On Bee's Bookshelf

A small town, a dark past. Jenna Willcot is a spunky, disabled, horror fanatic who visits rural Montana for a stay at a horror-themed rental cabin. Jenna has struggled with severe anxiety for years, hardly ever leaving the house. This vacation will test her limits, and, she hopes, open her back up to the world. But she is about to find out her dream vacation is built on a nightmare. 25 years earlier, the Bitter Butcher massacred 11 people in the small town of Marion, on the land where Jenna’s vacation cabin now sits. Her arrival coincides with the beginning of a new massacre as a body is discovered outside town. It quickly becomes clear that this is no isolated incident, as further killings occur, each with their own connection to the original massacre. Jenna starts seeing slashers around every corner and must team up with locals Erica and Jamie. Together, they will struggle to survive this killing spree while unearthing secrets connecting the town’s shameful history to slashers past a...

Nearly everyone died the first night  they  came… Two years ago, monstrous beings tore through Britain, leaving few survivors. Now Sara and her family live on the run, relying on scraps of folklore and fading pagan rituals to stay safe from the eldritch creatures they call "witches". While her mother grows increasingly paranoid, Sara longs for something more than fear. Then a strange girl appears in the garden of their current camp. Her name is Parsley, and she cannot remember where she came from or why she's there. Despite her family's suspicions, Sara feels drawn to her. But when Sara's younger brother is taken by the Witches, she and Parsley must cross desolate moors full of merciless terrors to get him back. As their bond deepens, so do the dangers they face—and Sara begins to question whether anything is truly as it seems. "Why would anyone ever go toward a hole like that? They wouldn't; it's just not in human nature to run toward danger that dar...

Megacorporation UniView is poised to cement their reputation as “the most trusted name in AI.” After pioneering self-driving and HR bots, UniView is now barreling toward an audacious new launch. That is, if they can pull it off in time. Enter Noah. A down-and-out copywriter reeling from a midlife crisis, he isn’t the typical hire for a groundbreaking tech company full of brilliant engineers and run by a cutthroat CEO. But Lex, UniView’s Head of HR and one of their greatest successes, makes no mistakes—her algorithm ensures it. UniView’s latest venture—a bot named Quinn that creates revolutionary personalized advertising—needs expert training. Noah needs to teach Quinn—who is a much better student than he ever could have hoped for—the finer points of consumer motivation and the art of writing a catchy tagline. But when corporate competitors force UniView to accelerate their timeline to market, guardrails around the AI loosen just as Quinn is learning a bit too much.   " Are you ali...

  An out-of-work actor accepts the role of a lifetime—sitting soundlessly in a lecture theatre, zipped into a large leather bag—to aid a professor’s psychological experiment. What could possibly go wrong? In Luke Kennard’s audacious new novel, a penniless and out-of-work actor picks up a job working for Dr. Blend, a university professor who is conducting a psychological experiment. How will Dr. Blend’s students react to someone zipped into an oversized bag, sitting at the back of the lecture hall over a series of Fall lectures? The role, eagerly accepted, soon has unexpected consequences. A professor of post-humanism develops research questions of her own—in particular, can you love someone secreted away inside a black bag?—and the actor’s childhood friend forms a vision for monetizing this new situation . . . "The question of what to do with my weekends now that I am gainfully employed as a black bag is a tricky one." Kennard writes books that should be pretentious, but just...

Yana, a vampire hunter, rides into Koprivci promising salvation. The village’s curse has endured for many years and rumour has it that Anka – whose parents died on the night of her birth – is to blame. But enduring the villagers’ suspicion is the least of Anka’s worries; now she has reached womanhood, she can no longer avoid the odious marriage that seems to be her only option. When animal corpses start to appear in the village square and eggs filled with blood are found in the chicken coops, panic rises. The villagers look to Yana for hope. She knows all about the monsters that stalk the night, monsters that only she can vanquish. But Yana is a liar. And monsters come in all different forms. Yana and Anka become unlikely allies in hatching a plo t to save both Koprivci and Anka from their fates. But then their plan takes on a horrifying life of its own... "Was that how demons felt? Clawing at the walls of the world, desperate to cross? The movement between was jarring, the passag...