Cursing Curses What Curse At Midnight

Althea

Author: McDaniels, Abigail
Pseudonym of: Dan Trent and Lynda Trent
Format: Mass Market Paperback
Page Count: 358pp.
Pub. Date: December 1995
Publisher: Zebra/Kensington

A cursed doll:

When Carol and her daughters move into the old house in Louisiana, they sense something in the house with them. Little Holly finds Althea, a beautiful antique doll, and realizes the doll can do more than walk and talk — and it’s about to give a whole new meaning to the word terror.

Christine

Author: King, Stephen
Format: Mass Market Paperback
Page Count: 528pp.
Pub. Date: September 7, 2004
Publisher: Signet
Original Pub: 1983 (Hardcover — Viking)
Links: StephenKing.com: The Official Stephen King Web Site

A cursed car:

It was love at first sight. From the moment seventeen-year-old Arnie Cunningham saw Christine, he knew he would do anything to possess her. But Christine is no lady. She is Stephen King’s ultimate vehicle of terror.

Dark Debts

Author: Hall, Karen
Format: Mass Market Paperback (Reprint)
Page Count: 501pp.
Pub. Date: April 28, 1997
Publisher: Ivy Books
Original Pub: August 1996 (Hardcover — Random House)

A cursed family:

Karen Hall spent five years creating this vividly original story of faith confronting evil in Atlanta and Los Angeles. Her characters include Michael, a sexy Jesuit priest who is having an affair with a beautiful New Yorker editor; Cam, a reclusive southern writer who survived a murderous family only to leap to his death under mysterious circumstances; Randa, an obsessive newspaper reporter on the trail of Cam’s family secret; and Jack, a lost soul who meets the love of his life just as he realizes he’s losing his mind. Dark Debts will give readers nightmares and fantasies, provoke fear and laughter, inspire doubt and faith.

From the Editors of Amazon.com:
An unspeakable curse has consumed a poor Southern family and Michael Kinney, a fallen priest, represents their only hope for salvation. In his struggles to save them from total ruin, Kinney also wages a personal battle to clear his name from a past injustice. As he investigates a deadly hotel fire and sifts through accounts of demonic possession, satanic ritual, and sightings of Jesus, Kinney comes to terms with his own personal demon, an unrivaled terror determined to bring the priest to death before he can find redemption.

Death Stone

Author: Jensen, Ruby Jean
Format: Mass Market Paperback
Page Count: ???pp.
Pub. Date: October 1, 1989
Publisher: Zebra/Kensington

A cursed ring:

Greta loved the ring she had fished out of the old abandoned well. But when she placed it on her finger, she began to feel someone urging her to kill. And then the murders began — just as that unknown someone started to become visible!

Family Inheritance

Author: LeBlanc, Deborah
Format: Mass Market Paperback
Page Count: 358pp.
Pub. Date: August 2004
Publisher: Leisure/Dorchester
Links: Author Deborah LeBlanc
Book List for Deborah LeBlanc

A family curse:

The dark, impenetrable bayous of Louisiana are filled with secrets that can never be revealed and mysterious forces that can never be understood. Nightmares live there. Jessica LeJeune left Louisiana, but she brought some of those mysterious forces with her — and now she’s being called back to her Cajun roots to confront a destiny she could not escape and a curse she might not survive.

Jessica’s younger brother, Todd, has descended into a world of madness. His shattered mind is now the plaything of an unimaginable evil, an unstoppable entity with cruel plans for both Jessica and Todd. But Jessica is not alone in her battle to save her brother’s soul. For deep in the misty bayous, in an isolated wooden shack, lives the one person who is their only hope . . .

Grave Intent

Author: LeBlanc, Deborah
Format: Mass Market Paperback
Page Count: 374pp.
Pub. Date: June 21, 2005
Publisher: Leisure/Dorchester
Links: Author Deborah LeBlanc
Book List for Deborah LeBlanc

A gypsy curse:

From the Editors of Barnes and Noble:
Michael Savoy, the director of a funeral home in Brusley, Louisiana, is looking forward to spending some much-needed downtime with his wife and young daughter at the family camp. All he has to do is get through a viewing and funeral for a beautiful 19-year-old woman tragically killed while riding a horse. The woman, Thalia Stevenson, was a Gypsy; during the crowded, chaotic viewing, Michael witnesses firsthand the bizarre rituals and incantations associated with Gypsy funerals. Just before the coffin is closed, a strange gold medallion is placed between Thalia’s hands. But when Michael’s father — a devious deadbeat who ran out on his family years earlier — steals the gold coin, he unleashes a supernatural horror that portends death without mercy if the medallion is not returned within two days.
–Paul Goat Allen

Needful Things

Author: King, Stephen
Format: Mass Market Paperback
Page Count: 731pp.
Pub. Date: April 6, 2004
Publisher: Signet
Original Pub: October 1991 (Hardcover — Viking)
Links: StephenKing.com: The Official Stephen King Web Site

Nominated for the 1991 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel

A cursed shop:

Leland Gaunt is a stranger in Castle Rock — and he calls his new shop Needful Things, where there is something for everyone. Mr. Gaunt takes pleasure in seeing how much people will pay for their most secret dreams and desires, and he knows that almost everything is for sale: love, hope, even the human soul.

Serenity Falls (A Jonathan Crowley Novel #2)

Author: Moore, James A.
Format: Trade Paperback
Page Count: 752pp.
Pub. Date: March 1, 2003
Publisher: Meisha Merlin
Links: Horror Of Horrors – The Offical Website for James A. Moore

Nominated for the 2003 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel

A cursed town:

Every town has secrets. Every town has a past that is littered with violence and tainted with lust and greed. Serenity Falls is no exception. There are deeds best forgotten, buried in the past and hidden from prying eyes, but some things refuse to stay concealed. Something in Serenity wants to make itself known and doesn’t care who gets hurt in the process.

Serenity has had its problems, to be sure, but as a whole everything seems to be getting better. The local economy is booming and the job market has gone from almost nothing to enough work to keep everyone who wants the work employed.

Still, something is going sour in the ‘Falls. The cemetery has been desecrated, the children are disappearing, the locals are having trouble with all the new people in town, and there have been several attacks by wild animals.

The town is trying to rebuild itself, to recover from over a decade of hard times, but every success is met with tragedy and Jonathan Crowley, a stranger himself in the town, is certain that the events are all connected. Proving his theories could be the death of him, because Jonathan Crowley didn’t come to Serenity Falls looking for work like most of the newcomers. He was led there, drawn by a series of deadly encounters to look into the town’s past and find out what the people who live there have been hiding.

Because some secrets aren’t meant to be kept and some towns aren’t meant to exist.
The truth will be known.
The past will be revealed.
Vengeance will be had.
Every Soul Will Scream.

From the Undead Rat:
Later this massive novel was broken into three parts and published as a trilogy by Penguin: Writ in Blood, The Pack and Dark Carnival.

Sineater

Author: Massie, Elizabeth
Format: Mass Market Paperback
Type: Novel
Page Count: 400pp.
Pub. Date: October 26, 2004
Publisher: ibooks, Inc.
Original Pub: April 1992 (Hardcover — Pan, UK)
Links: Elizabeth Massie — The Official Website
Book List for Elizabeth Massie

Winner of the 1992 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel

The father’s curse:

From the Editors of Amazon.com:
This grim, claustral story is about the consequences of a primitive form of Christianity practiced in the mountains of Virginia, the author’s home state. The sineater is a man shunned by all, a man whose face should never be seen. He performs the valuable service of absorbing all the sins of each person who dies, by eating ritual food laid out on their corpses. When the sineater’s son, Joel, is allowed to attend school, a series of violent omens convinces the fanatic locals that God is punishing them and that Judgment Day is nigh. As Joel searches for the real perpetrator of the crimes, along with other adolescents who reluctantly listen to him, the plot (the weakest part of the book) begins to resemble a wandering sort of whodunit. The focus of the novel, though, is on the well-evoked mood of fear and despair. Elizabeth Massie works her horror effects with an intimate approach, closing in on her characters as if she’s trapping them. And her descriptions do justice to the rustic setting, where people live in four-room cabins and honeysuckle winds around the knotty rails of the fences.

Sineater won a Bram Stoker Award for First Novel in 1993. Massie also won a Stoker for her novella “Stephen,” published in the first Borderlands anthology. As Tom Monteleone writes in Borderlands 3, Massie wields “a subtle power that rips at your emotions with velvet claws.”
–Fiona Webster

Thinner

Author: Bachman, Richard
Pseudonym of: Stephen King
Format: Hardcover
Page Count: 320pp.
Pub. Date: September 1, 1985
Publisher: Signet
Original Pub: December 1984 (Hardcover — NAL)
Links: StephenKing.com: The Official Stephen King Web Site.

A gypsy curse:

Six weeks after an old gypsy man curses Billy Halleck for sideswiping his daughter, he’s ninety-three pounds lighter. Now Billy is terrified — and desperate enough for one last gamble that will lead him to a nightmare showdown with the forces of evil that are melting his flesh away.