As the sun sets and the world grows quiet, a mystical looking glass comes to life. Its reflective surface shimmers with an ethereal glow, beckoning you to peer inside. As you do, you are transported into a realm where the magical connection between a mother and her son is unveiled. In this enchanted world, a mother's love is a force unlike any other. It radiates from her heart, enveloping her son in a warm embrace. The bond they share is unbreakable, a thread woven through time and space.
The town knew darkness. and the awful, heavy silence of terrifying images grotesquely dancing in and out of the shadows. and stark white faces, huge empty eyes and long gnarled hands that reached out with lustful insistence. and the paralyzing fear of a diabolical corruption and a hideous peril more dreadful than death.
If it is indeed haunted, maybe it ll help him understand the uncanny power that clings to his family, driving them from town to town, making them afraid to stop running. As they work together to unravel the mystery of the film and the obscure occultist who once roamed their city, Montserrat and Tristán may find that sorcerers and magic are not only the stuff of movies.
The bond they share is unbreakable, a thread woven through time and space. Through this mystical looking glass, you witness the profound impact a mother has on her son's life. From the moment of his birth, she becomes his guiding light, nurturing him with tenderness and care.
Mystical looking glass unveiling the magical connection between a mother and her son
"Penpal began as a series of short and interconnected stories posted on an online horror forum. Before long, it was adapted into illustrations, audio recordings, and short films; and that was before it was revised and expanded into a novel. How much do you remember about your childhood? In Penpal, a man investigates the seemingly unrelated bizarre, tragic, and horrific occurrences of his childhood in an attempt to finally understand them. Beginning with only fragments of his earliest years, you'll follow the narrator as he discovers that these strange and horrible events are actually part of a single terrifying story that has shaped the entirety of his life and the lives of those around him"--Amazon.com
A group of strangers bound by terrifying synchronicity becomes humankind's hope of survival in an exhilarating, twist-filled novel by Dean Koontz, the #1 New York Times bestselling master of suspense. As a girl, Joanna Chase thrived on Rustling Willows Ranch in Montana until tragedy upended her life. Now thirty-four and living in Santa Fe with only misty memories of the past, she begins to receive pleas--by phone, through her TV, in her dreams: I am in a dark place, Jojo. Please come and help me. Heeding the disturbing appeals, Joanna is compelled to return to Montana, and to a strange childhood companion she had long forgotten. She isn't the only one drawn to the Montana farmstead. People from all walks of life have converged at the remote ranch. They are haunted, on the run, obsessed, and seeking answers to the same omniscient danger Joanna came to confront. All the while, on the outskirts of Rustling Willows, a madman lurks with a vision to save the future. Mass murder is the only way to see his frightening manifesto come to pass. Through a bizarre twist of seemingly coincidental circumstances, a band of strangers now find themselves under Montana's big dark sky. Their lives entwined, they face an encroaching horror. Unless they can defeat this threat, it will spell the end for humanity.
Three ordinary people risk everything for a chance at redemption in this audacious, utterly gripping novel of catastrophe and survival at the end of the world, from the acclaimed author of The Chalk Man.
Hannah awakens to carnage, all mangled metal and shattered glass. Evacuated from a secluded boarding school during a snowstorm, her coach careered off the road, trapping her with a handful of survivors. They’ll need to work together to escape—with their sanity and secrets intact.
Meg awakens to a gentle rocking. She’s in a cable car stranded high above snowy mountains, with five strangers and no memory of how they got on board. They are heading to a place known only as “The Retreat,” but as the temperature drops and tensions mount, Meg realizes they may not all make it there alive.
Carter is gazing out the window of an isolated ski chalet that he and his companions call home. As their generator begins to waver in the storm, something hiding in the chalet’s depths threatens to escape, and their fragile bonds will be tested when the power finally fails—for good.
The imminent dangers faced by Hannah, Meg, and Carter are each one part of the puzzle. Lurking in their shadows is an even greater danger—one with the power to consume all of humanity.
In this gripping, horror-laced debut, a young Cree woman’s dreams lead her on a perilous journey of self-discovery that ultimately forces her to confront the toll of a legacy of violence on her family, her community and the land they call home.
When Mackenzie wakes up with a severed crow's head in her hands, she panics. Only moments earlier she had been fending off masses of birds in a snow-covered forest. In bed, when she blinks, the head disappears.
Night after night, Mackenzie’s dreams return her to a memory from before her sister Sabrina’s untimely death: a weekend at the family’s lakefront campsite, long obscured by a fog of guilt. But when the waking world starts closing in, too—a murder of crows stalks her every move around the city, she wakes up from a dream of drowning throwing up water, and gets threatening text messages from someone claiming to be Sabrina—Mackenzie knows this is more than she can handle alone.
Traveling north to her rural hometown in Alberta, she finds her family still steeped in the same grief that she ran away to Vancouver to escape. They welcome her back, but their shaky reunion only seems to intensify her dreams—and make them more dangerous.
What really happened that night at the lake, and what did it have to do with Sabrina’s death? Only a bad Cree would put their family at risk, but what if whatever has been calling Mackenzie home was already inside?
A gripping, page-turning novel set in Jim Crow Florida that follows Robert Stephens Jr. as he’s sent to a segregated reform school that is a chamber of terrors where he sees the horrors of racism and injustice, for the living, and the dead.
Twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens, Jr., is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory, for kicking the son of the largest landowner in town in defense of his older sister, Gloria. So begins Robbie’s journey further into the terrors of the Jim Crow South and the very real horror of the school they call The Reformatory.
Robbie has a talent for seeing ghosts, or haints. But what was once a comfort to him after the loss of his mother has become a window to the truth of what happens at the reformatory. Boys forced to work to remediate their so-called crimes have gone missing, but the haints Robbie sees hint at worse things. Through his friends Redbone and Blue, Robbie is learning not just the rules but how to survive. Meanwhile, Gloria is rallying every family member and connection in Florida to find a way to get Robbie out before it’s too late.
The Reformatory is a haunting work of historical fiction written as only American Book Award–winning author Tananarive Due could, by piecing together the life of the relative her family never spoke of and bringing his tragedy and those of so many others at the infamous Dozier School for Boys to the light in this riveting novel.
“What Kind of Mother mixes Southern Gothic, a missing child story, and body horror into an entertaining brew sure to inform your nightmares.”—Paul Tremblay, author of The Cabin at the End of the World and A Head Full of Ghosts
After striking out on her own as a teen mom, Madi Price is forced to return to her hometown of Brandywine, Virginia, with her seventeen-year-old daughter. With nothing to her name, she scrapes together a living as a palm reader at the local farmers market.
It’s there that she connects with old high school flame Henry McCabe, now a reclusive local fisherman whose infant son, Skyler, went missing five years ago. Everyone in town is sure Skyler is dead, but when Madi reads Henry’s palm, she’s haunted by strange and disturbing visions that suggest otherwise. As she follows the thread of these visions, Madi discovers a terrifying nightmare waiting at the center of the labyrinth—and it’s coming for everyone she holds dear.
Combining supernatural horror with domestic suspense into a visceral exploration of parental grief, What Kind of Mother cements Clay McLeod Chapman's reputation as a “star” (Vulture) and “the twenty-first century’s Richard Matheson” (Richard Chizmar, Chasing the Boogeyman.)
A USA TODAY BESTSELLER • A Best Book of the Year (Vulture) • An Indie Next Pick • A LibraryReads Hall of Fame Pick!
The author of The Last House on Needless Street, Catriona Ward, delivers a masterful story about friendship and betrayal, dark obsessions, and the impossibility of escaping your own story. "Here's your next obsession." (Kelly Link, author of Get In Trouble)
In a cottage overlooking the windswept Maine coast, Wilder Harlow has begun the last book he will ever write.
It is the story about the sun-drenched summer days of his youth in Whistler Bay, and the blood-stained path of the killer that stalked his small vacation town. About the terrible secret he and his companions, Nat and Harper, discovered entombed in the coves off the bay. And how the pact they swore that day echoed down the decades, forever shaping their lives.
But the more Wilder writes, the less he trusts himself and his memory. He starts to see things that can’t be real – notes hidden in the cabin, from an old friend now dead; a woman with dark hair drowning in the icy waters below, calling for help; entire chapters he doesn’t recall typing, appearing overnight. Who, or what, is haunting Wilder?
No longer able to trust his own eyes, Wilder begins to fear that this will not only be his last book, but the last thing he ever does.
“An origami puzzle of a book, the mystery so beautifully crafted you don’t see the folds, with edges sharp as a paper cut.”—Lauren Beukes, author of The Shining Girls
A terrifying Gothic thriller about grief and death and the depths of a father's love, Johnny Compton's The Spite House is a stunning debut by a horror master in the making—The Babadook meets A Head Full of Ghosts in Texas Hill Country.
Eric Ross is on the run from a mysterious past with his two daughters in tow. Having left his wife, his house, his whole life behind in Maryland, he's desperate for money—it's not easy to find steady, safe work when you can't provide references, you can't stay in one place for long, and you're paranoid that your past is creeping back up on you.
When he comes across the strange ad for the Masson House in Degener, Texas, Eric thinks they may have finally caught a lucky break. The Masson property, notorious for being one of the most haunted places in Texas, needs a caretaker of sorts. The owner is looking for proof of paranormal activity. All they need to do is stay in the house and keep a detailed record of everything that happens there. Provided the house’s horrors don’t drive them all mad, like the caretakers before them.
The job calls to Eric, not just because there's a huge payout if they can make it through, but because he wants to explore the secrets of the spite house. If it is indeed haunted, maybe it'll help him understand the uncanny power that clings to his family, driving them from town to town, making them afraid to stop running.
A woman is haunted by the Mexican folk demon La Llorona in this “utterly terrifying and wholly immersive . . . story about generational trauma, colonization, systemic oppression, and the horror at the heart of motherhood” (Library Journal, starred review).
“Castro is one of the most exciting genre authors on the scene right now, and this might be her most powerful book yet.”—Paste
Alejandra no longer knows who she is. To her husband, she is a wife, and to her children, a mother. To her own adoptive mother, she is a daughter. But they cannot see who Alejandra has become: a woman struggling with a darkness that threatens to consume her.
Nor can they see what Alejandra sees. In times of despair, a ghostly vision appears to her, the apparition of a crying woman in a ragged white gown.
When Alejandra visits a therapist, she begins exploring her family’s history, starting with the biological mother she never knew. As she goes deeper into the lives of the women in her family, she learns that heartbreak and tragedy are not the only things she has in common with her ancestors.
Because the crying woman was with them, too. She is La Llorona, the vengeful and murderous mother of Mexican legend. And she will not leave until Alejandra follows her mother, her grandmother, and all the women who came before her into the darkness.
But Alejandra has inherited more than just pain. She has inherited the strength and the courage of her foremothers—and she will have to summon everything they have given her to banish La Llorona forever.
The town knew darkness. and the awful, heavy silence of terrifying images grotesquely dancing in and out of the shadows. and stark white faces, huge empty eyes and long gnarled hands that reached out with lustful insistence. and the paralyzing fear of a diabolical corruption and a hideous peril more dreadful than death.
AN INSTANT USA TODAY BESTSELLER!
Vampires and vaqueros face off on the Texas-Mexico border in this supernatural western from the author of The Hacienda.
As the daughter of a rancher in 1840s Mexico, Nena knows a thing or two about monsters—her home has long been threatened by tensions with Anglo settlers from the north. But something more sinister lurks near the ranch at night, something that drains men of their blood and leaves them for dead.
Something that once attacked Nena nine years ago.
Believing Nena dead, Néstor has been on the run from his grief ever since, moving from ranch to ranch working as a vaquero. But no amount of drink can dispel the night terrors of sharp teeth; no woman can erase his childhood sweetheart from his mind.
When the United States invades Mexico in 1846, the two are brought abruptly together on the road to war: Nena as a curandera, a healer striving to prove her worth to her father so that he does not marry her off to a stranger, and Néstor as a member of the auxiliary cavalry of ranchers and vaqueros. But the shock of their reunion—and Nena’s rage at Néstor for seemingly abandoning her long ago—is quickly overshadowed by the appearance of a nightmare made flesh.
And unless Nena and Néstor work through their past and face the future together, neither will survive to see the dawn.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the New York Times bestselling author of The Daughter of Doctor Moreau and Mexican Gothic comes a fabulous meld of Mexican horror movies and Nazi occultism: a dark thriller about the curse that haunts a legendary lost film—and awakens one woman’s hidden powers.
“No one punctures the skin of reality to reveal the lurking, sinister magic beneath better than Silvia Moreno-Garcia.”—Kiersten White, #1 bestselling author of Hide
ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF THE SUMMER: The New York Times, NPR, Chicago Tribune, Paste, Lit Hub, CrimeReads
Montserrat has always been overlooked. She’s a talented sound editor, but she’s left out of the boys’ club running the film industry in ’90s Mexico City. And she’s all but invisible to her best friend, Tristán, a charming if faded soap opera star, though she’s been in love with him since childhood.
Then Tristán discovers his new neighbor is the cult horror director Abel Urueta, and the legendary auteur claims he can change their lives—even if his tale of a Nazi occultist imbuing magic into highly volatile silver nitrate stock sounds like sheer fantasy. The magic film was never finished, which is why, Urueta swears, his career vanished overnight. He is cursed.
Now the director wants Montserrat and Tristán to help him shoot the missing scene and lift the curse . . . but Montserrat soon notices a dark presence following her, and Tristán begins seeing the ghost of his ex-girlfriend.
As they work together to unravel the mystery of the film and the obscure occultist who once roamed their city, Montserrat and Tristán may find that sorcerers and magic are not only the stuff of movies.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Blue skies, empty land—and enough wide-open space to hide a horrifying secret. A woman with a past, a mysterious trunk, a town on the edge of nowhere, and an “absorbing, powerful” (BuzzFeed) new vision of the American West, from the award-winning author of The Changeling.
“Propulsive . . . LaValle combines chills with deep insights into our country’s divides.”—Los Angeles Times
ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2023: The New York Times, Time, Oprah Daily, Los Angeles Times, Esquire, Essence, Salon, Vulture, Reader’s Digest, The Root, LitHub, Paste, PopSugar, Chicago Review of Books, BookPage, Book Riot, Tordotcom, Crime Reads, Kirkus Reviews
Adelaide Henry carries an enormous steamer trunk with her wherever she goes. It’s locked at all times. Because when the trunk opens, people around Adelaide start to disappear.
The year is 1915, and Adelaide is in trouble. Her secret sin killed her parents, forcing her to flee California in a hellfire rush and make her way to Montana as a homesteader. Dragging the trunk with her at every stop, she will become one of the “lone women” taking advantage of the government’s offer of free land for those who can tame it—except that Adelaide isn’t alone. And the secret she’s tried so desperately to lock away might be the only thing that will help her survive the harsh territory.
Crafted by a modern master of magical suspense, Lone Women blends shimmering prose, an unforgettable cast of adventurers who find horror and sisterhood in a brutal landscape, and a portrait of early-twentieth-century America like you’ve never seen. And at its heart is the gripping story of a woman desperate to bury her past—or redeem it.
“This creepy, fast-paced read brings a fresh voice to horror. Fans of Paul Tremblay, Stephen Graham Jones, and V Castro will devour this bloody tale of vengeful spirits and the dark legacy of colonialism.”―Booklist
A Head Full of Ghosts meets Mexican Gothic in Piñata, a terrifying possession tale by author and artist Leopoldo Gout.
It was supposed to be the perfect summer.
Carmen Sanchez is back in Mexico, supervising the renovation of an ancient abbey. Her daughters Izel and Luna, too young to be left alone in New York, join her in what Carmen hopes is a chance for them to connect with their roots.
Then, an accident at the worksite unearths a stash of rare, centuries-old artifacts. The disaster costs Carmen her job, cutting the family trip short.
But something malevolent and unexplainable follows them home to New York, stalking the Sanchez family and heralding a coming catastrophe. And it may already be too late to escape what’s been awakened.
They were worshiped by our ancestors.
Now they are forgotten.
Soon, they’ll make us remember.
New York Times bestselling author Grady Hendrix takes on the haunted house in a thrilling new novel that explores the way your past--and your family--can haunt you like nothing else. When Louise finds out her parents have died, she dreads going home. She doesn't want to leave her daughter with her ex and fly to Charleston. She doesn't want to deal with her family home, stuffed to the rafters with the remnants of her father's academic career and her mother's lifelong obsession with puppets and dolls. She doesn't want to learn how to live without the two people who knew and loved her best in the world. Most of all, she doesn't want to deal with her brother, Mark, who never left their hometown, gets fired from one job after another, and resents her success. Unfortunately, she'll need his help to get the house ready for sale because it'll take more than some new paint on the walls and clearing out a lifetime of memories to get this place on the market. But some houses don't want to be sold, and their home has other plans for both of them. Like his novels The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires and The Final Girl Support Group, How to Sell a Haunted House is classic Hendrix: equal parts heartfelt and terrifying--a gripping new read from "the horror master" (USA Today).
AN INSTANT USA TODAY BESTSELLER!
As he grows, her love becomes a compass, navigating him through the challenges and triumphs of life. In this magical realm, you see the quiet moments between a mother and her son. The late-night conversations, where secrets are shared and dreams are whispered. The stolen glances, filled with understanding and compassion. The laughter that echoes through the air, carrying with it a sense of joy and belonging. But it is not only in the good times that a mother's love shines through. It is also in the moments of uncertainty and fear, when her unwavering support becomes a lifeline. Through this looking glass, you witness a mother's strength as she stands alongside her son, offering encouragement and a steady hand. As you continue to peer into the looking glass, you realize that this magical connection between a mother and her son is rooted in a deep understanding of one another. They share the same hopes and dreams, the same fears and sorrows. They are bound together by a love that transcends words and transcends time. The mystical looking glass reveals that the bond between a mother and her son is a precious gift, to be cherished and nurtured. It is a connection that shapes and molds a young boy into a man, guiding him towards his own destiny. It is a testament to the power of love, and the magical possibilities that lie within its depths. As you step away from the looking glass, the shimmering surface returns to stillness. But the vision of this mystical connection remains etched in your mind. You carry with you a newfound appreciation for the bond between a mother and her son, and a deeper understanding of the magic that lies within their love..
Reviews for "The Alchemical Merging: Unlocking the Magic of the Mother-Son Relationship"
1. Emily - 2 stars - I had high hopes for "Mystical looking glass unveiling the magical connection between a mother and her son" based on the synopsis, but unfortunately, I was left disappointed. The story felt disjointed, and the plot was hard to follow. Additionally, the characters lacked depth and development, making it difficult to connect with them on an emotional level. Overall, I found the book to be underwhelming and would not recommend it to others.
2. John - 2.5 stars - While the concept of "Mystical looking glass unveiling the magical connection between a mother and her son" seemed interesting, I found the execution to be lacking. The writing felt amateurish and the dialogue was often forced and unnatural. The pacing was also inconsistent, with some parts dragging on while others felt rushed. I struggled to stay engaged in the story and ultimately felt disconnected from the characters. Overall, I was disappointed with this book and wouldn't consider it a memorable read.
3. Sarah - 3 stars - "Mystical looking glass unveiling the magical connection between a mother and her son" had potential, but it fell short for me. The writing style was overly descriptive and took away from the plot's progression. The constant focus on unnecessary details made it hard to stay engaged. Additionally, the dialogue felt stilted and unnatural, making it difficult to connect with the characters. While the premise was unique, the execution left much to be desired. Overall, I found this book to be average and forgettable.