#HorrorForLibraries Giveaway: 2 Books for 1 Winner

Today I have an 2 lesser known titles, but they are both worth your time. The first is a finished copy of a title I reviewed in the January 2025 issue of Library Journal and the other, a signed ARC, the follow up to an award winning indie book.  Details below but first, here are the rules on how to enter:

1. You need to be affiliated with an American Library. My rationale behind that is that I will be encouraging you to read these books and share them with patrons. While many of them are advanced reader copies that you cannot add to your collections, if you get the chance to read them, my hope is that you will consider ordering a copy for your library and give away the ARC away as a prize or pass it on to a fellow staff member.
2. If you are interested in being included in any giveaway at any time, you must email me at zombiegrl75 [at] gmail [dot] com with the subject line "#HorrorForLibraries." In the body of the email all you have to say is that you want to be entered and the name of your library.
3. Each entry will be considered for EVERY giveaway. Meaning you enter once, and you are entered until you win. I will randomly draw a winner on Fridays sometime after 5pm central. But only entries received by 5pm each week will be considered for that week. I use Random.org and have a member of my family witness the "draw"based off your number in the Google Sheet.
4. If you win, you are ineligible to win again for 4 weeks; you will have to re-enter after that time to be considered [I have a list of who has won, when, and what title]. However, if you do not win, you carry over into the next week. There is NO NEED to reenter.

Click here for the previous giveaway. Our winner was Eric from Wisconsin. Now on to this week's giveaway. 

Let me start with a book I already gave away here, but that was the ARC. The fine folks at Invisible Press sent me a copy of Dead Writers: Stories by Jean Marc Ah-Sen,  Michael LaPointe, Cassidy McFadzean, Naben Ruthnum.and since it came out this week, I am giving it away so you can add this great cross over title on your shelves.

From my Library Journal draft review:

 Four Canadian writers of dark literary fiction were brought together to make a single volume of novellas, using the prompt of “a bargain.” While each story is very different in plot and narrative style, they are united by the underlying sense of dread that permeates each tale, and as a result, the entire volume. From a haunting tale of a woman hired to write a complicated writer’s biography after he commits suicide to a found historical document about the atrocities at an Indigenous school to a vacation that provides anything but the peace and tranquilty promised in its title to a jarringly direct examination of the “deal with the devil” trope. These are works which contain no jumpscares but rather, their horror stems from the sense that something unavoidably uneasy weighs heavily on the “deals” the characters are offered. And then consider the anthology’s title alongside the fact that every narrator is a writer themselves, and you ratchet the fear up to another level. 

Verdict: A deeply unsettling and insidious anthology of four psychological horror novellas, feelings that will linger with readers after completion just like with Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil by Lima or the work of Samanta Schweblin.

Three Words That Describe This Book: themed novellas, deeply unsettling, psychological horror

Dead Writers will not get the wide coverage it deserves and I was happy to review it in LJ to help boost its visibility to libraries, and now, give away a finished copy on the week of its release.

Next up is the next novel by Christopher Hawkins. Before we get to that, I need to remind you that his first novel, Downpour won the BookLife Prize for all of fiction. This means it was judged as the best independent book of all of 2023. This was also the first time a Horror novel won the overall prize. Daniel Kraus also blurbed it. I wrote about this book at length when I gave a copy away back in 2023 here. 

Now Hawkins is back with I Contain Multitudes (coming 4/30/25) and he sent me a signed ARC to get the buzz started and give away to one of you. Here is more about this book:

Hunted through an ever-shifting patchwork of worlds, one woman must rediscover her own past to restore reality before it's too late.

Unstuck from reality, Trina Bell never wakes up in the same world twice. Lost and alone, she crosses paths with an old librarian who is the only person who remembers her when everything else changes around them. When an encounter with a sadistic doctor makes Trina question whether she herself might be the cause of the shifting realities that are escalating out of control, she sets out to stop them.  

As each successive world becomes more unstable and dangerous than the last—and with the librarian lost and descending into madness—Trina must confront the secrets rooted deep in her own past in order to find a way to repair her world before it collapses for good.

From the award-winning author of Downpour comes a mind-bending multiversal thriller of betrayal, discovery, and the will to reshape destiny

Rarely do I have the chance to recommend you buy self published books that I know you can trust. This one is an easy sell though because-- BookLife Prize people!!! It's a big deal. 

Both of these under the radar, but excellent, titles are going to one winner. Get on this!

Finally, a note about upcoming giveaways. I have planned out the next 8 weeks and they are ALL major releases, and sometime in that range, I will also have ARCs of MY BOOK to give away. Coming soon!!!

Enter now to be entered going forward.