Bad Girl in the Box by Tim Curran

 

Birch Street. A beautiful neighborhood on a beautiful summer day.
Then raw meat falls from the sky.
People are at first offended, then intrigued.
Once tasting it, they can eat nothing else. It becomes an addiction
that owns them body and soul, releasing pent-up frustrations,
secret desires, and nameless horror. And when the meat runs out,
the monsters are loose on Birch Street.
Into this hell zone of starvation, rot, and worms comes a conflicted,
traumatized young woman. She’s returning home after a long, painful
absence. She alone broods over the secret of the meat. Through her is
deliverance from starvation.
But only at the most horrific price. 

One would think that juicy, tender, succulent, meat raining down free from the sky would be a good thing. But no, this flavorful, perfectly seasoned, filet and well marbled shank is not a gift from heaven, and the people of Birch Street are not blessed on this day. When Bria comes home for a visit to her mother's house in the ultimate dysfunctional relationship she is not expecting a peaceful good time, but she never expected the entire neighborhood to go to hell.

You'll need a strong stomach for this one! Bad Girl in the box is a raunchy, gruesome, and gory read full of open festering sores and gallons of pus. It is beyond dark and twisted and definitely not something to be read on a lunch break, or even while snacking, unless you have a stomach made of steel and nonexistent gag reflex. I may need to go vegetarian for a while after reading this. 

4 out of 5 stars

I received a complimentary copy.

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About the author

Tim Curran lives in Michigan and is the author of the novels Skin Medicine, Hive, Dead Sea, Resurrection, The Devil Next Door, and Biohazard, as well as the novella The Corpse King. His short stories have appeared in such magazines as City Slab, Flesh&Blood, Book of Dark Wisdom, and Inhuman, and anthologies such as Shivers IV, High Seas Cthulhu, and Vile Things.

For DarkFuse and its imprints, he has written the bestselling The Underdwelling, the Readers Choice-Nominated novella Fear Me, Puppet Graveyard as well as Long Black Coffin.

Find him on the web at: www.corpseking.com

Constellations of Scars by Melissa Eskue Ousley

 

Not all gifts are a blessing. Some are a curse.
When Amelia turned 12, she began growing pearls. Every month, a crop of beautiful pearls bursts from the skin on her back. Her mother, Denise, believes her daughter is blessed, and sells the pearls to put food on the table. Amelia sees her condition as a curse. As the pearls form, her body aches and her skin grows feverish. The harvest of pearls brings temporary relief from the pain, but leaves her back marred by scars. Denise hides Amelia away from the world, worried that Amelia’s gift will be discovered and she will be abducted for the wealth she can provide. Now a young woman, Amelia realizes she has become her mother’s captive, and plans her escape. When she runs away from home, she finds a new family in a troupe of performers at a museum of human oddities. She soon discovers the world is much more dangerous than her mother feared.

Amelia narrates what feels like a memoir, and due to that format I felt safe to assume that she would be ok (or at least alive) in the end. She never knew her father, and her mother refuses to speak about him. Other than that, she had a relatively normal childhood until puberty brought with it a strange affliction that made her feel like a human oyster. In addition to the monthly agony of shedding pearls that burst from her skin in a bloody mess, there was the constant pain of loneliness and a longing to be like other girls, with friends, slumber parties, and boyfriends. Amelia's mother won't even let her sit outside, never mind have any human interaction or go to school. She is kept in the house at all times, and when her mother goes out Amelia is locked in the attic. As she grows older she comes to realize that her mother's protection is more from greed than love and that is when she flees the confines of her mother's home. With no real knowledge of how the world works or how to interact with people other than what she learned from books, she makes her escape with the hope of building a life for herself.

Constellations of Scars lands somewhere between the borders of Grimm's fairy tale, and body horror. It is a unique coming of age story with a fast pace that kept me turning the pages.

I received a complimentary copy for review.

4 out of 5 stars

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About the author

Melissa Eskue Ousley is an award-winning author living on the Oregon coast with her family, a neurotic dog, two charming cats, and a piranha. Her dark fantasy, Constellations of Scars, will be released this June. Her suspense novel, Pitcher Plant, is set in Seaside, and won a 2018 Independent Publisher Book Award. Her young adult novel, Sunset Empire, debuted in a bestselling boxed set. Her short stories have been included in Rain Magazine, The North Coast Squid, and various anthologies. When she’s not writing, she can be found volunteering for her local wildlife center, caring for injured owls and hawks

Chapel Street by Sean Paul Murphy

 

Rick Bakos never had a chance at happiness. After enduring the tragic death of his father in a car accident, Rick grew up to helplessly watch both his older brother Lenny and his mother Agnes succumb to madness and suicide. Nor were they the first members of his family to kill themselves. Suicide has steadily stalked the Bakos family since they first arrived in Baltimore from Bohemia at the turn of the 20th Century.
Turning to genealogy to better understand his self-destructive family, Rick works as a volunteer for the website RestingPlace. After photographing the grave of Betty Kostek for the webpage, Rick finds himself drawn into a maelstrom of horror. Each night he finds himself inexorably drawn closer to self-destruction.
Rick’s only ally is a fellow volunteer named Teri Poskocil. She, too, has fallen under the suicidal spell of the late Betty Kostek. The couple soon discovers their pairing wasn’t a coincidence. Their great-grandparents were next door neighbors on Chapel Street nearly a century earlier. So were Betty’s grandparents. Together Rick and Teri must solve the mystery of Chapel Street before they find death at their own hands.

Chapel Street is a harrowing tale of good against evil as a demon stalks a family through several generations. Rick has struggled after the loss of multiple family members, but it may have been the guilt at not having been home when his mother killed herself that made Rick vulnerable to this supernatural attack. He is first visited by what seems to be the spirit of his dead brother after taking a photograph at the cemetery where one woman's final resting place is overloaded with fresh flowers while so many others are bare and forgotten. When he looks into the reasoning behind such an ongoing tribute he uncovers a creepy link between this deceased woman and his family, including her horrifying prediction about his own life. When Rick meets Teri, who has also been photographing graves for the RestingPlace website he learns that he is not alone in these strange happenings and ghostly visitations. As time goes on these occurrences become more frequent and more dangerous.  

This is one of my favorite types of horror. It's straight up scary and full of family secrets and the consequences and cost of inviting evil into your life whether unknowingly, or for personal gain. 

If you enjoy books like The Exorcist or you watch tv shows like A Haunting or Paranormal Survivor this book is meant for you. 

5 out of 5 stars

This story was inspired by an actual haunting, the details of which can be found on the Author's Blog

I received a complimentary copy for review.

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Father's Little Helper by Ronald Kelly

 

Black Christmas

The citizens of Cedar Bluff, Tennessee, have never recovered from the Christmas Massacre of 1978 - that tragic day when Richard McFarland, armed with a shotgun, abandoned his wife and son and selected a local church as the stage for a bloody, murderous rampage. McFarland paid for his crimes in the electric chair. Yet, not even death will stop him from finishing what he started.

Bloody Legacy

After 14 years, Sonny's father is back. He'd been away so long that Sonny hardly remembered him. But Richard McFarland remembered his only son. And now, he will teach him how to kill.

Sonny is about to become a deadly force that will be unleashed on the unsuspecting citizens of Cedar Bluff. For, when the time is right, he will return to the small, quiet town, bringing death and destruction on an even more terrifying Christmas Day!

I took some time off from reading ARCs to get back to some old school Zebra horror from 1992. This particular version is hard to find these days, but it has since been rereleased for Kindle under the title "12 Gauge"

I had a hard time reading this one. Not because it isn't well written, but due to the subject matter. I think I just chose a bad time to read a book about mass shootings. Or maybe since there have probably been around 300 mass shootings in the 30 years since this was first published there may never come a time when I wouldn't struggle with such a plot. In Father's Little Helper, the son of a mass murderer comes back to town to shoot the survivors of his father's crime. It is gut wrenching, and brutal. The story opens with the original shooting spree, after which the killer's wife takes her young son into hiding. Sonny grew up never knowing what his father had done, but he always had an interest in serial killers and mass murderers. When he is 17 he learns the truth and sets out to make his daddy proud. I would only cautiously recommend this book to those who think they can handle it.

Kindle Version

About the author

Ronald Kelly was born and raised in the hills and hollows of Middle Tennessee. He became interested in horror as a child, watching the local "Creature Feature" on Saturday nights and "The Big Show"---a Nashville-based TV show that presented every old monster movie ever made ---in the afternoons after school. In high school, his interest turned to horror literature and he read such writers as Poe, Lovecraft, Matheson, and King. He originally had dreams of becoming a comic book artist and created many of his own super heroes. But during his junior year, the writing bug bit him and he focused his attention on penning short stories and full-length novels. To date, he has had ten novels and eight short fiction collections published. In 1992, his audio-book, DARK DIXIE, was included on the nominating ballot for a Grammy Award. He currently lives in Brush Creek, Tennessee with his wife, Joyce, his two daughters, Reilly and Makenna, and his son, Ryan (Bubba)