In this package you will also receive a new release from the author who wrote the foreword for Feral & Hysterical, Ania Ahlborn. THE UNSEEN is A terrifying new novel from bestselling #HorrorBookTok sensation Ania Ahlborn—the acclaimed author of the modern classic Brother AND it comes with a signed bookplate

There will be a goodie bag with exclusive, custom bookmark & artwork which includes a sticker of an illustration my daughter did for my book!

Bram Stoker Awards® winning author Sadie “Mother Horror” Hartmann has curated the ultimate collection of recommendations from the leading ladies of horror! From classic authors such as Mary Shelley, Shirley Jackson, and Daphne du Maurier to the modern wave of indie names and all the underrated voices waiting to be discovered, there’s enough deadly damsels in here to leave you feeling distressed long after you’ve run out of shelf space.

Each recommendation includes a spoiler-free synopsis and has been carefully catalogued and organized into thematic reading lists making it easier than ever to sate your darkest desires. Are you in your Gothic Era? Love watching a marriage gruesomely fall apart? Just finished Mexican Gothicand need more Sporror in your life? Whatever you’re vibing with, there’s a list for that.

Featuring a foreword by prolific horror author Ania Ahlborn and five essays from Alma Katsu, Alexis Henderson, Christina Henry, Rae Wilde, and Laura Purcell, this fully illustrated reader’s guide is a must-have for any horror fanatic looking to get out of a reading slump or diversify their TBR pile.

“This is an essential, long-overdue guide, and a wonderful read.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, author of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“Hartmann is the Crypt Keeper, the Elvira, and the Vampira that the book world has been waiting for. I promise you, this book will sit on my bedside table until it’s in bloody tatters.”
― Daniel Kraus, author of Whalefall

“With boundless enthusiasm, thoughtful commentary, and the conversational tone of your BFF, this book will become your own personalized horror concierge.”
― Delilah S. Dawson, author of Bloom and The Violence

“Engaging and smart as hell.”
― Keith Rosson, author of Fever House and Coffin Moon

It’s hard to have an intellectual brain and an empathetic heart and a healthy sense of justice right now. I understand and it helps me to think of all the people who agree.

Love and kindness are free and radical in dark times. Be extreme & liberal with both.

Reasons: I’m fighting ongoing/recurring skin cancer in all its various forms right now and I’m winning

I won’t be at StokerCon this year (see *Reasons) but I hope you all have the best time (I know you will) community is essential. Good luck to all the nominees

My book, is available to request on NetGalley

June is the halfway mark and I want to highlight my 2025 favorites so far (please note the top 12 and the 3 backlist titles)

I have book reviews for January-May posted in an on-going article over at

Audiobooks are changing my life. I can listen to them at 2X now and have horror piped into my brain most of the day. Recent favs: All the Colors of the Dark, American Rapture, Something in the Walls, The Starving Saints, She’s A Lamb, Hungerstone, Honeysuckle and Bone, and The Ghosts of Gwendolyn Montgomery

We recently traveled to Victoria, Canada and fell in love with it. What a charming and beautiful city *

I was born and raised and lived for 40 years in Northern California. There has always been a Nor Cal vs. So Cal beef because our differences divided us. Not anymore. We’re united now and even though many of us moved to other parts of the West Coast, we are UNIFIED

11. Oh! Libro.FM is an audiobook platform that helps you support an indie bookstore of your choice. Members get to enjoy starting tomorrow and if you combine it with , you can get 6 audiobooks for the price of one

Please remember to hydrate and use sunscreen (50 SPF) please

Stay safe if you’re going out to and ongoing, and alert

HAPPY PRIDE MONTH!! The new season of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars is incredible! I have enjoyed: At Dark I Become Loathsome, Sour Cherry, The Ghosts of Gwendolyn Montgomery, I Can Fix Her, The Scald Crow, and Hell Followed With Us

Night Worms so you don’t have to worry about trying to get August’s package which will have a signed book AND a new release with a signed bookplate! Hint: The signed book is mine lol

I’m having a book launch at WorldCon and I’ll be on a lot of panels so stay tuned for more info! If you’re a horror person and going to WorldCon, let’s find each other

I have some spooky plans coming up with 카지노싸이트-stay tuned

I’ve been thinking about my Patreon tier benefits and I’m kicking around some ideas that would involve indie horror authors. More info soon

Get out in nature, a lot and put your phone in a time out while you do it.

Please enjoy this post:

Memories of Marion Scott- ESSAY

By Nina Allan

Marion Scott was born in Croydon on New Year’s Day 1935. Her father, Douglas Scott, had grown up in Glasgow and after working there for some years as a shipping clerk he moved south, founding his own business importing coffee and other products. Marion’s mother Evelyn was the sister of a London business colleague. The two married in 1930 and with the help of Evelyn’s father bought the leasehold on a large apartment on Blackhorse Lane. Marion’s older brother Kenneth was born the following year, with a younger brother Desmond born in 1936.

When Marion was three, Douglas Scott was offered a half-share in a coffee plantation in Kenya, and moved with his family to Nairobi.

‘I could never have dreamed such a place existed,’ Marion wrote of Kenya, later. ‘The vastness of that landscape, the particular light. Even though I was still a young child, my view of the world – of what was possible – became utterly changed.’ The outbreak of war in 1939 changed everything again. The family initially remained in Kenya but by 1942 they had returned to London, where Douglas took on work provisioning the army. It was decided that Marion and Kenneth would be sent north to Scotland, Kenneth to a boarding school in the Highlands, and Marion to live with her paternal grandparents in Banchory, on the river Dee. Though Marion found the colder climate an unpleasant shock after her years in East Africa, she did at least discover echoes of her earlier freedoms in the wild landscape of rural Aberdeenshire, and it was here, in the home of her grandparents, that she came to know the writers who would first inspire her to become a writer herself.

‘The winters in Banchory could seem endless,’ she wrote. ‘Darker evenings, weeks of snow and rain. Fortunately for me, my grandparents had a lot of books. Many were of no interest to a young child – dusty old volumes about Scottish clans and the church and so on – but I loved sorting through those books, because many of them had beautiful leather bindings and strange illustrations. And there was always the hope of stumbling upon something more interesting. There was one I loved about Scottish castles. Another about Scott and Amundsen’s race to the South Pole. But the book that changed my life was a thick compendium of ghost stories called The Mammoth Book of Thrillers, Ghosts and Mysteries. I remember there was a large black bat embossed on the front cover. The moment I saw that bat, I knew the book was for me. And I was right.’ The anthology, published in 1936 by Odhams Press and edited by JM Parrish and John R. Crossland, contains works by some popular pre-war writers including Agatha Christie and GK Chesterton, as well as older writers such as EF Benson, Edgar Allan Poe and Algernon Blackwood. ‘I remember AED Smith’s story ‘The Coat’ – the idea that an object could be haunted – and MR James’s ‘The Mezzotint’, which again was about an ordinary object that turns out not to be ordinary at all. But what affected me most of all – what I found most magical – was that these stories offered up an entirely different view of the world. They seemed to confirm to me my own view, that the world was different from how it appeared to be on the surface. I also loved the fact that many of these stories were set in what were then called faraway places –the Far East and Haiti and America and even Russia. Their authors had been to other countries or came from other countries. They reminded me of Africa, I suppose.’

Marion returned to the anthology many times throughout the two years or so she spent living with her grandparents. She also turned up a copy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and a peculiar little chapbook that claimed to be the private diary of Jack the Ripper. ‘My grandmother was horrified when she found out I’d been reading that one,’ Marion remembered. ‘But my granddad persuaded her that it would be all right, that it was just a made-up story. I think he felt sorry for me, having to be away from my parents and brothers for all that time. Of course, what he didn’t know was that I started to write stories of my own based on that book, about a man who went hunting for ghosts, including the ghost of Jack the Ripper, who was still committing crimes. It turned into quite a saga. I took the notebook home with me to London but I don’t know what happened to it after that.’

I would not claim to have met Marion Scott, exactly, but I was lucky enough to hear her read. It was at a ghost story festival in Oxford, in the late 1990s. I was just starting to discover my voice as a writer. I hadn’t yet sent off any of my own stories to magazines, but I was reading a lot of ghost stories and horror fiction, both classic and contemporary. I wanted to learn as much as I could about the history of strange and supernatural fiction – what was being written, who the major writers were, which kind of stories most appealed to me and why. Someone I’d been in college with and who had stayed in Oxford for work told me about the ghost story festival and asked if I wanted to come up for the weekend and of course I jumped at the chance.

The festival was based around different venues in the city – many of these ancient buildings already had ghost stories associated with them, which added to the atmosphere. The weekend turned out to be game-changing for me. There were writers there whose work I had read, but had never hoped to see in person – Ramsey Campbell, Tanith Lee, Susan Cooper – and others, such as Joel Lane, who I hadn’t yet heard of but whose writing immediately felt important to me and who later became friends. I had never heard of Marion Scott, but decided to go to her reading because there was a lot of excitement around it. I read in the festival programme that she rarely gave interviews, or appeared at these kind of events, but it turned out that wasn’t the only reason. Later on that evening – we were all in the bar by then – I was told that Marion had disappeared at the end of the 1970s, just as her name was starting to become known. She was missing from the scene for more than a decade, and among fans of horror fiction there were all sorts of theories about what had happened to her. Many believed that she had been murdered by a hitherto unidentified serial killer. The idea of this kind of crime was very much in the news when Marion vanished – the psychopath Patrick McKay had been arrested and imprisoned just a couple of years before, and the Yorkshire Ripper murders were still ongoing and still unsolved – and with nothing else to go on, as an explanation it did not seem all that far-fetched.

At some point in 1991 or early 1992, news began to circulate that Marion Scott was alive and well and living in the same flat in Croydon that had been her family home when she was a child. Her parents by then had both passed away, and her brother Kenneth had emigrated to the United States in the early 1950s. Desmond had sadly died of a heart attack at the age of forty-two, not long before Marion went missing. In an interview for Ghosts and Scholars in 1993, Marion was characteristically reticent about her time away, saying only that a close friend of hers had died, and that she had needed to be alone to come to terms with the loss. Whether it was Desmond’s death she was referring to or someone else’s, she never said. She gave no details of where she had been throughout those years and avoided speaking about the subject thereafter. There are some who now maintain that she was living in her flat all along.

At the event in Oxford, Marion read from a novel she had begun work on inspired by the life of Harry Price, a psychic investigator born in London who became famous for his researches into the ghosts of Borley Rectory. ‘I am finding more and more inspiration, these days, in the strangeness that is often present in true events,’ Marion said. She explained that she had worked for some years in the admissions office of the University of Cambridge, a position which had offered her privileged access to the university’s research facilities. ‘I did think for a while of moving to Cambridge permanently,’ she said, ‘especially in view of the city’s closeness to the landscapes that so inspired MR James. But I found that London kept calling me back. I like London because it’s easy to lose yourself there.’ She went on to speak about the work of Robert Aickman, who, she said, was for her easily the most important of the modern generation of weird fiction writers. I had vaguely heard of Aickman, but had never read him; it was entirely down to Marion that after her event had finished I went straight to the festival bookstall and bought a recently reissued collection of his short stories. I also bought a copy of Marion’s own novella Servants to the King, which had been published as a limited edition by the Eden Book Society soon after Marion turned up again in Croydon. Marion had spoken briefly about Servants to the King during the interview, saying the story was based around the real-life disappearance of a teenaged boy in South London. ‘The case stuck in my mind,’ she said, ‘because that poor boy has never been found. I remember seeing his photograph in the newspapers and thinking he could have been one of my own brothers.’ It is an unusual work, taking elements of the gritty urban detective story and lending them a heightened strangeness that recalls more traditional weird fiction writers such as Arthur Machen and RW Chambers. There is a marked shift in atmosphere from some of Scott’s earlier fiction, almost as if her ten years in the wilderness had refashioned her as a different writer. I was desperate for Marion to sign my copy of Servants – I think I realised even then that I might not get the chance to hear her speak again – but by the time I returned to the auditorium, she was gone.

— Nina Allan, author of The Dollmaker and The Rift

The Eden Book Society was a publishing house that produced horror novelettes for a private list of subscribers. It was established in 1919 by the Eden family and ran until 2006. Presided over by the Eden family, it was handed down through the generations issuing short horror novels to a confidential list of subscribers. Eden books were always written under pseudonyms and were rumoured to have been written by some of the greatest horror authors of their day, many of whom had strong ties to the Eden family. The Eden Book Society 1993 collection is now on Kickstarter. Dead Ink hopes that you will join us as we explore the evolving fears of society throughout the 20th Century and eventually entering the 21st...

The article at The LineUp begins with reviews from January to February. March reviews were published this past Friday! I share my reading experience of the following books:

On Instagram, I’m keeping a close eye on everything scheduled to be released this year that looks dark and disturbing. Book research is my *other* hobby, right there next to buying books and reading them.

You should add all these FOLK HORROR books to your 카지노싸이트 “Want to Read” shelf!

🌾The Wilding by Ian McDonald
🌾MERE by Danielle Giles
🌾Meet Me at the Surface by Jodie Matthews
🌾Secret Lives of the Dead by Tim Lebbon
🌾Little Horn by Gemma Files
🌾Greater Sins by Gabrielle Griffiths
🌾ITCH by Gemma Amor
🌾Playing Wolf Zuzana Říhová translated by Alex Zucher
🌾The Red Knot by Monique Asher
🌾When Devils Sing by Xan Kaur
🌾And the Trees Stare Back by Gigi Griffis
🌾Hallows Hill by Olivia Isaac-Henry

Over the last few years, I have discovered ways to keep track of and acquire books released in foreign markets, so I have access to dark & disturbing books that aren’t available in the US during our calendar publishing year. In 2024, I read books like and before their US debut. Following me on social media means you will know about amazing books you can enjoy sooner rather than later, and sometimes the UK covers are better than US editions.

Also, if you love my book recommendation and reading list curation, please which will be released this August on the 19th! It will be full of brand-new reading lists, and full-page illustrations by the cover artist, María Amaya. She lives in Córdoba, Argentina 🇦🇷 There are 5 essays too! Alma Katsu, Laura Purcell, Christina Henry, Alexis Henderson, and Rae Wilde

Thank you!

xx Sadie

Due to »EVERYTHING« that has happened since January 21st under the worst administration America has ever seen, we (my husband and myself) have been more intentional about how we spend our money, specifically which companies we support with our dollars. One of the companies we immediately focused on was Amazon for a plethora of reasons but primarily for oligarchical reasons. We canceled our Prime membership and we will not be buying anything on Amazon that we can buy elsewhere. I also canceled my Audible membership and went with instead. This is what I would call a personal boycott with the understanding that it isn’t super impactful (maybe if enough people do it but our reasons do not rely on others joining us). Amazon doesn’t make the bulk of its money through the marketplace. I think if people really wanted to punch Bezos in the dick it would be an organized effort to boycott companies that use Amazon Web Services, which is a huge list. Here are the big spenders:

So like I said, our efforts to boycott Amazon need to be rooted in personal shopping integrity for our peace of mind and control over where we spend our money vs. expectations on real impact. Amazon/Bezos has fingers in a lot of income pies—much tougher to defund than say Elon & Tesla, for example. Anyhoo! Now to my point about Kindle Unlimited.

The book ecosystem on Amazon is beneficial for self-published authors, LBGTQIA+, disabled authors, and BIPOC authors who are all underrepresented in traditional publishing outlets and platforms. Authors who have chosen to publish books through Kindle Unlimited, KDP, and Ingram typically agree to exclusivity so they can take advantage of certain programs offered by Amazon to boost sales, so those books cannot be listed elsewhere for readers to access as an alternative to Amazon/Kindle.

I read a lot of Kindle Unlimited books.
I read a lot of Amazon Originals.
I read a lot of Amazon imprints like Thomas & Mercer, Lake Union, and 47North.

Example of a Kindle Unlimited book I love: by Elizabeth Davidson. Such a good folk horror book! Super short and delivers the goods. You can’t read it anywhere else. Every time a reader turns a page of this book, Elizabeth Davidson makes a little money. And I want to support that.

Here is an example of Amazon Originals that I get excited about! I just got access to these on NetGalley but they will be published for Kindle Unlimited on April 15th, 2025

THE SHIVERS

A Thomas & Mercer book I’m excited about that you can read on Kindle Unlimited. You can read a lot of Cynthia Pelayo’s work on Kindle Unlimited. Ania Ahlborn too!

So, boycotting Amazon is nuanced and personalized, and we’re not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater or guilt/shame people for navigating hard times in their way. I don’t think authors need to bear the punitive damage of these boycotts—they are standing directly in the crosshairs for an indirect hit on Bezos that the billionaire won’t even feel. There are other ways to defund billionaires that will cost the consumer some modern conveniences and require doing research and letting go of some beloved indulgences…Kindle Unlimited isn’t it. Canceling your KU membership ultimately hurts the wrong people. That’s just my .02

I will continue reading good books on Kindle Unlimited. Your mileage may vary.

-Mother Horror

In the film, I Saw the TV Glow, one character is so entrenched in fandom, she decides the reality of the characters she covets is a better reality than the one she lives. Finally, something that understands my fandom for Florence + the Machine Her music speaks to something inside me in a way no other music can, and seeing her live in concert just makes that impact hit even harder. The mythologizing, the depth of self-reflection, in both the lyrics and the notes she carries. There is an immense love of life and a constant flirting with tragedy in her songs. Her voice is a beautiful siren, summoning me to crash on the rocks. I have seen her in concert every chance I can, and each time there’s an unmistakable feeling of communing with the crowd. It feels like a place of worship, with the goddess and muse on stage, as the revelers dance themselves to death. Music has always been my fuel, and oftentimes, F+TM is the only music I listen to. Put me on a deserted island with only her catalog, I would not feel lonely.

And since Florence Welch has been so open about her recovery from addiction, that connection has only grown deeper. She sings about addiction in songs such as Restraint, South London Forever, Mermaids, and of course, Morning Elvis, which has become my addiction recovery anthem.

All this may not be normal. But that’s okay, I wouldn’t want it any other way. My novel was written to the song HOWL, with its visceral and passionate depiction of Werewolves and the passion inside each of us. And my latest novel, , has been guided by Florence’s multiple depictions of water; of drownings, of ships that wreck, and the mermaids below with their teeth so sharp.

Florence has talked more than once about how she has an obsession with water and the idea of drowning and submersing yourself entirely. She joked about how people said “You already have one water song, you can’t have another” but instead, she drowns in more water songs. In one interview, she shared the origin of her water fascination:

“When I was growing up, there were these stories that kept popping up in my life

about children who would get swept out to sea, and the parents would dive in

after them. It made me think of this idea of the sea being this entity that needs a

sacrifice, like if it’s going to take your children, then you have to give yourself... I

also remember this idea about a river that has to have someone drowned in it

before you can cross it —like, if you see a river running smoothly, it’s because

someone has drowned in it, and if it is raging, it means that it’s still got bloodlust.”

Such is the content of my novel, To Those Willing to Drown. The title came from the phrase: The lake speaks most honestly to those willing to drown, and the parents in the novel risk sacrificing their lives to the lake to save their daughter’s soul. I was on a mission to try and brand this novel with some Florence lyrics. After many attempts to find the right corporation who held copyrights to her lyrics, I reached out to them, and finally received a reply months later. Before they would agree, I had to show them how the words would appear on the page, and the name, content, and expected distribution of the novel. Finally, after paying a fee and agreeing to instructions on how to credit, I received permission. While this might seem standard fare after I celebrated the permission to use the F+TM lyrics, even Sir Chuck Wendig replied to that social media post with:

*takes a bow*

But which song lyrics did I use? As it was, for a single passage, Never Let Me Go had the best impact. A song about drowning, about the pull of the water’s bottom, a longing for the only resting spot that will bring peace. Below is how it appears on the page:

Florence spoke about how she was in such a bad place when she wrote the song Never Let Me Go, that she had avoided playing it live for ten years. When she finally revisited the song, the audience's reaction brought her to tears. It became a regular on her setlist for the Dance Fever tour, and now its lyrics are part of my foreword. Oddly, I’d hardly be considered her target audience, but my interests have never aligned with my demographics And now here I go again, I have just written another story inspired by Mermaids and Morning Elvis. With my Florence fandom, at times it seems every word I’ve ever written, is just another way to scream her name.

Check out , where to save her child’s soul, a grieving mother must battle a sinister pastor who haunts a lake community.

“A powerful, thought-provoking, multifaceted story that proves nearly impossible to put down.” —D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review

About the Author

Mark Matthews is a graduate of the University of Michigan and a licensed professional counselor who has worked in behavioral health for over 25 years. He is the author of On the Lips of Children, All Smoke Rises, Milk-Blood, and The Hobgoblin of Little Minds. He is the editor of a trio of addiction horror anthologies including Orphans of Bliss, Lullabies for Suffering, and Garden of Fiends. In June of 2021, he was nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award. His novella, KALI’S WEB, is coming in August 2025 from Crystal Lake Entertainment.

2025 is a special year for horror. It seems like, for the last five years, horror has been trying to outdo itself every year. All you need to do is take a very close look at the yearly lists hosted on organized/compiled by Emily Hughes (congratulations to Emily and all the !)

2025 will see releases from critically acclaimed horror authors like,

Stephen King, Joe Hill, Alma Katsu, Rachel Harrison, Christopher Golden, Catriona Ward, Sarah Gailey, Stephen Graham Jones, Grady Hendrix, Philip Fracassi, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Cynthia Pelayo, Daniel Kraus, Clay MacLeod Chapman, T. Kingfisher, Laura Purcell, A. G. Slatter, Cherie Priest, Cassandra Khaw, Hailey Piper, Sarah Pinborough, Caitlin Starling, V. Castro, Chuck Wendig, C. J. Cooke, Ania Ahlborn, Gemma Amor, Delilah S. Dawson, Brian Keene, Eric LaRocca, and more!

There are so many exceptional debuts and returning champions! Already I have read a few books by new-to-me authors that have BLOWN MY MIND!

is one of the best debut novels I have ever read. (full review)

Another brilliant debut is . It must not be missed. It follows in the footsteps of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Tananarieve Due’s The Reformatory. A coming-of-age ghost story set in Pre-Civil War times (full review)

So many follow-up books from break-out talents in previous years who had banger debuts and are releasing highly anticipated sophomore efforts as well as authors who are going for a three-peat! I just finished by Kat Dunn and it was everything! Don’t miss it ()

Exciting Follow-ups!

Erika T. Wurth, Ling Ling Huang, Johanna Van Veen, Erin E. Adams, David Barnett, and Agustina Bazterrica

by Virginia Feito is a title you will hear a lot about. It has a with piping-hot, young actresses tied to the leading roles,

Margaret Qualley & Thomasin McKenzie (my full review)

Three-peats!

Nat Cassidy, Chuck Tingle, Isabel Cañas

I’m trying to keep up with as many new titles as I can this year, while also catching up on backlist titles I missed while I was writing my new book,

Look for my monthly wrap-ups at !

Move over Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Lovecraft—it’s time to let the Scream Queens howl. In Sadie Hartmann’s follow-up book to the Bram Stoker Award-winner 101 Horror Books to Read Before You’re Murdered, horror fans will be delighted to discover a whole new list of horror recommendations—all by women writers.

Taking a cue from the popular practice of mood reading, the most common requests she gets on social media, and the overwhelmingly positive reaction to the icons included in her first book, Sadie has carefully curated and organized her 200+ recommendations into reading lists based on, well, vibes. Are you in your “Gothic Era?” Sadie has a list for that. Going on vacation and need some good dark beach reads? There’s a list for that. Just finished Mexican Gothic and need more “Sporror in your life?” You guessed it, there’s a list for that too! Each book on every list will include its title, author(s), date of publication, publisher, page count, theme, and a spoiler-free description alongside Sadie’s recommendation.

Featuring five brand-new essays from popular and rising voices in the genre—Alma Katsu, Alexis Henderson, Christina Henry, Rae Knowles, and Laura Purcell, this illustrated reader’s guide is perfect for anyone looking to get out of a reading slump or diversify their TBR pile.

Happy Black History Month, 2025

“The 2025 Black History Month theme, African Americans and Labor, focuses on the various and profound ways that work and working of all kinds – free and unfree, skilled, and unskilled, vocational and voluntary – intersect with the collective experiences of Black people. Indeed, work is at the very center of much of Black history and culture.”