Here are 70 books that Succulent Prey fans have personally recommended if you like
Succulent Prey.
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I’ve always been intrigued by the behaviors of humans. Even as a child, I’ve watched how people interact with each other. We are all so different, yet we are all the same. Each of us has an imaginary box where keep some things locked up such as: our innermost desires—and our worse fears. Fears that, in a very subtle way, guide us in our life decisions. Afraid of blood… then you’d likely not choose nursing. Afraid of flying… then you probably won’t become a pilot. But what happens when we cannot avoid what we are most afraid of? This is where a horror story begins.
To set the record straight, I do not love this book. I still haven’t come to a decision if I even like it. It isn’t the “best” book on my list, yet it isthe most disturbing. And it is a must-read.
A warning, though. It’s a book that you won’t be able to stop and you’ll likely feel very guilty for even reading it. It dives into human behaviors that we don’t want to think about and surely would not intentionally want to take part in. I’ve a question for you: Is there a limit to what you would do to another human being if others were doing it too? How confident are you in your answer? The worse part about this novel is that it is based on a true story.
A teenage girl is held captive and brutally tortured by neighborhood children. Based on a true story, this shocking novel reveals the depravity of which we are all capable.
This novel contains graphic content and is recommended for regular readers of horror novels.
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…
My experience and expertise – I am not only a reader of horror, in particular extreme horror, but I am a published writer with several hundred writing credits. I have had hundreds of stories and articles published on many websites, magazines, and anthologies including a story in Year’s Best Hardcore Horror Volume 5. For eleven years I wrote articles on the bizarre and morbid for Girls and Corpses magazine. I have been consistently writing for 20 years, and have also helped write several independent horror films. I have written many reviews and interviews as well, most recently in Phantasmagoria Magazine.
Two of the top voices in extreme horror fiction unite to create a surreal road trip to hell. Loosely based on the crimes of the Zodiac Killer, as well as several other serial killers, Duet for the Devil pushes all possible boundaries and stands as a monumental achievement in Extreme Horror. Featuring hundreds of pages of brutality and disturbing criminal behavior, the book is not one to be forgotten.
DUET FOR THE DEVIL is a brutal and grim tale of The Zodiac Killer, serial slayers, drugs, dark gods, black magicks, detectives, and a dog-a road trip to oblivion. You've never read a hardboiled crime/erotic horror novel anything like this before- DUET FOR THE DEVIL completely redefines the meaning of extreme...and shatters, once and for all, the perceived limits of hardcore horror...
My experience and expertise – I am not only a reader of horror, in particular extreme horror, but I am a published writer with several hundred writing credits. I have had hundreds of stories and articles published on many websites, magazines, and anthologies including a story in Year’s Best Hardcore Horror Volume 5. For eleven years I wrote articles on the bizarre and morbid for Girls and Corpses magazine. I have been consistently writing for 20 years, and have also helped write several independent horror films. I have written many reviews and interviews as well, most recently in Phantasmagoria Magazine.
This is the best book written by Gonzalez, who recently passed away. It is the extreme and brutal tale of a woman who is abducted for the purpose of being put into a snuff film. The action is ferocious and brutal and the lead character is extremely strong, so much more than just another victim. I felt for her and cheered for her when her character fights back against the evil men hellbent on torturing and killing her.
BEFORE HOSTEL...BEFORE SAW..THERE WAS SURVIVOR... It was supposed to be a romantic weekend getaway. Lisa was looking forward to spending time alone with her husband-and telling him that they are going to have a baby. Instead, it becomes a nightmare when her husband is arrested and Lisa is kidnapped. But the kidnappers aren't asking for ransom. They want Lisa herself. They're going to make her a star-in a snuff film. What they have in mind for Lisa is unspeakable. They plan to torture and murder her as graphically and brutally as possible, and to capture it all on film. If…
A dark academia mystery thriller set in contemporary St Andrews, with snappy dialogue and a strong sense of place.
When Ellie Meikle moves to the picturesque seaside town of St Andrews to study for her PhD in Ancient History, she soon feels as if she has made a mistake. She…
My experience and expertise – I am not only a reader of horror, in particular extreme horror, but I am a published writer with several hundred writing credits. I have had hundreds of stories and articles published on many websites, magazines, and anthologies including a story in Year’s Best Hardcore Horror Volume 5. For eleven years I wrote articles on the bizarre and morbid for Girls and Corpses magazine. I have been consistently writing for 20 years, and have also helped write several independent horror films. I have written many reviews and interviews as well, most recently in Phantasmagoria Magazine.
The Groomer by Jonathan Athan is a heart-wrenching tale of true evil. It tells the story of a sleazy murderer and producer of child snuff films. At times the book was too much for me and I ended up having a good cry after one of the characters is exposed to some purely evil horror. An amazing and powerful book about the nature of evil.
Andrew McCarthy grows concerned for his family after he catches a young man, Zachary Denton, photographing his daughter, Grace McCarthy, and other children at a park. To his dismay, Zachary talks his way out of trouble when he’s confronted by the police. He hopes that’s the end of it. Then he finds Zachary at a diner and then at a grocery store. He knows their encounters aren't coincidences. And just as Andrew prepares to defend his family, Grace vanishes.
As the police search stalls and the leads dry up, Andrew decides to take matters into his own hands. He starts…
I have always had a passion for anything crime fiction—books, movies, podcasts, or TV shows. It didn’t matter. I loved it all. It was probably because I grew up in a family with six police officers that seldom talked about anything unrelated to policing. I was like a sponge and picked up some terminology and learned about different police procedures they would discuss. There was rarely a family gathering that didn’t have some type of story or anecdote being shared by each of them and I always found myself being drawn right in. For those reasons, I fell in love with trying to figure out the who’s, how’s and why’s of any story.
This book about a sadistic serial killer hunting women near Puget Sound, Washington made me check in the closet and under the bed. It was graphic and terrifying, and I simply couldn't stop reading it. An oddly paired detective duo, the easy, natural banter makes Kendall Stark and Josh Anderson believable right from the start. I fell in love with this book the more Kendall came to life through great descriptions of her caring but humanly flawed character. The addition of Pathologist Birdy Waterman as a second strong female character left me feeling that together these women meant business. This book frightened me enough to look over my shoulder when I think I’m alone.
The bodies are found in towns and cities around Puget Sound. The young women who are the victims had nothing in common-except the agony of their final moments. But somebody carefully chose them to stalk, capture, and torture...a depraved killer whose cunning is matched only by the depth of his bloodlust. But the dying has only just begun. And next victim will be the most shocking of all...
Growing up, I commonly read a sci-fi or fantasy novel a day. I craved freshly innovative stories, not megastar copycats. Innovation lacking, I stopped reading. I loved Salvatore’s invention of the Drow and favored groundbreaking stories where authors build on a predecessor’s shoulders rather than writing formulaic remakes for easy sales. Devastatingly, when I began writing, publishers, agents, and literary voices unitedly screamed at authors to “stay in their genre.” Write sci-fi or fantasy, never both. That wasn’t me, so I wrote about what happens when technology clashes with magic. The result? Mosaic Digest recently dubbed me “one of speculative fiction’s most inventive voices.”
My personal author coach (David Farland) suggested this read.
The premise of a teenage, self-diagnosed sociopath who works at a morgue but doesn’t want to become a serial killer was far too intriguing to pass by. Well’s background research into sociopath profiling and morgue duties kept me engaged, but never felt intrusive or information-dumpy.
Refreshingly, Wells keeps the teen character intelligent. Instead of the overwritten, arrogant teen who makes stupid decisions, the main character is thoughtful and bright, and recognizes beforehand that his choices driven by curiosity are a tad foolish.
Although I won’t read the sequels because they dive into a subgenre I’m not fond of, I consider I Am Not a Serial Killer one of the most innovative reads of this century.
I Am Not A Serial Killer is now a major film starring Christopher Lloyd and Max Records. This is the first title in the thrillingly dark John Wayne Carver series.
John works in his family's mortuary and has an obsession with serial killers. He wants to be a good person, but fears he is a sociopath, and for years he has suppressed his dark side through a strict system of rules designed to mimic 'normal' behavior.
Then a demon begins stalking his small town and killing people one by one, and John is forced to give in to his darker…
Lou Alcott is turning over a new leaf as a private investigator. Formerly police, she was forced to resign when she attacked a domestic violence perpetrator. She's always vowed to be nothing like her grandfather, Hamish, Melbourne's biggest crime boss, delivering an eye for an eye, but this guy had…
Some men need killing. Whether monsters, serial killers, or husbands, women often face off with danger and must put a stop to it. How they do that fascinates me as a former psychotherapist. Must her life be in imminent danger, his finger depressing the trigger, for her to shoot? What if he terrorized or stalked her, but at the moment of death, she sneaks up on him? What if this guy killed her family, and she seeks revenge? Where we draw these lines in fiction informs who we are as humans and the very nature of our souls. And each of the books on my list, prism-like, reveals a separate facet.
I’m ending with this unorthodox double feature (think Godzilla v. Kong) because girls who kill put a twist on the theme of this list. What are little girls made of? Sugar and spice and everything nice. But maybe they’re a little less nice when boys are boys.
A feminist reimagining of March’s classic 1950s novel has Claude Daigle perhaps deserving of his fate at Rhoda Penmark’s hands. What if he tormented and taunted her, and she took revenge? While the daughter in Stage’s contemporary novel walks a very narrow line that kept me unsure the whole time… the guessing was delicious. Is Hanna evil? Or misunderstood? Is her mom, Suzette, going to get her due? Or is she going insane?
The bestselling novel that inspired Mervyn LeRoy’s classic horror film about the little girl who can get away with anything—even murder.
There’s something special about eight-year-old Rhoda Penmark. With her carefully plaited hair and her sweet cotton dresses, she’s the very picture of old-fashioned innocence. But when their neighborhood suffers a series of terrible accidents, her mother begins to wonder: Why do bad things seem to happen when little Rhoda is around?
Originally published in 1954, William March’s final novel was an instant bestseller and National Book Award finalist before it was adapted for the stage and made into a…
I’ve been fascinated with true crime since a serial killer operated in my hometown when I was a kid. I’m now an expert on criminal psychology, which I teach at DeSales University. I’ve appeared in more than 200 crime documentaries and was an executive producer on Murder House Flip (my idea) and A&E’s Confession of a Serial Killer: BTK. I’ve published more than 72 books, and over the past 12 years, I’ve penned a blog on the dark side of the human psyche for Psychology Today. Currently, I’m writing a fiction series based on a female forensic psychologist who runs a PI agency and consults on unique death investigations.
For over a century, there’s been a mystery about the identity of one of the most notorious female serial killers of the twentieth century, Belle Gunness. Did she die in a fire, or did she fake her death and escape?
Schechter’s book-length study leaves no stone unturned. If anyone could fully address this mystery, I knew he could. He’s a foremost authority on true crime. For me, any book he writes is a must-read.
Although I knew this story well, Schechter brought more to it than I’d seen before. I was fascinated with the details of the reports from mental health experts, including criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso. He spotted Belle’s “super intelligence for doing evil,” making her “more terrible than any male criminal.” I found this page-turner to be both meticulous and gripping.
"Hell's Princess takes its place among Schechter's other true-crime classics as the definitive rendering of one of the most beguiling and brutal of all female serial killers. His gruesome page-turner, grounded in meticulous historical research, confirms his reputation as one of the top true-crime writers of our time." -Psychology Today
The chilling true account of one of the twentieth century's most prolific female serial killers. Now an Amazon Charts bestseller.
In the pantheon of serial killers, Belle Gunness stands alone. She was the rarest of female psychopaths, a woman who engaged in wholesale slaughter, partly out of greed but mostly…
Not only have I been a fan of the genre since my early childhood, I’ve also submerged myself from an author's perspective. I've honed my craft through several courses, research, and networking so that I know what I’m putting out is the best work I can produce. I love the familiar style of description and a plot woven into a well-versed tale of good versus evil, especially if the reader is left questioning whether it really was good that won in the end. My love for horror started young when I delved into Stephen King’s Bag of Bones, and I have devoured a lot of classic horror fiction since then.
I went into this book blind, I can’t remember the exact circumstances but if I’m not mistaken it was when I was advertising myself as a reviewer for indie authors. This takes the serial killer theme to all new levels as based on a truth fiction tale. Hammott has an enjoyable writing style that flows and draws the reader in. It is an excellent retelling that kept me wanting to know more about Holmes. I have subsequently researched the killer and found Hammott's accounts to be factually correct which just makes the story that much more chilling.
If your hear him lock the door, you are already dead!
"An atmospheric dramatization of a true crime mystery using source documents and the investigations carried out by detective Frank Geyer to portray a believable and disturbing account of the heinous murders and crimes of the serial killer, Henry H. Holmes."
"Insightful thoughts of some characters during their impending death make it too easy to identify with the horror of what they experienced. By the time I got to the end of some parts, I was out of breath, literally!"
"Grabs your concentration by the throat with every horrific and…
Memory's Eyes: A New York Oedipus Novel
by
Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau,
Memory's Eyes is a contemporary New York Oedipus novel. It is written for readers who enjoy playing with concepts and storylines, here namely the classical Oedipus myth, Sophocles' three Theban plays, the psychoanalytic concept of the Oedipus complex, and its pop-cultural adaptations in movies, cartoons, and jokes.
I have a wealth of knowledge and experience for living through tragic situations from my young adult life. I have overcome a traumatic childhood, alcoholism, drug addiction, and mental health. I find psychology fascinating; I have personally had many attempts by others to take my life. I have survived violent attacks, stalkers, and abuse. I love thriller books that have psychology embedded alongside many life lessons.
This book had me hooked from the very beginning, it is exciting and shocking.
Many books can have slower chapters than others but there were no slow chapters in this book. The ending was not super predictable like some thriller books can be, and the characters were rich with great background stories.
I devoured this book and if you read one thriller book this year then make sure it is this one. The MC is a detective who is being taunted by a serial killer and the story felt current and not outdated. I am a fan of Criminal Minds and Psychology and if you are too then give this book a read.
*Don't miss WRITTEN IN BLOOD, the next instalment in the compulsive Robert Hunter series from Sunday Times number one bestselling author Chris Carter - available to pre-order now!*
FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER THE CALLER.
When the body of a young woman is discovered in a derelict cottage in Los Angeles, Robert Hunter is thrown into a nightmare case. The victim suffered a terrible death, and on the nape of her neck has been carved a strange double-cross: the signature of a psychopath known as the Crucifix Killer.
