Three Ways to Lose Sleep This Halloween: A Nazca Press Horror Roundup
The nights are drawing in, and the Halloween reading pile is calling. Nazca Press, Misti Media’s imprint for science fiction, fantasy, and horror, has three unsettling reads for anyone who likes their seasonal stories strange, literary, or lurking just beneath the floorboards.
These aren’t three versions of the same scare. One takes you back to a neighborhood with a hungry secret. Another gathers tales shaped by a literary imagination. The third introduces a cast of people who might make you look twice at the shadows, and at your neighbors.
Pick your path into the dark. We’ll keep a light on.
Crawl Space — Warren R. Langlois
Some monsters never leave the neighborhood. In Warren R. Langlois’s horror novel, a quiet Wisconsin house and the overgrown yard behind it hold a secret that has been waiting for Henry Adams since childhood. In 1964, nine-year-old Henry escapes a terrifying encounter, and sees a neighborhood bully taken by whatever lives beneath Old Lady Appleton’s backyard. The other boys call them crocodiles. Henry knows better.
Decades later, Henry returns to his family home to clear it out and sell it. He is now Luther Adams, a bestselling novelist, but fame and time haven’t managed to put the past behind him. The crawl space under the kitchen is still there. So is the field out back. And something remembers Henry.
Warren R. Langlois builds a slow-burn story around the uneasy overlap between childhood memory and adult life. Small-town atmosphere, buried trauma, and the dread of returning to a place you thought you’d escaped give the book its steady pull. If you like your Halloween horror to unfold gradually, with the sense that the past is not quite past, this is a haunting place to begin.
Explore Crawl Space at the publisher-direct shop
Dark Hearts and Tattletales — Jane Gwaltney
Known as “Poe’s Sparrow,” Jane Gwaltney brings a literary sensibility to stories that move among horror, fantasy, mystery, and crime. Dark Hearts and Tattletales gathers twelve of her previously published short stories in one collection, several of them major award nominees, alongside four brand-new tales.
That mix makes this a welcoming entry point for new readers and a fresh find for longtime fans. Instead of settling into just one kind of fright, the collection shifts its footing: the next story might lean into horror, take a turn toward mystery, or blend genres in a way that keeps the mood deliciously uncertain.
Poe is an inspiration and muse, but Gwaltney’s collection also celebrates the range of women writing horror today. If your Halloween stack could use something more varied than a single long descent into darkness, these sixteen stories offer plenty of doors to open, and a few you may want to leave closed.
Explore Dark Hearts and Tattletales at the publisher-direct shop
Strange People, Scary People — Tally Harbour
Tally Harbour’s collection brings together fourteen tales of terror built around people who are difficult to forget, and perhaps best not to meet alone at night. There’s a witch-like woman who tells stories to children while grinding her teeth, and Eddie, a strange man with disturbing problems around pregnant women. Even the undertakers have their own unsettling idea of how a town should respect the dead.
Then there’s little Rita Jean Shumate, a filthy young girl troubled by the tiny crawling creatures called cooties, though no one has ever actually seen them. Harbour’s cast makes the everyday feel off-kilter: a storyteller, a neighbor, a familiar childhood fear, each with something unnerving just below the surface.
With fourteen different tales, this is a natural pick for readers who like their horror in short, sharp visits. Settle in for one story, or keep turning pages to see who else steps out of the shadows. Just don’t blame us if ordinary people seem a little stranger afterward.
Explore Strange People, Scary People at the publisher-direct shop
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Choose Your Halloween Haunt
Whether you’re in the mood for a slow-burn novel, literary horror, or a collection of unsettling characters, these Nazca Press reads offer three distinct ways to make your Halloween reading list a little darker.
Which kind of horror keeps you turning pages: a monster close to home, a story with a literary twist, or a parade of strange people?
