of both human and
otherworldly powers.
Kraken
by China Mieville
With this outrageous new novel, China Miéville has written
one of the strangest, funniest, and flat-out scariest books you will read
this—or any other—year. The London that comes to life in Kraken is a weird
metropolis awash in secret currents of myth and magic, where criminals, police,
cultists, and wizards are locked in a war to bring about—or prevent—the End of
All Things.
White
is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi
At once an unforgettable mystery and a meditation on race,
nationality, and family legacies, White is for Witching is a
boldly original, terrifying, and elegant novel by a prodigious talent.
Maplecroft
(The Borden Dispatches Book 1) by Cherie Priest
Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty
whacks; and when she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one....
The people of Fall River, Massachusetts, fear me. Perhaps rightfully so. I
remain a suspect in the brutal deaths of my father and his second wife despite
the verdict of innocence at my trial. With our inheritance, my sister, Emma,
and I have taken up residence in Maplecroft, a mansion near the sea and far
from gossip and scrutiny. But it is not far enough from the affliction that
possessed my parents.
Their characters, their very souls, were consumed from within by something
that left malevolent entities in their place. It originates from the ocean’s
depths, plaguing the populace with tides of nightmares and madness. This evil
cannot hide from me. No matter what guise it assumes, I will be waiting for it.
With an axe.
The
Hole by Hye-young Pyun
A bestseller in Korea, The Hole is a superbly
crafted and deeply unnerving novel about the horrors of isolation and neglect
in all of its banal and brutal forms. As Oghi desperately searches for a way to
escape, he discovers the difficult truth about his wife and the toll their life
together took on her.
We
Cast a Shadow by Maurice Carlos Ruffin
“You can be beautiful, even more beautiful than before.”
This is the seductive promise of Dr. Nzinga’s clinic, where anyone can get
their lips thinned, their skin bleached, and their nose narrowed. A complete
demelanization will liberate you from the confines of being born in a black
body—if you can afford it. In this near-future Southern city plagued by
fenced-in ghettos and police violence, more and more residents are turning to
this experimental medical procedure.
Like any father, our narrator just wants the best for his son, Nigel, a
biracial boy whose black birthmark is getting bigger by the day. The darker
Nigel becomes, the more frightened his father feels. But how far will he go to
protect his son? And will he destroy his family in the process?
Amatka
by Karin Tidbeck
Vanja, an information assistant, is sent from her home city
of Essre to the austere, wintry colony of Amatka with an assignment to collect
intelligence for the government. Immediately she feels that something strange
is going on: people act oddly in Amatka, and citizens are monitored for signs
of subversion.
Intending to stay just a short while, Vanja falls in love with her housemate,
Nina, and prolongs her visit. But when she stumbles on evidence of a growing
threat to the colony, and a cover-up by its administration, she embarks on an
investigation that puts her at tremendous risk.
A
Peculiar Peril (The Misadventures of Jonathan Lambshead Book 1) by Jeff
VanderMeer
A Peculiar Peril is a head-spinning epic about three
friends on a quest to protect the world from a threat as unknowable as it is
terrifying, from the Nebula Award–winning and New York
Times bestselling author of Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer.
Ring
Shout by P. Djeli Clark (This book will be published October 13, 2020. Keep
an eye out!)
Nebula, Locus, and Alex Award-winner P. Djèlí Clark returns
with Ring Shout, a dark fantasy historical novella that gives a
supernatural twist to the Ku Klux Klan's reign of terror
Meddling
Kids by Edgar Cantero
A mad scientist's concoction of H. P. Lovecraft, teen detectives,
and a love of Americana, Edgar Cantero's Meddling Kids is a story
filled with rich horror, thrilling twists, outright hilarity, and surprising
poignancy.
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