Halloween is almost here. I like to watch all the scary movies on television when Halloween rolls around. Do you like to read tales of horror this time of year? I do! This would be a great time to get a couple of scary eBooks loaded up on your Treo or Centro and read them in the dark of night. I've been saving "Cell" by Stephen King for a time like this, so I think I'll read that eBook on my Centro this week if I have time. It takes a lot to scare me. I've never been one to leave my bedroom light on at night. But let me tell you, when I read Stephen King's "Pet Cemetery" years ago, I actually did leave my bedroom light on all night. That story just creeped me out big time. The part that really got to me was the scene in which the walking corpse of Victor Pascow visits main character Louis Creed in Creed's bedroom late at night. I still can't believe ole King scared me good enough to leave my light on! ;-) I must say that I'm surprised that Fictionwise doesn't carry "Pet Cemetery".
Anyway, if you're in a horror story reading mood, Fictionwise is having a Harrowing Halloween Sale through November 1, 2008. All MultiFormat Horror and Dark Fantasy eBooks feature a 25% discount, and all Secure Horror and Dark Fantasy eBooks receive a 25% Micropay Rebate when paying with a credit card or PayPal. Fictionwise is also offering a 40% Micropay Rebate on the entire Inheritance Cycle Series by Christopher Paolini:
Buy now and get a 40% Micropay Rebate on any or ALL eBooks in this incredibly popular series featuring dragons, ancient races, elves and dwarves. Both offers end November 1, 2008, so don't wait!
I've rounded up some SPOOKY eREADING from Fictionwise below:
Soulless by Christopher Golden
Times Square, New York City: The first ever mass seance is broadcasting live on the Sunrise morning show. If it works, the spirits of the departed on the other side will have a brief window--just a few minutes--to send a final message to their grieving loved ones. Clasping hands in an impenetrable grip, three mediums call to their spirit guides as the audience looks on in breathless anticipation. The mediums slump over, slackjawed--catatonic. And in cemeteries surrounding Manhattan, fragments of old corpses dig themselves out of the ground.... The spirits have returned. The dead are walking. They will seek out those who loved them in life, those they left behind...but they are savage and they are hungry. They are no longer your mother or father, your brother or sister, your best friend or lover.The horror spreads quickly, droves of the ravenous dead seeking out the living--shredding flesh from bone, feeding. But a disparate group of unlikely heroes--two headstrong college rivals, a troubled gang member, a teenage pop star and her bodyguard--is making its way to the center of the nightmare, fighting to protect their loved ones, fighting for their lives, and fighting to end the madness.
You can get "Soulless" here for $9.95.
Cell by Stephen King
There's a Reason Cell Rhymes with Hell. There are one hundred and ninety-three million cell phones in the United States alone. Who doesn't have one? Stephen King's utterly gripping, gory, and fascinating novel doesn't just ask the question "Can you hear me now?" It answers it with a vengeance.
You can get "Cell" here for $9.99.
I'm pretty sure that all of you reading this own a cell phone. Read this one on your Treo or Centro.... if you dare! Bwahahahahaha!
Bugged! by Thomas Weston
CRAIG CARLYLE was enjoying his life as a slacker until the death of an elderly widow across the street started a string of events that sucked him into a whirlpool of madness in which horror after horror cascaded down upon him and he found himself enmeshed in a situation where he was teetering on the cusp of madness. IN THIS terrifying science fiction/horror masterpiece, Thomas Weston weaves a tale of deception and intrigue that is guaranteed to make your skin crawl. THOMAS WESTON is the author of MAVIS AND THE PAINTED LADIES as well as a number of other books, collections of poetry, and erotic novels. His recent novels PENTECOSTAL PSYCHO and DARK TRANFORMATIONS have proven to be best-sellers.
Ugh! I just read the eBook excerpt for this book and it sounds like a doozie! I don't know about y'all, but anything about cockroaches just makes my skin absolutely crawl! I despise those nasty critters! I couldn't sleep a wink if I thought that even one cockroach was in my house. We used to have a woodpile next to our basement door. I saw a woodroach in our basement soon after we stacked that pile of wood there. I couldn't get to the hardware store fast enough to buy the biggest jug of bug spray. Boyhowdy, I sprayed that stuff until I thought my hand and arm were going to fall off! Roaches are one subject that can scare me to death because I hate them so much. I've heard so many real life roach horror stories and I don't care to ever experience any of them personally if I can help it. My Mom can't believe that I watch the television show "Verminators" because many of the episodes are about the guys going to roach infested homes. Hey, I can't help if I like to get scared every once in awhile.
I do believe that "Bugged" would scare me silly so I guess I'm going to have to buy that one. You can get it here for $2.97.
From Beyond & 16 Other Macabre Masterpieces by H.P. Lovecraft
A chilling collection of classic terror tales by the man Stephen King calls "the 20th century horror story's dark and baroque prince." Includes three stories that became hit horror films--"From Beyond," "The Lurking Fear" and "Reanimator." From Beyond & 16 Other Macabre Masterpieces gathers seventeeen of H. P. Lovecraft's most chilling creations. Gathered in this exclusive eBook collection are: "The Music of Erich Zann," "Beyond the Wall of Sleep," "The Tomb," "The Statement of Randolph Carter," "Dagon," "The Lurking Fear," "The Doom that Came to Sarnath," "From Beyond," "The Temple," "The Cats of Ulthar," "The Moon-Bog," "The White Ship," "Arthur Jermyn," "Nyarlathotep," "The Picture in the House," "The Transition of Juan Romero," and "Herbert West: Reanimator." To read these scarifying stories is to discover why The Reader's Guide to Fantasy hails Lovecraft as "the successor to Poe." Here are all the horror meister's celebrated preoccupations: death and decay, the horrors of inbreeding, family doom, stupendous, cyclopean evil, and shadowy, malevolent, near-omnipotent forces that could without effort extinguish all life on earth. A must-read for horror fans, selected and introduced by editor/critic Jean Marie Stine. Cover design: J.L. "Frankie" Hill.
You can get it here for $2.99.
Shadowfires by Dean Koontz
Here's the eBook description:
Now with a new afterword by the NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR ... And a brand-new package. A woman's relief over the death of her husband gives way to mind-numbing terror in this shockingly suspenseful thriller from New York Times bestselling author Dean Koontz.
This was the first Dean Koontz book that I ever read. At the time though, I didn't even know it was a Koontz book because my copy was written under his pseudonym "Leigh Nichols" in 1985. After I bought my knowingly first copy of a Dean Koontz book, "Whispers", I was totally hooked on this writer's books. So I was happy to find out that Koontz had written "Shadowfires".
Below is the description from my copy, which is an Avon Books paperback:
He's Dead
Rachael's violently possessive ex-husband, hideously mangled in a freak accident, has disappeard from the city morgue.
He's Alive
Now someone, or something, is watching her. Calling her. Stalking her. And though no one will believe her, she knows who it is.
He Wants Her
His walking corpse a grotesque mockery of life. His brilliant, warped mind once again "alive" - and seething with jealous rage.
He's Coming Home
Seeking an unspeakable revenge beyond her worst nightmare. Stalking her with a murderous lust that will not die.
He's at the Door
There's nowhere left to run, Rachael. Don't bother to get up. He has his own key.
"Shadowfires" is a great read and perfect for Halloween! You can get it here for $7.99.
Infected by Scott Sigler
Across America a mysterious disease is turning ordinary people into raving, paranoid murderers who inflict brutal horrors on strangers, themselves, and even their own families. Working under the government's shroud of secrecy, CIA operative Dew Phillips crisscrosses the country trying in vain to capture a live victim. With only decomposing corpses for clues, CDC epidemiologist Margaret Montoya races to analyze the science behind this deadly contagion. She discovers that these killers all have one thing in common--they've been contaminated by a bio-engineered parasite, shaped by a complexity far beyond the limits of known science. Meanwhile Perry Dawsey--a hulking former football star now resigned to life as a cubicle-bound desk jockey--awakens one morning to find several mysterious welts growing on his body. Soon Perry finds himself acting and thinking strangely, hearing voices ... he is infected. The fate of the human race may well depend on the bloody war Perry must wage with his own body, because the parasites want something from him, something that goes beyond mere murder. Infected is the first major print release from Internet phenom Scott Sigler, whose podcast-only audiobooks have drawn an immense cult following, with more than three million individual episodes downloaded. Now Sigler storms the bookstore shelves with this cinematic, relentlessly paced novel that mixes and matches genres, combining horror, techno-thriller, and suspense in a heady mix that is equal parts Chuck Palahniuk, Michael Crichton, and Stephen King. Infected will crawl beneath your skin and leave fresh blood on every page.
Dang, that's another one that I'll have to buy! It's a good thing that Fictionwise is having this sale.You can get "Infected" here for $13.95.
The Ghost Pirates by William Hope Hodgson
THIS HORROR TALE GAVE LOVECRAFT CHILLS The Ghosts Pirates is "one of the greatest supernatural stories of the sea, written by probably the greatest writer of horror at sea who ever lived. It is a literary feat of the first magnitude." Relentless doom and grisly death are the fate of a doomed ship when it crosses the path of a ghostly vessel manned by the living dead. One by one the narrator watches his fellows disappear in the night, until he and the ships' captain and doctor resolve on a desperate plan to save themselves. H. P. Lovecraft raved that "With its command of maritime knowledge, and-its clever selection of hints and incidents suggestive of latent horrors in nature, [The Ghost Pirates] reaches enviable peaks of power." Clark Ashton Smith wrote that "One must also accord a more than formal praise to The Ghost Pirates which is really one of the few successful long stories dealing with the phantasmal. Its rout of ghastly and persistent specters will follow the reader long after they have seized the haunted ship!" Fritz Leiber hailed it as a novel that " ... fulfills at book length au the canons of the spectral tale laid down by Lovecraft, James, and others... There is a steady progress toward doom, in which the suspense builds with an almost unparalleled uninterruptedness." By the author of The House on the Borderland, also available from Renaissance E Books.
Get it here for $2.99
The Hymn by Graham Masterton
When Celia Williams is found dead, having burned herself in a lurid act of suicide, her fiancé Lloyd Denman doesn't seem to be able to go on with his own life, haunted by Celia and their past together. As Lloyd struggles to deal with this tragic event he learns about a bizarre accident in the California desert where a busload of people have burned to death. Police speculate that this was an act of a suicide pact, but as Lloyd's investigation reveals connections between the two events, he begins to learn what is at the root of these horrific suicides. When he discovers a link to Nazi Germany, Llyod becomes involved in something that may be beyond his world. But once he has begun can he escape? [Original Title: The Burning]
Get "The Hymn" here for $5.39.
Well, those are just a few of hundreds of spooky eBooks. You can check out all of the Fictionwise Horror eBooks here. Don't forget that you have until November 1st to get any of the MultiFormat eBooks at the 25% discount.
I'm sure that this sour economy has eaten a hole through your pockets, so here are some Free eBooks of the horror genre that you might enjoy:
Ghost Rider: Stories by Jonathan Lowe
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving
Vision by N. D. Hansen-Hill
The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe [Volume 1 of 5]
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Happy eReading! ;-)
