Women in Horror Starter Kit

For everyone who wants a quick introduction to the work being done by women in contemporary horror we have created a Women in Horror Starter Kit. This special bundle deal will be available all throughout February, which is Women in Horror Month, as we continue updating our site with features about our own authors, and those operating elsewhere in the publishing industry.

The RDSP Women in Horror Starter Kit

• City Ash and Desert Bones by Laurel Myler
  300 years in the future the world is run by the Theocracy and the Apostles are their representatives. The tiny, dusty and ironically named town of Big City has never seen Apostles until the newly deputized team, Reesa and Joule, are given their first assignment—get to the bottom of the town’s untapped oil reserves. They are a married couple, supposed to have been matched perfectly by the Theocracy, and Reesa is eager to do her duty while Joule is dismayed at the backwater, Old West-style location they find themselves in. Just as Big City belies its name, so do nearly all appearances in this small town. Efforts to find out what’s going on there are thwarted by the mayor and citizens alike. Soon they discover that the quaint false front of the town hides a terrible truth—it’s under siege by creatures known as Takers. The town has placed their faith in Tombstone, a stoic straight shooter, but even he can’t keep everyone safe. As the bodies begin to mount Reesa strikes out on her own only to discover that she is at the center of the biggest lie of all.
• The Curiosity Killers by K.W. Taylor
  In the twenty-second century, a second Civil War is decades past. The states of the New British Empire have been reduced to working with Victorian-era technology—that is, except physicist Edward Vere, who invents time travel with a little help from aviation pioneer Wilbur Wright. Vere partners with historian Ben Jonson to monetize the invention,  founding the first time travel agency. Unbeknownst to them, a serial killer is using the technology to murder without detection. When Ben discovers the killer has targeted the woman he loves, the mild-mannered academic must become brave enough to change history rather than merely observing it.
• Mr. Wicker by Maria Alexander
  RECIPIENT OF A BRAM STOKER AWARD FOR SUPERIOR ACHIEVEMENT IN A FIRST NOVEL Alicia Baum is missing a deadly childhood memory. Located beyond life, The Library of Lost Childhood Memories holds the answer. The Librarian is Mr. Wicker — a seductive yet sinister creature with an unthinkable past and an agenda just as lethal. After committing suicide, Alicia finds herself before the Librarian, who informs her that her lost memory is not only the reason she took her life, but the cause of every bad thing that has happened to her. Alicia spurns Mr. Wicker and attempts to enter the hereafter without the Book that would make her spirit whole. But instead of the oblivion she craves, she finds herself in a psychiatric hold at Bayford Hospital, where the staff is more pernicious than its patients. Child psychiatrist Dr. James Farron is researching an unusual phenomenon: traumatized children whisper to a mysterious figure in their sleep. When they awaken, they forget both the traumatic event and the character that kept them company in their dreams — someone they call “Mr. Wicker.”
• Red Horses by Donna Lynch
  Donna Lynch has returned with the prequel to her acclaimed debut novel Isabel Burning. This is the tragic and haunting love story of damaged Russian scientist Vladimir Millerovo, a Grace ancestor, and his gifted, beautiful Romanian bride Veda.The couple are forced to flee late 1800’s Moscow, along with their baby daughter Ana, across several continents and an ocean to escape Vladimir’s crimes and the ghosts that seek their revenge. Finding sanctuary in the Caribbean paradise of Martinique, the family tries to repair what has been broken only to find that the horror they sought to leave behind has been irrevocably burned into each of their hearts, and ignited a terrible gift in young Ana.

BONUS The Expanded Starter Kit includes everything listed above, plus:

• Mourning Jewelry by Stephanie M. Wytovich
  The tradition of Victorian mourning jewelry began with Queen Victoria after the death of her husband, Prince Albert. Without photography, mementos of personal remembrance were used to honor the dead so that their loved ones could commemorate their memory and keep their spirits close. Ashes were placed within rings, and necklaces were made out of hair, and the concept of death photography, small portraitures of the deceased, were often encased behind glass. Mourning jewelry became a fashion statement as much as a way to cope with grief, and as their pain evolved over the years, so did their jewelry. But what about the sadness and the memories that they kept close to them at all times? The death-day visions and the reoccurring nightmares? Wytovich explores the horror that breeds inside of the lockets, the quiet terror that hides in the center of the rings. Her collection shows that mourning isn’t a temporary state of being, but rather a permanent sickness, an encompassing disease. Her women are alive and dead, lovers and ghosts. They live in worlds that we cannot see, but that we can feel at midnight, that we can explore at three a.m.
• Snowed by Maria Alexander (hardcover)
  Charity Jones is a 16-year-old engineering genius who’s much-bullied for being biracial and a skeptic at her conservative school in Oak County, California. Everything changes when Charity’s social worker mother brings home a sweet teen runaway named Aidan to foster for the holidays. Matched in every way, Charity and Aidan quickly fall in love. But it seems he’s not the only new arrival: Charity soon finds the brutally slain corpse of her worst bully and she gets hard, haunting evidence that the killer is stalking Oak County. As she and her Skeptics Club investigate this death and others, they find at every turn the mystery only grows darker and more deadly. One thing’s for certain: there’s a bloody battle coming this holiday season that will change their lives – and human history – forever.