Adult Winter Reading: Turn Off the Lights

Detective Andy Cooper is about to retire. Everything changes when bodies begin to turn up. Murdered, but how? Not by knife, gun, or any obvious weapon. Instead: teeth marks. Chunks missing. Like they’d been chewed on. And not by humans.

Set in an alternate reality where pregnancy endows women with exceptional powers, one new mother uncovers terrifying truths about herself and life in this philosophical and propulsive tale of a woman and mother in crisis.

When the reclusive Dr. Halder offers her a position illustrating his vast collection of insects, Sonia jumps at the chance to move to his North Carolina manor house and put her talents to use. Once there though, she encounters dark happenings in the Carolina woods, and even darker questions come to light.

A mother’s last hope for her father’s future is threatened by the sins of the past as the residents of a public housing project are besieged by an epidemic of gun violence and otherworldly forces haunting their very homes.

In this electrifying horror debut that’s equal parts funny and harrowing, a stealth trans woman desperate to maintain her picture-perfect life discovers that she’s seemingly-impossibly-pregnant.

Meet Julia Flang, a twenty-something former semi-professional gamer. Out of the blue, her estranged mother, a CFO for one of the world’s largest tech companies, offers her a temp job with a payday Julia can’t refuse. The job: to chaperone a man in a vegetative state–one with proprietary AI implanted in his head.

When Carwyn finds a strange stone head in a disused corner of his Welsh sheep farm, he realizes the artifact is just one piece of something much larger–something unfathomably old. But there was a reason his ancestors kept the past buried, and in disturbing the earth, he has called forth a power greater and more terrible than he could have imagined.

When Jamie attends a speed-dating event, she expects to meet a roster of mediocre men. She doesn’t expect one of her dates to have his throat slit at their table during a blackout. Armed with makeshift weapons and Jamie’s extensive knowledge of what NOT to do in a slasher, the remaining speed daters try to find an exit while the killer adds to their body count.

A haunting reimagining of Linda Taylor–known as the original Welfare Queen–pursued, scrutinized, celebrated and vilified, and the impact her image has had for generations.

When Johnny–a filmmaker and grandson of the famous Black actress Mazelle Washington–brings his family to Mazywood, the secluded California mountain lodge left behind by his grandmother, he expects a quiet retreat. Instead, he uncovers a legacy of rage, secrets, and terror that has haunted his family for generations.

By the time Scarlett Sutton arrives at her dad’s cabin in the Smoky Mountains, two locals have already been eaten alive by wasps. Of course, she doesn’t know this yet.

The untimely death of a student at a girls’ boarding school marks the first in a haunting series of escalating supernatural events, and uncovers buried truths of teenage repression, queer desire, and the everyday horror of coming of age.