Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Devil Inside by Clay McLeod Chapman, which releases on August 11th 2026.

After a traumatic accident that almost cost Jordan his life, he’s finally starting to feel normal again. Well, maybe not normal. Everything tastes like ash, and when he looks at the people around him, their faces start to melt. At least he’s not dead, right? His friends are doing their best to get him back on his feet, maybe find someone to talk to, perhaps even find someone to take his mind off his last failed relationship.

Then he meets Lilith. The two share an instant connection but after a wild and passionate night together, she ghosts him. Jordan searches the city for Lilith, desperate to see her again. But when a woman claiming to be Lilith shows up, wearing a different face but knowing intimate details about Jordan, he worries he’s losing his grip on reality. As he grows closer to this mysterious woman, he discovers that happily ever afters sometimes come at a cost. How far will Lilith take him, and how much darkness will he embrace to find love?

EXCERPT

JORDAN

Let me tell you about the day I died.

First pickup gets called in at —get this —7:58. The caffeine from my red eye has barely hit my bloodstream when my radio starts blowing up with a rush delivery. Some startup needs me to pony express a package down to Shockoe Bottom in the next thirty.

Not impossible. I just wish I could sit here with the Saddle Sores and sip what’s left of my double-barrel espresso. Get this day-old bagel down before kicking off my day.

So it goes.

The crew all meetings up in Carytown. We chain our bikes together in a spinal column of fixed gears and hunker down on the curb for some quality pre-clocking-in time.

“First round’s on me,” I offer up.

“You shouldn’t have,” Deak says.

“What’s mine is yours.” Which is to say we’ve all got a lot of nothing. I definitely can’t afford anything in Carytown. All these shops are way overpriced. Chichi boutiques, home décor emporiums, fancy candles. This block of Richmond is for the Southsiders who want to cross the James River, slip into the safest stretch of downtown, and shop till they plop.

Our bike crew is definitely not Carytown clientele. Even the coffee is too expensive. Luckily, we’ve got Jenn- darling, angelic Jenn- hooking us up whenever she opens.

Betsy’s Coffee Shop is situated right at the corner of Cary and S. Auburn. Betsy always turns a blind eye to Jenn doling out of the Danishes nobody else wants to eat. She’s got a soft spot for couriers. Who can blame her? We’re sweating charm out of every pore.

On the mornings Jenn opens the store, she’ll serve us all up a cup and hand out whatever didn’t get eaten the day before, as long as we tip something. We’ve become intimately aware of her work schedule because, well . . . we all need to eat, now, don’t we?

There’s five of us most mornings. Couriers come and go, depending on how many bones get broken—all in a day’s work—but when it comes to the true hardcore Saddle Sores, you’ve got me, Deak, Lysistrata, and Freel. We’ve been riding through Richmond for the last couple years, all of us working for the same messenger company—Hell on Wheels—divvying the city up into sections and delivering whatever needs dispatching that day. Hell of a lot faster than UPS. Fuck FedEx. These streets are ours.

We all meet in the morning, smoke a cig, down some fresh joe until our throats burn, throw bagel bricks at each other, hacky sack that shit for a bit before gearing up and go go going. The others never notice why I’m always the first to arrive when we meet at Betsy’s. The assumption is I’m punctual. The truth is, I’ve been waking up next to Jenn.

“Your friends still don’t know about us, do they?”

“Friends?” I muttered into the pillow, still not entirely present. Waking up is not a strength of mine, I’ll admit. The ache of the day carries over. Drains me. All that riding.

“Your bike buddies.”

“Bike buddies? What are we? Ten?”

“Sure act like it.”

Earlier this morning, not two hours ago. I was still half asleep, tangled up in her bedsheets, face buried in her pillow. She’s already getting dressed, a breath away from heading out the door. I’m not getting the message that I’m supposed to move my ass. Her roommates don’t take too kindly to unchaperoned beaus wandering about the apartment. Particularly ones who raid the fridge in everyone’s absence, draining the OJ in their boxers.

“You ever gonna tell them?” Jenn slips on a collared shirt. She keeps her ink where her sleeves swallow them up, a barricade of cotton tucking her tattoos out of sight whenever she’s at work, as if she has to hide them from her customers. Hide herself.

“What’s there to tell?” I rub my face, feeling that sandpaper scrape.

“Really? So that’s how you feel about me?”

It’s not like I’ve been purposefully keeping her a secret. Not entirely, at least. The truth is it’s hard to bring someone into this riding lifestyle who isn’t a lane drifter already.

I’m not about to get all mystical here, but I will say this: Riding is a way of life.

My life, at least.

It’s difficult to explain to someone who isn’t a part of this world. To most folks, we’re just a nuisance. People see nothing but a bunch of punks on their bikes, tearing through traffic. They don’t know what it’s like to feel the tug of gravity on their fixed gear, weave down the street through the flow of vehicles, drifting along all that metal, glass, and steel. Like riding with whales. The behemoths of the streets. Your pulse picks up and you know, you just know, you’re not simply riding your bike through the city . . . you’re gliding along the borderline between life and death, racing against your own mortality. The Grim Reaper’s at your back, chasing you down on his pale little pony, and you’re simply kicking his ass, blue ribbon-style. Bike couriering isn’t just a job, it’s the only way I know how to feel alive.

The post Read An Excerpt From ‘Devil Inside’ by Clay McLeod Chapman appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

Hannah Whitten’s newest title, Reliquary, is a fast-paced journey through layers of grief, trauma, and survival. At 320 pages, the novel is a quick read with action-packed scenes that skillfully move the reader through the narrative.

Reliquary is a bit of a departure from Whitten’s most recent work, the Wilderwood duology, including For the Wolf (2021) and For the Throne (2022), which falls firmly into the dark fantasy and fairy tale genres. Though Reliquary is horror, it certainly fits the tone and scope of the many novels Whitten shares on her social media (Instagram).

Unlike some of Whitten’s other works, Reliquary is placed in a contemporary setting on the west coast of the U.S. Whitten adopts a third-person limited perspective for the protagonist, Claire, whose fiancé, Elias, has recently passed. Due to family estrangement, Claire has not yet met Elias’s family, but when they extend an invitation for her to visit their family home, Claire accepts–and then is whisked away on a luxury jet, taken on a high-end shopping excursion, and finally to a private island–all perfectly normal behavior for a grieving family.

In a Lovecraftian sense, the novel focuses on body horror as well as a sense of primal fear of the unknown–but Whitten adds a layer of snark and humor to Claire’s interiority. Though the spice level is low-to-none, that bodily horror rating and gore in general is pretty high–perhaps not one to listen to in the parent pick-up line, for audio-listeners with children. In the earlier chapters, the structure of the novel is a bit disjointed–probably intentionally so–with frequent flashbacks and short scenes before evening out once Claire arrives on the island. The novel also uses section titles, chapter titles, and then scene numbers, which is quite helpful for the reader to know how much time has passed after her arrival.

Ultimately, the novel explores several main themes. It serves not only as a critique of the wealthy but also as a reflection on how some achieve their status and power and the lengths they will go to protect and continue it. Even moreso, the novel delves into the impacts of trauma, both on the mind and the body. Trauma is deeply multifaceted, and survivors may experience anything from nothing at all to depression to full catatonia, but the risk of fully abandoning the self can allow someone else to take over–and giving that self-control to someone else is a dangerous thing. Something Claire must learn in this novel. To grieve is normal; to completely abandon the self in the long-term can be life-threatening.

After accepting the invitation to her deceased fiancé’s family’s compound, Claire must continually face her anxiety and claustrophobia, which leads to frequent panic attacks. As she tries to remain open-minded and polite, the world around her descends into one shock after another–and once again, a woman trying to be polite puts herself in a great deal of danger (take heed, ladies).

Soon, Claire notices the presence of oddly-behaving servants with various bodily anomalies, which she at first ascribes to open-minded employers–until she sees one such woman eating raw meat with a human finger dangling from it. Combine this with the odd prayers of the men of her fiancé’s family, and Claire is, rightfully, more than ready to call it quits.

Her attempts at escape are, of course, fruitless, and so she must navigate this island of Dr. Moreau–or forever become a part of it.

Reliquary is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, and other good book retailers, as of August 11th 2026, and perfect for readers of gothic or horror genres, a briney adventure awaits.

Will you be picking up Reliquary? Tell us in the comments below!

Synopsis

A young woman is lured to her late fiancé’s remote island estate—only to uncover eerie family secrets, a haunting past, and a monstrous hunger stirring beneath the sea in this deliciously atmospheric horror debut from New York Times bestselling author Hannah Whitten.

When Claire’s fiancé mysteriously dies of an unknown neurological illness, she’s prepared to sink back into the lonely life she lived before. Orphaned by a freak boating accident in her childhood, she never expected to find connection like she did with Elias, anyway. Their relationship wasn’t perfect—his coldness, his secrets, his strange aversion to the ocean—but what relationship is?

When Elias’s family reaches out—his incredibly wealthy family, from whom he was estranged—and invites Claire to a three-day wake at Harrow Point, their family home on a private island, Claire is given the chance to find family again. To belong to something, just like she’s always wanted. Just like Elias knew she was desperate to have.

Even if that family is a little strange. Even if their coastal home stirs up memories of the accident that killed her parents and sister. Even if Ash, Elias’s older brother, seems insistent on Claire leaving as soon as possible.

As she dives deeper into the world of Harrow Point, she will uncover the nature of her own traumatic connection to the ocean. There is something swimming in the bowels of Harrow Point, and it is hungry…

The post Review: Reliquary by Hannah Whitten appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Salomé by Leslie Baird, which releases on May 19th 2026.

Don’t open your eyes…

Courtney notices Salomé the moment she steps onto the plane. She’s magnetic, quicksilver, and, best of all for incurable Francophile Courtney, French. So when Salomé invites Courtney to her mother’s town in northwestern France, Courtney doesn’t even have to think about it.

But things are, almost immediately, surreal. Despite feeling right at home with Salomé, Courtney is confronted by a house outfitted with cameras and the dark, watchful presence of Salomé’s mother. Courtney senses she should leave, but with Salomé she feels as if she’s rediscovered the “French Courtney,” an alternate version of herself who made a life in France.

That is, until she starts to experience paralyzing nightmares in which strange voices intone Don’t open your eyes . . . and encounters Salomé’s charismatic stepfather, Marco, whose pyramid-scheme vitamin company offers a tempting segue into an even more insidious group obsessed with eternal life. Or is it an actual cult? And how much does Salomé really know? As a conspiracy unfurls, Courtney is torn between her loyalty to Salomé and what might be the story of a lifetime, the kind that could make a journalist’s career—if it doesn’t kill her first.

A modern reclamation of the original femme fatale whose story, until now, has been almost exclusively told by men, Salomé is a tantalizing, feminist tale exploring power, loyalty, connection, and the measures we’ll take to harness our deepest desires.

EXCERPT

June 19, 2018

In college, I lived in the 18th arrondissement of Paris above a locksmith shop—a serrurerie, which is considered to be the most difficult word for Americans to pronounce in the French language. The verb serrer means to tighten or to squeeze, among other things. Serrure is the lock itself, from the Latin sera: a bolt or crossbar.

The word, for me, took on its own meaning, as words are apt to do. To think of serrurerie placed me so fully in a time and space not exactly in the past or the future, and certainly not the present as I experienced it. Serrurerie became a portal of sorts into an alternative world in which I’d never left Paris. Now I spent most of my time saving up for my next trip back.

Once I’d bought a plane ticket, I ticked the days off on the calendar and wrote serrurerie lovingly in the margins of my notebook, the way people tended to their gardens in anticipation of the harvest. Perhaps that’s how everyone felt about vacations—but I would never consider my trips to France as vacations. They were somewhere between a homecoming and a compulsion satisfied.

As I shuffled down the plane’s center aisle, stopping to wait for other passengers to lift their bags into the overhead bins, my fingers tapped gently against my thigh. S-E-R-R-E-R. My going-to-Paris word. The two Rs, a double tap on the middle finger, naturally.

I found my row, deep in basic economy. There was a woman around my age in the window seat. I lifted my backpack into the overhead compartment before taking my seat next to her. She was looking down at her hands, which were folded neatly in her lap, her thumbs side-by-side. One thumb slid over to the other and smoothed the nail.

Two tears dripped from her chin and onto her thigh. She must’ve felt me looking. Her watery eyes turned to me, but she didn’t seem ashamed, and maybe only partially aware of how obvious it was that she was crying.

“I’m sad,” she said with a small shrug.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I won’t bother you.” I plugged in my headphones and started a podcast before I realized she was still looking at me. I paused the podcast and removed my earbuds.

“I don’t love to fly,” she said. She had an accent. She couldn’t be French, could she? French people weren’t typically as quick as Americans to strike up conversations with strangers.

“Neither do I,” I said. “But I love to travel, so I have to.”

She angled her body toward me. “Same, same.”

“I’m Courtney.”

She slipped her hand, soft and cool, into mine. “Salomé.” Se serrer la main.

I’d always wanted to meet someone named Salomé.

She was prettier than me, but not by a lot. Her hair was dark blonde, parted down the middle and cut into a long bob with curtain bangs. Each time she tucked her bangs behind her ear, they fell right back out, dusting her cheek. It was more the way she moved that gave me the sense that she was beautiful, some sort of sensual lag behind the beat.

There were a number of normal responses for a situation like this: “Oh, what a lovely name,” or even, “I’ve always wanted to meet a Salomé.”

But I said, “You aren’t going to behead me, are you?”

Her mouth fell open.

“I’m sorry, you probably hear that all the time.”

She tilted her head slightly to the side. “No, I don’t. And never before from a young person.”

“I’m a recovering Catholic,” I said. “And I’m not that young.”

She squinted and leaned a little closer. “I think we are the same age.”

“I’m thirty-one.”

“I’m twenty-nine,” she said.

“Well. I’m actually thirty. My birthday is on Sunday. It’s Saint John the Baptist Day, which is why I knew that whole thing about your name.”

“Joyeux anniversaire,” she said.

“Thank you.” I didn’t want the conversation to switch to French, though it was unlikely she expected it to. It wasn’t that my French was rusty. I was afraid to make mistakes.

Salomé lifted the window shade to look down where the airline workers were bustling around the exterior of the plane and immediately closed it again. Somehow, I knew how the next exchange would unfold, though I tried to talk myself out of it at first. I always chose the aisle seat. The window was too claustrophobic, and I could never bring myself to wake a sleeping passenger to slide past to go to the bathroom. But mostly I avoided that seat because in my worst moments of plane anxiety I would imagine the glass bursting open and sucking my body out, where I would still be conscious as I started to fall.

I knew she didn’t want the window seat either. I couldn’t stop myself; I asked, “Would you like to switch seats?”

She raised her eyebrows in pleasant surprise. “Oh, how did you know? Yes, thank you, I don’t like the window. It was the only seat available. I just bought my ticket yesterday.”

I almost had the row to myself. And now I was voluntarily giving up my seat because a pretty young woman seemed to want it. How chivalrous. We awkwardly switched seats. My new seat was still warm where her narrower hips had been. One by one, she handed me my cell phone, hand sanitizer, and bottle of water from the seat back pocket so delicately you’d think she was handling butterflies. I did the same with hers.

The last item was the notebook I’d hoped to use as a journal but that was mostly filled with to-do lists. She ran her fingertips over its embossed cover, swirling gold and green. It was a Christmas gift from my dad, who had gotten the idea years before that I liked Celtic stuff, which was neither true nor untrue.

“Pretty,” she said, before handing it to me.

The flight attendant came by and pressed the overhead bin closed. The engines rumbled to a new frequency. I spelled serrer across my fingers a few times and tried not to hold my breath. If I used the right distractions, it wouldn’t be so bad. I spelled through the flight attendant’s safety spiel, first in English and then in halting French, and through the Delta commercial that played involuntarily on our screens. I got my stopwatch ready as the plane rolled forward and picked up speed, and pressed “start” as soon as the wings caught air. The plane tilted dramatically to the left at twenty-two seconds. I just had to keep my eyes trained on the stopwatch for two more minutes. The Concorde flight 4590 crashed on July 25, 2000, two minutes after taking off from Charles de Gaulle Airport. So after two and a half minutes, I would consider myself safe until landing.

You need to meditate. That’s what they all said. Friends, boyfriends, all of them, and every last drop of advice unsolicited. Meditating involved going in there and that’s the last place I ever wanted to be. Imagine it’s snowing. You decide to give in to the whimsical moment and open your mouth to let a snowflake land on your tongue. But instead of a snowflake, an entire battlefield’s worth of bullets rains down on your open mouth and pummels you into the ground. That’s what it felt like to go in there. But it was okay. I’d learned to circumvent the battlefield.

I tried spelling “Salomé” across my fingers, but it didn’t fit well. It had a silvery quality, like water moving beneath the surface of a frozen river. What a beautiful name. Was she named after the biblical Salomé, who’d ordered the head of John the Baptist brought to her on a plate? She obviously understood my reference. The name was too distinct to not be deliberate.

Maybe Salomé was thinking of how my name didn’t suit me. In French, court means “short.” Maybe she could feel my thoughts snaking out like tendrils and filling up the plane. The ones that got close all felt it eventually.

The post Read An Excerpt From ‘Salomé’ by Leslie Baird appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from The Curse of Hester Gardens by Tamika Thompson, which is out now.

Nona McKinley raised three boys in the Hester Gardens section of Medford, Michigan, an impoverished community divided by those who follow their faith in God and those who turn to crime to survive. With her drug dealer husband behind bars and her eldest son shot to death at eighteen, Nona has devoted herself to ensuring her other children escape their brother’s fate.

Her second son Marcus is on the right path. He’s a valedictorian heading to an Ivy League school. He can get out.

But then, strange things start happening to Nona and other residents: mysterious footsteps are heard when she’s alone, people have phantom encounters in the streets, unattended appliances go off at all hours. Even more concerning is the state of Nona’s living sons. Her youngest, Lance, is hanging around with a bad crowd, and Marcus becomes moody and secretive. Sometimes he even seems to act like a different person entirely.

Nona has her secrets too. Her affair with the married church pastor has been weighing on her conscience, but that’s not the only guilt haunting her. She fears that someone—or something— is seeking revenge for an act she made in a moment of weakness to protect her family. And now everyone in Hester Gardens must pay the price . . .

EXCERPT

Only a few Hester Gardens townhomes faced north, and in Medford lore, they were the reason the public housing complex was haunted. When the sun rose on the eastern-facing units that overlooked the Rodgers Freeway, light poured into the tiny windows, baking the occupants from May through September and reminding them of summer the rest of the year. For the homes that faced west, the setting sun bathed the walls in eerie pinks and purples reminiscent of late-afternoon funerals down south. The handful of southern-facing dwellings were dim most of the day except around noon, when the sun was high enough to peek through curtains like an intrusive neighbor. But the haunted quarters were the ones facing north, or so everyone said. For those homes, the sun never seemed to rise, the days were cast in a never-ending pall of gray, and the murdered just didn’t know how to leave.

Nona McKinley’s unit faced north. On the morning of her middle son’s high school graduation, she showered, powdered herself, and primped in her bedroom mirror. It was a quarter past six, and she’d been up since four a.m. cleaning and fretting, filled with a range of emotions she couldn’t quite place. She fastened her favorite bra—the best of the three she owned because it crafted the deepest cleavage—and hummed along to a gospel tune flowing from the television Pastor Davis had bought her. The song had also played at her eldest son’s funeral.

Kendall.

That wound was still so raw.

Being home alone was a rare but welcome event. A full bed alongside a milk crate draped with a neighbor’s discarded curtains completed her room, and the makeshift nightstand housed her blessing oil and bible. The bars on the lone window and the narrowness of the room were her prison. Back when Vance still lived there, the space had seemed larger. His mere presence had stretched apart the walls and pushed up the ceiling.

She searched her closet for something that might dress up the outfit she would wear. At the back, she found the skirt she’d worn that day in the alley. It had taken her weeks to remove the blood- stains. Vance had made her promise not to throw it in the trash.

“I can burn it,” she’d offered.

“Nothing out of the ordinary,” he’d countered. “Just clean it and hang it again like you do with all of your clothes on a normal week.”

The memory of NaDarius came to her, of his hand reaching for her skirt, but she wouldn’t let him haunt her this day. Not at such a special moment. The occasion she’d been waiting for, when all of her hopes and dreams and backbreaking work were finally paying off.

She wasn’t expecting the boys to return home before the ceremony. In fact, she was set to meet them there. So when her front door groaned open and slammed shut, she drew in a breath and stared at the image of her own wide eyes.

With her bra hooked but backwards on her torso, she snapped off the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir, and waited for familiar footsteps—deliberate if they belonged to Marcus, the graduate; dawdling if they were Lance’s, the middle schooler’s.

These footfalls were neither; they rushed across her floor as if set aflame.

Was it a junkie? Or one of the boys from the local gang, the Hester Boys, rummaging through her kitchen drawers? How would they have gotten in? She had wrought iron on the front door, and there were but two ways a person could force entry, one of which involved a screwdriver.

Only she, Marcus, and Lance had keys, and her boys would never lose nor loan theirs. She prayed it was Marcus stomping across the living-room floor, drawing closer to her room. Perhaps he’d forgotten the printout for his speech?

“Marcus?”

She didn’t like the way the movement stopped on the other side of the wall. The clock ticked louder than usual. Across the hall, the toilet bubbled. Sweat formed on her upper lip and about her temples, and she pressed her palm to her chest, hoping the gesture would calm her breathing.

No answer from the living room.

She rushed forward and pressed the dime-sized gold lock on her bedroom door. With trembling fingers almost too thick to work, she tugged her bra into place, slid on her blouse, and zipped her hips into her pencil skirt.

She tiptoed back to the dresser and quietly searched the top for her phone. Mable. She’d call Mable Cleveland. Mable lived several doors down in Hester Gardens and was always armed, even at funerals, even in line at the neighborhood food pantry. Where was Nona’s cell?

Blush brushes, BB cream, and her bottle of blue-black mascara covered the dresser top, but no phone. She eased open the top drawer in case the device had fallen in. It wasn’t there either.

Nerves stabbed her stomach and chest. She must have left it on the kitchen counter. Her only way to call for help was on the other side of her home, out where the steps gave way to a dragging sound, a heaviness being pulled across her floors.

“It’s me,” someone said. The voice moved to the hallway, outside her bedroom door. Closer. Louder. “It’s me.”

She snatched up the metal baseball bat she kept beside her bed, careful not to make a sound. She didn’t know who was on the other side of the thin wood, but the voice—deadpan, bass-heavy, and evil—didn’t belong to any of her sons.

How could such a flimsy lock keep her safe? She backed up, bumping her nightstand and knocking her bible to the floor. She regretted making Vance get rid of the revolver he’d kept in the milk crate.

Floorboards creaked on the other side of the door.

“You better get out of my house if you know what’s good for you.” She drew closer to the wood again, hoping to sound like a large, menacing person who had a weapon and perhaps also knew how to throw a punch, but her voice came out shrill and weak.

The doorknob rotated slowly, the motion barely emitting a sound. The handle squeaked in protest as someone moved it left, right, left, right. The lock Pastor had installed worked after all. The metal held.

When she didn’t open the door, the intruder violently shook it in its frame. A crack the size of a strand of hair appeared near the edge; it wouldn’t take much more pressure to break through. She wished she hadn’t told Pastor to install those irons on the bedroom windows and the front door. Now she had no way to get out.

She pressed her ear to the wood; the post of her stud earring dug into the flesh behind her lobe.

Everything came to a stop.

She brought the bat to her right shoulder anyway, gripping the handle and gearing up to swing. Her pulse throbbed against her temples. Tears burned the outer corners of her eyes. The clock beside the bedroom door ticked. As the red minute hand crept forward, the thin rod counted down the seconds until she came face to face with this prowler. She waited. Her pounding heart echoed in her ears.

The post Read An Excerpt From ‘The Curse of Hester Gardens’ by Tamika Thompson appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Decomposition Book by Sara Van Os, which releases on May 19th 2026.

Spiraling from a disastrous falling-out with her best friend, Savannah retreats to her parents’ empty lake house in upstate New York to tend her wounds. Isolated and reeling from rejection, she spends her days in a fog, drinking and overthinking in equal worrisome measure. Until she wakes up one morning in the woods behind the house—next to a dead body.

Instead of calling the police, Savannah reads the journal she finds nearby, reliving the last desperate months of this woman’s life lost in the wilderness, fighting for survival. Ava, as it turns out, is more than just a cold, lonely corpse. She was funny. She was smart. And Savannah has finally found someone she can talk to…

As she pushes deeper into Ava’s harrowing story, Savannah notices a change, a shift in her reality. Each page brings her closer to the Ava from the journal…and the ghost before her now. Before long, Savannah feels something for Ava she hasn’t felt for anyone else—and there’s a good chance letting go would haunt her for the rest of her life.

Is Savannah finally losing her grip? Or has she found the friend she’s needed all along?

Loading…

Taking too long?

Reload document

| Open in new tab

The post Read An Excerpt From ‘Decomposition Book’ by Sara Van Os appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

It’s this kind of horror Sarah Gailey brings forth in their new novel, Make Me Better.

Celia lives a shadow of a life. With a long history of profound loss, broken relationships, and failed attempts working various pyramid schemes, she doesn’t have much to lose. So, she decides to take a chance and visit enigmatic Kindred Cove—a place many have heard of but few have ever seen.

Kindred Cove is a small island on tranquil Lake Vetiver surrounded by a great coral reef. Once each year, the community there allows a small number of visitors to participate in their annual Salt Festival. Rumours suggest this mysterious locale offers an opportunity like no other for a truly transformational, life-changing experience. Although visitors are not allowed to stay, Celia hopes to be the exception and start fresh with a group of people who know nothing about her. She hopes that, finally, this will be the way to break free from her hardened shell of a life and become the person she always wanted to be.

As the days unfold, Celia is invited to see Kindred Cove as its residents do: A place where people can heal, where no one needs to be sad or in pain. A place where no one is ever lost. A place that shuns the world’s propensity for selfishness, valuing community over all else and caring for its own in a way the outside world fails to understand. But we are talking horror here, so of course everything on this beautiful island isn’t quite what it seems to be on the surface.

A remote island populated by a group of people who work hard to keep themselves separate from the outside world? A group that claims to have all the answers to peace and happiness in life, if only you trust in them and follow their ways? In the real world, if it sounds too good to be true, it often is. In the world of Sarah’s Gailey’s darkly clever mind, if it sounds too good to be true, it just might be a cult. No one likes spoilers in a book review, though, so you’ll have to read to find out how Celia navigates this newfound community.

Make Me Better falls firmly in the slow burn category and this works really effectively to build tension throughout the novel. Although readers may sense where the story is going, it’s a deep dread of the inevitable that will keep your eyes glued to the page chapter after chapter.

The structure also really helps drive the narrative along, stringing the reader out. The novel is divided into six parts, jumping back and forth in time between present day Kindred Cove, Celia’s past, and the history of the island residents. With this, an incredible range of primary and secondary characters draws the reader into the story. Each one is intriguing in their own way—and you’ll find yourself alternating between loathing many of them and sympathising with them at various points throughout the book.

This is arguably Sarah Gailey’s best writing to date and Kindred Cove is perhaps the most full and complete world they’ve built on the page. So, if you’re looking for a quiet horror, a story with some speculative elements that is also insidious and realistic to our own world and experiences, you won’t want to miss Make Me Better.

*Trigger warning: If you decide to venture into the world of Make Me Better, please keep in mind pregnancy loss is part of this story, including some graphic and difficult to read scenes.

Make Me Better is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore, as of May 12th 2026.

Will you be picking up Make Me Better? Tell us in the comments below!

Synopsis | Macmillan

Sarah Gailey’s MAKE ME BETTER is an eerily seductive look at the desire for community connection and self-improvement—and the darkest places inside us all. Urgent and yet timeless, this read is perfect for fans of Shirley Jackson, Ari Aster, and Patricia Highsmith.

An exclusive invitation.

A remote island infamous for its miraculous ecology.

A once-in-a-lifetime chance to fix everything that’s broken.

But sometimes growth requires sacrifice….

WELCOME TO KINDRED COVE.

Celia is so tired of being alone. All she wants is to have a family—to belong to someone. That’s why she’s going to Kindred Cove for the annual Salt Festival held by the secluded community that lives there. They promise that healing is possible. They promise that transformation is inevitable. There is no grief at Kindred Cove, because there is no suffering. Nothing is ever lost.

Celia knows that, at that mysterious island surrounded by that impossible, ever-growing reef — she will find herself.

She’s ready to be healed. She’s ready to be transformed.

She’s ready to believe.

The post Review: Make Me Better by Sarah Gailey appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Thrall by Rebecca Mahoney, which releases on April 21st 2026. PLUS you can check out a video below from Rebecca too!

EXCERPT

Lucy woke like she was surfacing from water.

The air was thick and damp when she gasped it in. But there was a breeze moving on her skin, lukewarm as breath. There was a chorus of frog song overhead. And a few feet away, the tree line sat patiently.

She was standing outside, in the field across from her dorm. In her pajamas, without shoes. And the low afternoon light she had fallen asleep to was long, long gone. The night was deep around her. So deep that the pond in the center of the field looked like a hole in the earth. The sidewalk lights whirled as she spun around. There was no one with her in the quad that she could see—and she could see surprisingly well, despite the dark. Most of the lights in the windows were off.

And yet something about the dark felt very . . . full. As she stood, scrambling for her bearings, she found her eyes drawn once, then twice, to the same corner of the woods. I don’t want to be here. It was a hilariously inadequate thought. But her whole body screamed it.

Between the low light and the surge of adrenaline, all four buildings looked the same. She darted to the wrong dorm first. And once she correctly located Quincey’s front entrance, she realized, with a jolt, that she didn’t have her ID for the card swipe. She knocked softly, at first.

Then, when she remembered that the RA’s dorm was a ways down the hall, she pounded with both fists.

She forgot, until she saw the rumpled figure emerge, exactly who the building’s RA was. But making a better second impression wasn’t her first priority at the moment.

Lucy? Mila mouthed, her brown eyes narrowed in sleepy confusion. She padded across the hall and, with a click, pulled open the heavy outer door. “What’s wrong?” she rasped. “Are you okay?”

“Sorry.” Lucy’s own voice startled her: it was a cracked whisper even rougher than Mila’s. Her throat felt sore. “I think I was sleepwalking.”

Mila’s brow smoothed out, softening the rest of her face. “You’re certainly having a day, aren’t you,” she muttered. “Is your room unlocked, you think? Or is your roommate there to let us in?”

“I . . .” Lucy blinked, hard. Had Whitney come home? She was usually a light sleeper, so she didn’t think she’d missed it. Though she usually wouldn’t sleep through climbing out of bed, descending a flight of stairs, and walking outside, either. “I’m not sure.”

“I’ll get my keys and walk you up,” Mila said. “Wait here a second?”

Lucy watched Mila disappear around the corner toward her room, then slumped back against the textured cool of the concrete of the wall.

She could feel one last bead of sweat slipping down her neck—a slow, lukewarm slide. Absently, she reached up to swipe it away with two fingers.

They came away red.

And for the second time that day, she smelled it. That bright metallic tang.

It was standing there, with blood on her fingers and that smell coating the back of her throat, that the word finally swam through her mind. It was such a full, immediate understanding that it must have crossed her mind, if only subconsciously, before that moment. Maybe in the health center. Or maybe the moment she’d spotted the bruise on her neck.

“Mila?” Her voice sounded so quiet next to the blare of her thoughts. The useless cries of a door alarm for an intruder who was long gone. “I’m just gonna use the bathroom for a second.”

“Huh?” came Mila’s faint voice in reply. “Sure. Take your time.”

Lucy slipped through the nearby door and flicked on the overhead fluorescent lights. She didn’t run. It didn’t seem like there was much point anymore.

Her perpetually pink complexion was a sallow gray in the bathroom light. Her pale blond hair was a ghostly cloud from the humidity. When she swept it back from her neck, it felt damp under her fingertips.

She didn’t have to look. She could have left her hair right where it was, followed Mila back to her dorm. She could probably still pretend, if she tried hard enough, that none of this was really happening. But it would still be right there against her skin.

So she moved her hair clear. And she could see now exactly what was bleeding. Mixed among the mottled blue and purple in the center of the bruise, there were two deliberate punctures along the curve of her neck.

There was no such thing as vampires.

But if there weren’t—then what was this?

The post Read An Excerpt From ‘Thrall’ by Rebecca Mahoney appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

This is a heartbreaking story about control and possession through the prism of a classic tale and Welsh folklore. It encapsulates horror’s ability to recontextualise something we are familiar with and make it anew. I loved how Fridman-Tell reimagined the story of Blodeuwedd, a Welsh myth that I wasn’t familiar with but now want to know everything about. It combines so well with the familiar echoes of Frankenstein thematically and feels like a sadly increasingly timely read as the discussion around women’s bodies and autonomy grows louder and more divided. At the same this, this is something fresh and new and exciting.

There is a stunning quality to the writing that halts you in your tracks and keeps you glued to the pages. The turn of phrase is deliberate and devastating at times and at others utterly gorgeous. It moves delicately between love and horror with an emotional edge to it at all times. You delve deeply into issues around bodily autonomy presented in this speculative lens and the world-building around the folklore. This is an art that people can study and that pursuit of knowledge pushes Rory. He claims it is to serve Daye but the novel is less sure of that assertion. His character arc is a fascinating one and showcases a story of obsession masquerading as love. It is a terrifying headspace to inhabit at times, but Fridman-Tell cleverly shows his motivations and justifications. You can understand why he thinks he is right and yet still recognise him as being wrong.

A real strength of this book is the characterisation. The emotional beats only land as impactfully because you wholly believe in these characters. They are so well-constructed with intriguing character arcs that may just reveal the depths to them that were present from the first page. Daye is a great protagonist and the journey she goes on as a character is fascinating. The trajectory is so tragic and beautiful in equal measure. You instinctively root for her and connect to her vulnerability and the love that consumes her. She is devoted to Rory but that devotion is built on an imbalance of power. There are scenes in here that caused my skin to shudder and the way Fridman-Tell builds on these later on is masterful. Rory is also devoted to Daye from childhood friends and protector to other dynamics. The initial fledgling sparks of romance are written in such a rose-tinted glow but as a reader, you cannot help but feel uneasy and a little sick.

There is that undercurrent throughout of violence and possession, even from Daye’s initial creation. This is a magic that demands sacrifice, that will break and eventually erode. That fragility is paradoxically so human and epitomises that careful integration of the speculative elements to highlight the experiences of humanity being explored. It is used as a metaphorical tool to show a mirror to our world. Within this, there is a palpable anger that runs through the book and sits with the reader long after the final page. And yet, there is also a palpable sense of hope against all odds. It is but a glimmer but it is there in the moments of Daye being at one with herself and her world and in the childhood friendship that starts this whole chain of events.

Honeysuckle is exquisite horror with prose that feels like a fever dream and a story that sweeps you up into its world. A very strong debut from a promising writer you should keep your eye on.

Honeysuckle is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Waterstones, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore.

Will you be picking up Honeysuckle? Tell us in the comments below!

Synopsis

Once upon a time, on the edge of a forest, there was a lonely child with only his older sister for company. So his sister made him a playmate — Daye, a girl woven from carefully selected flowers and words.

Rory is gloriously happy, until he learns that Daye is a seasonal creature. At the end of each season, she must be woven back together or fall gruesomely apart. And when, one autumn, his sister fails to return home from university in time, Rory has no choice but to watch his best friend slowly crumble.

Realizing he can no longer rely on his sister to keep Daye alive, Rory determines he must leave home to learn how to do it himself. Rory sinks deeper into research and experiments to end the cycle of bloom and decay. But as Rory grows older, his thoughts turn darker . . .

An entrancing, inventive and unsettling reimagining of the story of Blodeuwedd from Welsh mythology, Honeysuckle by Bar Fridman-Tell is a feminist Frankenstein with flowers; a deliciously dark, twisted, horror-tinged fairytale with rot at its heart . . .

The post Review: Honeysuckle by Bar Fridman-Tell appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Nothing Tastes As Good by Luke Dumas, which releases on March 31st 2026.

Retail worker Emmett Truesdale has never fit the Southern California mold of six-pack, suntanned masculinity. Over three hundred pounds, he carries the weight of his childhood trauma and millennial ennui around his waist and in his soul. After trying every diet under the sun, he remains stuck—in his dead-end job, in love, and in his body.

Desperate for help, he enrolls in a clinical trial for a new weight loss product called Obexity. The treatment is as horrifying as the results are miraculous and as Emmett sheds pounds at superhuman speed, every part of his life improves overnight.

Unfortunately, Obexity comes with some killer side effects, including lost stretches of time and overwhelming cravings. Worse, people who were cruel to him have started disappearing and when the police warn of a cannibalistic killer on the loose, he fears that Obexity is turning him into a monster. But how can he give it up now that people are finally starting to treat him like he’s human?

Nerve-racking, sinister, and at times surreal, Nothing Tastes as Good is an unputdownable thriller that combines The Substance with the best of Stephen King and keeps you guessing until the final page.

Loading…

Taking too long?

Reload document

| Open in new tab

The post Read An Excerpt From ‘Nothing Tastes As Good’ by Luke Dumas appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Hollow by Celina Myers, which releases in a deluxe limited edition on January 13th 2026.

Mia Adair isn’t even twenty-five yet, but she’s starting to wonder if her peak has already passed. She’s spent years working at her local bookstore, a job that was supposed to be temporary. As a kid, she experienced a strange sort of fame within the paranormal community thanks to her inclusion in a book that revealed Mia’s ability to talk with the dead. But that was then, and Mia’s “gift” dried up once adolescence set in. These days, she feels like she’s nobody special.

Until she dies in a tragic car crash and reawakens as a vampire…

Forced to leave behind everything she knew, Mia must choose to live with one of two rival vampire families. The Bellamy and Sutton clans share a dark, complicated history that spans centuries. As Mia learns about their age-old traditions and extraordinary powers, along with their forbidden romances and betrayals, she’s drawn toward two very different loves. And as she feels her gift returning, more potent than ever before, Mia realizes she’ll need it to protect innocent lives—and save the only family she has left.

CHAPTER ONE

The embroidered edges of the curtains that framed Mia’s double- paned windows moved in smooth ripples just above her head, the breeze brushing against her face.

Nearly every morning of her life began this way, no matter the temperature.

Mia was in love with the night and the mystery the silence carried. Every evening her mother would storm into her bedroom to slam the window closed. But regardless of how many times her mother asked her to leave the window shut, she couldn’t. The moon just called to her; in her mind, if the window was open, the sky and her were connected in a way that was only feasible if the glass wasn’t there to separate them. She thought herself a  moon child.

When Mia was younger, she thought her mother was more concerned with the energy bills than anything else. She’d had no idea then that there was such a thing as bad people who sometimes crawled through windows and stole little girls. It would have made zero sense to her anyway, as the people who did make their way into her room didn’t need windows or even a door, and they never meant any harm. Her mother knew this. When Mia was barely old enough to go to school, people-l ike things would show up as faint dustings in the air. Maybe they were just a shadow or a faint outline, but she used her childlike mind to try to rationalize what she saw. Even at that young age, she could make connections with the things she had seen on TV and learned in books.

Her mother also knew that only Mia could see these people.

Mia’s mother was Elizabeth Adair, a world- renowned psychiatrist, and her passion was parapsychology. In her childhood and early teens, Mia was her mother’s most famous case. She was known as Case 37 in the book her mother had written, the work of literature that was almost a handbook for paranormal enthusiasts across the globe. It was strange for Mia during the few times she had been coaxed into sitting through one of her mom’s presentations in front of hundreds, or even thousands, of fans. The sec-ond she heard her number, 37, called out, she watched the faces of strangers light up.

She had been born with the ability to see and hear things other people didn’t. From the day she started speaking, she talked about the people in her bedroom. Seeing those strangers was as normal to Mia as breathing. Sometimes she got a few visitors a week, sometimes every night. Some of the spirits spoke to her, but most did not. Their strange movements sometimes scared her. It was strange to see a person who appeared lost and found all in the same moment. They would pace her room, having conversations with themselves as if lost in the moment, re- creating their final days. Saying the things they wished they’d had the chance to say in life. It seemed that just being seen and acknowledged was enough for them. Mia didn’t know what happened to the people after they disappeared, but she liked to think they crossed over into the afterlife. Every so often, someone would ask her to give their loved ones a message, but usually, the spirit disappeared before she could find out their name and where they had lived. It was as if Mia simply being there to hear their final words of love— or confessions of wrongdoing— was enough to release them from their earthly ties.

Elizabeth had hated being home ever since her husband, Ben, was killed in a car accident when Mia was seven years old. Mia’s little sister, Sasha, had been only three at the time. Elizabeth wasn’t completely absent from their lives; she just wasn’t there as much as a parent should have been. Like the day Mia got her first period. Or the day Sasha fell off the swings in the backyard and broke her arm. Mia was the one waking up most mornings and cooking microwave oatmeal for the girls before they caught the bus to school. The grief had a way of convincing Elizabeth that Mia was mature enough to be the lady of the house for weeks at a time. Little did Elizabeth know that her daughter was just as lost in grief, but the little girl didn’t get to escape. The whole situation had triggered a deep loneliness in Mia. She lost the opportunity to feel like a child; instead, she was just a mini adult who no one took seriously.

Elizabeth and Ben had loved each other fiercely, and in the first year after Ben’s death, Elizabeth was lost. She had a daughter who could speak to people on the other side, yet Ben never came through. Mia and Elizabeth spent countless nights sitting on the living room floor, the room full of candles, but there was no sign of him. Mia felt like she was letting her mother down. Elizabeth always reassured her that she wasn’t, but the frustration was evident in her eyes. Mia and her father had been exceptionally close; if he wouldn’t come through to her, it meant he had already passed over. That meant no final words for the love of his life, and it left Elizabeth feeling empty. The way Mia saw it, her father had been free to move on to the next phase of existence, which was a beautiful thing. She wished that her mother could see it the same way. Mia had seen so many spirits lost in all the “what-i fs,” the last thing she wanted was for her father to glide around her room, confused and asking questions she couldn’t answer. Elizabeth didn’t care; she needed confirmation that he was okay. She went as far as waking Mia up in the dead of night during an electrical storm with hopes that the energy in the air would help pull him through.

In the years that followed, Elizabeth often dropped the girls off at Slow Burn, the local hybrid coffee and book shop, on weekend mornings so she could meet with various clients over brunch. She’d kiss them on their cheeks and slip a five- dollar bill into each girl’s hand before taking off in whatever fashionable silver sedan she had leased that year. The store was one of several located in an old garment fac-tory. The wooden slats on the floor and the brick walls at the front and back of the building were original; scuffs on the hardwood showed where women had repeatedly pushed back their chairs over the course of a century. Holes in the beams overhead marked where racks had once hung with newly finished blouses and coats.

Every corner of the place smelled musty, and every floorboard was slightly offset from its neighbors. The shop rarely carried new releases, specializing in weird, old books and nonfiction by local authors. It was the kind of place where they wanted you to enjoy a book with your coffee, not feel pressured to buy. Mia loved to pick out a bizarre title and then curl up in one of the overstuffed, mismatched chairs. Her favorite spot was just underneath one of the windows, where a seamstress from an unknown time had scratched TM+LK into the wood. The initials were faded, but they were like a secret message from the past, a physical reminder of people who had once walked the floors. That at one point in time, they were the main characters. She loved seeing tributes that showed how even after people were gone, their love could carry on. Sometimes Mia hated how sentimental she was, never wanting to appear too soft.

Mr. Horvath, the owner, had welcomed the girls wordlessly as if it was the most natural thing in the world to have two unaccompanied children spend time with him on Saturday mornings. He would waddle his way down the road and unlock the doors for them, making them a pot of strawberry green tea, or perhaps a nice earthy rooibos, before flipping the sign to Open. Most kids would prefer to spend their weekends with friends, watching cartoons, or scootering around the local strip mall, but not Mia. She was happiest sitting in her chair reading books. She and Mr. Horvath didn’t speak most of the time, just existed in the same space until Elizabeth breezed in the door to collect her daughters.

As Mia visited the worlds in the pages of Mr. Horvath’s book collection, she found pieces of herself. By junior high, Sasha had outgrown the shop and spent her weekends hanging out with her friends, but by the time Mia could drive, she was working at Slow Burn on Friday evenings and weekend mornings. Mr. Horvath had quickly become something of a surrogate father. His smile reached his ears every time Mia opened the door. His boys had moved away and were preoccupied with their own families and jobs on the east coast. Mr. Horvath was the one who showed Mia how to change the oil in her car and how to save money. School was tedious, but the weekends were less so, thanks to Mr. Horvath and his book collection.

Mia’s time at Slow Burn seemed to be the only time she stayed out of minor boredom- fueled trouble. She wasn’t a delinquent, but when she was bored, she tried desperately to erase the feeling. So sometimes, instead of attending math, she’d end up smoking cigarettes in the basement of her high school, under the science wing. When she was supposed to be in history, she was instead making out with Dylan under the bleachers at the football field, a boy who pretended he didn’t even know her when they passed in the hallways. Mia’s mother worried, but she graduated on time and without an arrest or even a suspension on her record.

…

Mia looked at her phone; she had exactly forty- two minutes before she had to be in her car and heading down the lane toward work. She’d planned to work at Slow Burn through college, but the shop had closed down six years ago. Mia didn’t want to think about that now. These days, she worked for a bookstore chain, which was the only bookshop in town now. She hadn’t known at age eighteen that she’d still be working there at nearly twenty- five. It was the kind of job that was supposed to only fill a gap year between high school and college, that magical year where responsibilities were few and every day was full of a fun part- time job, friends, and drinking, but time just got away from her. After high school, college seemed like a waste of time and money. She had so many dreams and ideas of careers but no idea of who she really was or what she wanted to do with the rest of her life.

After all, she’d peaked anonymously before puberty and was a household name— “Case 37”— in the paranormal community. It was so weird to Mia that she could be so wanted by one community but ostracized by her peers for the same thing. Memories easily flooded back into her mind of moments in the high school halls when spirits as solid as a human being appeared in front of her. Her schoolmates had thought she was crazy since the day they found her in the schoolyard talking to the air— they only found her more strange when she insisted she was trying to tell Maddison Alireza’s grandmother that she could move on. Teenagers didn’t take easily to things they didn’t understand.

From HOLLOW by Celina Myers. Copyright © 2026 by Celina Myers. Published by Hanover Square Press, an imprint of HarperCollins.

The post Read An Excerpt From ‘Hollow’ by Celina Myers appeared first on The Nerd Daily.