By KEVIN HOOVER
Did you support an indie shop during Independent Bookstore Day in April? Even if you didn’t, Bookshop.org makes it easy to throw your book budget behind the booksellers who work hard to keep our personal libraries brimming with new nightmares, and May is a damn fine month to add works from up-and-coming authors and industry vets to your TBR stack. Enjoy a novelization of one of the most controversial films released in the early aughts, a fresh perspective on Sweeney Todd’s bloody rampage through Fleet Street and the latest from The King of Horror.
Deadgirl: The Novelization
Bridgett Nelson
Encyclopocalypse Publications
May 6th – Pre-order Now
Once deemed too controversial to release, Deadgirl stunned festival audiences, outraged religious groups and became an instant cult sensation. A film that seared itself into the minds of the depraved and the discerning alike, it remains one of the most transgressive and boundary-pushing nightmares of its era.
When two high school misfits – bound by boredom and adolescent hunger – ditch class to slip beyond the rusted doors of an abandoned hospital, they stumble upon a gruesome secret that will shatter their innocence and test the limits of their sanity: a woman, stripped bare and chained to a table.
She’s abandoned. She’s beautiful. She’s dead … or is she?
The Butcher’s Daughter: The Hitherto Untold Story of Mrs. Lovett
David Demchuk and Corinne Leigh Clark
Hell’s Hundred
May 6th – Pre-order Now
London, 1887: At the abandoned apartment of a missing young woman, a dossier of evidence is collected, ordered chronologically and sent to the Chief Inspector of the London Metropolitan Police. It contains a frightening correspondence between an inquisitive journalist, Miss Emily Gibson, and the woman Gibson thinks may be the infamous Mrs. Lovett – Sweeney Todd’s accomplice, “a wicked woman” who baked men into pies and sold them in her pie shop on Fleet Street. The talk of London Town – even decades after her horrendous misdeeds.
The Devils
Joe Abercrombie
Tor Books
May 13th – Pre-order Now
Holy work sometimes requires unholy deeds.
Brother Diaz has been summoned to the Sacred City, where he is certain a commendation and grand holy assignment awaits him. But his new flock is made up of unrepentant murderers, practitioners of ghastly magic and outright monsters. The mission he is tasked with will require bloody measures from them all in order to achieve its righteous ends.
Puppet’s Banquet
Valkyrie Loughcrewe
Tenebrous Press
May 14th – Pre-order Now
Married couple Celia and Martin are brutally attacked on their drive through the Irish countryside. The attack leaves Celia with a violent schism in her mind, seemingly existing in two places at once: one the “real” world, the other a howling maelstrom of abstract monstrosity.
Of her husband, there is no trace … until weeks later, when Martin is discovered in a hospital for rare and abnormal diseases, his body spliced together with that of an unknown woman.
And they are very pregnant.
Never Flinch
Stephen King
Scribner
May 27th – Pre-order Now
When the Buckeye City Police Department receives a disturbing letter from a person threatening to “kill thirteen innocents and one guilty” in “an act of atonement for the needless death of an innocent man,” Detective Izzy Jaynes has no idea what to think. Are fourteen citizens about to be slaughtered in an unhinged act of retribution? As the investigation unfolds, Izzy realizes that the letter writer is deadly serious, and she turns to her friend Holly Gibney for help.
*Purchases made through any included links will directly benefit independent bookstores and could result in compensation for RUE MORGUE. Release dates are subject to change.
