Each month the Ladies of Horror Fiction team posts all of the books we are aware of that will be releasing during that month. If you are involved in the process of publishing a horror book written by a female author, please reach out to us and let us know so we can help to spotlight the book’s release!
The Best of Both Worlds by S.P. Miskowski
Roland and his sister Pigeon are the kind of people most visitors to the small town of Skillute never notice: ordinary, hardworking folk who keep to themselves. They obey the speed limit and pay their taxes on time. Yet something isn’t quite normal about these adult siblings who perform strange rituals in the basement and tend to their garden late at night.
To their affluent new neighbors, caught up in a fantasy of pastoral family life, Roland and Pigeon might as well be invisible. Old acquaintances take them for granted, as though they’re part of the fragmented landscape. In truth, no one knows what secret worlds they may inhabit, whether stalking the living or speaking to the dead.
Published May 1st 2020 by Trepidatio Publishing | Amazon | Goodreads
Fractured Tide by Leslie Lutz
Lost meets Stranger Things in this eerie, immersive YA thriller, thrusting seventeen-year-old Sia into a reality where the waters in front of her and the jungle behind her are as dangerous as the survivors alongside her.
Sia practically grew up in the water scuba diving, and wreck dives are run of the mill. Take the tourists out. Explore the reef. Uncover the secrets locked in the sunken craft. But this time … the dive goes terribly wrong.
Attacked by a mysterious creature, Sia’s boat is sunk, her customers are killed, and she washes up on a deserted island with no sign of rescue in sight. Waiting in the water is a seemingly unstoppable monster that is still hungry. In the jungle just off the beach are dangers best left untested. When Sia reunites with a handful of survivors, she sees it as the first sign of light.
Sia is wrong.
Between the gulf of deadly seawater in front of her and suffocating depth of the jungle behind her, even the island isn’t what it seems.
Haunted by her own mistakes and an inescapable dread, Sia’s best hope for finding answers may rest in the center of the island, at the bottom of a flooded sinkhole that only she has the skills to navigate. But even if the creature lurking in the depths doesn’t swallow her and the other survivors, the secrets of their fractured reality on the island might.
Expected publication: May 5th 2020 by Blink | Amazon | Goodreads
The Anthill by Julianne Pachico
An intoxicating literary ghost story told through the eyes of a young woman returning to her former homeland of Colombia to seek redemption for a past she can’t entirely remember.
Twenty-eight year old Lina has come home to the country of her childhood. Sent away from Colombia to England after her mother’s death twenty years before, she’s searching for a connection to herself and to the one person who can help her make sense of their shared past. She’s never forgotten Matty–her childhood friend and protector who now runs the Anthill, a daycare refuge for the street kids of Medellín. Lina begins volunteering there, but her reunion with Matty is not what she had imagined. He has no interest in discussing the past and his secretive behaviour puts Lina on guard. Soon strange happenings start taking place at the Anthill: scratches on the supply closet door, disturbing crayon drawings and sightings of a small, dirty boy with pointy teeth. Is Lina losing her grip on reality, or is something more sinister going on? Did she ever really understand what happened to her mother? Or to Matty?
A visceral, hallucinatory ride by an author who has been called “blunt, fresh and unsentimental” (The New York Times Book Review) and “remarkably inventive” (The Atlantic), The Anthill asks what it means to belong and how a person–or a country–can heal from the horrors visited upon them.
Expected publication: May 12th 2020 by Doubleday Books | Amazon | Goodreads
My Mother’s House by Francesca Momplaisir
For fans of Kate Atkinson, Oyinkan Braithwaite, Edwidge Danticat, Tana French, Mohsin Hamid, Hari Kunzru, Imbolo Mbue, Alex Michaelides, and Jesmyn Ward
A literary thriller about the complex underbelly of the immigrant American dream and the dangerous ripple effect one person’s damages can have on the lives of others—told unexpectedly by a house that has held unspeakable horrors
When Lucien flees Haiti with his wife, Marie-Ange, and their three children to New York City’s South Ozone Park, he does so hoping for reinvention, wealth, and comfort. He buys a rundown house in a community that is quickly changing from an Italian enclave of mobsters to a haven for Haitian immigrants, and begins life anew. Lucien and Marie-Ange call their home La Kay—“my mother’s house”—and it becomes a place where their fellow immigrants can find peace, a good meal, and legal help. But as a severely emotionally damaged man emigrating from a country whose evils he knows to one whose evils he doesn’t, Lucien soon falls into his worst habits and impulses, with La Kay as the backdrop for his lasciviousness. What he can’t even begin to fathom is that the house is watching, passing judgment, and deciding to put an end to all the sins it has been made to hold. But only after it has set itself aflame will frightened whispers reveal Lucien’s ultimate evil.
At once an uncompromising look at the immigrant experience and an electrifying page-turner, My Mother’s House is a singular, unforgettable achievement.
Expected publication: May 12th 2020 by Knopf | Amazon | Goodreads
America’s First Female Serial Killer: Jane Toppan and the Making of a Monster by Mary Kay McBrayer
The Making of a Female Serial Killer
For readers who are fascinated by how serial killers are made. This book is for listeners of true crime podcasts and readers of both fiction and true crime nonfiction. It is for watchers of television shows like Deadly Women and Mindhunter, who are fascinated by how killers are made. It’s for self-conscious feminists, Americans trying to bootstrap themselves into success, and anyone who loves a vigilante beatdown, especially one gone off the rails.
America’s first female serial killer was not always a killer. America’s First Female Serial Killer novelizes the true story of first-generation Irish-American nurse Jane Toppan, born as Honora Kelley. Although all the facts are intact, books about her life and her crimes are all facts and no story. Jane Toppan was absolutely a monster, but she did not start out that way.
Making of a serial killer. When Jane was a young child, her father abandoned her and her sister to the Boston Female Asylum. From there, Jane was indentured to a wealthy family who changed her name, never adopted her, wrote her out of the will, and essentially taught her how to hate herself. Jilted at the altar, Jane became a nurse and took control of her life, and the lives of her victims.
Readers of America’s First Female Serial Killer:
- Will gain insight into the personal development of a severely damaged person without rationalizing her crimes
- Experience the rarely told story of a female serial killer
- Understand that even monsters were humans, first
If you enjoyed books such as In Cold Blood, Perfume, Alias Grace, or Devil in the White City; you will love reading America’s First Female Serial Killer.
Expected publication: May 19th 2020 by Mango | Amazon | Goodreads
Hell’s Bells by Lisa Quigley
It’s 1991, and Sasha, Hayley, Tiffany, and Jessica are four best friends into black clothes and rock music. They dabble in Ouija boards and occult games like ‘light as a feather,’ but when Hayley gets ‘saved,’ she’s convinced rock music is the devil’s domain and conspires to save them all. Her good intentions go up in flames and the four girls accidentally summon Satan. Trapped in the basement with entities beyond their wildest nightmares, their only saving grace is rock & roll. They have to hope to hell it’s enough, before another one bites the dust.
Book 8 in the Rewind-or-Die series: imagine your local movie rental store back in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, remember all those fantastic covers. Remember taking those movies home and watching in awe as the stories unfolded in nasty rainbows of gore, remember the atmosphere and textures. Remember the blood.
Expected publication: May 28th 2020 by Unnerving | Amazon | Goodreads
The Kelping by Jan Stinchcomb
Doctor Craig Bo has everything: a perfect wife and children, a thriving dermatology practice, and a house in a lovely coastal town. Nobody is surprised when he is chosen to be the Sea King of Beachside in his hometown’s annual festival.
But after the festival Craig’s world turns upside down. Something starts growing on his skin. His son tells him a story about a sinister mermaid who lives in the attic of the local history museum. And his beautiful wife, Penelope, can no longer hide her dark connection to the sea.
As Craig grapples with his own secrets and misdeeds, he finally understands the woman he married and the plans she has for him.
Book 9 in the Rewind-or-Die series: imagine your local movie rental store back in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, remember all those fantastic covers. Remember taking those movies home and watching in awe as the stories unfolded in nasty rainbows of gore, remember the atmosphere and textures. Remember the blood.
Expected publication: May 28th 2020 by Unnerving | Amazon | Goodreads
Have we missed any May 2020 LOHF titles you are excited about? Let us know in the comments!
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