Malice House by Megan Shepherd is the perfect horror book for those who love their horror mixed in with a little fantasy and supernatural.
For horror writers and artists of macabre, maybe our worst nightmare is seeing our work come alive and do what it was created to do: kill in the most gruesome of ways.
I received Malice House last year when I was in the middle of taking a course at Conde Nast College in London, so I wasn’t able to get to it then. When I finally sat down to read it last month, I sat there thinking, “Look at you, Megan Shepherd. Scaring the hell out of me was not what I was expecting from this.”
I love a good horror story, especially when I wasn’t expecting to be scared at all. For me, being scared all lies with me walking away and thinking about what the author just whispered to me in between those pages. Did I carry it with me, mull it over, and think, “Yeah, that shit was scary?” I did with this one.
The scare factor lies in those creatives (or those, like me, who are writing a horror romance novel) who would be petrified if their scariest creations came to life and they went on a killing spree and there’s no natural way to stop them. It is kind of like the Jason, Freddie Krueger, and Michael Myers genre where you can’t kill them. They’ll keep coming back.
So if that’s your kind of scare factor, this is your next read.
You can get Malice House on Kindle Unlimited as part of your KU membership. Book two, Midnight Showing, releases on October 3, 2023.
SYNOPSIS
“One step away from our world lies another: a land of violent fantasies, of sharp-toothed delights. . . .”Of all the things aspiring artist Haven Marbury expected to find while clearing out her late father’s remote seaside house, Bedtime Stories for Monsters was not on the list. This secret handwritten manuscript is disturbingly different from his Pulitzer-winning works: its interweaving short stories crawl with horrific monsters and enigmatic humans that exist somewhere between this world and the next. The stories unsettle but also entice Haven, practically compelling her to illustrate them while she stays in the house that her father warned her was haunted. Clearly just dementia whispering in his ear . . . right?
Reeling from a failed marriage, Haven hopes an illustrated Bedtime Stories can be the lucrative posthumous father-daughter collaboration she desperately needs to jump-start her art career. However, everyone in the nearby vacation town wants a piece of the manuscript: her father’s obsessive literary salon members, the Ink Drinkers; her mysterious yet charming neighbor, who has a tendency toward three a.m. bonfires; a young barista with a literary forgery business; and of course, whoever keeps trying to break into her house. But when a monstrous creature appears under Haven’s bed right as grisly deaths are reported in the nearby woods, she must race to uncover dark, otherworldly family secrets—completely rewriting everything she ever knew about herself in the process.
[DISCLOSURE: I received a copy of this book from the publisher for purposes of review. The opinions expressed here are by no means influenced by the publisher or the author. This post contains affiliate links. Should you click on the link and purchase the product, I may receive a commission from the sale at no additional cost to you.]