Try an eBook: Jenna Sighed

by The Undead Rat on January 5, 2009

We finish off our examination of digital downloads with this chapbook by Michael McBride.

Jenna Sighed
Jenna Sighed

Jenna Sighed

Author: McBride, Michael
Format: Digital Chapbook
Type: Novella
Links: Michael McBride Horror Fiction.

Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.
—Albert Einstein

Jenna Wallace, a research assistant for Pembroke-Smith, the world’s leading pharmaceutical conglomerate, is part of a top-secret team working on a cure for one of the most nefarious contagions the planet has ever known. Through the genetic alteration of their test subjects, they have created mutated capable of killing even the most virulent strains within the host. These modified white blood cells are more than simply resistant to the pathogen. They aggressively seek out foreign microbes and destroy them.

But there are side-effects.

Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.


Horror Mall

About Michael McBride

Jenna Sighed

Michael McBride writes stories about various apocalyptic catastrophies and technological horror. He doesn’t mean to destroy the world, it just . . . happens . . . a lot. Michael is the author of Bloodletting, God’s End, God’s End: Trail of Blood, Remains, and The Infected.

Find Out More Information about Horror Mall eBooks here.

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Try an eBook: Skin Flowers

by The Undead Rat on January 4, 2009

And now, introducing a great new Bizzaro author to our website:

Skin Flowers
Skin Flowers

Skin Flowers

Author: Ranalli, Gina
Format: Digital Chapbook
Type: Novella
Links: Gina Ranalli: The Official Website.
Links: Inverted Vertigo: The Online Journal of Bizarro Author Gina Ranalli.

Digital Chapbook #1 from Cargo Cult Press.

Tony Croft has always hated his grandmother’s folksy name for the mushrooms that periodically popped up in his garden, the fleshy fungus threatening the serene beauty he worked so hard to maintain. Gardening is one of Tony’s passions. Meticulous by nature, he enjoys the pattern. Dig. Plant. Bury.

And his other passion? He burys that, too.

Skin Flowers is the story of what happens when Tony Croft’s carefully arranged passions intersect.


Horror Mall

About Gina Ranalli

Skin FlowersGina Ranalli is an author of the bizarre, strange, and surreal. She is out to capture your heart and maybe your liver. She is the author of 13 Thorns, Chemical Gardens, Suicide Girls in the Afterlife, Wall of Kiss.

Find Out More Information about Horror Mall eBooks here.

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Try an eBook: Swan Lake

by The Undead Rat on January 3, 2009

If you are easily offended, do NOT buy this book. You were warned.

Swan Lake
Swan Lake

Swan Lake

Author: Kill, Patrick
Format: Digital Chapbook
Type: Novelette

Swan Lake, the cult classic novelette, remains one of the genre’s most controversial stories. Its original release stirred up a host of disgruntled readers offended by several scenes in the book.

The story takes place in a remote resort off the shore of a mystical lake that is believed to hold the key to transforming ugly and crippled people into breathtaking beauties. Two friends, along with one’s retarded cousin, travel many miles to “tap” into the lake’s beauty (or soon to be beauties).

Driven by the desire to fornicate, their pursuit ultimately turns tragic and results in a horrid transformation that threatens the safety of the entire resort.


Horror Mall

About Shane Ryan Staley aka Patrick Kill

Swan Lake

Patrick Kill/Shane Ryan Staley is an editor, writer, publisher, and bookseller. Shane does it all. He established Delirium Books in January 1999 and is currently its Editor-in-Chief. He is also the owner and operator of Horror Mall. He is the author of Corrosion, Dead Santa, I’ll be Damned, Luster, Psychotica, The Cleansing, and Where’s Bin Laden?

Find Out More Information about Horror Mall eBooks here.

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Try an eBook: Midnight Blues

by The Undead Rat on January 2, 2009

According to Brian Knight’s website, Brian-Knight.com, Midnight Blues was originally scheduled for publication as part of the Hardcover chapbook series by Delirium Press when that line was canceled due to economic crisis. Instead they released it as a digital download. It’s an inexpensive way to get a really fine story.

Midnight Blues
Midnight Blues

Midnight Blues

Author: Knight, Brian
Format: Digital Chapbook
Type: Novella
Links: Brian-Knight.com.

Jerry Conway is old, sick, heartbroken and nearly used up when the old car comes back into his life, hungry for vengeance. With Jerry’s help, Midnight Blues tracks down the men responsible for the death of his wife. But what does Midnight Blues and his lost love’s angry spirit have in store for him, the man who failed to protect her?

Horror Mall

About Brian Knight

Midnight Blues

Brian Knight is a horror author who lives in the Pacific Northwest with his family. He is the author of Broken Angel, Hacks, Dragonfly, Feral, King of Souls, Apocalypse Green, and 1200 am Live.

Furthermore, you can get free fiction by Brian Knight on his webpage of free fiction here. You can download the out-of-print chapbook Heart of the Monster, Toys in the Attic and the illustrated story Don’t Toy With Me.

Find Out More Information about Horror Mall eBooks here.

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January is The Price Month

by The Undead Rat on January 1, 2009

Alexandra Sokoloff is a Hollywood screenwriter, novelist and author of two psychological suspense/horror novels — The Harrowing: A Ghost Story and The Price.

All this month you can view the book trailer for The Price here on …With Intent to Commit Horror website (over there, to the right, in the multimedia box — just click the arrow to run it) and the trailer for The Harrowing: A Ghost Story on The Lair of the Undead Rat website.

The Harrowing: A Ghost Story
The Harrowing: A Ghost Story

The Harrowing: A Ghost Story

Author: Sokoloff, Alexandra
Format: Hardcover
Type: Novel
Page Count: 256pp.
Pub. Date: August 22, 2006
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press

The Harrowing
The Harrowing

The Harrowing

Author: Sokoloff, Alexandra
Format: Mass Market Paperback
Type: Novel
Page Count: 320pp.
Pub. Date: October 30, 2007
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press

Nominated for the 2006 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel
Nominated for an Anthony Award for Best First Novel

Baird College’s Mendenhall echoes with the footsteps of the last home-bound students heading off for Thanksgiving break, and Robin Stone swears she can feel the creepy, hundred-year-old residence hall breathe a sigh of relief for its long-awaited solitude. Or perhaps it’s only gathering itself for the coming weekend.

As a massive storm dumps rain on the isolated campus, four other lonely students reveal themselves: Patrick, a handsome jock; Lisa, a manipulative tease; Cain, a brooding musician; and finally Martin, a scholarly eccentric. Each has forsaken a long weekend at home for their own secret reasons.

The five unlikely companions establish a tentative rapport, but they soon become aware of a sixth presence disturbing the ominous silence that pervades the building. Are they the victims of a simple college prank taken way too far, or is the unusual energy evidence of something genuine and intent on using the five students for its own terrifying ends? It’s only Thursday afternoon, and they have three long days and dark nights before the rest of the world returns to find out what’s become of them. But for now it’s just the darkness keeping company with five students nobody wants and no one will miss.

Amazon.com Barnes and Noble
The Price
The Price

The Price

Author: Sokoloff, Alexandra
Format: Hardcover
Type: Novel
Page Count: 288pp.
Pub. Date: February 19, 2008
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press

The Price
The Price

The Price

Author: Sokoloff, Alexandra
Format: Mass Market Paperback
Type: Novel
Page Count: 304pp.
Pub. Date: December 2, 2008
Publisher: St. Martin’s Paperbacks

Nominated for the 2008 Black Quill Award for Best Dark Genre Novel

Boston’s Briarwood Medical Center is a bewildering maze of six separate hospitals symbiotically entwined, connected by glass bridges, underground tunnels, indoor and outdoor gardens — its own self-contained city. But Briarwood, like every hospital, is also a threshold . . . to the other side.

Idealistic Boston District Attorney Will Sullivan, son of a political family, is the front runner in the Massachusetts Governor’s race — until his five-year old daughter Sydney is diagnosed with a malignant, inoperable tumor. Now Will and his wife Joanna, whom he loves more than life, are living at Briarwood Hospital, waiting for their daughter to die. Joanna is slowly losing her mind with grief and Will himself starts to question his own sanity. He has begun to see bizarre and inexplicable things around him — patients disappearing from elevators, monstrous nuns watching from the shadows. A doctor assures Will that he’s suffering from a not uncommon stress reaction — the ongoing trauma of his circumstances coupled with severe sleep deprivation is bringing on these hallucinations.

But Will knows there’s more going on at Briarwood. The strange occurrences seem to center around a dark, charismatic counselor named Salk who befriends Will and talks mysteriously about the power of faith to heal. Will is intrigued, but too much of a rationalist to believe — until he starts to see patients who have talked to Salk miraculously recover.

One terrifying night, Sydney goes into renal failure and is rushed into emergency surgery. Joanna disappears that night and doesn’t return until morning. Sydney not only survives the surgery, but in fact has gone into remission. And Salk has completely disappeared — the hospital administration has no knowledge of him — he was never on staff at all.

Will begins to suspect that Joanna has made a terrible deal to save their daughter’s life. Now he must uncover the truth in order to save them all.

Amazon.com Barnes and Noble

You can visit Alexandra’s website Alexandra Sokoloff.com to find out more about this author.

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Try an eBook: Redemption

by The Undead Rat on January 1, 2009

Shane Ryan Staley and Brian Keene — could they be two great tastes that taste great together?

Horror Mall — a great place to shop for those hard to find small press and medium press horror books, chapbooks, DVDs and artwork – and now eBooks. Today I’m presenting Shane Ryan Staley and Brian Keene’s eBook called Redemption.

Redemption
Redemption

Redemption

Author: Staley, Shane Ryan and Keene, Brian
Format: Digital eBook
Type: Novella
Links: Shane Ryan Staley’s MySpace Page.
Links: Brian Keene’s Official Website.

Shane Ryan Staley and Brian Keene team up to bring you one of the year’s most shocking and emotionally-charged tales.

Redemption is a novella about how the balance of life affects us, in death and on God’s terms.

John wakes up to the fact that the balance in his life is horribly wrong. While neglecting his family for work, he suffers a terrible loss. His son has disappeared. During the months that follow, his life is ripped apart.

The mystery of his son’s disappearance is slowly unraveled as part of a plan to rid the world of evil.

In order to get redemption, John realizes that there is only one road he can travel.

A road that twists through Hell.


Horror Mall

About Shane Ryan Staley and Brian Keene

RedemptionEditor, writer, publisher, bookseller and general world devourer, Shane Ryan Staley does it all. He established Delirium Books in January 1999 and is currently its Editor-in-Chief. He is also the owner and operator of Horror Mall.

Brian Keene is making a big splash in the horror fiction world and is slated to be the next Brian Keene — a tough vocation but with books like the Stoker Award winning The Rising, The Rising: Selected Scenes from the End of the World, Ghoul, Terminal, and Kill Whitey, he is all set to do just that. Just don’t ask him to write another zombie novel, lest he tear your heart out and feast on it before your eyes . . . or maybe he’ll feast on it after your eyes — I don’t know.

Find Out More Information about Horror Mall eBooks here.

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Try an eBook: Descent

by The Undead Rat on December 30, 2008

“There are stronger forces than a solitary woman’s prayers.”

The Horror Mall, a great place to shop for those hard to find small press and medium press horror books, chapbooks, DVDs and artwork is now selling eBooks. Today I’m presenting Sandy DeLuca’s eBook called Descent.

Descent
Descent

Descent

Author: DeLuca, Sandy
Format: Digital eBook
Type: Novel
Links: Sandy DeLuca Artist and Author.

In the ’70s Julia accompanied a mad man on an unforgettable road trip from Providence to Miami. She encountered demons, decadence and death. She was helpless and subservient as pain and blood became a fact of her life. She finally escaped from that hell on earth. However, the demons and the dead followed her throughout her life. For twenty-one years they came to her in dreams. They manifested onto her painter’s canvas and they called to her from the darkness.

When another murder occurs, true madness begins to unfold. Guilt, longing and terror erupt. A secret caller lures Julia to her descent, haunting and tempting her until she realizes that she must confront her past and perhaps the Devil himself.


Horror Mall

About Sandy DeLuca

DescentSandy DeLuca is an accomplished artist who has several pieces of horror themed artwork available for sale at Horror Mall. She is also a published poet and novelist, having recently published Manhattan Grimoire with Delirium Books.

Find Out More Information about Horror Mall eBooks here.

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Unearthing the Monster

by The Undead Rat on December 29, 2008

“I was right . . . It was never dead.”

In a desert town, a monster revives after hundreds of years to continue its rampage of bloody mayhem.

This is the last movie in our series on the After Dark Horrorfest Movie series. Today’s movie is Unearthed, a movie about a desert and its monster.

Unearthed

TITLE:

UNEARTHED

Director:

Matthew Leutwyler

Writer:

Matthew Leutwyler

GENRE:

Horror, Thriller,

DESCRIPTORS:

Horror, Desert Community, Native Americans, Archeology, Monsters, Science, Alcoholism.

RATING:

Rated R

SUMMARY:

Sheriff Annie Flynn is an alcoholic and about to be voted out of office when she gets the call about truck overturned on the only road leading to town. The driver turns out to be missing. Then cows are found butchered and devoured. Trying to fend off the bottle, work with a resentful community and make it to next week’s vote, Annie turns to a native American botanist Caya for help determining the origin of a piece of . . . something . . . found at the wreckage.

That thing nearly annihilated the entire tribe.

Several travelers driving through Hat Creek stop off at Caya’s grandfather’s gas station only to find it out of gas and not likely to get any until the next day. Meanwhile, Kale, an intense young archaeologist who has been working at a near by dig, discovers proof for his theories about the native American people who once lived in that region. However, what he doesn’t realize is that a creature was unearthed in his excavations and it isn’t dead.

As night falls, people in the small community begin to meet bad ends. The monster is fast and impervious to harm. To make matters worse, Kale has his own ideas about how to deal with the creature and it means capturing the survivors, including Sheriff Flynn and Caya to use as bait.

APPEAL:

Despite the problems, I enjoyed watching this movie. There is something about the unstoppable voracious monster plowing through a herd of hapless humans that really makes for an enjoyable movie event. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not rooting for the monster, but I enjoy a story where all the dice are loaded in the monster’s favor and the humans don’t have a chance unless they get real smart and real brave.

Unearthed

The monster stayed in the shadows and remained convincing. Considering that this was a low budget production, I was impressed with the special effects including the CGI.

Unfortunately, the movie had lighting problems making some scenes difficult to follow. Also the scene between the grandfather and Kale was too murky and I lost most of the information that passed between them which marred my enjoyment of the story.

The movie was weak on characters. I think with another writer, the Grandfather, Caya and even Sheriff Flynn could have been more compelling to the viewer which would have increased the horror effect tremendously. It would have made the final scene incredibly powerful and satisfying. But, that said, it wasn’t a bad monster romp.

WATCHALIKES:

Unearthed is one of the many offspring of Ridley Scott’s Alien. Released in 1979, Alien still holds up exceptionally well. Get the director’s cut, get a bowl of popcorn and watch it late at night with the lights off. It’s a classic that never fails to scare.

You can order either the 2006 After Dark Horrorfest: 8 Films to Die For or the 2007 After Dark Horrorfest: 8 Films to Die For collected 8 movie set from Amazon by clicking on the titles.

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December Updates

by The Undead Rat on December 28, 2008

Hello fellow horror readers,

Recently I changed the theme I use on this website from Neoclassical to a paid theme called Thesis WordPress Theme from DIY Themes (both themes were created by the talented Chris Pearson). Changing themes caused my booklists to look a little . . . odd. So I decided to fix them. And since I was fixing them, I’d update them as well.

I’m also changing the web address (URL) of each book list page. Instead of the long and obnoxious
http://theundeadrat.com/book-list-by-author/book-list-by-author-a/horror-author/
it will now sport the sleeker, sexier
http://theundeadrat.com/horror-author/.

If you’ve book marked any of the pages listed below, you may wish to update them.

You may notice that there are a couple of new pages. Go ahead and check them out. You might just find some wonderful reading inside.

New Book Lists:

Author Pages for:
Maurice Broaddus
Lawrence C. Connolly
Gary Frank

Series Page for:
Darkest Powers Series

Updated Book Lists:

Author Pages for:
Linda D. Addison
John Paul Allen
Kelley Armstrong
Michael A. Arnzen
Jenna Black
Raven Bower
Kealan Patrick Burke
Fran Friel
Gerard D. Houarner

Series Page for:
The Apparitions Series
The Dead Cat Series
The Guardians of the Night Series
Max the Assassin Series
Morgan Kingsley, Exorcist
The Timmy Quinn Series
The Women of the Otherworld Series

Thank you for visiting my website and hang on — next year promises to be bigger and better.

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Read Heart of the Monster for Free

by The Undead Rat on December 26, 2008

“Where does your rage come from?”

One of the nice things about reading horror is that many of the authors are willing to experiement and take risks both in their fiction and in the real world.

One such horror writer, Brian Knight, is making his out-of-print novella called Heart of the Monster available for free from his website Brian-Knight.com.

This story was published as a chapbook in 2004 with a limited run. It’s out of print and not easily found — until now.

I read it and was blown away by the power of the story, the use of metaphore and by the really cool monster waiting within the pages.

Click on this link to go to the page where you can download Heart of the Monster. You can read it right there or save it to your hard drive. The novella is in a PDF format so you need Adobe Acrobat Reader to view it — if you don’t have Acrobat Reader installed on your computer, you can get it for free here.

While you’re there, check out Brian’s website and see what else he’s written.

Heart of the Monster by Brian KnightWhere does your rage come from?

Karl knows; he stares at it every night from his back patio.

The Heart Of The Monster.

It calls to him, and for fifteen years Karl has resisted it’s pull. But to confront the monster he is becoming he must go back and confront the ghosts of his past, and those who he left behind.

(Originally posted in The Lair of the Undead Rat)

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