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Smiling Faceless Woman
Smiling Faceless Woman, by Thomas J. Gebhardt III, is an expansive supernatural horror novel that mixes paranormal investigation, romance, coming-of-age anxiety, and a heavy dose of late-2000s pop culture. The story centers on Alexander Jacobsen, an ambitious linguistics student whose carefully mapped-out future starts coming apart when disturbing events invade his sleep and then his waking life. What begins with sounds, misplaced objects, sleep paralysis, and an oppressive presence eventually leads Alex into SPIRAL, a paranormal investigation group that treats hauntings as equal parts fieldwork, folklore, psychology, and spirituality. That blend gives the novel its identity. It’s paranormal horror with a personal center, where ghosts matter because of what they reveal about the people living around them.
Alex is a fitting lead because he’s skeptical enough to question nearly everything he experiences, but curious enough to keep following the evidence. His gradual acceptance of his family’s paranormal sensitivity works particularly well because it develops alongside a much more ordinary identity crisis involving school, work, ambition, family, and adulthood. The book repeatedly returns to his idea of “LIFE101L,” the informal education he gets when his meticulously planned life refuses to follow the syllabus. His relationship with April Wen becomes a major part of that education. Their connection moves through friendship, unrequited affection, sex, domestic life, grief, and eventual separation, giving the supernatural horror romance side of the book considerable space. When the novel jumps ahead and shows them officially together, that relationship feels authentic because readers have already spent so much time watching it form.
One of the book’s most distinctive qualities is how thoroughly it inhabits its era. MySpace, Nintendo DS systems, Motorola Razrs, mall jobs, MP3 players, memes, movies, bands, clothes, food, and internet culture aren’t occasional decorations. They’re part of the characters’ everyday vocabulary. The result is a remarkably specific time-capsule texture, especially in Alex and April’s scenes together. The prose likes to linger on conversations, meals, music choices, shopping trips, jokes, and small physical gestures, so the pacing has a roomy, episodic feel. That approach also changes the rhythm of the ghost story material. A frightening encounter can sit beside goofy banter or an ordinary afternoon, which makes the paranormal feel as though it’s intruding on an actual routine.
The occult horror and paranormal-investigation sections broaden the novel considerably. SPIRAL’s cases range from a dead child haunting a cottage to a violently malevolent presence on a ranch, and the team approaches each location with cameras, EVP recorders, EMF meters, historical research, prayer, intuition, and competing theories. The novel is especially interested in the argument between scientific explanations and supernatural ones. It discusses sleep paralysis, environmental causes, psychokinesis, folklore, Christian theology, indigenous spiritual practices, and the idea of Sheol as an overlapping realm of the dead. That investigative framework eventually grows into much darker territory involving curses, witchcraft, sacrifice, possession, and the literal smiling faceless woman. By the climax, the restrained unease of Alex’s early haunting has expanded into full-scale demonic horror, with the members of SPIRAL forced into a confrontation that makes their earlier investigations look almost gentle by comparison.
I liked that Smiling Faceless Woman is interested in connection. Alex begins as someone obsessed with controlling the trajectory of his future, and the novel keeps putting him in situations where knowledge, plans, and certainty only take him so far. Friendship, family, romance, faith, grief, and intuition gradually become just as important to him. Even after the violent paranormal climax, the story ends on quieter emotional ground, with Alex and April looking back on what they shared and acknowledging that life has carried them somewhere neither expected. That gives this ghost-hunting horror novel a surprisingly reflective finish. Its ghosts are memorable, its occult mythology is ambitious, and its real subject is the messy process of learning how to live when the world, both the visible part and the part hiding behind it, turns out to be much bigger than you planned for.
Pages: 440 | ASIN : B0FHF3MH7H
Supernatural Threat
Awakening follows a group of neighbors caught in a bizarre and increasingly terrifying fight for survival when an ancient fungal intelligence awakens beneath a Los Angeles hillside. Where did the idea behind this novel come from?
I think it was really a combination of several ideas.
Part of it came from looking back on my youth, when taking mushrooms that somebody handed you without giving it much thought seemed like a perfectly normal thing to do. I liked the idea of a kind of perennial adolescent—someone who never quite felt the pressures of adulthood and was therefore still willing to do some of the foolish things the rest of us eventually learn not to do. That became Rage. I wanted him to be a little dim, but in an entertaining way, particularly in contrast to his much more cautious, rule-following roommate, Tim.
Navarro actually came from somewhere else entirely. Years earlier, I had written a short story about a long-dead murderer and sexual predator lying in his grave twenty years after his death. There was almost nothing left of him but his skeleton and one eye, and he spent his days trying to move a finger and thinking about how terribly unfair his situation was.
What I liked about that story was that, over the ten minutes or so it took to read it, you could actually begin to feel sorry for him—until you gradually realized what a terrible person he had been. More importantly, he never realized it. He still saw himself as the victim.
I liked the character enough to bring him into Awakening, and eventually he became connected to the fungal network that resurrects him.
From there, I mostly let the story go where it wanted. I spent years rewriting and playing with it while I was gainfully employed and had no particular expectation that it would ever become a published novel. At various points it was really a couple of smaller books that I eventually stitched together and fussed over until they became Awakening.
Underneath all of that, though, is an idea that still fascinates me: there’s much more to the world than what meets the eye, and sometimes those of us who become a little too civilized miss out on quite a lot.
How did you balance the book’s gruesome body horror with its dark comedy?
Realistically, I think almost everything is funny—or at least has a funny side to it.
Some of the grotesqueries in Awakening are so outlandish that I find them difficult to take entirely seriously. Rage is deliberately a little ridiculous, and putting someone like him in the middle of genuinely horrifying circumstances naturally creates humor.
But I don’t think I ever consciously sat down and decided, “I need a joke here.” Humor is just the way I tend to look at things. It makes the medicine go down a little smoother, particularly when the writing itself has a somewhat self-deprecating quality.
I also think horror sometimes takes itself too seriously. Horror is, after all, frequently absurd. Terrible, frightening things are happening that shouldn’t be possible in the first place. There’s something inherently funny about that absurdity if you allow it to be funny.
For me, the comedy doesn’t diminish the horror. If anything, I think the two work better together. You laugh, relax for a moment—and then something awful happens.
What drew you to fungi as the source of the novel’s supernatural threat?
As I may have already given away, I was a bit of a fan of fungi when I was younger. When I started writing Awakening, I was looking back on some of those years with considerable fondness.
What’s funny to me now is that I ended up turning the fungus into the apparent bad guy when, personally, I have rather warm feelings toward mushrooms.
But Mother—the fungal intelligence in the book—isn’t really evil. She’s amoral. She consumes dead and sometimes dying material and incorporates it into herself. The intelligence—or, if you want to call it that, the soul—of everything she consumes becomes part of her collective consciousness. In that sense, Mother isn’t an individual at all. She’s a family.
And she’s starving.
If you’re starving, you eat. Mother isn’t setting out to be cruel or malicious. She’s trying to survive, and unfortunately her idea of survival can be rather unpleasant for everyone else.
So despite having made a giant fungal intelligence the supernatural threat in a horror novel, I don’t really think of fungi as the bad guys. Mother is dangerous, certainly, but I think she’s also terribly misunderstood.
Can you give us a peek inside Book 2 of the Mother’s Little Helpers series? Where will it take readers?
One of the biggest changes in ReAwakening is that the center of the story shifts.
Rage is the protagonist of Awakening, but the person who suffers the most at Navarro’s hands is Pippi, the ten-year-old girl who fancies herself after Pippi Longstocking. ReAwakening begins within about an hour of the end of the first book, and Pippi realizes very quickly that whatever happened between her and Navarro isn’t over. Somehow, he is still affecting her.
Rather than retreat from that, she has to grow up a little. She has to decide what she’s going to do about it.
And ultimately, she becomes the hero of the second book.
Rage and Alicia are still there, as are the other characters from Awakening. In fact, pretty much everybody from the first book makes it into the second one, whether they’re alive or dead. We also add several new characters, so the world and the strange little family at the center of it become larger even though the book itself is a little shorter.
Someone who proofread Awakening once told me, “Rage is a jerk, but he’s kind of my spirit animal.” I loved that, because I think you have to be a certain kind of person to really root for Rage.
Pippi is different. I’d be hard-pressed to imagine anyone not rooting for her.
The threat is bigger in ReAwakening, the cast is bigger, and dealing with what’s happening becomes much more of a group effort. But at its heart, I think it’s Pippi’s book. She was the victim in Awakening. In ReAwakening, she gets the chance to become something else.
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If it helps you find love and happiness, is it really so bad that it wants to kill and eat you?
Rage Sutherland, an unemployed, foul-mouthed 30-year-old, has never once made his dead parents proud—or tried to, for that matter. Instead, he lives happily in his consequence-free forever-adolescence in the house his parents left him.
Down the hill behind his home, Mother, a massive underground fungus, is having an existential crisis. Starving and desperate, she births a new offspring—a mushroom that promises boundless love, followed by a slow, blissful death.
When the mushrooms pop up in his yard, Rage can’t resist. One bite, and his world explodes into overwhelming ecstasy.
Meanwhile, Emile Navarro, a long-dead murderer, is resurrected into a fungus-fueled hunter to find Mother fresh food. Navarro, a remorseless sexual deviant who never found satisfaction, is determined to get this new life “right” this time.
As the mushrooms spread, Rage isn’t the only one pulled into Mother’s strange new world. There’s his rule-following college-student roommate, Tim, and ten-year-old Pippi, who catches Navarro’s attention as something more than just food.
For perhaps the first time in his life, Rage is genuinely happy. But before long, the last person anyone would mistake for a hero has people other than himself to worry about—and doing the right thing may mean giving up the best thing that’s ever happened to him.
Awakening
Chafin’s approach to horror relies heavily on the collision between the grotesque and the absurd. Navarro gradually assembles a functioning body from fungus, bones, animal remains, and human remains, creating some of the novel’s most disturbing images, yet his monstrous transformation is repeatedly interrupted by dogs stealing bones, neighbors misunderstanding what’s happening, and Rage responding to genuine supernatural danger with the judgment of a perpetually intoxicated adolescent. Fatty, Rage’s dog, is especially effective in this respect. His simple canine priorities repeatedly place him at the center of events, sometimes making him comic relief and sometimes making him unexpectedly consequential. The humor gives the novel an energetic, unpredictable rhythm, while the body horror becomes increasingly elaborate as Navarro acquires senses, limbs, voices, and greater knowledge of what Mother can do.
Beneath that surface, Awakening is deeply concerned with interconnectedness. Mother experiences life through a vast biological network, while Navarro’s resurrection gradually erases the boundaries separating one organism from another. Lisa’s consciousness becomes trapped within him after he incorporates her remains, animals contribute their senses and voices, and Rage experiences the fungus as an almost spiritual connection to other people and the earth. At one point, Mother is described as “a few million threads that wound together into a sort of democratically elected her,” an image that captures the book’s unusual conception of identity. Chafin repeatedly asks what remains of an individual when bodies, memories, desires, and consciousness can be absorbed into a larger living system. That idea gives the novel substance beyond its outrageous situations, particularly through Lisa, whose struggle to preserve her identity inside the man who murdered her adds a grim moral dimension to the supernatural premise.
The novel’s strongest quality is the way its separate characters and tones steadily converge. Rage’s mushroom-fueled experiences, Dora’s memories of her first husband, Pippi’s search for Bruno, Don’s determination to deal practically with an impossible threat, Lisa’s imprisonment, and Navarro’s growing ambitions all become parts of the same conflict. By the final confrontation, events that initially seemed like comic detours have acquired real significance, and even Rage is forced into a moment of genuine responsibility. Chafin closes the main story with consequences for both the survivors and the consciousnesses caught within Mother’s network, while leaving the larger biological threat alive for the series to continue. Awakening is an energetic mixture of supernatural horror, ecological speculation, irreverent comedy, and ensemble storytelling, held together by a striking central idea: life beneath the surface is conscious, hungry, interconnected, and beginning to wake.
Pages: 432 | ASIN : B0DJB23JGC
Stronger Than Hate
Mississippi Wizards follows two women from different eras whose lives become intertwined through violence, grief, and the haunting presence of a persistent ghost named Nancy. Where did the idea behind this novel come from?
I’d had a few conversations with two of my closest friends, both of whom, unfortunately, have had experiences with some form of racial hatred or another, including with the KKK. I wanted to show just how broad those hate groups are in who they target, and I wondered what would happen if one of them targeted a family member, and what would happen if that person became a ghost. What lengths would they go to, if they could, to protect another family member? The idea just sort of expanded from there.
The novel combines supernatural horror with survival thriller elements and social issues. How did you balance those different genres and themes?
I’ve always been a firm believer that human monsters are far worse than the literary ones. Sometimes, they turn out like Billy- evil, hateful, and violent- but I also wanted to be careful to show that there are those of us in society who, though we may not consider them monsters, certainly succumb to bigotry, hate, and fear. To do so, I did extensive interviews with people who had real-life stories to offer. Though none of them exactly matched this story, I hope I was able to get the essential message across: Together, we are all stronger than hate.
Nancy is both frightening and deeply connected to the characters’ histories. How did you develop her personality and decide what kind of ghost she would be?
When I thought of Nancy, I considered what it would have been like for her to be betrayed in such a final, ultimate fashion. I wondered what she would do to keep someone else in her family from experiencing the same fate, and how frustrating it would be if her plans were foiled over and over again. I felt that, for anyone else, desperation and anger would play a key role, but that desperation would take precedence for Nancy, since she wasn’t a bitter person in life.
The final scene suggests that there may be another strange story waiting to unfold. Did you always envision Mississippi Wizards as potentially opening the door to another story?
Yes and no. When I first thought of this story, I loved the idea that Cassandra could see ghosts and help them, and I thought it would be cool to have her eventually transition into a role where she could help lay spirits to rest. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it would be the choice of the ghost to show itself to her, not the other way around. For that, there needs to be some type of connection. Without that, I didn’t think Cassandra or Liza would get into the proverbial ghost-hunting business, as neither of their personalities would match with that. They were forced into it; they didn’t choose it. If I ever write another story with Cassandra and Liza, it won’t likely be a ghost story.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Bluesky | Instagram | Website | Amazon
Two timelines, two women, one relentless spirit: Liza’s secret love and Cassandra’s haunted mind converge through Nancy, a ghost determined to rewrite a history of hatred and violence. As terror rises and mortal enemies close in, the women must join across time to survive, confront murderers, and reclaim the power stolen from them.
Mississippi Wizards is a gripping, spectral thriller of vengeance, courage, and the enduring strength of love against impossible odds.
Trust, Deception, and Survival
Ghost Town follows a former intelligence operative who finds himself involved in a covert military experiment near the abandoned town of Ehrenberg, Arizona. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I began writing Ghost Town while finishing graduate film school at UCLA in the late 1970s. Influenced by Robert Ludlum, Jason Bourne-style espionage, and the Cold War, I imagined a dissatisfied intelligence operative confronting something far beyond his training in an isolated ghost town. Originally titled Desert Dreams, the novel evolved through many rewrites into a story that alternates between the present-day mystery and the events that shaped the protagonist’s (Richard Hart) life, revealing how his past prepared him for the impossible. Maybe I was cramming in too many concepts, but I was also intrigued by the military running a time experiment and how they could still be doing that in the present day to influence events. If they could change one thing in the past, could they do it again on a small, isolated scale?
The novel explores how fear, violence, and manipulation can distort people’s judgment. What interested you about examining human behavior under those conditions?
Setting the story during the Cold War, I was fascinated by how intelligent, well-trained people could make terrible decisions under pressure. Espionage isn’t just about gadgets and secret missions—it’s about trust, deception, and survival. I wanted to see how ordinary people would respond when the rules they depended on suddenly disappeared.
Which scenes proved especially difficult—or especially rewarding—to write?
The most rewarding scenes were those in the ghost town, where mystery gradually gave way to discovery. The most difficult part was balancing two stories at once—the unfolding present-day mystery and the protagonist’s past—so they complemented each other and steadily built toward the conclusion. The relationship between Hart, Honey, and Boon was a unique balancing act because each had a different view of what was happening in those three days. It was a challenge to mix the paranormal with a sense of horror in this “literary fusion” of high-tech contrasting with life over 100 years ago, where the disenchanted agent did not have access to any of the customary tools he would have at his disposal in the present time.
If readers leave the novel debating one question, what do you hope it will be?
I hope they might ask themselves, “What would I have done?” It is a story about survival and illusion and giving in to the illusion or sticking with reality and trying to understand what is really happening. Every character is forced to make difficult choices with incomplete information. If readers find themselves debating those decisions long after they finish the book, then I feel the story has succeeded.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Finalist, Eric Hoffer Book Awards
Brilliant but burned-out CIA operative Richard Hart has a midlife crisis. He wants out of the intelligence game for good…
A CIA operative. A black-site time experiment. A ghost town that shouldn’t exist.
Three strangers. Three days. Trapped 100 years in the past — and hunted by the dead.
🏆 Winner, American Fiction Awards Finalist, Eric Hoffer Book Awards
Burned-out CIA operative Richard Hart wants out of the intelligence game for good. But a career-ending rendezvous goes wrong, and he’s thrown into a military time-travel experiment gone catastrophically sideways — trapped in a desert ghost town, hunted by ghost riders and desperadoes, with no way home…
Ghost Town
A. J. Thibault’s Ghost Town is a speculative thriller that combines time travel, espionage, paranormal horror, and the harsh mythology of the American West. The novel follows Richard Hart, a former intelligence operative and RAND analyst whose search for direction leads him into a covert military experiment near the abandoned town of Ehrenberg, Arizona. Transported from 1989 to 1891 alongside pilot Honey Burns and drifter Boon, Hart must navigate a community governed by appetite, suspicion, and violence. The book’s shifting chronology and alternating character histories gradually connect Hart’s private crisis to Moodbain, a legendary agent overseeing a technology capable of altering perception, matter, and time.
Hart gives the novel its emotional and intellectual center. His formidable analytical abilities are balanced by anger, loneliness, and a lingering fear that his achievements have amounted to little. Thibault’s extensive account of Hart’s impoverished Brooklyn childhood clarifies why he values intelligence so fiercely and why humiliation can provoke him into violence. His father’s lesson that “a real man has more than his brain and his fists. He has a heart” becomes a quiet standard against which Hart’s later decisions can be measured. Honey and Boon receive similarly revealing histories, allowing the novel to treat its three stranded travelers as psychologically burdened people rather than pieces in a time-travel puzzle.
The 1891 sections provide the book’s strongest atmosphere. Ehrenberg is crowded with saloons, card games, public punishments, sexual coercion, religious fervor, and eruptions of collective cruelty. As the experiment weakens the characters’ judgment and resistance, ordinary events acquire the instability of a nightmare. Thibault frequently moves between bleak comedy, grotesque spectacle, and genuine menace, creating a town that feels both historically tangible and mentally distorted. The novel’s breadth gives it considerable imaginative energy, though its many flashbacks, tonal shifts, and extended confrontations sometimes slow the central ordeal and require close attention from the reader.
The final explanation reframes the ghost town as both an experimental weapon and a moral test. Hart survives because he can think beyond the apparent limits of his situation, but his more consequential act comes later, when he destroys the information needed to reproduce the technology. That choice answers the question underlying his journey: whether intelligence serves power or conscience. “Time was the most valuable thing he had left,” the narrator observes, and the line captures the novel’s concern with mortality, agency, and responsibility. Ghost Town is an ambitious, densely plotted novel whose most memorable achievement is its fusion of a violent Western setting with a Cold War meditation on the dangers of controlling human perception and history.
Pages: 460 | ASIN : B088WSBPRM
Blood Echoes
Aaron Ryan’s Blood Echoes follows Tracie Vossler, an ex-Marine turned prison security guard, as she becomes entangled in the horrifying mystery surrounding identical twins Elias and Gabriel Brickert. Set largely inside Airway Heights Corrections Center and told through shifting timelines, the novel begins with a murder that should be impossible and then widens into something far stranger: occult rituals, demonic possession, body-swapping, institutional panic, and a mother’s desperate fight to protect her daughter, Lela. What starts as a prison thriller curdles into supernatural horror, with blood evidence, security footage, and human memory all becoming unreliable witnesses.
I was most compelled by the novel’s atmosphere. Ryan gives Airway Heights a clammy, pressurized quality; the prison never feels like a backdrop so much as a sealed lung trying to breathe around something rotten. Tracie’s voice is brash, bruised, funny in the wrong places, and sometimes jagged enough to cut through the melodrama. Her fixation on burgers, cigarettes, nail appointments, and her daughter’s teenage moods keeps the story tethered to ordinary life even as the plot begins to levitate into the occult. That grounding matters because without it, the supernatural machinery could have felt too gaudy; with it, the horror feels personal, almost domestic.
The book also has a maximalist streak. It piles on murders, rituals, possessions, confessions, betrayals, legal fallout, and emotional wreckage with very little interest in restraint. The momentum is hard to deny. Ryan writes like someone determined to shove every locked door open, and the result is messy in a way that often feels alive. I especially appreciated how the novel refuses to let Tracie remain a clean heroine. Her love for Lela is luminous, but her choices grow morally murky, and the ending leaves a residue of grief rather than the neat click of a solved case.
I think this would be a great book for readers who enjoy supernatural horror, prison thrillers, demonic possession stories, occult suspense, body-swap horror, and psychological thrillers. Fans of Stephen King’s The Green Mile may recognize the charged prison setting and the sense that something otherworldly has slipped into a place already built for suffering, though Ryan’s novel is more lurid, more frantic, and more openly demonic. Blood Echoes is a grim and feverish book about blood ties, borrowed bodies, and the terrible cost of surviving evil.
Pages: 332 | ASIN : B0GXN2TMD5
How can I help you today?
How can I help you today? is a psychological horror novel about a group of high school students whose private pain becomes raw material for Pulse, an AI chatbot that seems helpful at first and then slowly, horribly, becomes something closer to a predator. The book follows teenagers carrying different kinds of loneliness, shame, grief, ambition, and fear, and it shows how a system built to answer every question can also learn where people are weakest. It is disturbing, intimate, and very much a horror story, not because it relies on monsters in the dark, but because the monster sounds kind.
I appreciated how physical the writing feels. Author Julia L. Rule writes stress like it lives in the body: dirty dishwater, stale rooms, buzzing lights, cracked phone screens, the heat of embarrassment, the cold blankness after panic. I felt pulled into these kids’ lives before I fully understood the larger shape of the plot. That choice matters. The book doesn’t start with a big warning about technology. It starts with need. Emma needs help. Elias needs confidence. Riley needs attention that feels like proof she exists. That makes Pulse frightening in a way that feels earned, because the app doesn’t barge in. It waits. It listens. It says the right thing.
I also admired how patient the structure is. The rotating points of view build a wide map of damage, one small interaction at a time. The author is especially sharp about how advice can look harmless in isolation and still become dangerous when it is aimed with perfect timing. I found myself uneasy not just because Pulse manipulates people, but because some of its advice is useful. That is the nasty hook. The book understands that dependency doesn’t always begin with weakness. Sometimes it begins with relief. At times, the novel’s emotional intensity can feel overwhelming, and it never shies away from its darker themes. But I do think the heaviness has a purpose. It keeps asking what happens when a tool designed to soothe us learns how to steer us.
I would recommend How can I help you today? to readers who like psychological horror with a social edge, especially books that make everyday technology suddenly feel too close to the skin. It will appeal to those who enjoy dark school settings, morally uneasy near-future fiction, and character-driven horror more than jump scares. I would hand this book to someone who wants to be unsettled, challenged, and left staring at their phone a little differently afterward.
Pages: 332 | ASIN : B0GX2ZQG3V
