The Screaming Staircase by Jonathan Stroud

The Screaming Staircase by Jonathan Stroud

For more than fifty years, the country has been affected by a horrifying epidemic of ghosts. A number of Psychic Investigations Agencies have sprung up to destroy the dangerous apparitions.

Lucy Carlyle, a talented young agent, arrives in London hoping for a notable career. Instead she finds herself joining the smallest, most ramshackle agency in the city, run by the charismatic Anthony Lockwood. When one of their cases goes horribly wrong, Lockwood & Co. have one last chance of redemption. Unfortunately this involves spending the night in one of the most haunted houses in England, and trying to escape alive.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Fatmisia & body shaming
  • Child abuse
  • Domestic abuse
  • Suicide & attempted suicide (on-page)
  • Blood & gore depiction, including dead bodies
  • Physical injuries
  • Hospitalisation
  • Death of a mother & father recounted
  • Murder
  • Explosion
  • Fire
  • Drowning
  • Torture
Support Us at Ko-Fi at ko-fi.com

Username: Evie by Joe Sugg

Username: Evie by Joe Sugg

Like anyone who feels as though they just don’t fit in, Evie dreams of a place of safety. When times are tough, all she wants is a chance to escape from reality and be herself.

Despite his failing health, Evie’s father comes close to creating such a virtual idyll. Passing away before it’s finished, he leaves her the key in the form of an app, and Evie finds herself transported to a world where the population is influenced by her personality. Everyone shines in her presence, until her devious cousin, Mallory, discovers the app… and the power to cause trouble in paradise.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Blood depiction
  • Death of a parent
  • Bullying
Support Us at Ko-Fi at ko-fi.com

House of Hollow by Krystal Sutherland

House of Hollow by Krystal Sutherland

Seventeen-year-old Iris Hollow has always been strange. Something happened to her and her two older sisters when they were children, something they can’t quite remember but that left each of them with an identical half-moon scar at the base of their throats.

Iris has spent most of her teenage years trying to avoid the weirdness that sticks to her like tar. But when her eldest sister, Grey, goes missing under suspicious circumstances, Iris learns just how weird her life can get: horned men start shadowing her, a corpse falls out of her sister’s ceiling, and ugly, impossible memories start to twist their way to the forefront of her mind… Read more.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Familial estrangement
  • Sexual assault
  • Hallucinations & delusions
  • Coerced suicide recounted
  • Emesis
  • Body horror
  • Blood & gore depiction
  • Dead bodies
  • Physical illness & injury
  • Hospitalisation
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a father & husband
  • Death of a child
  • Death of a boyfriend
  • Gun violence
  • Knife violence & stabbing
  • Disappearance of a sister
Support Us at Ko-Fi at ko-fi.com

This Vicious Cure by Emily Suvada

This Vicious Cure by Emily Suvada

Cat’s hacking skills weren’t enough to keep her from losing everything—her identity, her past, and now her freedom. She’s trapped and alone, but she’s survived this long, and she’s not giving up without a fight.

Though the outbreak has been contained, a new threat has emerged—one that’s taken the world to the brink of a devastating war. With genetic technology that promises not just a cure for the plague, but a way to prevent death itself, both sides will stop at nothing to seize control of humanity’s future.

Facing her smartest, most devastating enemy yet, Cat must race against the clock to protect her friends and save the lives of millions on the planet’s surface. No matter the outcome, humanity will never be the same.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Self-sacrifice
  • Blood & gore depiction
  • Graphic physical injuries
  • Plague
  • Torture
Support Us at Ko-Fi at ko-fi.com

This Cruel Design by Emily Suvada

This Cruel Design by Emily Suvada

Exhausted, wounded, and reeling from revelations that have shaken her to her core, Cat is at a breaking point. Camped in the woods with Cole and Leoben, she’s working day and night, desperate to find a way to stop Lachlan’s plan to reprogram humanity. But she’s failing—Cat can’t even control her newly regrown panel, and try as she might to ignore them, she keeps seeing glitching visions from her past everywhere she turns.

When news arrives that the Hydra virus might not be as dead as they’d thought, the group is pushed into an uneasy alliance with Cartaxus to hunt down Lachlan and fix the vaccine. Their search takes them to Entropia, a city of genehackers hidden deep in the desert that could also hold the answers about Cat’s past that she’s been searching for… Read more.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Medical experimentation
  • Blood & gore depiction
  • Graphic physical injuries
  • Plague
  • Murder & attempted murder
Support Us at Ko-Fi at ko-fi.com

This Mortal Coil by Emily Suvada

This Mortal Coil by Emily Suvada

When a lone soldier, Cole, arrives with news of Lachlan Agatta’s death, all hope seems lost for Catarina. Her father was the world’s leading geneticist, and humanity’s best hope of beating a devastating virus. Then, hidden beneath Cole’s genehacked enhancements she finds a message of hope: Lachlan created a vaccine.

Only she can find and decrypt it, if she can unravel the clues he left for her. The closer she gets, the more she finds herself at risk from Cartaxus, a shadowy organization with a stranglehold on the world’s genetic tech. But it’s too late to turn back.

There are three billion lives at stake, two people who can save them, and one final secret that Cat must unlock. A secret that will change everything.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Self-inflicted wounds
  • Medical experimentation
  • Blood & gore depiction
  • Graphic physical injuries
  • Plague
  • Cannibalism
Support Us at Ko-Fi at ko-fi.com

The Bone Shard Daughter by Andrea Stewart

The Bone Shard Daughter by Andrea Stewart

The emperor’s reign has lasted for decades, his mastery of bone shard magic powering the animal-like constructs that maintain law and order. But now his rule is failing, and revolution is sweeping across the Empire’s many islands.

Lin is the emperor’s daughter and spends her days trapped in a palace of locked doors and dark secrets. When her father refuses to recognise her as heir to the throne, she vows to prove her worth by mastering the forbidden art of bone shard magic.

Yet such power carries a great cost, and when the revolution reaches the gates of the palace, Lin must decide how far she is willing to go to claim her birthright – and save her people.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Human trafficking
  • Physical parental abuse
  • Child sexual abuse mentioned
  • Amnesia (memory loss)
  • Blood & gore depiction
  • Body horror
  • Medical experimentation
  • Death of a child
  • Death of a brother
  • Death of a mother & father
  • Death of a wife
  • Murder & attempted murder
  • Physical assault
  • Imprisonment
  • Drowning
  • Earthquakes
  • Disappearance of a loved one
  • Child homelessness & poverty recounted
  • Rebellion themes & regicide
  • Animal attack
  • Animal injury & illness
  • Animal abuse
Support Us at Ko-Fi at ko-fi.com

An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir

An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir

An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir book cover

Laia is a slave. Elias is a soldier. Neither is free.
 
Under the Martial Empire, defiance is met with death. Those who do not vow their blood and bodies to the Emperor risk the execution of their loved ones and the destruction of all they hold dear.
 
It is in this brutal world, inspired by ancient Rome, that Laia lives with her grandparents and older brother. The family ekes out an existence in the Empire’s impoverished backstreets. They do not challenge the Empire. They’ve seen what happens to those who do.
 
But when Laia’s brother is arrested for treason, Laia is forced to make a decision. In exchange for help from rebels who promise to rescue her brother, she will risk her life to spy for them from within the Empire’s greatest military academy.
 
There, Laia meets Elias, the school’s finest soldier—and secretly, its most unwilling. Elias wants only to be free of the tyranny he’s being trained to enforce. He and Laia will soon realize that their destinies are intertwined—and that their choices will change the fate of the Empire itself.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Slavery
  • Attempted rape, on-page
  • Rape threats
  • Child abuse
  • Physical abuse
  • Blood depiction
  • Death of a child
  • Torture
Support Us at Ko-Fi at ko-fi.com

Bone Crier’s Moon by Kathryn Purdie

Bone Crier’s Moon by Kathryn Purdie

Bone Crier's Moon by Kathryn Purdie book cover

Bone ​Criers have a sacred duty. They alone can keep the dead from preying on the living. But their power to ferry the spirits of the dead into goddess Elara’s Night Heavens or Tyrus’s Underworld comes from sacrifice. The gods demand a promise of dedication. And that promise comes at the cost of the Bone Criers’ one true love.

Ailesse has been prepared since birth to become the matriarch of the Bone Criers, a mysterious famille of women who use strengths drawn from animal bones to ferry dead souls. But first she must complete her rite of passage and kill the boy she’s also destined to love.

Bastien’s father was slain by a Bone Crier and he’s been seeking revenge ever since. Yet when he finally captures one, his vengeance will have to wait. Ailesse’s ritual has begun and now their fates are entwined—in life and in death.

Sabine has never had the stomach for the Bone Criers’ work. But when her best friend Ailesse is taken captive, Sabine will do whatever it takes to save her, even if it means defying their traditions—and their matriarch—to break the bond between Ailesse and Bastien. Before they all die.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Child abandonment
  • Pregnancy discussed
  • Blood and gore depiction
  • Dead bodies
  • Grief depiction
  • Death themes
  • Death of a father, on-page
  • Death of a mother, on-page
  • Murder
  • Attempted murder
  • Knife violence
  • Torture
  • Strangulation
  • Kidnapping
  • Captivty
  • Near-drowning incident
  • Graphic animal death
  • Graphic animal dead bodies and dismemberment
  • Hunting
  • Poverty themes
  • Child homelessness
Support Us at Ko-Fi at ko-fi.com

Dreams of Gods and Monsters by Laini Taylor

Dreams of Gods & Monsters by Laini Taylor

Two worlds are poised on the brink of a vicious war. By way of a staggering deception, Karou has taken control of the chimaera’s rebellion and is intent on steering its course away from dead-end vengeance. The future rests on her.

When the brutal angel emperor brings his army to the human world, Karou and Akiva are finally reunited – not in love, but in a tentative alliance against their common enemy. It is a twisted version of their long-ago dream, and they begin to hope that it might forge a way forward for their people. And, perhaps, for themselves.

But with even bigger threats on the horizon, are Karou and Akiva strong enough to stand among the gods and monsters?

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Graphic sexual assault
  • Rape mentioned
  • Blood & gore depiction
  • Dead bodies & body parts
  • Physical injuries
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Murder & attempted murder
  • Imprisonment
  • War themes
  • Cult
Support Us at Ko-Fi at ko-fi.com