Blood on Her Tongue
Van Veen’s “stunning sophomore outing,” per PW’s starred review, takes place in her native Netherlands in the 1880s, when a bog body surfaces on Sarah’s husband’s estate with a stone in its mouth. Her obsession with the centuries-old corpse concerns her twin, Lucy, who begins to suspect that Sarah’s increasingly bizarre behavior is not the brain fever the doctor has diagnosed, but something far more sinister and inhuman.
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The Butcher’s Daughter
The infamous Mrs. Lovett, sidekick to Sweeney Todd, steps into the spotlight. In Victorian London, the chief inspector of the London Metropolitan Police receives a mysterious package: a bundle of letters between journalist Miss Emily Gibson and an unnamed correspondent whom Gibson believes to be the notorious Fleet Street pie baker.
Polybius
In what PW’s review called Armstrong’s “chilling debut,” the sleepy oceanside town of Tasker Bay, Calif., is rocked by the 1982 arrival of the terrifying video game of the title. Two teens—newcomer Andi and sheriff’s son Ro—meet at the local arcade, where the game’s fans quickly turn obsessive and violent. As a storm cuts off Tasker Bay from the world, its inhabitants are seized by a mysterious, virus-like illness, and Andi and Ro are sure the game is the culprit.
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The Possession of Alba Diaz
When a plague hits the Mexican city of Zacatecas in 1765, Alba and her parents seek refuge in the remote silver mine belonging to the family of Carlos, her fiancé. She finds herself strangely drawn to Carlos’s cousin, Elías, and a good thing too—he’s the first to notice when she begins to hallucinate and sleepwalk, almost as if another entity were speaking through her mouth and living in her skin. Caught between a demon and the Catholic Church, the two face down something much more frightening than the plague.
The Starving Saints
In this tale of medieval religious fervor and sapphic desire, Aymar Castle has been under siege for six months, and with food running out, the women inside are beginning to eye one another with more hunger than lust. The arrival of the Constant Lady and her Saints—a group of knights who claim divine status—seems to offer salvation. But war hero Ser Voyne, nun-turned-sorceress Phosyne, and maidservant Treila all see what the Lady is up to, and the three must battle the evils within their walls along with the army outside.
The Unkillable Frank Lightning
Rountree’s latest weird western is a retelling of Frankenstein that sees a grief-stricken doctor and occultist, Catherine Coldbridge, raise her husband from the dead. The monster that comes back from the grave is not the man she buried, and she flees. Twenty-five years later, plagued by guilt, she heads to Texas with mercenary killers to put him down for good. But the undead Frank has remade himself: he is now the Unkillable Frank Lightning, a star in a traveling Wild West show.
