Top Ten Tuesday: Halloween Freebie

Happy Tuesday! It’s time for another top ten list hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic is a Halloween freebie.

Top Ten Spooky Reads I’m Looking Forward To Reading:

1) Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh:

There is a Wild Man who lives in the deep quiet of Greenhollow, and he listens to the wood. Tobias, tethered to the forest, does not dwell on his past life, but he lives a perfectly unremarkable existence with his cottage, his cat, and his dryads.

When Greenhollow Hall acquires a handsome, intensely curious new owner in Henry Silver, everything changes. Old secrets better left buried are dug up, and Tobias is forced to reckon with his troubled past—both the green magic of the woods, and the dark things that rest in its heart.

2) Her Soul for Revenge by Harley Laroux:

Juniper
After a cult tried to sacrifice me to their wicked God, I went on the run, doing whatever was necessary to survive. Until a demon offered me a deal: give him my soul and he’ll help me claim the vengeance I seek. Blood will be spilled, and the monsters I once ran from will soon be running from me. But damning my soul was just the beginning – it’s my heart the demon wants next.

Zane
I’ve been hunting souls for centuries, but she’s the ultimate prize – vicious and feral, with a broken soul as dark as my own. I thought claiming her would be a simple game, but Juniper is far from simple. I chose to follow her on a path drenched with the blood of her enemies, but it’s our blood that may be spilled next. As an ancient God wakes from Its slumber, neither of us may survive.

Her Soul for Revenge is book 2 in the Souls Trilogy. Although all the books are interconnected, they are stand-alone and can be read in any order.

3) Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark

IN AMERICA, DEMONS WEAR WHITE HOODS.

In 1915, The Birth of a Nation cast a spell across America, swelling the Klan’s ranks and drinking deep from the darkest thoughts of white folk. All across the nation they ride, spreading fear and violence among the vulnerable. They plan to bring Hell to Earth. But even Ku Kluxes can die.

Standing in their way is Maryse Boudreaux and her fellow resistance fighters, a foul-mouthed sharpshooter and a Harlem Hellfighter. Armed with blade, bullet, and bomb, they hunt their hunters and send the Klan’s demons straight to Hell. But something awful’s brewing in Macon, and the war on Hell is about to heat up.

Can Maryse stop the Klan before it ends the world?

4) Dead Boys by Gabriel Squailia:

A decade dead, Jacob Campbell is a preservationist, providing a kind of taxidermy to keep his clients looking lifelike for as long as the forces of entropy will allow. But in the Land of the Dead, where the currency is time itself and there is little for corpses to do but drink, thieve, and gamble eternity away, Jacob abandons his home and his fortune for an opportunity to meet the man who cheated the rules of life and death entirely.

According to legend, the Living Man is the only adventurer to ever cross into the underworld without dying first. It’s rumored he met his end somewhere in the labyrinth of pubs beneath Dead City’s streets, disappearing without a trace. Now Jacob’s vow to find the Living Man and follow him back to the land of the living sends him on a perilous journey through an underworld where the only certainty is decay.

Accompanying him are the boy Remington, an innocent with mysterious powers over the bones of the dead, and the hanged man Leopold l’Eclair, a flamboyant rogue whose criminal ambitions spark the undesired attention of the shadowy ruler known as the Magnate.

An ambitious debut that mingles the fantastic with the philosophical, Dead Boys twists the well-worn epic quest into a compelling, one-of-a-kind work of weird fiction that transcends genre, recalling the novels of China Miéville and Neil Gaiman.

5) The Ancient Ones by Cassandra L. Thompson:

When David stumbles upon a tragic young woman in a sordid Limehouse pub, he has no idea she’d recognize him as the last vampyre alive, nor that she’d be the one to pull out his story. Yet as he recalls his life from the sweltering vineyards of Ancient Rome to the cold horrors of Medieval Romania – as well as his tumultuous past with the mad and mysterious Lucius – he realizes she is much more than what she seems.

Gothic horror and mythological fantasy blend seamlessly together in this thrilling adventure, breathing new life into vampire lore as it reveals its true origins. The Ancient Ones is a tale of myth, mayhem, and magic … with a dash of romance that bites.

6) The Atrocities by Jeremy C. Shipp:

When Isabella died, her parents were determined to ensure her education wouldn’t suffer.

But Isabella’s parents had not informed her new governess of Isabella’s… condition, and when Ms Valdez arrives at the estate, having forced herself through a surreal nightmare maze of twisted human-like statues, she discovers that there is no girl to tutor.

Or is there…?

7) The Crows by C. M. Rosens:

Carrie Rickard, leaving an abusive relationship back in London, tries to escape her own past by throwing herself into her restoration project: Fairwood House, known to locals of Pagham-on-Sea as The Crows. Unable to resist as it whispers to her, Carrie’s obsession only grows when she discovers it was the site of a gruesome unsolved murder.

As Carrie digs deeper into the mystery surrounding the bloodless child stuffed up the kitchen chimney in the 1950s, she awakens dark and dangerous forces that threaten her own life.

Cue an introduction to her eldritch neighbour, Ricky Porter, a foul-mouthed modern-day Merlin in a hoody and a tracksuit, who claims he can see the future. But Ricky, as obsessed with The Crows as Carrie is, has an agenda and several secrets of his own, not least of which are what’s really under his hood, and what he’s got in the cellar…

…Is his offer of help sincere? Or is he the reason she’s doomed?

8) Phobetor’s Children by MG Mason:

It is the AD70s. The tumult of The Year of the Four Emperors is over. Under Vespasian, Rome finally has stability and peace, an emperor with the respect of all classes, and all provinces. The Flavian dynasty is confident and ready to flex its muscles.

Yet beyond the borders of the empire, something dark and unknown is stirring.

A fort deep in the forests of Germania failed to report in to the border town of Mogontiacum.

Tribes friendly to Rome report catastrophic damage to buildings and Roman war machines alike. Most of the Roman soldiers are missing and what few bodies remain are mutilated.

Unsure of the size and nature of the threat, the new emperor realises he must act fast and decisively. He knows Rome cannot spare a single legion to investigate, and the senate would not authorise such a mission. But Rome can spare six of the empire’s most famous retired gladiators. With the promise of riches and prestige, it is down to those six: five men and one woman, to cross the border, travel to the forest, and find out what happened.

But the gladiators will find that the greatest horrors are what each of them already carries within their hearts and their minds.

9) The Grimy and the Greedy by Meaghan Curley:

The odious Jeanette Sobriquet is dead and her granddaughter, Fizzy, is too relieved to grieve. Unfortunately for her, when Fizzy announces her refusal to attend the abusive woman’s funeral, her life becomes a living nightmare. Now, she has demons, ghosts, and the threat of homelessness hunting her down, all demanding she caves into the dead woman’s iron will.

Bar owner, Affidious Dixon, is forced to carry out Fizzy’s dead grandmother’s last requests; otherwise, the ghost of the Bosnian war criminal that is following him around will murder his mother.

The Grimy & the Greedy is a comedic paranormal thriller about one woman’s fight to save herself from tyrannical death customs and one man’s journey to save his mother from pure evil.

10) It Devours by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor:

From the authors of the New York Times bestselling novel Welcome to Night Vale and the creators of the #1 international podcast of the same name, comes a mystery exploring the intersections of faith and science, the growing relationship between two young people who want desperately to trust each other, and the terrifying, toothy power of the Smiling God.

Nilanjana Sikdar is an outsider to the town of Night Vale. Working for Carlos, the town’s top scientist, she relies on fact and logic as her guiding principles. But all of that is put into question when Carlos gives her a special assignment investigating a mysterious rumbling in the desert wasteland outside of town. This investigation leads her to the Joyous Congregation of the Smiling God, and to Darryl, one of its most committed members. Caught between her beliefs in the ultimate power of science and her growing attraction to Darryl, she begins to suspect the Congregation is planning a ritual that could threaten the lives of everyone in town. Nilanjana and Darryl must search for common ground between their very different world views as they are faced with the Congregation’s darkest and most terrible secret.

And that’s all he wrote. What spooky reads are you looking forward to reading? Or what ones have you been reading already this Halloween? Let me know in the comments!

-Gabriel