Genre

Horror

Every Horror title currently on the Dracon shelf.

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Horror on the shelf

The Frost Beneath

Damian Frost has spent his life outrunning the gravity of Briar Lane, a remote mountain road where, before he could form memories, something went terribly wrong. Now, holding a deed to a house he never asked for and a past he cannot fully recall, he makes the seventeen-mile climb into the dark, where his GPS goes blank and the only map left is the one drawn into his bones. The empty house is not empty. The mountain is not quiet. And the cold that settles into Briar Lane is not the kind that any season can explain. As the frost thickens, Damian is pulled into the tangled histories of Maren Cole, a woman bound to the place by grief; Evangeline Mott, whose knowing eyes suggest she has waited a long time; and the broken orbits of the Breck and Frost families, whose secrets run deeper than the snow. With each night, the house reveals something new, a child's laughter where no child stands, a door that opens from the inside, a name scratched into the wallpaper. Damian came looking for an inheritance. What he finds is a debt. To survive the winter, he will have to confront what really happened on Briar Lane before he was old enough to speak, and what has been waiting, patient and patient, for him to come home. Some inheritances are passed down. Others refuse to let go.

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M. Gallows

by M. Gallows

The Gallows Harvest

Meredith Gallows left Hollow Creek, Virginia years ago and swore never to return, until her mother's death drags her back to count the dead woman's secrets among the estate. The Appalachian town has not changed: the corn still grows tall enough to swallow a person, the church still preaches about Providence, and Sheriff Dale Hutcherson still drives the same dirt roads with the same unreadable eyes. But the soil remembers. When a shallow grave yields the body of an unknown young woman and the cornfields begin to give back what they have taken, Meredith's journalistic instincts refuse to let her leave. Widower Ezra Crane presses a weathered journal into her hands and claims her mother bargained with something called The Harvest King, a generational pact that has kept Hollow Creek prosperous at the cost of one body every autumn. Nora Pickett, the county clerk, holds ledger books that name names, and the names belong to the town's founding bloodlines, including the Gallows family and the long-dead patriarch Willem Gallows. Reverend Solomon Marsh insists salvation is within reach, but the Corn Wife whispers from the edge of the tree line that no salvation comes without a price. As the equinox narrows, Margaret Gallows is released from a hospital bed she has occupied for decades, and Clara Pickett goes missing from her own porch. Meredith can dig until the truth buries her, or she can run and let the next harvest fall on someone else. But the ground in Hollow Creek has already been opened, and it knows her name.

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R. Dark

by R. Dark

What the Hollow Keeps

Nine years after fleeing his cursed hometown, Reese Dark receives a call that drags him back to Briarvale, a nowhere town where the blacktop unspools into dust and the dead do not stay buried. A woman at Mile Seven has collapsed with wounds that bleed backwards, and she is not the first. As a paramedic who fled the only life he knew, Reese is the only soul who remembers the night the ground opened and swallowed Ezra Meachum whole, and the silence his family has kept ever since. His sister Mae, his old friend Cal, and Pastor Owen Thresh all guard the same terrible secret, one tied to the soil itself. Dr. Lena Pruitt at Mercy General sees patients disappearing from her ward without explanation. Hattie Vance, who once held the town's memory in her hands, now speaks in fragments. And Eunice Holler, who has lived longer than anyone should, watches from the porch of the house that will not fall. Reese has one chance to cut the tether binding Briarvale to its hunger. But the hollow keeps what it takes, and some debts are paid only in blood. To save the woman at Mile Seven, and himself, Reese must dig up what his family buried, before the next soul is claimed.

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I. Voss

by I. Voss

The Hollow Beneath Millhaven

When Isadora Voss steps off a bus into the dying October town of Millhaven, she expects only grief, dust, and the quiet labor of settling a dead relative's estate. Instead, she finds a house that groans when no one is inside it, a town that politely refuses to speak of what lies beneath the old foundation, and a locked journal written in her grandmother Evelyn Voss's frantic hand. The pages warn that something has been listening beneath Millhaven for generations, a presence that takes root in family lines and does not let go. As Isadora peels back layers of enforced silence, she draws the attention of the Listener itself, an entity that feeds on memory, inheritance, and blood. The locals, including the guarded Harlan Croft and the sharp-eyed Della Marsh, watch her with a terrible patience, while the reclusive Amos Tully hints that her family made a bargain long ago. A cache of letters from Elias Thorne and the half-burned records of Isadora's own mother suggest that every woman in her bloodline has been called to this reckoning. June Calloway, the town newcomer, claims she came to escape something similar, and may not have. Wendell Pryce, the estate's solicitor, knows more than his sealed lips admit. With Evelyn's journal growing colder in her hands and the Listener whispering her name through the walls, Isadora must choose: surrender her inheritance and everything it demands, or answer the thing beneath Millhaven and learn what it wants in return.

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