Tag: Ghost Story

Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Accumulation by Aimee Pokwatka: A haunted house story that refuses to play by the rules

Mandy Webster

The first time something feels off in Accumulation by Aimee Pokwatka, it’s easy to dismiss—just like Tennessee Cherish does. A faucet left running. A misplaced object. A strange sense that something isn’t quite lining up. But as the novel unfolds, that quiet unease starts to loop in on itself, building into something far more deliberate—and far more unsettling—than it first appears.

Get your copy of Accumulation from my independent online bookstore today!

Set to release on May 5, 2026, Accumulation follows Tenn, a former documentary filmmaker turned stay-at-home mom, who relocates with her family to the kind of dream house that’s supposed to signal a fresh start. Instead, it becomes the backdrop for a slow, creeping unraveling. Her husband is largely absent, her children begin behaving in increasingly disturbing ways, and the house itself seems to resist settling into anything resembling normalcy.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Nowhere Burning by Catriona Ward: A brutal, brilliant thriller about survival in the ashes

Mandy Webster

A lot of thrillers pretend to be gritty—Nowhere Burning by Catriona Ward actually earns it, dragging readers into the Colorado Rockies and refusing to let them look away. Releasing February 24, 2026, Nowhere Burning is a harrowing, genre-blurring novel that folds the dark myth of Peter Pan and the feral desperation of Lord of the Flies into something uniquely Ward: unsettling, intimate, and psychologically razor-sharp.

Get your copy of Nowhere Burning from my independent online bookstore today!

Riley and her younger brother Oliver flee their troubled home in the middle of the night, chasing rumors of Nowhere—an abandoned ranch once owned by a reclusive movie star and now whispered about as a refuge for runaways. What they find is a scorched sanctuary with its own rules, its own hierarchy, and its own buried horrors. It promises freedom. It demands a price.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

A Harvest of Furies by Hayden Casey reimagines ancient tragedy in the American heartland

Mandy Webster

The first thing that struck me about A Harvest of Furies by Hayden Casey was its ambition. This contemporary retelling of Aeschylus’s Oresteia brings ancient themes of guilt, vengeance, and divine punishment into a modern Midwestern setting—an inspired concept that could have easily collapsed under its own weight. Yet, for much of the novel, Casey manages to sustain that tension between the mythic and the mundane, between the haunted family home and the echoes of war that ripple through its walls.

Get your copy of A Harvest of Furies from my independent online bookstore today!

The story centers on siblings Orrie and Emma, whose family has been cursed for generations. When their father, Aggie, returns home from war a changed man, the fragile normalcy they’ve built begins to unravel. Secrets surface, deaths follow, and before long, the house itself seems alive with voices—echoes of both the past and the family’s own unraveling sanity.

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Call for Submissions

Submissions open for Beautiful and Terrifying: Tales and Visions from the Edge of the Uncanny

Mandy Webster

There’s beauty in the things that unnerve us. Beautiful and Terrifying is the next anthology from Elderfly Press—an exploration of the eerie, the intimate, and the in-between. Submissions are now open for short stories, poetry, and black-and-white art that linger in the shadows of the strange and the sublime.

There’s beauty in what haunts us.
Submit to Beautiful and Terrifying today!

This collection seeks work that blurs boundaries—between beauty and fear, humanity and monstrosity, love and decay. We’re drawn to dark, literary narratives and haunting imagery that leave readers with a sense of wonder and unease. Not every story needs to fit neatly into horror or realism; the best pieces often live in the uncanny space between.

What Elderfly Press is looking for:

This anthology invites a wide range of voices and forms with themes of transformation, obsession, decay, beauty, violence, or the supernatural:

  • Genre fiction: horror, speculative, gothic, dystopian, weird, sci-fi, supernatural—anything that chills, disturbs, or unsettles
  • Literary fiction: moody, shadowed, emotionally raw
  • Poetry: rooted in chaos, shadow, or change
  • Visual art: black-and-white art that captures the eerie, surreal, or dreamlike
Continue reading “Submissions open for Beautiful and Terrifying: Tales and Visions from the Edge of the Uncanny” →
Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

What secrets lie behind the Midnight Door? Katrina Monroe’s haunting tale of sisterhood and trauma

Mandy Webster

What if the scariest thing isn’t what waits behind a mysterious door, but what happens when you never speak of it again? Katrina Monroe’s Through the Midnight Door is a genre-bending novel that slips between the psychological and the supernatural, the traumatic and the magical, all while anchoring itself in the emotionally raw terrain of sisterhood. It’s eerie and unsettling in the best way—but also heartbreakingly intimate.

Get your copy of Through the Midnight Door from my independent online bookstore today!

Years after the Finch sisters dared to unlock the doors in a seemingly impossible abandoned house in their dying hometown, the youngest, Claire, is found dead inside it. Her death pulls Meg and Esther—both estranged and damaged in different ways—back into each other’s lives. They’re not just grieving a sister; they’re unraveling what really happened that summer and what they never told each other.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Why you shouldn’t sleep on Jessica Johns’ Bad Cree: A chilling debut about family, grief, and survival

Mandy Webster

What begins with a severed crow’s head and a haunting dream evolves into something far more layered in Bad Cree, Jessica Johns’ eerie and powerful debut. This genre-blending novel offers readers a gripping supernatural mystery while also digging deep into themes of grief, intergenerational trauma, and the quiet, often unseen strength of women supporting one another through pain.

Get your copy of Bad Cree from my independent online bookstore today!

When Mackenzie wakes to find a crow’s head in her hands—only to have it vanish—she can no longer ignore the disturbing dreams that have been plaguing her. As her waking world becomes increasingly infected by her nightmares, she leaves Vancouver for her hometown in Alberta to reconnect with the family she left behind. At first, she fears the worst: her mother and sister are furious with her for skipping her sister Sabrina’s funeral. The stage is set for major emotional fallout—but instead of fracturing further, the women in Mackenzie’s family do something more surprising: they show up for each other.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

What if your dreams could incriminate you? A review of The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami

Mandy Webster

Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel is one of the most urgent and unputdownable novels I’ve read in years. I devoured it in a single day, heart pounding and mind racing, both captivated by its story and shaken by how plausible it all feels. Set in a chillingly believable future where artificial intelligence and corporate surveillance have penetrated even our subconscious minds, the book offers a harrowing exploration of power, privacy, and resistance—especially for women.

Get your copy of The Dream Hotel from my independent online bookstore today!

When Sara returns home from an overseas trip, she’s abruptly detained by the Risk Assessment Administration and told that, based on an algorithm analyzing her dreams, she is likely to commit a violent crime against her husband. She’s placed in a detention center with other “dreamers,” all women, all accused not of what they’ve done, but of what they might do. With every misstep—real or perceived—their stay is extended, and their ability to prove their innocence slips further out of reach.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

I’ll Be Waiting is so creepy, I had to stop reading it at night!

Mandy Webster

Kelley Armstrong’s latest horror novel isn’t just chilling—it’s emotionally haunting in a way that lingers long after the lights are out. Most of my reading happens right before I go to bed, but I’ll Be Waiting by Kelley Armstrong made that nearly impossible. Every chapter brims with tension so expertly crafted that I found myself burrowing into my comforter at night to hide every part of myself from whatever might lurk in the shadows. But beyond the scares—and there are plenty—it’s also a story about grief, illness, and the unexpected twists in a life already marked by limited time.

Get your copy of I’ll Be Waiting from my independent online bookstore today!

We meet Nicola Laughton in her thirties, a woman who was never supposed to live that long. Diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis (CF) as a child, she beat the odds thanks to medical advances. She even allowed herself to fall in love. Anton was her future—the person who taught her to hope for more than just survival. The two were married for only a couple of years before a car crash left Nicola widowed. Anton’s final words to his wife—“I’ll be waiting for you”—became both a deeply personal haunting and a viral social media curiosity.

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Call for Submissions

Under a dark sky: Elderfly Press announces open submissions for Bad Moon on the Rise

Mandy Webster

Something is stirring in the shadows—and Elderfly Press wants you to capture it.
Submissions are now open for Bad Moon on the Rise, a new anthology that delves into what it means to live under a dark sky—literally or metaphorically. Whether you’re drawn to haunted landscapes, personal reckonings, or the eerie quiet of things unraveling, this is your chance to contribute to a collection where strange winds and long-buried truths come to light.

What Elderfly Press is looking for:

This anthology invites a wide range of voices and forms:

  • Genre fiction: horror, speculative, gothic, dystopian, weird, sci-fi, supernatural—anything that chills, disturbs, or unsettles
  • Literary fiction: moody, shadowed, emotionally raw
  • Essays: on upheaval, transformation, liminality, or living through cultural shifts
  • Poetry: rooted in chaos, shadow, or change
  • Visual art: black-and-white pieces that evoke the mood of the anthology
Continue reading “Under a dark sky: Elderfly Press announces open submissions for Bad Moon on the Rise” →