I often think about this one episode of the 1998 TV series Charmed, “Once Upon a Time” (2000), in which the Halliwell sisters must protect a young girl who is being stalked by dark, mythical creatures that lurk in the “in-betweens,” points of time and space at which two worlds intersect and create a door. I have long been fascinated by the idea of what lies just beyond our own realm but stands close enough that, in the right conditions, we might be able to touch it. Or perhaps, more frighteningly, it might touch us.
The threshold between our own world and another offers an exciting and, if I’m being honest, fearsome landscape that is at once a doorway to adventure and a barrier to untold danger. And it is on this fertile landscape that we see authors sow stories of colliding worlds in which some entities try to break out of their cages, in which others beckon the curious and unsuspecting into their realm, and in which even more threaten destruction to reality as we know it.
Through the pages of these six novels, I invite you to glimpse what lurks beyond — beyond Earth, beyond space, beyond time, beyond our own dimension, beyond everything we know to be true. Because whether you slip into strange new worlds or discover that the rest of the world has inexplicably slipped away, you’re sure to land in that irresistible sweet spot between terrific and terrifying as you come face to face with whatever exists on the other side.
Gallant by V.E. Schwab | Greenwillow Books
Raised at a school for independent girls, Olivia Prior knows very little about her family aside from the sparse details contained in the journal her mother left behind. The entries seem to devolve into madness with the turn of every page, but the final entry is a surprisingly lucid letter addressed to Olivia that ends in warning: “You will be safe as long as you stay away from Gallant.” What that means, Olivia hasn’t the faintest idea. That is, until a letter arrives from a mysterious uncle, summoning her home to the family’s estate.
After her long journey, Olivia’s hopes, like the derelict estate she finds, are crumbling. Her uncle is long dead, and no one had been expecting her. But as night falls, the residents feel compelled to shelter her from whatever lurks beyond the relative safety of the manor. Determined to uncover Gallant’s secrets before her disgruntled cousin can send her away, she finds herself drawn to a free-standing wall at the back of the grounds and the locked door that sits at its center. Aptly described as The Secret Garden meets Crimson Peak, Schwab whisks readers into a quietly haunting tale. (Our review.)
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Slade House by David Mitchell | Random House
Here, readers find themselves in the presence of another mysterious door, well, maybe, if they know precisely where — and when — to look. Once every nine years, a black iron door appears in London, tucked inside a dark, narrow alley just a stone’s throw from the shabby Fox and Hounds Pub. So small you’ll have to stoop to go through it, the door leads to the peculiar Slade House, home to the well-preserved 120-year-old twins Norah and Jonah, and those welcomed into this misleading paradise discover too late that there is no exit.
“Like Shirley Jackson’s Hill House or the Overlook Hotel from Stephen King’s The Shining,” writes San Francisco Chronicle, “[Slade House] is a thin sliver of hell designed to entrap the unwary,” like a nerdy 13-year-old and his mother, a recently divorced detective inspector, a group of student paranormal investigators or the many others who fall prey to the house’s splendorous façade. Spanning from 1979 to 2015, The Washington Post calls it “a fiendish delight,” The Guardian “manically ingenious,” as the novel unfolds through the stories of five separate house guests. So, go ahead, enter … if you dare.
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | Bookshop
Kaleidoscopic Shades: Within Black Eternity by David A. Neuman | Gatekeeper Press
Bidding adieu to a tale of travels to a frightful new dimension, we now greet one about a father and son’s fight to save their own. More than a decade ago, a cataclysmic event nearly destroyed Earth. Scientists chalked the happenings up to freak solar flares, and the world moved on. Just as inventor Bob Triplow and his family are settling into their new suburban life in California, however, he discovers that the nightmare is far from over. Clocks start to behave erratically, disrupting electronics and flights everywhere. People vanish with the sudden appearance of UFO-like balloons. The same terrifying dreams of a “man in black” haunt children everywhere, including Bob’s 10-year-old son, Joshua. The Black Eternity has returned.
To save Earth, Bob and Joshua must battle the forces of darkness, but doing so requires a journey to the past and revisiting the ghosts Bob thought he left behind in childhood. Editor Jason Pettus says Kaleidoscopic Shades is “Part Stephen King, part David Mitchell, part David Lynch … with [an] emphasis on wry humor and clever wordplay.” A paranormal sci-fi thriller readers can really sink their teeth into, Neuman’s novel will intrigue fans of eerie and delightfully strange classics like The Twilight Zone and Alice in Wonderland. Read our review here.
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | Bookshop
Alice by Christina Henry | Ace
Speaking of Alice in Wonderland … “Careful, this white rabbit will lead you on a psychotic journey through the bowels of magic and madness,” warns horror novelist Brom of Christina Henry’s gritty and horrific spin on Lewis Carroll’s 1865 classic.
After her adventures down the rabbit hole to wonderland (if you can call it that), young Alice is found wandering around, bloody, holding a knife and muttering the same phrase over and over again. Clearly, she has suffered a trauma, but with the frightening state she’s in and no memory of what transpired, her parents deliver her to an asylum where she remains locked away for years.
When a hospital fire breaks out, Alice and a fellow patient seize the opportunity to flee, but as they race toward freedom, Alice hoping to unlock the stifled memories of what happened all those years earlier, they realize something has escaped the hospital with them. Something dark. Something powerful. Finding what she so desperately wants means tracking this creature to the heart of Old City, where an old friend waits for Alice.
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | Bookshop
Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire | Tordotcom
Rabbit holes aren’t the only kind of portal to darker horizons. Twin sisters Jack and Jill spent the first 12 years of their lives filling the strict roles prescribed by their perfection-obsessed parents. Jaqueline has played the part of her mother’s perfect daughter: a prim and proper princess, always quiet, polite and dressed in fine clothes that she dares not get dirty. In the absence of the preferable son to complete this nuclear family, Jillian has become her father’s perfect tom-boy: an adventurous, uninhibited thrill-seeker. An adventure in their attic, however, brings all that nonsense to an end.
Opening a chest, they find not old clothes, but an impossible set of stairs leading down, down, and even further down to a door marked “Be Sure.” But without much thought, they push open the door to the Moors, a strange, dark land flooded by the light of too-large blood-colored moon. There are roles for them to play here, too, but the Moors are a dangerous place. If the beasts don’t swallow them, they may spit them out utterly transformed and unrecognizable. RT Book Reviews says this entry in McGuire’s Hugo, Nebula and Locus Award-winning Wayward Children series, weds “the strange with the poignant, the fearsome with the fascinating.”
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | Bookshop
Darkness on the Edge of Town by Brian Keene | Deadite Press
It’s plausible, even if it is a frightening thought, for a person or two, especially children, to disappear — whether by human hands or through some doorway to the unknown. It is far more shocking, however, to discover that the rest of the world has just … vanished. But that is precisely the discovery the residents of Walden, VA, made as they awoke one morning. To pile the bizarre onto this strange new reality of theirs, the town is now surrounded by an inky barrier of darkness, effectively plunging Walden into a kind of perpetual night.
Cut off from everything — electricity, methods of communication, vital supplies, and of course, light — some people ventured into the mysterious darkness, but none of them have returned. Although, their shrieks and screams carried back toward town. The confines of Walden are quickly driving residents mad, pitting neighbor against neighbor as they struggle to survive and hang onto what little sanity they can. But outside town, something prowls in the darkness, something far worse than the madness infecting those within. Partly inspired by Stephen King’s The Mist, it’s best to keep the lights on while turning pages. As one reviewer notes, “this is as dark as it gets!”
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | Bookshop
Gallant by V.E. Schwab
Raised at a school for independent girls, Olivia Prior knows very little about her family aside from the sparse details contained in the journal her mother left behind. The entries seem to devolve into madness with the turn of every page, but the final entry is a surprisingly lucid letter addressed to Olivia that ends in warning: “You will be safe as long as you stay away from Gallant.” What that means, Olivia hasn’t the faintest idea. That is, until a letter arrives from a mysterious uncle, summoning her home to the family’s estate. After her long journey, Olivia’s hopes, like the derelict estate she finds, are crumbling. Her uncle is long dead, and no one had been expecting her. But as night falls, the residents feel compelled to shelter her from whatever lurks beyond the relative safety of the manor. Determined to uncover Gallant’s secrets before her disgruntled cousin can send her away, she finds herself drawn to a free-standing wall at the back of the grounds and the locked door that sits at its center. Aptly described as The Secret Garden meets Crimson Peak, Schwab whisks readers into a quietly haunting tale. (Our review.)
Slade House by David Mitchell
Here, readers find themselves in the presence of another mysterious door, well, maybe, if they know precisely where — and when — to look. Once every nine years, a black iron door appears in London, tucked inside a dark, narrow alley just a stone’s throw from the shabby Fox and Hounds Pub. So small you’ll have to stoop to go through it, the door leads to the peculiar Slade House, home to the well-preserved 120-year-old twins Norah and Jonah, and those welcomed into this misleading paradise discover too late that there is no exit. “Like Shirley Jackson’s Hill House or the Overlook Hotel from Stephen King’s The Shining,” writes San Francisco Chronicle, “[Slade House] is a thin sliver of hell designed to entrap the unwary,” like a nerdy 13-year-old and his mother, a recently divorced detective inspector, a group of student paranormal investigators or the many others who fall prey to the house’s splendorous façade. Spanning from 1979 to 2015, The Washington Post calls it “a fiendish delight,” The Guardian “manically ingenious,” as the novel unfolds through the stories of five separate house guests. So, go ahead, enter … if you dare.
Kaleidoscopic Shades: Within Black Eternity by David A. Neuman
Bidding adieu to a tale of travels to a frightful new dimension, we now greet one about a father and son’s fight to save their own. More than a decade ago, a cataclysmic event nearly destroyed Earth. Scientists chalked the happenings up to freak solar flares, and the world moved on. Just as inventor Bob Triplow and his family are settling into their new suburban life in California, however, he discovers that the nightmare is far from over. Clocks start to behave erratically, disrupting electronics and flights everywhere. People vanish with the sudden appearance of UFO-like balloons. The same terrifying dreams of a “man in black” haunt children everywhere, including Bob’s 10-year-old son, Joshua. The Black Eternity has returned. To save Earth, Bob and Joshua must battle the forces of darkness, but doing so requires a journey to the past and revisiting the ghosts Bob thought he left behind in childhood. Editor Jason Pettus says Kaleidoscopic Shades is “Part Stephen King, part David Mitchell, part David Lynch … with [an] emphasis on wry humor and clever wordplay.” A paranormal sci-fi thriller readers can really sink their teeth into, Neuman’s novel will intrigue fans of eerie and delightfully strange classics like The Twilight Zone and Alice in Wonderland. Read our review here.
Alice by Christina Henry
Speaking of Alice in Wonderland … “Careful, this white rabbit will lead you on a psychotic journey through the bowels of magic and madness,” warns horror novelist Brom of Christina Henry’s gritty and horrific spin on Lewis Carroll’s 1865 classic. After her adventures down the rabbit hole to wonderland (if you can call it that), young Alice is found wandering around, bloody, holding a knife and muttering the same phrase over and over again. Clearly, she has suffered a trauma, but with the frightening state she’s in and no memory of what transpired, her parents deliver her to an asylum where she remains locked away for years. When a hospital fire breaks out, Alice and a fellow patient seize the opportunity to flee, but as they race toward freedom, Alice hoping to unlock the stifled memories of what happened all those years earlier, they realize something has escaped the hospital with them. Something dark. Something powerful. Finding what she so desperately wants means tracking this creature to the heart of Old City, where an old friend waits for Alice.
Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire
Rabbit holes aren’t the only kind of portal to darker horizons. Twin sisters Jack and Jill spent the first 12 years of their lives filling the strict roles prescribed by their perfection-obsessed parents. Jaqueline has played the part of her mother’s perfect daughter: a prim and proper princess, always quiet, polite and dressed in fine clothes that she dares not get dirty. In the absence of the preferable son to complete this nuclear family, Jillian has become her father’s perfect tom-boy: an adventurous, uninhibited thrill-seeker. An adventure in their attic, however, brings all that nonsense to an end. Opening a chest, they find not old clothes, but an impossible set of stairs leading down, down, and even further down to a door marked “Be Sure.” But without much thought, they push open the door to the Moors, a strange, dark land flooded by the light of too-large blood-colored moon. There are roles for them to play here, too, but the Moors are a dangerous place. If the beasts don’t swallow them, they may spit them out utterly transformed and unrecognizable. RT Book Reviews says this entry in McGuire’s Hugo, Nebula and Locus Award-winning Wayward Children series, weds “the strange with the poignant, the fearsome with the fascinating.”
Darkness on the Edge of Town by Brian Keene
It’s plausible, even if it is a frightening thought, for a person or two, especially children, to disappear — whether by human hands or through some doorway to the unknown. It is far more shocking, however, to discover that the rest of the world has just … vanished. But that is precisely the discovery the residents of Walden, VA, made as they awoke one morning. To pile the bizarre onto this strange new reality of theirs, the town is now surrounded by an inky barrier of darkness, effectively plunging Walden into a kind of perpetual night. Cut off from everything — electricity, methods of communication, vital supplies, and of course, light — some people ventured into the mysterious darkness, but none of them have returned. Although, their shrieks and screams carried back toward town. The confines of Walden are quickly driving residents mad, pitting neighbor against neighbor as they struggle to survive and hang onto what little sanity they can. But outside town, something prowls in the darkness, something far worse than the madness infecting those within. Partly inspired by Stephen King’s The Mist, it’s best to keep the lights on while turning pages. As one reviewer notes, “this is as dark as it gets!”
