Social Horror

She wanted safety. She found a controlled community instead. Your new neighbors are watching. For your own good. I thought moving to Serenity Heights would fix everything. After my divorce, the manicured lawns, smiling neighbors, and promise of safety felt like a fresh start—exactly what I needed to rebuild a broken life. But insomnia has a way of revealing what daylight hides. While the rest of the neighborhood sleeps, I’m awake—watching residents move through the streets in eerie synchronization. Noticing how questions are quietly discouraged. How people who push too hard suddenly ...

Winter doesn't just bring cold. It brings hunger. Winter Teeth collects eight tales of winter horror where the season is a character, and it doesn't play fair. From supernatural snowmen to predatory storms, from haunted apartments to corporate holiday parties gone wrong, these stories ask: what if winter had teeth? Dark, sharp, and ice-cold, this collection is for readers who like their holidays with a body count and their horror with a wink. Because nothing says "season's greetings" like frostbite and fear.

Social Security admits it has made $21.6 billion in incorrect benefits payments! Now it wants its money back—from widows, orphans, retired schoolteachers, and even young children whose parents received disability benefits on their behalf. Often with no explanation, they send threatening letters clawing back amounts ranging from several thousand dollars to more than $100,000. Learn how to make sure you get the correct Social Security benefits, avoid frightening clawbacks, and how to deal with the opaque bureaucracy of Social Security.

Four friends. One viral post. A nightmare they'll never tweet about. Mia and her friends were chasing a ghost—an impossibly perfect, sapphire-blue swimming hole hidden deep in the Jersey wilderness, known only by its hashtag. The plan was simple: drive in, get the perfect shot for their feeds, and be home by dark. It was meant to be an escape from their curated lives, a quest for something real to post about. But when their car breaks down and their phones lose signal, the vast, silent forest begins to feel less like an adventure and more like a trap. They are not alone. The strange ...

Step into the worlds of G.G. Melies, where science, terror, and philosophy intertwine. Science Fiction and Horror Stories gathers a series of thought-provoking tales that explore the hidden social and political questions often debated at family tables. Through gripping narratives and vivid dialogue, Melies fuses scientific reasoning and historical awareness with the uncertainty of the future. His characters move through alien landscapes, moral paradoxes, and human contradictions that reveal the fragile balance between progress and conscience. Profound, imaginative, and unsettling — this ...

Analyzing the way in which horror has been used throughout history to articulate the fears and taboos of the current generation, Darryl Jones considers the continuing evolution of the genre today. As horror is mass marketed to mainstream society in the form of romantic vampires and blockbuster hits, it also continues to maintain its former shadowy presence on the edges of respectability, as banned films and violent internet phenomena push us to question both our own preconceptions and the terrifying capacity of human nature.

Gothic media moguls Meg Hafdahl and Kelly Florence, authors of The Science of Monsters and The Science of Women in Horror, and co-hosts of the Horror Rewind podcast present a guide to the Stephen King stories and characters we all know and love. Through interviews, literary and film analysis, and bone-chilling discoveries, The Science of Stephen King delves into the uniquely horrific Stephen King universe to uncover the science behind the legendary novels that have become an integral part of modern pop culture.

The world is increasingly unthinkable, a world of planetary disasters, emerging pandemics, and the looming threat of extinction. In this book, Eugene Thacker suggests that we look to the genre of horror as offering a way of thinking about the unthinkable world. To confront this idea is to confront the limit of our ability to understand the world in which we live - a central motif of the horror genre. In the Dust of This Planet explores these relationships between philosophy and horror.

Los Angeles, Zombie Apocalypse! By James Bachman When the outbreak spreads to the City of Angels, chaos reigns. Los Angeles descends into a nightmare as wildfires blaze, the infected roam the streets, and survivors scramble to escape a city consumed by death. In a world where the rich hide behind gates and the poor are left to fend for themselves, the lines between life and death blur—and survival comes at an unimaginable cost. Fast-paced, gritty, and unrelenting, Los Angeles, Zombie Apocalypse! plunges readers into a city where every moment is a fight to stay alive. Perfect for fans of ...

Seth Grahame-Smith delivers the definitive, essential guide to making it through a horror movie in one piece. As hilarious as it is useful (if you’re trapped in a scary flick, that is), How to Survive a Horror Movie covers all the bases. Trapped in a haunted house? Check. Stalked by an evil doll? Check. Wandering aimlessly through the remains of the old world as a plague of zombies sweeps over the planet? Check.

In 1892, investigative journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett published a pamphlet with unflinching and honest descriptions of the cruelties being enacted against Black Americans in the South by their White neighbors. Wells’ poignant and raw reporting of the horrors of lynching scandalized many of her readers outside the South, yet the practice continued unimpeded for more than half a century after. Today, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases is a sobering reminder that American racism and inequality did not simply end with emancipation.

"Blood-soaked, heart-wrenching, grim and glorious.”—Rachel Harrison, national bestselling author of Black Sheep From CJ Leede, the author of Maeve Fly, comes a scorching new apocalyptic novel. American Gods meets The Last of Us in this epic and sweeping story about the end of the world as we...

Cinema is full of neurotic personalities, but few things are more transfixing than a woman losing her mind onscreen. Horror as a genre provides the most welcoming platform for these histrionics: crippling paranoia, desperate loneliness, masochistic death-wishes, dangerous obsessiveness, apocalyptic hysteria. Unlike her male counterpart—the eccentric'—the female neurotic lives a shamed existence, making these films those rare places where her destructive emotions get to play.

A claustrophobic supernatural horror novella from award-winning author Matthew Tait. At the height of a global pandemic, Lucas and Vanessa awake in darkness. They've been stolen from their lives and dumped inside Ashbrook Court – an abandoned social housing estate in Adelaide long since left to rot. As memories return and the body count rises, they begin to uncover the truth about Ashbrook Court. Something is waiting. Something that wants to hatch. INSECT KIN is a descent into isolation, madness, and infestation.

Horror films promise an experience: fear. But how exactly do filmmakers pull this off? The truth is, there's more to it than just loud noises and creepy images. With the affection of a true horror fan and the critical analysis of a scientist, Nesseth explains how audiences engage horror with both their brains and bodies, and teases apart the elements that make horror films tick. Nightmare Fuel covers everything from jump scares to creature features, serial killers to the undead, and the fears that stick around to those that fade over time.

One woman's deadly obsession with a haunted archival film precipitates her undoing in Black Flame, from the USA Today bestselling author of Manhunt, Gretchen Felker-Martin. “[Narrator Dana] Aronowitz's skillful portrayal of Ellen's breakdown will lead listeners to ponder if she can possibly...

Carlos Castaneda takes the listener into the very heart of sorcery, challenging both imagination and reason, shaking the very foundations of our belief in what is “natural” and “logical”. His landscape is full of terrors and mysterious forces, as sharply etched as a flash of lightning on the deserts and mountains where don Juan takes him to pursue the sorcerer’s knowledge - the knowledge that it is the Eagle that gives us, at our births, a spark of awareness, that it expects to reclaim at the end of our lives and which the sorcerer, through his discipline, fights to retain.

For readers of Nightbitch and We Ride Upon Sticks, this strange and sexy novel of queer love in a small town is an unsettling reminder that the horrors of modern life is a monster ready to possess us all. Angelina Sicco was born and raised in Cadenze, an ugly little mountain town that's dead...

A teen with social anxiety is tormented by a dangerous and deadly stalker… After the deaths of his best friend and stepdad, seventeen-year-old Blake Thomas can't escape the memories of that night... the screams... the blood... the axe. Making friends at his new home seems impossible. As a way to slowly step back into social relationships, Blake joins a social media site called The Reading Buddy. Recovery seems to be within reach, but after three local teens pull Blake into their own circle, it appears that an online friend doesn't want to share. Soon Blake falls victim to a chilling game ...

From “one of the best new voices in horror fiction” (Brian Keene, Bram Stoker Award–winning author), this darkly satirical supernatural thriller follows a would-be influencer whose dreams of online fame spiral into nightmare territory when she encounters a mysterious and dangerous social...