Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, who lives in Edinburgh, donated £1 million to the “Better Together” campaign to keep Scotland in the United Kingdom. In September, the majority of four million Scottish residents voted against going independent.
In a shock revelation posted on an online blog, author Marion Zimmer Bradley’s daughter Moira Greyland accused her late mother of molesting her as a child, along with her father, Walter Breen, a convicted long-time molester who died in prison.
Charlaine Harris’ Midnight Crossroad (aka Midnight) was the first in a trilogy set in the near-deserted town of Midnight, Texas.
A Detroit policewoman was on the trail of a ritualistic serial killer in Broken Monsters by South African author Lauren Beukes.
A troop of boy scouts encountered a bio-engineered horror in the Canadian wilderness in The Troop by the pseudonymous “Nick Cutter” (Craig Davidson), which came with a cover quote by Stephen King that described the novel as “old-school horror at its best”.
Keith Donohue’s The Boy Who Drew Monsters was set at Christmas, as the behaviour of a young boy with Asperger’s may have been connected to a shipwreck that occurred near his home.
Valerie Martin’s historical novel The Ghost of the Mary Celeste combined the mystery of the famously abandoned ship and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Set in Victorian times, the worlds of two Yorkshire orphans and London’s mysterious Aegolius Club collided in The Quick by Lauren Owen, while the long-dead V.C. Andrews® was credited as the author of The Unwelcomed Child, about a girl who was considered evil by the religious extremists who raised her.
Twin sisters had to quieten the souls of the damned in the Forest of the Dead in Sea of Shadows, the first in a new trilogy by Kelley Armstrong.
Pandemic was the third and final volume in Scott Sigler’s “Infected” series about a plague of alien parasites.
Kim Newman’s long-awaited haunted house novel, An English Ghost Story, was published by Titan Books, who also issued an updated edition of Newman’s 1990 novel Bad Dreams, which included the novella ‘Bloody Students’ (aka ‘Orgy of the Blood Parasites’) and a new historical Afterword by the author.
Steve Rasnic Tem’s Southern Gothic Blood Kin alternated between the Great Depression and the present day, and a plague of insomnia left victims unable to differentiate between dreams and reality in Kenneth Calhoun’s Black Moon.
In Christopher Fowler’s Nyctophobia, an architect became convinced that something lived in the perpetual shadows of her new house in Spain, which was built into the side of a cliff.
A woman rented a room in a house of horrors in No One Gets Out Alive by Adam Nevill, and a woman inherited a haunted home in The Unquiet House by Alison Littlewood.
Children started disappearing from a quiet suburb in the early 1990s in December Park by Ronald Malfi.
A restored Southern plantation mansion was beset by evil forces in The Vines by Christopher Rice, and strange things happened in a hospital for soldiers recovering from the First World War in Silence for the Dead by Simone St. James (Simone Seguin).
Red Delicious was the second volume about a werepire demon hunter by Kathleen Tierney (Caitlín R. Kiernan).
Something blew into the town of Coventry during a mammoth blizzard that left its victims frozen in Snowblind by Christopher Golden, while the disappearance of a woman’s mother was related to past events in The Winter People by Jennifer McMahon.
A former convict forced to steal a mysterious object was pursued by a group of deadly assassins in Mark Morris’ The Wolves of London, the first in the “Obsidian Heart” series.
Three child survivors of the simultaneous crashing of four planes may have heralded the apocalypse in The Three by Sarah Lotz, and a woman and her children wore blindfolds to protect themselves from being driven mad in an apocalyptic near-future world in Josh Malerman’s Bird Box.
The owner of Poe’s Tooth Books was haunted by a bird in Wakening the Crow by Stephen Gregory, and a woman became a companion to a reclusive horror writer in The Vanishing by Wendy Webb.
The Ghoul Next Door was the eighth volume in Victoria Laurie’s super-natural mystery series about ghost hunter M.J. Holliday.
A scientist attempted to communicate with plants on a remote island in Seeders by A.J. Colucci, while mutant sea creatures attacked Long Island Sound in Mount Misery by Angelo Peluso.
Cat Out of Hell by Lynne Truss, the best-selling author of Eats, Shoots and Leaves, was published under the Hammer imprint.
Inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft, Pete Rawlik’s The Weird Company was a sequel to Reanimators.
Daniel Levine’s Hyde re-told Robert Louis Stevenson’s short novel from the point-of-view of the titular character. It also included the original 1886 work with an Introduction by Levine.
In The Carpathian Assignment, Chip Wagar re-told Bram Stoker’s Dracula from the point-of-view of the local authorities.
Children all over the world came back from the dead hungry for blood in Craig DiLouie’s Suffer the Children, while the protagonist of Christopher Buehlman’s The Lesser Dead was an eternally adolescent vampire living in New York City in 1978.
The Vault was the third in the vampire series by Emily McKay that began with The Farm, and A Wind in the Night was the twelfth volume in the “Noble Dead” series by Barb Hendee and J.C. Hendee.
Sustenance, the twenty-seventh volume in Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s “Count Saint-Germain” series, was set in post-World War II Paris, as the vampire helped a group of Americans branded communists.
Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, helped a werewolf sort out his relationship problems in Jason, which also contained a preview of the next novel in the series, Dead Ice.
An ancient vampire believed that a werewolf was the reincarnation of his lost love in By Blood We Live, the third in the series by Glen Duncan, and The Frenzy Wolves was the third in the “Frenzy Cycle” by Gregory Lamberson.
The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. (Mike) Carey was a road trip with a difference, as a 10-year-old zombie girl who was part of an experiment to give the “hungries” intelligence attempted to survive in a post-apocalyptic Britain.
Creator Stephen Jones spun his Zombie Apocalypse! franchise off into a new series of inter-connected novels with Horror Hospital by Mark Morris and Washington Deceased by Lisa Morton.