Tag: Demons of the Night

Writers on Writing

Demons of the Night: A horror novel about good, evil, and finding your own path

Mandy Webster

Demons of the Night is a horror novel that asks: who gets to decide what is good and what is evil? It follows Docia, a young woman whose parents have gone to great lengths to hide the truth about who she really is. They want her to be a “good Christian woman” and believe secrecy is the only way to protect her. But their plan is about to backfire.

The cover of Demons of the Night was designed by my friend, author and artist Lance Savage, who created a fictionalized version of Holy Hill to reflect the novel’s dark atmosphere. Visit Lance’s website to see more of his work.

Docia longs for independence, for a life beyond her family’s overprotection. She wants normal experiences—friendships, romance, freedom. When Blane appears at a church lecture on demons, Docia is intrigued. But he’s there for the wrong reasons, and she quickly realizes that the life she desires may require confronting truths her parents have worked so hard to conceal. As the story unfolds, Docia must grapple with her identity, her morality, and the question of whether she can define herself outside the rigid framework her family imposes.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Trad Wife by Saratoga Schaefer: A ferocious horror novel about motherhood, patriarchy, and the cost of being “good”

Mandy Webster

Trad Wife by Saratoga Schaefer is a horror novel that knows how to tell a gripping story while quietly dismantling the cultural myths propping it up. Scheduled to release on February 10, 2026, it’s the rare book that makes you start mentally planning your year-end “best of” list before you’re even finished reading. Trad Wife is an unsettling, deeply intelligent literary thriller that uses horror not just to disturb, but to say something urgent about womanhood, motherhood, and the performance of femininity in the age of social media.

Get your copy of Trad Wife from my independent online bookstore today!

Camille Deming presents herself online as the ideal #tradwife: cooking from scratch, tending her homestead, centering her life around her husband and home. The problem is that she’s missing the one thing her followers—and the ideology she’s bought into—demand most: a baby. When Camille discovers a mysterious well behind her farmhouse and makes a wish, her desire is answered in ways that are grotesque, intimate, and impossible to undo. Her pregnancy brings skyrocketing engagement and validation, even as her body begins to change in frightening ways and her marriage quietly continues to rot.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

The Wind Witch Murders by Casey Dunn — A haunting coming-of-age in southern gothic

Mandy Webster

The whole town was just waiting for the death of the Wind Witch before moving forward, and it held Raven back all along. In The Wind Witch Murders by Casey Dunn, that tension becomes the engine of a story about inheritance, fear, and the struggle to claim your own life when everyone around you believes they have a right to it.

Get your copy of The Wind Witch Murders from my independent online bookstore today!

Raven has grown up under the heavy hand of her devout Christian grandmother, the woman who took her in after her mother, Deanne, was convicted of the ritualistic murders of two boys. Deanne never confessed, never explained, and never stopped haunting the edges of Raven’s identity. Now that she’s dead, the town seems to exhale—almost as if it had been waiting for permission to move on. But Raven doesn’t get that luxury. Not when a stranger places a single feather on her mother’s casket, a quiet signal that whatever Deanne was mixed up in is still alive.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Facing the demons we inherit: a review of This Is My Body by Lindsay King-Miller

Mandy Webster

Shame is a demon—and sometimes it takes more than holy water to drive it out. In This Is My Body, Lindsay King-Miller delivers a gut-punch of a horror novel that fuses family trauma, queer identity, and religious extremism into a story that’s as unsettling as it is compulsively readable. At its core, this is a book about how the shame we inherit can twist us, haunt us, and, if left unchecked, destroy us.

Get your copy of This is My Body from my independent online bookstore today!

Brigid, a gay single mom, has spent years keeping her daughter Dylan far from the influence of her fanatically Catholic family. But when Dylan begins experiencing violent, terrifying fits that seem eerily familiar to an incident from Brigid’s childhood, she does the unthinkable—she goes back. Back to the home she swore she’d never return to. Back to her manipulative, self-righteous Uncle Angus, the priest who once “saved” a girl through exorcism.

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Events

Meet me at the Midwest Holiday Market to get signed book copies for the reader on your shopping list!

Mandy Webster

Join me this Friday and Saturday, November 1st and 2nd at the Village Square Mall in Effingham, Illinois for the Midwest Holiday Market! If you have book nerds on your holiday shopping list, then you HAVE to stop by my booth and check out my books and other bookish gift ideas.

The 2024 Midwest Market Holiday Show takes place this Friday and Saturday, November 1-2 at the Village Square Mall!
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Conventions & Conferences, Events

Meet the author at Nightmare on 2nd Street in Chillicothe, IL!

Mandy Webster

Join me this Saturday, October 26th for Nightmare on Second Street at Chillicothe City Park (Chillicothe, IL) in support of brain tumor awareness. I’ll be selling and signing my books along with lots of other bookish and spooky gifts at my vendor booth.

The 2024 Nightmare on Second Street takes place this Saturday, October 26, at Chillicothe City Park.
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Author Interview

Author interview with thriller/suspense author, Mandy Webster

Mandy Webster

As I’m promoting my latest novel, It Had To Happen, it occurs to me that it might be fun to answer some of my own author interview questions so my readers can get to know me a bit better. The list of questions is quite long, but I typically ask authors to choose their favorite ones. I’ve probably gone a bit beyond what the average author would provide, but hey– it’s my blog!

Q: When did you first catch the writing bug? What drove you to persist?

A: As far as I can remember, I’ve been writing stories since I learned to write. The stories themselves are often what drive me to persist. Most of my story ideas that have become novels have been ideas that got stuck in my head and wouldn’t leave me alone until I wrote them. At times, it seems I might be a hostage to my own muse! It’s okay though because we get along well—most of the time!

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Novel Writing

I have two new #novels in the works!

Mandy Webster

I am so excited about my writing right now! I just finished a rough draft of the second of two novel manuscripts that I plan to finish by the middle of this year!

It usually takes me some time to switch from writing mode to revising mode, but it really helps that I set one of the manuscripts aside and moved on to the next one before editing this time. Revisions are already going well, and I hope to have this manuscript ready to share with my creative writing workshop in just a few weeks!

How about I tell you what I’ve been working on so you can share in my excitement?

Project #1: Demons of the Night

I started this book quite some time ago when I had one of those dreams that was too good to not write it into a scene. This novel is very different from my last two. It’s an adult book that includes witches, demons, and philandering preachers. It’s a battle of good and evil, where it’s not always obvious which side is which.

Image Credit: https://www.freepik.com/free-photo/halloween-demon_955179.htm Designed by Freepik

At the center of this battle is Docia, a sheltered young woman whose father and step-mother are determined to keep her sequestered within the “safe” world of her grandfather’s church compound and seem unlikely to ever allow her to move forward into a life of her own choosing. Continue reading “I have two new #novels in the works!” →

Demons of the Night, NaNoWriMo, Novel Writing, Valley of the Bees

It’s time to gear up for #NaNoWriMo 2016!

Mandy Webster

It’s that time of year again, writing friends! Time to prep for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in November! This year, I am doing it, and I am doing it right. Anyway, that’s the plan!

nanowrimo_2016_webbanner_participant

I don’t know about you, but I have a lot to do over this next month to prepare. My writing plans for October include: Continue reading “It’s time to gear up for #NaNoWriMo 2016!” →