Author: Rebecca Rowland

Articles / Reviews

 by 

Epeolatry Book Review: Spinal Remains by Chad Lutzke

Disclosure:

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: Spinal Remains
Author: Chad Lutzke
Publisher: Cemetery Gates Media
Genre: Horror
Release Date: 9th August, 2022

Synopsis: In his third short story collection, Lutzke offers yet another bender-tossed concoction of fiction colored dark. Fourteen tales covering a multitude of subgenres, including: psychological, crime, extreme, human horrors, bizarre, coming of age, and humor.

(more…)

Articles / Reviews

 by 

Epeolatry Book Review: We Haunt These Woods by Holley Cornetto

Disclosure:

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: We Haunt These Woods
Author: Holley Cornetto
Publisher: Bleeding Edge Books
Genre: Horror/Coming of Age
Release Date: 19th July, 2022

Synopsis: Nate Holbrook had put his past behind him. When his friends went missing all those years ago at Lake Swart, it had been nothing more than a tragic mystery. No matter what stories they’d told each other about the “Forest Man,” there was no primeval menace lingering in that cave they found deep in the woods.
But when Nate meets up with Jennifer, a fellow Lake Swart survivor and his first love, everything changes. Finding her scarred and broken by the weight of the past, he proposes a daring remedy for their shared trauma—to return to their old summer haunt and prove the thing in the cave nothing more than a delusion and a myth.
But what if Nate is wrong?
What if the Forest Man is still waiting, after all this time, for a new friend to sing his song… to take his hand and disappear?

(more…)

Articles / Reviews

 by 

Epeolatry Book Review: Three Days in the Pink Tower by EV Knight

Disclosure:

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: Three Days in the Pink Tower
Author:  EV Knight
Publisher: Creature Publishing, LLC
Genre: Occult
Release Date: July 12th, 2022

Synopsis: Josey Claypool begins the summer before her senior year at a carnival, where a fortune teller with milky-white eyes gives her a foreboding tarot reading. She’s spooked, but nothing could prepare her for the following day when two strange men show up at her front door. Josey is kidnapped at gunpoint and brought to a pink cabin in the woods where she is held prisoner. In her darkest moment, the fortune teller appears and gives her a deck of tarot cards, which she must cast and interpret in a fight for her life.

In this work of speculative autofiction, award-winning author EV Knight reclaims the narrative of her own past in an exploration of trauma, agency, and survival.

(more…)

Articles / Reviews

 by 

Epeolatry Book Review: Growth by Elin Olausson

Disclosure:

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: Growth
Editor: Elin Olausson
Publisher: Dark Ink
Genre: Horror
Release Date: 20th June, 2022

Synopsis: Twenty dark tales of psychosocial horror fill the pages of Elin Olausson’s stunningly creepy short story collection debut. Three sisters live isolated in the wilderness, unbothered, until their world shatters with the arrival of a stranger. A young man revisits the childhood home where his sister danced and his mother died. A woman is promised the house of her dreams and goes mad when she doesn’t get it. Two evil teens stand united against the world, until one of them falls in love. In an abandoned asylum in the desert, a girl chants her own name.

Filled with madness, darkness and the truth of the human condition, Olausson’s stories will leave readers thinking about their own sanity and questioning the motives of those who are closest to them.

(more…)

Articles / Reviews

 by 

Epeolatry Book Review: Symphony of the Damned, ed. TroyAnthony Schermer

Disclosure:

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: Symphony of the Damned
Author: Various, ed. TroyAnthony Schermer
Publisher: Savage Realms Press
Genre: Horror
Release Date: 16th April, 2022

Synopsis: From Savage Realms Press comes a dark and twisted tome with over 400 pages of skin-crawling, spine-tingling horror that is sure to make you sleep with the lights on!
This eclectic mix of the macabre and the maniacal features 27 tales of terror:

  • A man purchases a painting by the notorious serial killer, John Wayne Gacy.
  • A night of seemingly harmless flirtation brings a woman much more than she bargained for.
  • A journalist’s interview for a human-interest story quickly evolves into a living, breathing nightmare.
  • A man’s dream of making contact with extraterrestrials has unforeseen consequences.
  • While investigating a beautiful and mysterious planet, the crew of the Starship Tigris quickly discovers that all is not the paradise it appears to be
  • A doctor’s emergency house call results in a truly horrifying discovery
  • In a near-future dystopia, stringent laws are passed dictating how men can interact with women
  • A couple receives a phone call from their daughter on the 15-year anniversary eve of her death
  • An elite team discovers the sole lifeform on a deserted planet is carrying a deadly secret
  • A bus ride takes an unexpected detour into the gruesome and the macabre
  • and many more

(more…)

Articles / Reviews

 by 

Epeolatry Book Review: The Ghost That Ate Us by Daniel Kraus

Disclosure:

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: The Ghost That Ate Us: The Tragic True Story of the Burger City Poltergeist

Author: Daniel Kraus

Genre: Horror

Publisher: Raw Dog Screaming Press

Release Date: 12th July, 2022

Synopsis:

You remember the brutal crime, don’t you?

Maybe you read about it on Twitter. Maybe a friend sent you a news clip. Maybe you saw it on an episode of Spectral Journeys that night you were flipping through channels, unable to sleep.

Maybe after reading the true story, you won’t ever sleep again.

On June 1, 2017, six people were killed at a Burger City franchise off I-80 near Jonny, Iowa. It was the bizarre and gruesome conclusion to nine months of alleged paranormal activity at the fast-food joint-events popularly known as “the Burger City Poltergeist.”

The story inspired Facebook memes, Twitter hashtags, Buzzfeed listicles, Saturday Night Live sketches, and more. But the case was never much more than a punchline…until bestselling writer Daniel Kraus (The Shape of Water, The Living Dead) decided to head to Iowa to dig up what really happened.

Presented here is the definitive story of “the most exhaustively documented haunting in history,” including-for the first time ever-interviews with every living survivor of the tragedy.

The employees of Burger City were a family. They loved one another. At least, at the beginning.

(more…)

Articles / Reviews

 by 

Epeolatry Book Review: Trigger Warning: Speaking Ill, ed. John Baltisberger

Disclosure:

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: Trigger Warning: Speaking Ill
Author: Various, ed. John Baltisberger
Publisher: Madness Heart Press
Genre: Horror
Release Date: 11th February, 2022

Synopsis:“Death canonizes even the most awful of us. No one will speak ill of you when the dirt is still fresh upon your grave. It’s only once the grass starts to grow that everyone remembers what a piece of shit you were.”
–Chandler Morrison, Hate to Feel

What are we doing when we refused to engage the dead in our stories, in our horror? Are we respecting them? Or are we forgetting them and condemning their memory to oblivion?

We at Madness Heart Press contend that the only way to truly respect those who are gone is to fully engage them with the disrespect they are due.

Through strange, terrifying, and disgusting horror, these 9 authors ensure that death is no safe space. No corpse will escape their due through death, but will instead be allotted the full measure of what our authors have in store.

This is your trigger warning.

(more…)

Articles / Reviews

 by 

Epeolatry Book Review: Nocturnal Pursuits by Glenn Rolfe

Disclosure:

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: Nocturnal Pursuits
Author: Glenn Rolfe
Genre: Horror
Publisher: Silver Shamrock Publishing
Release Date: 29th November, 2021

Synopsis: Glenn Rolfe (Blood and Rain and August’s Eyes) is back with a new collection of deliciously frightening, thought-provoking horror. Whether dealing with werewolves in “The Dead Brother Situation”, a vicious cult in “The Devil’s Kin”, an evil doll in the Splatterpunk Award-nominated “Molly”, or gut-wrenching loss in “Gone Away”, these fifteen dark tales promise to entertain, cause your skin to crawl, and make you feel a little more.

Nocturnal Pursuits takes you on a journey into the heart of an author both obsessed with and afraid of the macabre. Be it a suicide woods, a crazed gas station attendant, or neighborhood enigma throwing a party, you won’t soon forget these encounters.

When the shadows fall upon the day and the living are fast asleep, Glenn Rolfe is wide-awake wrestling with aliens, demons, and the ghosts that take up the dark corners of his mind. You’ve been invited. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

(more…)