Hot Off The Shelf: October 3rd New Releases
Welcome to Spooktober, everyone!
It is the best month for those who enjoy thrillers, horror, and some dark sci-fi/fantasy novels. The month of October feels like a clean slate and a chance to try something new. Luckily for avid readers like us, plenty of books are being released in the next four months to keep us invested. Whether they are debut novels or long-awaited sequels, there is something for everyone.
Check out the books being released the first week of October.
October 3rd
Opal is a lot of things — orphan, high school dropout, full-time cynic and part-time cashier — but above all, she’s determined to find a better life for her younger brother Jasper. One that gets them out of Eden, Kentucky, a town remarkable for only two things: bad luck and E. Starling, the reclusive nineteenth-century author of The Underland, who disappeared over a hundred years ago. All she left behind were dark rumours — and her home. Everyone agrees that it’s best to ignore the uncanny mansion and its misanthropic heir, Arthur. Almost everyone, anyway.
In her small hometown, librarian Ruth Cornier has always felt like an outsider, even as her beloved father rains fire-and-brimstone warnings from the pulpit at Holy Fire Baptist. Unfortunately for Ruth, the only things the townspeople fear more than God and the devil are the myths that haunt the area, like the story of the Low Man, the vampiric figure said to steal into sinners’ bedrooms and kill them on moonless nights. When a skull is found deep in the swamp next to mysterious carved symbols, Bottom Springs is thrown into uproar — and Ruth realizes only she and Everett, an old friend with a dark past, have the power to comb the town’s secret underbelly in search of true evil.
A woman arrives alone at a Best Western seeking respite from an emptiness that plagues her. She has fled to the California high desert to escape a cloud of sorrow — for both her father in the ICU and her husband whose illness is worsening. What the motel provides, however, is not peace but a path, thanks to a receptionish who recommends a nearby hike. Out on the sun-scorched trail, the woman encounters a towering cactus whose size and shape mean it should not exist in California. Yet the cactus is there, with a gash through its side that beckons like a familiar door. So she enters it. What awaits her inside the mystical succulent sets her on a journey at once desolate and rich, hilarious and poignant.
Open the door… Holly Sherwin has been a struggling playwright for years, but now, after receiving a grant to develop her play Witching Night, she might finally be close to her big break. All she needs is time and space to bring her vision to life. When she stumbles across Hill House on a weekend getaway upstate, she is immediately taken in by the mansion, nearly hidden outside a remote village. It’s enormous, old, and ever so eerie — the perfect place to develop and rehearse her play.
Despite her own hesitations, Holly’s girlfriend, Nisa agrees to join Holly in renting the house for a month, and soon a troupe of actors, each with ghosts of their own, arrive. Yet as they settle in, the house’s peculiarities are made known: strange creatures stalk the grounds, disturbing sounds echo throughout the halls, and time itself seems to shift.
The Prince of Envy has never claimed to be a saint. But when a cryptic note arrives, signalling the beginning of a deadly game, he knows it will take more than a hint of sin to win and save his falling demon court. Riddles, hexed objects anonymous players, nothing will stand in his way, though none of his meticulous plans prepare him for her, the frustrating artist who ignites his sin like no other.
The rouble with scoundrels and blackguards is that they haven’t a modicum of honour, a fact Miss Camilla Antonius learns after one desperate mistake allows Waverly Green’s most notorious rake to blackmail her. To avoid a ruinous scandal, Camilla is forced to enter a devil’s bargain with Envy, little expecting his game will awaken her true nature…
Fritzi is a witch. The lone survivor of a brutal attack on her coven, she’s determined to find her only remaining family member and bring the hexenjägers — zealot witch hunters — to justice for the lives they ended. To do this, she will need to take down their leader, the merciless and enigmatic Kommandant Dieter Kirch. Otto is a hexenjäger — but that’s just his cover. Years ago, the hexenjäges burned his innocent mother alive, and he has been plotting his revenge against the people who tore apart his family ever since. And now the time has come for them to pay for what they’ve done.
1836, Wisconsin. Catalina lives with her Pa and her brother in a ramshackle cabin on the edge of the wilderness. Harsh winters have brought the family to the brink of starvation, and Catalina has replaced her poet’s soul with an unyielding determination to keep Pa and her brother alive.
When a sudden illness claims Pa, a strange man appears — a man covered in bark, leaves growing from his head, and sap dripping from his eyes. He scoops up her brother and disappears, leaving behind a bird with crimson wings. Catalina can’t let this man — if that’s what he is — have her brother. So, she grabs Pa’s knife and follows the bird. Along the way, she finds help from a young lumberjack, who has his own reasons for hunting the Man of Sap.
In the future, a Black girl known only as Inmate Eleven is kept confined — to be used as a colour of sadness. She lives in a small-small room with her dog, who is going wolf more often - he’s pacing and imagining he’s free. Inmate Eleven wants to go wolf too — she wants to know why she feels so Blue and what is beyond her small-small room.
In the present, Imogen lives outside of Washington DC. The pandemic has distanced her from everyone but her mother and her therapist. Imogen has intense phobias and nightmares of confinement. Her two older brothers used to help her, but now she’s on her own, until a college student helps her see the difference between being Blue and sad, and Black and empowered.
Emory might be a student at the prestigious Aldryn College for Lunar Magics, but her healing abilities have always been mediocre at best — until a treacherous night in the Dovermere sea caves leaves a group of her classmates dead and her as the only survivor. Now Emory is plagued by strange, impossible powers that no healer should possess. Powers that would ruin her life if the wrong person were to discover them.
To gain control of these new abilities, Emory enlists the help of the school’s most reclusive student, Baz — a boy already well-versed in the deadly nature of darker magic, whose sister happened to be one of the drowned students and Emory’s best friend. Determined to find the truth behind the drownings and the cult-like secret society she’s convinced her classmates were involved in, Emory is faced with even more questions when the supposedly drowned students start washing ashore — alive — only for each of them to die horrible, magical deaths.
After nearly winning the eleventh iteration of Rabbits, the mysterious alternate reality game so vast it uses the entire world as its canvas, Emily Connors suddenly finds herself trapped in a dimensional stream where the game does not exist. At all. except… why do sinister figures show up to stop her every time she goes looking? Does Rabbits truly not exist, or is it being hidden? And if it’s being hidden, why — and by whom?
Meanwhile, architect and theme park designer Rowan Chess is having the weirdest month of his life, full of odd coincidences and people who appear one moment and vanish the next, with no trace they ever existed. The game that is hiding from Emily seems to have found Rowan — with a vengeance.
Hild is no longer the bright child who made a place in Edwin Overking’s court with her seemingly supernatural insight. She is eighteen, honed and tested, the formidable lady of Elmet, now building her personal stronghold in the valley of Menewood.
But old alliances are fraying. Younger rivals are snapping at Edwin’s heels. War is brewing — bitter war, winter war. Not knowing whom to trust, Edwin becomes volatile and recalls his young advisor to court. There Hild begins to understand the true extent of the chaos ahead — and realizes she must find a way to navigate the turbulence and fight to protect both the kingdom and her own people.
Have you picked any of the books listed above? If you have, let us know which ones! If you have any recommendations similar to the books listed above drop them in the comments below.
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