Claire Parnell, plain, repressed, and broke, falls desperately in love with Sam Murray, the sought-after new guy in town, and must overcome her scheming mother, a badly decorated red room, the enticements of the flesh (albeit scrawny), and Sam's unsavory past, to claim the same hard-fought happiness as her favorite literary heroine...Jane Eyre.

Do you believe in curses? I never did. Not until that fated night, six years ago, when I sat in The Devil's Chair and made a wish. Not until it came true. Not until I met River Caliban himself, heir to a fortune of curses. My fated sworn enemy. I knew I should have stayed away from him. I should have run the other way when he called out my name, when he flashed that sinful smile of his, but instead, I walked toward him, leaving the light behind. Instead, I go against all reason, against all warning, and attended the gala of the year at his dark, allegedly haunted home at the top of the hill. The moment I step foot inside I know I'm in trouble, but there's something about River that magnetizes me, reels me in, and when he asks for the impossible, I find it impossible to turn him away.

Nineteen twisted tales from a vibrant, online community of horror enthusiasts! What’s HorrorTube? A creepy, new carnival ride combining a water slide park with a haunted funhouse? Not quite, although that sounds like a blast. A subset of BookTube, HorrorTube is an online community of horror enthusiasts who regularly post YouTube videos about horror-related topics, including books, films, and fiction writing. Some of the writers included in this anthology cover horror exclusively. You’ll find them posting creepy photos on Instagram or waxing poetic about the seventies drive-in flick that kept them up all night. Some read widely, only delving into the horror genre occasionally. All are passionate about books and writing. Joined together by this vibrant, online community of readers and writers, these nineteen authors bring you scary stories from all parts of the globe, proving that fear is universal. Local Haunts has taken the horror BookTube community’s global influence and shrunk it down into one village of horror and mayhem you’ll not soon forget. Inside these pages are frightening stories from around the globe, telling tales of haunts, monsters, and other terrible things local to each author’s place of residence. Within these pages you’ll find terrifying tales from North America, my own included, joined by terrible happenings in the Australian bushlands, ghosts haunting an old Greek mansion, an abandoned Vietnamese hospital, and a creepy museum, among many other eldritch encounters. From the foreword by Jason White A Stone’s Throw by Dane Cobain The Gentleman by Ryan Stroud The Salt Hag by CJ Wright Crowthorne by Andrew Lyall Mount Gilead by R. Saint Claire Screen Eight by Michael Taylor Drive Like Hell by Ken Poirier The Mount of Death by Kevin David Anderson The Drifter by James Flynn The Blocked Cellar by Mihalis Georgostathis The Night Watchman by Marie McWilliams Alone Among the Gum Trees by Cam Wolfe Highway to Hell by Nicholas Gray The Room Within by D.L. Tillery Fading Applause in Quintland by Lydia Peever A Full Moon Over Black Star Canyon by Matt Wall Long Buried by E.D. Lewis Darkness Descends by Jason White At the End of the Rope by Cameron Chaney Cover art by Cameron Roubique

A powerful and searingly honest memoir about a young woman who loses her family but finds herself in the process. In this astonishing debut, Claire Bidwell Smith, an only child, is just fourteen years old when both of her charismatic parents are diagnosed with cancer. What follows is a coming-of-age story that is both heartbreaking and exhilarating. As Claire hurtles towards loss she throws herself at anything she thinks might help her cope with the weight of this harsh reality: boys, alcohol, traveling, and the anonymity of cities like New York and Los Angeles. By the time she is twenty-five years old they are both gone and Claire is very much alone in the world. Claire's story is less of a tragic tale and more of a remarkable lesson on how to overcome some of life's greatest hardships. Written with suspense and style, and bursting with love and adventure, The Rules of Inheritance vividly captures the deep grief and surprising light of a young woman forging ahead on a journey of loss that humbled, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.

The extraordinary debut collection from the Guggenheim Award-winning author of the forthcoming Gold Fame Citrus Winner of the 2012 Story Prize Recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters 2013 Rosenthal Family Foundation Award Named one of the National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35" fiction writers of 2012 Winner of New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award NPR Best Short Story Collections of 2012 A Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, and Time Out New York Best Book of the year, and more . . . Like the work of Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson, Richard Ford, and Annie Proulx, Battleborn represents a near-perfect confluence of sensibility and setting, and the introduction of an exceptionally powerful and original literary voice. In each of these ten unforgettable stories, Claire Vaye Watkins writes her way fearlessly into the mythology of the American West, utterly reimagining it. Her characters orbit around the region's vast spaces, winning redemption despite - and often because of - the hardship and violence they endure. The arrival of a foreigner transforms the exchange of eroticism and emotion at a prostitution ranch. A prospecting hermit discovers the limits of his rugged individualism when he tries to rescue an abused teenager. Decades after she led her best friend into a degrading encounter in a Vegas hotel room, a woman feels the aftershock. Most bravely of all, Watkins takes on - and reinvents - her own troubled legacy in a story that emerges from the mayhem and destruction of Helter Skelter. Arcing from the sweeping and sublime to the minute and personal, from Gold Rush to ghost town to desert to brothel, the collection echoes not only in its title but also in its fierce, undefeated spirit the motto of her home state.

“The woman who emerges from these pages is as riveting as her books” (The Wall Street Journal) in this compelling celebration of the famously private V.C. Andrews—featuring family photos, personal letters, a partial manuscript for an unpublished novel, and more. Best known for her internationally, multi-million-copy bestselling novel Flowers in the Attic, Cleo Virginia Andrews lived a fascinating life. Born to modest means, she came of age in the American South during the Great Depression and faced a series of increasingly challenging health issues. Yet, once she rose to international literary fame, she prided herself on her intense privacy. Now, The Woman Beyond the Attic aims to connect her personal life with the public novels for which she was famous. Based on Virginia’s own letters, and interviews with her dearest family members, her long-term ghostwriter Andrew Neiderman tells Virginia’s full story for the first time. Perfect for anyone hoping to learn more about the enigmatic woman behind one of the most important novels of the 20th century, The Woman Beyond the Attic will have you “transfixed” (Publishers Weekly) from the first page.

Claire Kann's If It Makes You Happy is a coming-of-age novel about a young girl learning to embrace her cultural and sexuality identity. Winnie is living her best fat girl life and is on her way to the best place on earth. No, not Disneyland--her Granny’s diner, Goldeen’s, in the small town of Misty Haven. While there, she works in her fabulous 50’s inspired uniform, twirling around the diner floor and earning an obscene amount of tips. With her family and ungirlfriend at her side, she has everything she needs for one last perfect summer before starting college in the fall. ...until she becomes Misty Haven’s Summer Queen in a highly anticipated matchmaking tradition that she wants absolutely nothing to do with. Newly crowned, Winnie is forced to take center stage in photoshoots and a never-ending list of community royal engagements. Almost immediately, she discovers that she’s deathly afraid of it all: the spotlight, the obligations, and the way her Merry Haven Summer King, wears his heart, humor, and honesty on his sleeve. Stripped of Goldeen’s protective bubble, to salvage her summer Winnie must conquer her fears, defy expectations, and be the best Winnie she knows she can be—regardless of what anyone else thinks of her.