Author: Joseph Pietris

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Epeolatry Book Review: Nightwood by Elana Gomel

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Our reviews may contain affiliate links. If you purchase something through the links in this article we may receive a small commission or referral fee. This happens without any additional cost to you.

Title: Nightwood
Author: Elana Gomel
Publisher: Crystal Lake Publishing
Genre: Mythology, Historical Fantasy, Fantasy Adventure Fiction, Horror
Release date: 18th January, 2023

Synopsis: All fairy tales were history once.
Ally is a Ukrainian bride who married a wealthy Californian, Carl Morris. Everything is strange in her new home: the shadowy redwoods, the peculiar neighbors, and the mystery surrounding the death of Carl’s first wife. But Ally is determined to leave her own tragic past behind and to be a good wife and a good American.
Escaping darkness is not so easy, however. Ally discovers that her house is situated on the borders of Nightwood, where fairy tales become nightmares and nightmares become reality. And the ruler of Nightwood has plans of his own.
When Carl is abducted by a forest monster, Ally follows him into the land where the Red, Black, and White Horsemen drag the sun in their wake. There she is taken prisoner by the ghoulish Little Mother and is forced to labor in a filthy farmyard filled with deformed human livestock. But Little Mother is not the most terrifying creature in Nightwood. The Ogre, squatting in the Castle with no Windows, is poised to invade our world. He has Carl; and he wants Ally.
Unexpectedly joined by new friends, Ally escapes to embark on a perilous journey across a dying land filled with mythical beasts and creatures from fairy tales. To save Carl, Ally will have to brave the horrors of Nightwood and uncover the shattering secret of her own identity.

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Epeolatry Book Review: Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle

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Title: Camp Damascus
Author: Chuck Tingle
Publisher: Tor Nightfire
Genre: Horror/Occult/Fantasy/LGBTQ+
Release date: 18th July, 2023

Synopsis: From beloved internet icon Chuck Tingle, Camp Damascus is a searing and earnest horror debut about the demons the queer community faces in America, the price of keeping secrets, and finding the courage to burn it all down.
Welcome to Neverton, Montana: home to a God-fearing community with a heart of gold.
Nestled high up in the mountains is Camp Damascus, the self-proclaimed “most effective” gay conversion camp in the country. Here, a life free from sin awaits. But the secret behind that success is anything but holy.
And they’ll scare you straight to hell.

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Epeolatry Book Review: Bad Moon Rising by Luisa Colón

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Our reviews may contain affiliate links. If you purchase something through the links in this article we may receive a small commission or referral fee. This happens without any additional cost to you.

Title: Bad Moon Rising
Author: Luisa Colón
Publisher: Cemetery Dance Publications
Genre: Horror, Occult
Release date: 11th August, 2023

Synopsis: In Gravesend, Brooklyn, sixteen-year-old Elodia is an outcast at school, at odds with her father, and longing for her mysteriously absent mother. Lonely and isolated, Elodia knows that something unspeakably terrible has happened to her—she just can’t remember what.

Miles away in upstate New York, a young man named Gabriel occupies his time by killing sparrows and searching for his birth parents. Gabriel wants to show them what a good son he can be, well-behaved and helpful and no trouble at all—until a savage betrayal plants an ever-growing seed of revenge within him.

Desperate for the promise of their past lives and future dreams, both Elodia and Gabriel are broken and scarred, their lives shattered. Their wounds run deep—and that kind of damage is irrevocable. Unchangeable. Irreversible.

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Epeolatry Book Review: Conjured Darkness by Michael Jess Alexander

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Our reviews may contain affiliate links. If you purchase something through the links in this article we may receive a small commission or referral fee. This happens without any additional cost to you.

Title: Conjured Darkness
Author: Michael Jess Alexander
Publisher: Independent
Genre: Horror
Release date: 23rd December, 2022

Synopsis: In this short story collection, award-winning writer Michael Jess Alexander serves up a morbid menagerie of aliens, cultists, murderers, and more.

“Trapdoors” depicts a world plagued by a bizarre, seemingly lethal phenomenon.

In “The Screaming Void,” a betrayal of trust causes a teen to suffer unfortunate consequences.

A youth struggles to control a terrifying, newfound power in “Away Game.”

These and other tales make up this work of imaginative horror prose. 

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Epeolatry Book Review: Kill Radio by Lauren Bolger

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Our reviews may contain affiliate links. If you purchase something through the links in this article we may receive a small commission or referral fee. This happens without any additional cost to you.

Title: Kill Radio
Author: Lauren Bolger
Publisher: Malarkey Books
Genre: Horror
Release Date: 1st, April, 2023

Synopsis: When five-year-old Rory unearths his estranged father’s handmade crystal radio-which happens to patch straight through to Hell-violence and terror reign in the form of hellhounds, shadow figures, and demonic possessions.

Aided by a laconic fisherman and a charming warlock, Rory’s mother, Rachelle, must track down her ex, the only person who can shut down the radio before the worst denizens of Hell are unleashed on earth.

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Epeolatry Book Review: You are my Sunshine and Other Stories by Octavia Cade

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Our reviews may contain affiliate links. If you purchase something through the links in this article we may receive a small commission or referral fee. This happens without any additional cost to you.

Title: You are my Sunshine and Other Stories
Author: Octavia Cade
Publisher: Stelliform Press
Genre: Horror, Sci Fi, Fantasy, Solarpunk, Short Story Collection
Release date: 21st September, 2023

Synopsis: Sometimes change can hurt. This collection of short stories traces the growing pains of a new world, beginning with the death throes of our current way of life and ending with a world transformed by science and technology, and by grief, hope, love, and humanity’s will to transform. This is a collection that will both tear you apart and tend to your wounds. Cade’s beautifully wrought stories are informed by science, tracing the biological and emotional threads that bind us, human and non-human alike. Containing a brand new novelette in the Impossible Resurrection of Grief universe, You Are My Sunshine and Other Stories is a promise of what worlds are possible if we allow ourselves to change.

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Epeolatry Book Review: The Horror at Pleasant Brook by Kevin Lucia

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Title: The Horror at Pleasant Brook

Author: Kevin Lucia

Publisher: Crystal Lake Publishing

Genre: vampire / occult horror

Release date: October 2023

Synopsis: This Halloween, a malevolent, creeping horror invades a small, isolated town nestled deep in the Adirondacks. It cares nothing for this town’s secrets, prejudices, or flaws. Its only desires are to consume everything in its path and spread, until nothing else remains.

It is ancient, pitiless, and unstoppable. It is the horror at Pleasant Brook.

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Epeolatry Book Review: The Massacre at Yellow Hill by C.S. Humble

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Title: The Massacre at Yellow Hill
Author: C.S. Humble 
Genre: Weird West
Publisher: Cemetery Dance Publishing
Release Date: 17th April, 2023

Synopsis: When George Miller is killed in the mines of Yellow Hill, his wife and children are left to try and piece their lives back together. Tabitha Miller, George’s widow, is thrown into deeper chaos when she discovers that George’s death had nothing to do with the cave’s collapse, but was caused by some terrible predator deep within the earth. His death covered up by the mine’s Proprietor-Jeremiah Hart.

In nearby Big Spring, freed slave-turned-occult bounty hunter Gilbert Ptolemy arrives with his adopted son in search of a murderous vampire. New revelations in Yellow Hill draw the duo toward the struggling Miller family, the strange mine, and the horrors lurking within.

The Miller and Ptolemy families are pitted against mundane and supernatural forces in this Weird West adventure. Family struggles, heart-stopping gunfights, and nightmare creatures from dark realms abound in this award-winning novel from C.S. Humble.

“Humble writes with rare passion in the tradition of Robert E. Howard and a young Stephen King.” – Laird Barron, author of The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All

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