More New Spring Horror Releases

As promised in last week's post, here are some other horror books to look forward to:


March

Ellen Datlow (ed.) – The Doll Collection 

An illustrated anthology featuring all-original dark tales of dolls from bestselling and award-winning authors, compiled by one of the top editors in the field. Among the writers featured are
Joyce Carol Oates, Seanan McGuire, Carrie Vaughn, Pat Cadigan, Tim Lebbon, Richard Kadrey, Genevieve Valentine, and Jeffrey Ford.


April

Joe Hill – The Fireman

In a world overtaken by a deadly and dramatic new virus, the protagonist is determined to live long enough to deliver her baby. But when it only takes a spark to start a deadly blaze, she’s going to need some help from the mysterious fireman....


May

Sarah Lotz – Day Four

Four days into a five-day singles cruise on the Gulf of Mexico, the aging ship Beautiful Dreamer stops dead in the water. With no electricity and no cellular signals, the passengers and crew have no way to call for help. But everyone is certain that rescue teams will come looking for them soon. All they have to do is wait.
That is, until the toilets stop working and the food begins to run out. When the body of a woman is discovered in her cabin the passengers start to panic. There’s a murderer on board the Beautiful Dreamer… and maybe something worse.

June

Christopher Golden – Tin Men

Economies are collapsing, environmental disasters are widespread, and war is the backdrop to life. In response the military has developed a force of elite soldiers to keep the peace. A force like nothing seen before … code-named Tin Man, soldiers are virtually transported to inhabit robot frames in war-torn countries.


Paul Tremblay – A Head Full of Ghosts 

The lives of a normal suburban New England family are torn apart when the fourteen-year-old daughter begins to display signs of acute schizophrenia. To her parents’ despair, the doctors are unable to stop her descent into madness. As their stable home devolves into a house of horrors, they reluctantly turn to a local Catholic priest for help....


Thanks to A Fantastical Librarian blog for the selection of new horror books. If you are interested in new science fiction releases, there are also many listed on this site.

Upcoming Horror Fiction

 Here are some upcoming horror novels for spring and summer that you might like to check out.

Within These Walls by Ania Ahlborn - This supernatural thriller questions how far an individual would go for success, and what  he would be capable of if the promise of forever was real. (Release Date: April 21)

Also by the same author, Brother, the tale of a teenager trying to break free of his family's deeply-disturbing traditions that involve missing young girls and screams in the night. (Release Date: September 8).

Deep in the heart of Appalachia stands a crooked farmhouse miles from any road. The Morrows keep to themselves, and it’s served them well so far. When girls go missing off the side of the highway, the cops don’t knock on their door. Which is a good thing, seeing as to what’s buried in the Morrows’ backyard.

But nineteen-year-old Michael Morrow isn’t like the rest of his family. He doesn’t take pleasure in the screams that echo through the trees. Michael pines for normalcy, and he’s sure that someday he’ll see the world beyond West Virginia. - See more at: http://books.simonandschuster.co.uk/Brother/Ania-Ahlborn/9781476783734#sthash.b1oKsOJ3.dpuf

Dawn of the Dead by George A. Romero and Susanna Sparrow - This novel is based on the cult movie classic of the same name and is being re-issued with an introduction by Simon Pegg. Zombies have overpowered the living and ravaged the world. Society has collapsed as humans race to save themselves. There are four survivors with nowhere to hide who must face a final showdown with these monsters. (Release Date: June 2)

[Adapted from a post on The Baryon Review (Barry R. Hunter) and supplemented by book descriptions from Barnes & Noble]

Stay tuned for more new releases next week!:

Bram Stoker Award® Nominees

In case you missed it, the Horror Writers Association announced the final ballot results for the Bram Stoker Awards® on February 24:

Superior Achievement in a Novel

Craig DiLouie – Suffer the Children (Gallery Books of Simon & Schuster)
Patrick Freivald – Jade Sky (JournalStone)
Chuck Palahniuk – Beautiful You (Jonathan Cape, Vintage/Penguin Random House UK)
Christopher Rice – The Vines (47North)
Steve Rasnic Tem – Blood Kin (Solaris Books)

Superior Achievement in a First Novel

Maria Alexander – Mr. Wicker (Raw Dog Screaming Press)
J.D. Barker – Forsaken (Hampton Creek Press)
David Cronenberg – Consumed (Scribner)
Michael Knost – Return of the Mothman (Woodland Press)
Josh Malerman – Bird Box (Harper Collins)

Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel

Jake Bible – Intentional Haunting (Permuted Press)
John Dixon – Phoenix Island (Simon & Schuster/Gallery Books)
Kami Garcia – Unmarked (The Legion Series Book 2) (Little Brown Books for Young Readers)
Tonya Hurley – Passionaries (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers)
Peter Adam Salomon – All Those Broken Angels (Flux)

Superior Achievement in a Graphic Novel

Emily Carroll – Through the Woods (Margaret K. McElderry Books)
Joe Hill – Locke and Key, Vol. 6 (IDW Publishing)
Joe R. Lansdale and Daniele Serra – I Tell You It’s Love (Short, Scary Tales Publications)
Jonathan Maberry – Bad Blood (Dark Horse Books)
Paul Tobin – The Witcher (Dark Horse Books)

Superior Achievement in Long Fiction

Taylor Grant – “The Infected” (Cemetery Dance #71) (Cemetery Dance)
Eric J. Guignard – “Dreams of a Little Suicide” (Hell Comes to Hollywood II: Twenty-Two More Tales of Tinseltown Terror (Volume 2)) (Big Time Books)
Joe R. Lansdale – “Fishing for Dinosaurs” (Limbus, Inc., Book II) (JournalStone)
Jonathan Maberry – “Three Guys Walk into a Bar” (Limbus, Inc., Book II) (JournalStone)
Joe McKinney – “Lost and Found” (Limbus, Inc., Book II) (JournalStone)

Superior Achievement in Short Fiction

Hal Bodner – “Hot Tub” (Hell Comes to Hollywood II: Twenty-Two More Tales of Tinseltown Terror (Volume 2)) (Big Time Books)
Sydney Leigh – “Baby’s Breath” (Bugs: Tales That Slither, Creep, and Crawl) (Great Old Ones Publishing)
Usman T. Malik – “The Vaporization Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family” (Qualia Nous) (Written Backwards)
Rena Mason – “Ruminations” (Qualia Nous) (Written Backwards)
John Palisano – “Splinterette” (Widowmakers: A Benefit Anthology of Dark Fiction) (Widowmaker Press)
Damien Angelica Walters – “The Floating Girls: A Documentary” (Jamais Vu, Issue Three) (Post Mortem Press)

Superior Achievement in a Screenplay

Scott M. Gimple – The Walking Dead: “The Grove”, episode 4:14 (AMC)
Jennifer Kent – The Babadook (Causeway Films)
John Logan – Penny Dreadful: “Séance” (Desert Wolf Productions/Neal Street Productions)
Steven Moffat – Doctor Who: “Listen” (British Broadcasting Corporation)
James Wong – American Horror Story: Coven: “The Magical Delights of Stevie Nicks” (FX Network)

Superior Achievement in an Anthology

Michael Bailey – Qualia Nous (Written Backwards)
Jason V Brock – A Darke Phantastique (Cycatrix Press)
Ellen Datlow – Fearful Symmetries (ChiZine Publications)
Chuck Palahniuk, Richard Thomas, and Dennis Widmyer – Burnt Tongues (Medallion Press)
Brett J. Talley – Limbus, Inc., Book II (JournalStone)

Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection

Stephen Graham Jones – After the People Lights Have Gone Off (Dark House Press)
John R. Little – Little by Little (Bad Moon Books)
Helen Marshall – Gifts for the One Who Comes After (ChiZine Publications)
Lucy Snyder – Soft Apocalypses (Raw Dog Screaming Press)
John F.D. Taff – The End in All Beginnings (Grey Matter Press)

Superior Achievement in Non-Fiction

Jason V Brock – Disorders of Magnitude (Rowman & Littlefield)
S.T. Joshi – Lovecraft and a World in Transition (Hippocampus Press)
Leslie S. Klinger – The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft (Liveright Publishing Corp., a division of W.W. Norton & Co.)
Joe Mynhardt and Emma Audsley – Horror 101: The Way Forward (Crystal Lake Publishing)
Lucy Snyder – Shooting Yourself in the Head For Fun and Profit: A Writer’s Survival Guide (Post Mortem Press)

Superior Achievement in a Poetry Collection

Robert Payne Cabeen – Fearworms: Selected Poems (Fanboy Comics)
Corrinne De Winter and Alessandro Manzetti – Venus Intervention (Kipple Officina Libraria)
Tom Piccirilli – Forgiving Judas (Crossroad Press)
Marge Simon and Mary Turzillo – Sweet Poison (Dark Renaissance Books)
Stephanie Wytovich – Mourning Jewelry (Raw Dog Screaming Press)

The presentation of the Bram Stoker Awards® will occur during the World Horror Convention in Atlanta, Georgia, on the evening of Saturday, May 9, 2015. Tickets to the banquet and the convention are on sale to the public at www.whc2015.org. The awards presentation will also be live-streamed online.

It's Raining . . . Frogs

 

I figured it was time to take a break from evil dolls, and look at other horrors that could befall humanity. The following is adapted from a previous post on Behind the Walls of Nightmare:

It may rain cats and dogs only metaphorically, but there have been numerous documented cases of frog and fish rainfall. Cases of such rainfalls, often associated in the popular mind with Biblical curses, have been reported frequently in modern times.

 Here are some examples:

• In 1977, thousands of frogs fell from the sky in Brignoles, France.

• On June 7, 2005, thousands of frogs rained on Odzaci, a small town in northwestern Serbia.

• At the end of February 2010, residents of Lajamanu, a small Australian town, saw hundreds of spangled perch fall from the sky.

• The United Kingdom is especially prone to falling frogs, having experienced a number of episodes, the most recent being in Bromley, England.

Many scientists believe that tornadic waterspouts—tornadoes that form over land and travel over water—may be responsible for frog and fish rainfalls. Other scientists theorize that any unusually powerful updraft could lift small organisms or organic material into the sky during a storm. (An updraft is a wind current caused by warm air from high pressure areas near the earth rising into cooler, low-pressure areas in the atmosphere.)

Of course, if you're Stephen King, the frogs have teeth and appear in an annual rainfall to prey upon their skeptics... (See his short story “Rainy Season” in Nightmares and Dreamscapes.)

If you're interested in taking a look at frog and fish rainfall, there are numerous YouTube videos that you can google on this subject.

Annabelle the Doll

Annabelle in the Warren's Occult Museum in Connecticut

If you've watched The Conjuring and its spinoff/prequel Annabelle, you've heard of Annabelle the Doll.

Annabelle is a rag doll rather than the porcelain doll depicted in the two movies. It originally belonged to a nursing student named Donna--a gift from her mother. The doll was reputed to move about in her apartment and to change its poses, as well as leaving cryptic notes saying HELP on pieces of parchment.

When Donna came home to her apartment one day and found drops of blood on the doll's hand, she called upon the services of a psychic. The medium advised Donna that the doll was haunted by the spirit of a dead child named Annabelle Higgins (hence the name given to the doll).

When the doll later became violent towards her roommate's boyfriend Lou, Donna contacted demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren. They advised her that the doll was not inhabited by the spirit of Annabelle Higgins, but was in fact possessed by a devil. At Donna's request, they removed it from her apartment.

The doll now resides in an occult museum owned by the Warrens. According to Ed Warren, Annabelle was responsible for the death of a young man who visited the museum and taunted the doll, daring it to do its worst to him. The man died three hours later in a motorcycle crash.

There's lot of reading/viewing material on Annabelle, including videotaped reenactments of its history on YouTube.

To learn more of the doll's story, please click here and here. And you can also contact the Warren's Occult Museum through Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Warrens-Occult-Museum/126070474135029.

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Robert the Haunted Doll

I had heard of Chucky, the evil doll of the Child's Play franchise, but until I was doing research for my second supernatural novel, I wasn't aware that Robert the Doll was in fact the inspiration for Chucky.

Robert is a hand-crafted doll made around the turn of the 20th century and named for Robert Eugene Otto, to whom the doll belonged until his death in 1974. As a child, Otto invested the doll with a human identity, often talked to him, and blamed the doll when he was accused of misbehavior. According to Otto's parents, the doll talked back to their son, giggled, and was capable of movement. After Otto's death, the doll remained in the house, and the new owner took Robert with her when she moved six years later. In 1994 she donated the doll to the Fort East Martello Museum in Key West, Florida, saying that the doll was haunted. (She too had observed the doll's ability to move from room to room.)

(Source: http://www.kwahs.org/exhibitions/online-exhibitions/robert-the-doll/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_%28doll%29.)

Robert the Doll now has his own website at http://www.robertthedoll.org/, Twitter account at https://twitter.com/Robertthedoll, and Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/robert.thedoll.5. You can also send him an e-mail at robert@robertthedoll.org.

And if you'd like your own Robert doll, you can buy one from the Key West museum where Robert currently resides.

Next week's post ... Annabelle the Doll


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robert@robertthedoll.org

robert@robertthedoll.org

Robert Eugene Otto

Robert Eugene Otto

Robert Eugene Otto

Afterlife: The Series

       
If you're a fan of Andrew Lincoln (Rick in The Walking Dead), you might also like to check out Afterlife, a psychological and supernatural British TV drama  in which he plays a leading role. The series is superbly acted, but despite its critical and popular acclaim, it was unfortunately not renewed past its second season.
 
Aterlife is the story of a university professor, Dr. Robert Bridge (played by Lincoln), who has lost his young son. His son's death has led to his divorce and torn a seemingly irreparable hole in his life. Bridge is a skeptic who views psychics as unscrupulous fakes that give false hope to the living while draining their financial resources. Then he comes up against what appears to be the genuine article--Alison Mundy, brilliantly played by Lesley Sharp--who would like nothing more than to be freed from her ability to see and communicate with the spirits of the dead, including Bridge's son.


Of course, the first thing you need to adjust to in watching Afterlife is Andrew Lincoln's native British accent, which one tends to forget because of how well he performs his American drawl in The Walking Dead.

Afterlife is available through Amazon.