Publication date: May 4th, 2021

Links: Amazon | Goodreads

One of the most popular role-playing properties in the world gets new life with this trio of horror novellas set in Vampire: The Masquerade's World of Darkness by three brilliant talents: Genevieve Gornichec, Cassandra Khaw, and Caitlin Starling

The subtle horror and infernal politics of the World of Darkness are shown in a new light in Vampire: The Masquerade: Walk Among Us, an audio-first collection of three novellas that show the terror, hunger, and power of the Kindred as you've never seen them before.

In Genevieve Gornichec's A SHEEP AMONG WOLVES, depression and radicalization go hand-in-hand as a young woman finds companionship in the darkness...

In Cassandra Khaw's FINE PRINT, an arrogant tech bro learns the importance of reading the fine print in the contract for immortality...

And in Caitlin Starling's THE LAND OF MILK AND HONEY, ideals and ethics bump heads with appetite on a blood farm.

Three very different stories from three amazing, distinct voices, but all with one thing in common: the hunger never stops, and for someone to experience power, many others are going to have to feel pain.

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Walk Among Us is a collection of three novellas set in the world of Vampire: The Masquerade. For those of you unfamiliar with Vampire: The Masquerade, it's a gothic tabletop RPG that rose to popularity in the 1990s.  Set in the "World of Darkness", players play vampires, complete with the struggle to maintain some humanity as well as navigating treacherous political machinations of both vampire and human alike. True to the vampires of that world, these stories are dark and broody. The vampires within these tales have diverse backgrounds and ideologies. 

"A Sheep Among Wolves" is the first foray into the world of White Wolf. This story by Genevieve Gornichec was the weakest of the bunch for me. In it, a college student dealing with depression and loneliness finds herself realizing a whole other world has been right in front of her. I struggled with this story the most. The pacing was incredibly slow and I really had to push myself to get through it. The main character felt very insipid and reserved. Any supporting characters went the reverse direction and were absurdly stereotypical. While I certainly appreciated the overall mental health theme, this one just felt like something I'd read before. 

The second story, Cassandra Khaw's "Fine Print", certainly elevates the collection. Bringing a modern-day touch, the main character here is someone that you love to see get what he deserves. Khaw brings this detestable character to life in hi-def and lets us take a seat to watch his undoing. Arrogant and overbearing, this rather tedious specimen of manhood thinks that he's getting the better deal when in all actuality he's getting played by vampires way older and smarter than he is. This one truly shows that vampires are inexhaustible masters of manipulative and cunning. 

"The Land of Milk and Honey" by Caitlin Starling brings up the rear in this collection. This unique story combines ethics and vampirism with this setting of sustenance and sustainable farming. Out of all the stories, I enjoyed this one the most. The strange quandary of needing blood to survive but to do so without killing is one that has been touched on before in vampire fiction but never quite in this way. It brings up some interesting parallels to our own struggles. This story has a bit of everything, some romance, a little treachery, and a lot of manipulation. 

For a collection that only holds three stories, it took a while to get through this one. I enjoyed the variety of themes presented by each story. Vampire fiction has been around for a long time so getting something that feels fresh is a unique experience in itself. 

Here is September's roundup of anticipated horror releases! 

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Publication date: August 31th, 2021

Links: Amazon | Goodreads

Adaline Rushner is a woman in pieces. Her daughters have gone missing, and although the authorities seem to have found their bodies, something still isn't right. Her husband, Cache, can't bear the pain and wants to move on, but Adaline can't shake the feeling they're still alive. She even starts seeing them in the house, though Cache does not. Adaline wonders whether this current tragedy has something to do with the misfortune and painful experiences she suffered in her own childhood, but her memories have gaps in them that she can't quite close on her own.

After Adaline and Cache move to Salt Lake City, everything gets even stranger. Local cop Officer Abbott thinks Adaline's distinctive owl necklace may somehow link to his own missing daughter. Adaline's neighbor Maggie offers assistance and comfort, but Adaline suspects her of hiding other truths from her. Adaline tries to prepare for her girls' eventual return while investigating her own past forgotten traumas, but a threatening message urges her to let the past stay forgotten. Can Adaline find the truth and save her marriage to Cache, or will the tangled web of memories from her past keep her from moving on?

Author Lauri Schoenfeld's psychological thriller is a suspenseful tale of family trauma, discovering our inner strength, and understanding the power of forgiveness.

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Giving Your Characters Pain
by Lauri Schoenfeld

We all go through pain either psychologically, emotionally, or physically. A lot of times it can end up being all three. No one shares their agony exactly in the same way as another because of our different personalities, upbringing, experiences, and perspectives. None of us are free from it.

As you're writing, your character or characters will always have something in one of these areas that they're striving to get through—trying to understand and process. They may be searching out who they are, and maybe because of their upbringing or culture, this search causes them a great deal of affliction, going outside the grain of figuring those pieces out. Perhaps the loss of someone they love has greatly affected their worth, will, drive, or purpose for existence. Or physically, an illness they feel is so intense that even getting up to take a shower is too much to handle. Each area can weaken your character's spirit and heart.

Readers want to keep reading because pain is a universal thing, even if they don't completely relate to what that character's dealing with. They want to root for them. The readers feel the agony and empathize with how much this space hurts the characters deeply and want to be there to push them forward.

The hero's journey for our characters is constant movement within that anguish. Getting to the next step can be more intense, scary, hard, and worse before it gets better. Our characters will want to leave, but they'll have to make the hard choice to face it and keep going through the storm. By doing so, some answers, lessons, and moments will define them.

Here are a few examples from some of my favorite books. There are no spoilers on endings!

From Fault in Our Stars, the character Hazel Grace Lancaster is a seventeen-year-old who has thyroid cancer. It's started to spread into her lungs, so she uses a portable oxygen tank to breathe properly. Hazel feels suffering day in and day out. She wants to be understood. To appease her mother, she attends a cancer patient's support group and meets a teenage boy named Augustus Waters. They begin to build a friendship, and she finds out he had osteosarcoma but had his leg amputated and is cancer-free. With their friendship, they're able to help each other with the struggles they both face.

In Shutter Island, Teddy Daniels is devastated by the loss of his wife, which took place in a fire. The grief he feels messes with him both emotionally and psychologically, sending him spirally to look for answers about his wife's death and his own sanity. He wants truth and answers. The story makes you question the depth of this man's sorrow, and you can't help but wonder where his head's at, but you're rooting for him to figure it out.

In Wonder, August Pullman, also known as Auggie, has "mandibulofacial dysostosis," a rare facial deformity. Surgery is not uncommon for him, as he's had (27) of them. Auggie's been homeschooled by his mom for eleven years, so when he's enrolled to go to 5th grade in a public school, pain, and fear of being different sets in. He wants to be accepted and liked. Auggie goes to school anyways and faces the unknown each day.

What hardship is your character dealing with?

Is it physical, mental, or emotional? All of them?

What would your character/characters have to do to face that pain? The next step forward?

What is one thing that your character wants and is in search of?

• Hazel wants to be understood/friendship.

• Teddy wants truth and answers.

• Auggie wants to be accepted and liked as he is.

For fun and research, go through some of your favorite movies and establish the characters' ultimate affliction and want/need (goal). Or even think about your own life story, a friend, or a family member. How has their pain/ struggle made them tick? React? How have they handled it?

Now, write that novel. Bring in all the raw emotion, so the reader's sucked into feeling it all right along with your character.

  

Publication date: August 5th, 2021

Links: Amazon | Goodreads

From its creepy town mascot to the story of its cursed waterfall, Burden Falls is a small town dripping with superstition. Ava Thorn knows this well – since the horrific accident she witnessed a year ago, she’s been plagued by nightmares.

But when her school nemesis is brutally murdered and Ava is the primary suspect, she starts to wonder if the legends surrounding the town are more fact than fiction.

Whatever secrets Burden Falls is hiding, there’s a killer on the loose, and they have a vendetta against the Thorns…

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Kat Ellis opens the curtain on this small town thriller with the introduction to our protagonist, Ava Thorn. Ava, a senior in high school, has been ousted from her childhood home, the manor and grounds of the once-thriving Thorn apple orchards which has been owned by the family for generations. To make matters so much worse, it's been sold by her uncle to the one person Ava despises most—the man who collided with her parents' car and who she blames for her parents' deaths—Madoc Miller. When one of the Millers turns up dead and Ava is the one to discover the body, rumors start to fly of Dead Eyed Sadie, a blight upon the Thorn family history.  But is Sadie really behind the death or is it less supernatural?

The small-town setting of Burden Falls is absolutely dripping with superstitions from Dead Eyed Sadie to the drawings of the evil eye everywhere. This is one small town where the roots go deep and sometimes tear themselves out of the grave to haunt you. It's impossible for everyone in town to not know what's happening and easier for the rumors to spread. To make things even more interesting, Dead Eyed Sadie is a harbinger of death for the Thorns. It's rumored that every Thorn who has died has seen Sadie right before death and Ava even has first-hand knowledge of that with her dad's sighting right before the wreck. Is Dead Eyed Sadie for real? It's hard to know for sure.  There's a crosshatching of supernatural and natural that is surprisingly effortless here.  

Ava is an interesting MC. High schooler. Outsider. Bloody Thorn. The death of her parents is fresh in her mind as it only happened last year. She has the added benefit of being right there in the car with them when it occurred and those seconds are etched on her mind and heart. Typically, teenage protagonists annoy me. They are self-centered and vapid. While some of the side characters (looking at you, Ford), definitely had no inkling how to think of anyone but themselves, Ava is fallible and yet still lionhearted and intelligent. She's also grieving and attempting to come to grips with what her new life holds. On the outside, she's fine but internally, she's just trying to hold it together. Anyone who has ever endured grief like this knows that every day you might wake up with a completely different emotion than you had the day before. That made Ava much more relatable with the layers of emotions that she experiences. From our external viewpoint, we still know that Ava is an incredibly unreliable narrator. She dreams things that feel real and has moments of seeing things that are there—until they aren't. She doesn't even know if she can trust herself to know the truth. It's a fantastic trick to make the reader second guess everything but Ava is so vulnerable that you want desperately to believe in her.

This is one of those mysteries that the person you least expect is always the person you should most suspect. I can't say there were any surprises in the end given that formula but I enjoyed the ride. Even though it's technically YA, Ava's maturity has been thrust upon her and made her read much older. Great characters with complicated relationships start you down this dismal path but the urban legends, dark familial history, and a splash of blood will keep you there until the end. 

Kat Ellis is a young adult author whose novels include Wicked Little Deeds/Burden Falls (August 2021), Harrow Lake (July 2020), Purge (September 2016), Breaker (May 2016), and Blackfin Sky (May 2014). She is a fan of all things horror and sci-fi, and a keen explorer of ruins, castles and cemeteries – all of which are plentiful in North Wales, where Kat lives with her husband.
You can find out more about Kat at www.katelliswrites.com or connect with her on social media. 
Email: katelliswrites@gmail.com
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Publication date: July 18th 2021

Links: Amazon | Goodreads

Flirting with evil will be the ruination of her soul.

Goodness is much easier to corrupt than it is to hold on to. And for Natasha, a woman reeling from the pain of losing a loved one, evil is all the more tempting. Luck or misfortune spirits Natasha away to the foreign Court of Velaris in a quest for a suitor but instead secures her a place among Velarian royalty. Craving revenge, Natasha makes use of this opportunity to enact her plans as she navigates the lush court where aristocracy is a double-edged blade. But when she befriends her soon-to-be husband Mikhail, the Beloved Prince, Natasha makes a deadly mistake. She captures the attention of the debonair Darkling Prince; a villainous man meant to ascend the Velarian throne.

Enamored, the Darkling Prince charms Natasha, and soon the two feel a forbidden emotion captivate their stoic, scabrous hearts. But with the existence of a violent rebel group capable of cataclysmic damage, there is little time for love. With war brewing amidst the enigmatic kingdom, the royals must become all the more cunning and devious if they wish to triumph over their adversaries. What draws the insidious line between right and wrong when it comes to a battle of survival? For Natasha, nothing is too far, too light, too bloody, too evil.

Soon, the only reflection Natasha sees in her mirror's beveled glass is that of an Evil Queen. Often, the cost of survival is more frightening than the beasts of death. But that's what gives the Queen of Shadow's beauty an edge: she wears her darkness adorned about her throat like the grandest of all diamonds, ebony, and bloodred in shade

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