Happy Halloween! 🎃 Today is the spookiest of days, and there’s nothing spookier (or comforting?) than reading a good story by candlelight with snacks of course. To celebrate Halloween, here at Read Indie Fantasy we’ve got a collection of a dark fantasy, horror, and a touch of sci-fi books by indie authors. The following books are also a mix of short story, novel, and novella lengths, so you’ll find something you like! All treats, no tricks!
And if you’re looking for a real treat, check out this bundle of related books on Itch.io for Halloween, hosted by Susanne Schmidt!
Grab a spooky book today:
A Dress To Kill For by Tessa Hastjarjanto
How much are you willing to sacrifice to gain everything you ever wanted?
Lady Claire Rosewood lives on the fringes of society, being pitied by people she once thought of as friends. Her husband isn’t the suave businessman he used to be when he proposed marriage. Both frustrated with their situation and marriage, they long for more.
When an opportunity comes around that allows her to not just be part of higher society, but to be at the very top, she needs to make a choice. The price is higher than she ever dared to think. Is she ready to pay with blood?
Bad Grains by Susanne Schmidt
Eleven-year-old Jo loves Halloween and all things horror, but she doesn’t believe anything bad could ever happen in Fels, her small German hometown. When Hektor, her annoying older brother, disappears on his way home from school, Jo assumes he is playing a prank on her. But then both her father and grandma forget Hektor’s name, and his stuff mysteriously disappears from his room.
With the adults of no help whatsoever, Jo starts an investigation of her own, uncovering an old legend that has haunted the children of Fels for centuries. A monster lives in the rye fields, and draws children into its world under the roots. With two days until the gate between their worlds closes, and only Hektor’s obnoxious best friend to help her, Jo must figure out a way to rescue her brother, or lose him forever.
Books and Bone by Veo Corva
A Librarians-and-Necromancy Fantasy Novel with Small Town Charm in a City of the Dead
The others believe in blood and bone. Ree believes in books.
She manages the libraries and draws maps for the denizens of her hometown, a secret society of necromancers hiding in a sprawling underground crypt. Though they look down on her for not practicing their craft, Ree has bigger ambitions than raising the dead. She’s going to resurrect therianthropy, the ancient magic of shapeshifting. Or at least — she’ll do it if it really exists. And if she can find the books that prove it.
But Smythe, a chatty historian from the world above, stumbles into the crypt and takes a curse meant for Ree. Now she has to find a way to save him, keep the townsfolk off her back, and convince her necromancer parents that shapeshifting is a viable career path.
Ree is certain that if she and Smythe combine their scholarly skill sets, they’ll find the right books to solve their problems. But Ree’s search for power might put the entire town in danger, and her father and the other townsfolk want Smythe dead lest he reveal their home to a world that hates them.
A dark and sweet story with an asexual protagonist and a touch of romance.
Coal Gets In Your Veins by Cat Rector
Penny Harbour was once a booming coal mining town, full of industry and possibility. But jobs like that come at a price. Accidents. Cave-ins. Explosions. The residents fed the ground with their blood, and coal dust settled inside them. Eventually, the world moved on from coal. The mines closed, the jobs left, and the grief stayed rooted in the people.
Laurel is trying to carve out a decent life in what remains of the town. Her family has lived in the Harbour for generations. She’s seen the best and worst it has to offer. But no matter what she wants for herself, her husband’s boot is still on her neck. She’s survived him for two decades, and she’s just about out of reasons to stay.
Just up the hill, Spencer is wading through his eternity mourning the deaths of his great loves. Penny Harbour is his own personal purgatory. He’s a queer vampire in a dying, conservative rural community, and everyone’s blood is full of grit and ashes. It’s the perfect place to slip into isolation and punish himself for all he’s lost.
But Penny Harbour has a life all its own. Children with a penchant for lighting fires. Unmarked graves when mines used to be. Traditions built to lift each other out of grief. Personal hells that live behind closed doors. And when the town sinks its teeth into someone, it would sooner rip their throat out than let them go.
Part romantic vampire horror, part rural Atlantic Canadian memorial pyre, Coal Gets In Your Veins is a novel about generational trauma and what it will do to keep its claws in you.
Echoes of the EtherStone by Lucy A. McLaren
Someone is murdering people in Alpinside.
It began with young women, then couples and families, all from the Workers’ District. Dubbed the “Scrubbers’ Stalker” by the press, the killer has created an environment of fear among the poor, and gossip among the wealthy.
When Ellana is attacked, her younger brother stabs the man in the back, allowing for their escape. While deciding on what to do next, they are confronted by the wealthy Lord Estamore and forced into his employ—though Ellana vows to find out why their father was killed.
Elizabetha, the daughter of Lord Estamore, is focused on her upcoming wedding and has little time for teaching Ellana the intricacies of being her new lady’s Companion—but when she learns of Ellana’s encounter with the Stalker, Elizabetha promises to use her time and resources to solve the mystery and unmask the killer once and for all, no matter the cost.
How to Bite Your Neighbor and Win a Wager by D.N. Bryn
“I WANT YOU TO BITE ME.”
Vincent Barnes has suffered four years as a vampire, and they’ve been the most miserable years of his pathetic life. Too poor for black market blood, he feeds from sleeping humans to survive. He tries to never intrude on the same prey twice, but after a single delicious taste of a long-lost childhood neighbor, he can’t help returning for seconds.
Wesley Garcia has been waking up with fang marks. Lucky for him, he needs a vampire—to use as bait. He’s certain Vitalis-Barron Pharmaceutical killed his mother, but to gain access to their covert research labs, he has to bring them a bloodsucker for their experiments.
Step one, a dramatic offer: Stay, and you can bite me.
Vincent leaps at the chance to gobble Wesley up.
Wes’s plan is perfect. He’ll befriend the vampire, then trick him into coming to the lab. No fighting, no fuss. But Vincent is more than Wesley has bargained for: sweet and shy, with intoxicating fangs that awaken new desires in Wes. As the two bond, Vincent believes he might have finally found someone worth putting his trust in… and Wes fears neither of them will survive the betrayal he has planned.
How to Bite Your Neighbor and Win and Wager is a slow-burn paranormal mm romance full of laughter, angst, and thirsty pining. It is perfect for fans of fangs and scientific interpretations of vampirism, with a medium spice level that heats up further in the free bonus content. Content includes bite kink, bleeding (non-kinky), medical experimentation (not experienced by the point of view characters), one particular lesbian BFF who should be reported to HR, and the use of “bodice-ripping” as a verb.
Kill Me Quick by Josie Jaffrey
The pirates of Charleston’s Golden Age aren’t as dead as you might think.
In her centuries-long life, Kulika Yadav has chalked up more than her fair share of regrets. Deserting the crew of former pirate king Bartholomew Roberts is not one of them. She vowed she would never return to his Charleston mansion, knowing that doing so would mean captivity or death. Now, two hundred years after she left, she has no other her new master is dying, and the person who holds the key to his cure has disappeared on Bartholomew’s turf.
But Kulika isn’t the only woman on a mission in South Carolina. Patience Quick has been searching for her best friend for six months now, along with enough other missing people to fill a whole deck of cards. She’s willing to do just about anything to find her friend, even if it means following a midnight lead to a colonial-era mansion, where a never-ending pool party is about to turn sinister.
While Kulika knowingly confronts the man who gave her immortality, Quick is left scrambling to understand the nature of the creatures whose nest she has unwittingly disturbed. When the two women’s paths cross, blood will fly.
Kill Me Quick is the first book in Josie Jaffrey’s QuickSilver series, a sapphic dark fantasy series set in Charleston, South Carolina.
Reap, Sow by S.H. Cooper
The halls are familiar. Lucianne “Lucky” Boyle knows that much. But how she came to be in this strange place that tries to make itself look like home is a mystery. Filled with doors that have no handles, rooms that shift to almost familiar, and faceless people in blue, Lucky is determined to find a way out to get back to her family and the man she loves. Until her family starts to show up, one by one, to lead her down a dark and twisted path that ends in a terrible truth.
Someone Else’s Horror Story by Rebecca Crunden
Jace Venable lives a quiet life in the house his father left him. He dreams of fixing up the barn out back so that he doesn’t have to return to the city he’s only too happy to leave behind. He likes to be left alone, thank you very much.
And then, one night, he finds a runaway in his barn. A boy with a horrifying story that’s about to upend Jace’s quiet life permanently.
The Bayou by Arden Powell
“Eugene didn’t know if he believed in the devil beyond the wicked things people did of their own accord, but if the devil had a face, it would look like Johnny Walker’s.”
Small-town Louisiana, 1935.
When Eugene was twelve, a girl from town disappeared. Everyone said the gators must have got her when she strayed too near the bayou. No foul play, just a terrible accident. But Eugene can’t shake the conviction that Mary Beth’s death had something to do with the man who used to haunt her—the man no one else could see.
Now, nearly two decades later, there are more dangerous things than gators in Chanlarivyè. People are disappearing again, and this time, no one can find the bodies. As the town’s unease grows, charismatic fugitive Johnny Walker arrives on the scene, shedding bullet casings and stolen bank notes in his wake.
He tangles himself up in Eugene’s life and awakens memories Eugene thought he had laid to rest years ago. Memories of the mysterious man who followed Eugene into his dreams, and memories of the bayou—
And of the horrifying entity that lurks beneath the water’s surface, slowly seeping into the town like a stain.
The Binding of Bloom Mountain by Vesper Doom
ADVENTURER WANTED FOR OVERNIGHT HIKE
After losing her job with the US Forestry Service, Celeste Foster makes a desperate gamble. She answers an ad for a job in rural Virginia, but doesn’t anticipate sliding into an alternate version of the Appalachian mountains.
Before Celeste understands what’s happening, she’s agreed to hike up a cursed mountain to save a town from complete annihilation. And in the days leading up to the ritual, she learns that gods and monsters live alongside humans in the Valley. Here magic runs in every family and her connection to the Valley runs deep.
Armed with a bag of ritual items, a recording, and the hopes of the pretty barista who helped her, Celeste starts up Bloom Mountain. The ritual will test Celeste to her core, and push her autistic boundaries to their fullest.
The Binding of Bloom Mountain is an adult cozy fantasy/folk horror book with mild horror sequences and a soft sapphic romance subplot. Content warnings available inside and on the authors website.
The Devil in the Woods by S. Jean
Fifty years ago, a girl walked into the woods with only matches to guide her and then disappeared. Days later, her dead body came out without her heart and upon her skin was written a dare:
“Come into the woods and find my still beating heart.”
It’s a silly urban legend, or at least, it’s supposed to be. Over the years, many have followed the dare and many of the same have disappeared or come out just as dead, prompting the city to declare the woods off-limits.
Not that off-limits ever stops would-be urban legend debunkers…
When high schooler Felix Graves agrees to help his classmates debunk the urban legend of the Devil in the Woods once and for all, he doesn’t believe there’s anything to it.
Until something finds him in the dark.
The Erstwhile Tyler Kyle by Steve Hugh Westenra
Tyler Kyle doesn’t believe in monsters.
A washed-up thirty-year-old actor and reluctant cryptid investigator, Tyler is used to playing the Scully to his best friend Josh’s Mulder on their stupidly popular YouTube channel. But when Tyler receives previously unseen footage of the B movie bombshell mother who abandoned him eighteen years ago—footage linked to an isolated island in the Canadian wilderness—the mystery is one conspiracy he’s determined to investigate. The fact that following the scent gives Tyler an excuse to run away from the “straight” Josh, whom he drunkenly made out with, is just the cherry on the shit sundae.
But Echo Island isn’t what it seems. Its eerily scenic veneer hides a twisted secret buried in its roots as a gay conversion camp, and as Tyler retraces his mother’s footsteps, he discovers a supernatural connection between the residents and the island—one they seem to think Tyler and his mother share.
Even worse, the footage of Tyler’s mom came from someone on the island–a stalker whose obsessive fascination with both Tyler and Josh is about to make Tyler wish he hadn’t gone this one alone. Puppeteered by his stalker, searching for his mother, and debating whether it’s possible to queerbait yourself, Tyler comes to realize that it doesn’t matter so much whether you believe in monsters, if they believe in you.
THE ERSTWHILE TYLER KYLE is an adult horror comedy for fans of GHOST FILES, BUZZFEED UNSOLVED, and TWIN PEAKS.
The God Sun by Alan K. Dell
The ISF Althaemenes was the first of its kind. A spacecraft capable of travelling the vast distances to other stars. But on its maiden voyage to Proxima Centauri, all contact was lost and its crew never returned.
Four years later, the United Earth Confederacy received the ship’s distress signal.
Captain Helene Cross and the crew of the ISF Apemosyne are sent to determine what happened, and if possible, rescue the wayward explorers. However, there is no response from the crew and the mystery deepens when scans show that the supposedly stranded vessel is in full working order, leaving Helene and her team no other choice but to board and investigate. Soon, a maddening presence begins to stalk their minds, influencing their actions, threatening their very survival.
The crew of the Apemosyne must discover the source of the madness and put an end to it if they are to have any hope of escape.
We’re All Monsters Here by Amy Marsden
When Anna is invited to a secluded retreat full of selfish, greedy humans, of course she doesn’t say no. Not only did she manipulate the CEO of the world’s largest oil corporation, Peter Beyer, into organising the four-day getaway in the first place, but no self-respecting vampire would ever turn down such easy prey. Her weekend gets even better when she meets Saira, one of Peter Beyer’s employees, and they begin a whirlwind affair. Blood and beautiful women are Anna’s idea of a great time.
She should have known it was too good to be true.
Hunters are dangerous, deadly, and dedicated to eradicating vampires. When a group of them turn up at the retreat, Anna must use her centuries of experience to escape their ever-closing net. Will she get out unscathed, or will they finally catch up to her? Will she give into her intense and unexpected feelings for Saira, or will she leave her to burn as she destroys all evidence she was ever there?
A fresh twist on urban fantasy, with an added splash of sapphic romance.
Got any spooky books you recommend for Halloween? Drop us a comment!
