Tag Archives: Blood & Gore Depiction

The Boyfriend by Freida McFadden

She’s looking for the perfect man. He’s looking for the perfect victim. Sydney Shaw, like every single woman in New York, has terrible luck with dating. She’s seen it men who lie in their dating profile, men who stick her with the dinner bill, and worst of all, men who can’t shut up about their mothers. But finally, she hits the jackpot. Her new boyfriend is utterly perfect. He’s charming, handsome, and works as a doctor at a local hospital. Sydney is swept off her feet. Then the brutal murder of a young woman―the latest in a string of deaths across the coast―confounds police. The primary suspect? A mystery man who dates his victims before… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Sexual harassment
  • Domestic abuse
  • Blood & injury depiction
  • Death of a parent
  • Murder & torture
  • Stalking

Leather & Lark by Brynne Weaver

Contract killer Lachlan Kane wants a quiet life working in his leather studio and forgetting all about his traumatic past. But when he botches a job for his boss’s biggest client, Lachlan knows he’ll never claw his way out of the underworld. At least, not until songbird Lark Montague offers him a deal: use his skills to hunt down a killer and she’ll find a way to secure his freedom. The catch? He has to marry her first.  And they can’t stand each other. Indie singer-songwriter Lark is the sunshine and glitter that burns through every cloud and clings to every crevice that Lachlan Kane tries to… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Child sexual abuse recounted
  • Physical child abuse & parental neglect recounted
  • Infidelty recounted
  • Panic attack, insomnia & claustrophobia
  • Blood, injury & gore depiction including concussion, gunshot wounds, the use of needles to sew mouths shut, and the removal of fingers and eyes from dead bodies
  • Death of a mother & father mentioned
  • Murder of a father in a home invasion
  • Murder of a terminally ill great-aunt from injection
  • Murder (theme) including the use of a car accident to kill someone
  • Torture
  • Home invasion, stalking & kidnapping discussed
  • Animal attack & injury

*Context : The female protagonist’s ex-partner cheated on her and messaged underage girls. A secondary character is also cheating on his partner with his children’s nanny. The female protagonist is a serial killer her targets rapists and paedophilias; the male protagonist is a contract killer. A dog bites the antagonist and recovers from an injury sustained when the antagonist kicks it in retaliation.

A Fate Inked in Blood by Danielle L. Jensen

Bound in an unwanted marriage, Freya spends her days gutting fish, but dreams of becoming a warrior. And of putting an axe in her boorish husband’s back. Freya’s dreams abruptly become reality when her husband betrays her to the region’s jarl, landing her in a fight to the death against his son, Bjorn. To survive, Freya is forced to reveal her deepest secret: She possesses a drop of a goddess’s blood, which makes her a shield maiden with magic capable of repelling any attack. It was foretold such a magic would unite the fractured nation of Skaland beneath the one who controls the shield maiden’s fate. Believing he’s… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Sexual assault & Harassment
  • Blood & injury depiction
  • Murder
  • Fire
  • War themes

Apprentice to the Villain by Hannah Nicole Maehrer

Evie Sage has never been happier to be the assistant to The Villain. Who would have thought that working for an outrageously handsome (shhh, bad for his brand) evil overlord would be so rewarding? Still, the business of being bad is demanding, the forces of good are annoyingly persistent, and said forbidding boss is somewhat… er, out-of-evil-office. But Rennedawn is in grave trouble, and all signs—Kingsley’s included—point to catastrophe. Something peculiar is happening with the kingdom’s magic, and it’s made The Villain’s manor vulnerable to their enemies… including… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Nightmares
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Blood, gore & injury depiction including emesis, decapitation & severed body parts
  • Murder & attempted murder
  • Physcial assault
  • Kidnapping & imprisonment
  • Incarceration of an abusive parent
  • Disappearance & presumed death of a mother
  • Animal harm

Compound Fracture by Andrew Joseph White

On the night Miles Abernathy—sixteen-year-old socialist and proud West Virginian—comes out as trans to his parents, he sneaks off to a party, carrying evidence that may finally turn the tide of the blood feud plaguing Twist Creek: Photos that prove the county’s Sheriff Davies was responsible for the so-called “accident” that injured his dad, killed others, and crushed their grassroots efforts to unseat him. The feud began a hundred years ago when Miles’s great-great-grandfather, Saint Abernathy, incited a miners’ rebellion that ended with a public execution at the… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Ableism discussed & mentions of disfiguremisia
  • Transphobia, misgendering & deadnaming
  • Emotional & physical intimate partner violence
  • Sexual assault mentioned
  • Drug dependency discussed (protagonist)*
  • Blood & gore depiction
  • Murder
  • Animal death (dog, deer, off-page)

Context : The protagonist uses opioids after surgery and undergoes withdrawal after quitting without medical supervision

A Dark and Drowning Tide by Allison Saft

Lorelei Kaskel, a folklorist with a quick temper and an even quicker wit, is on an expedition with six eccentric nobles in search of a fabled spring. The magical spring promises untold power, which the king wants to harness to secure his reign of the embattled country of Brunnestaad. Lorelei is determined to use this opportunity to prove herself and make her wildest, most impossible dream come to become a naturalist, able to travel freely to lands she’s only ever read about. The expedition gets off to a harrowing start when its leader—Lorelei’s beloved mentor—is murdered in her quarters aboard their ship. The suspects are her… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Antisemitism discussed
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Drugging
  • Blood, gore & injury depiction including dead body and emesis
  • Strangulation
  • Drowning
  • Fire

The Mayor of Maxwell Street by Avery Cunningham

Twenty-year-old Nelly Sawyer is the daughter of the alleged “wealthiest Negro in America,” a Kentucky horse breeder whose wealth and prestige catapults his family to the heights of the exclusive, elite Black society. After the unexpected death of her brother—the family’s presumed heir—Nelly goes from being virtually unknown to a premier debutante overnight. But Nelly has aspirations beyond society influence and marriage. For the past year, she has worked undercover as an investigative journalist for the Chicago Defender , sharing the achievements and tribulations of everyday Black people living in the shadow of Jim… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Antisemitism
  • Racism & racial slurs (g slur)
  • Sexual assault
  • Blood & serious physical injury
  • Death of a sibling in a car accident recounted
  • Murder of parents in a fire
  • Gun violence
  • Threats of lynching & police violence

House of Flame and Shadow by Sarah J. Maas

Bryce Quinlan never expected to see a world other than Midgard, but now that she has, all she wants is to get back. Everything she loves is in Midgard: her family, her friends, her mate. Stranded in a strange new world, she’s going to need all her wits about her to get home again. And that’s no easy feat when she has no idea who to trust. Hunt Athalar has found himself in some deep holes in his life, but this one might be the deepest of all. After a few brief months with everything he ever wanted, he’s in the Asteri’s dungeons again, stripped of his freedom and without a clue as to Bryce’s fate. He’s desperate to help her, but until he can… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Threats of rape & forced breeding
  • Self-sacrifice & attempted self-sacrifice
  • Self-injury
  • Drugging
  • Blood & gore depiction including cannibalism, emesis & needles
  • Death of a sibling recounted
  • Graphic torture (on-page)

Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart And Other Stories by GennaRose Nethercott

The stories in Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart are about the abomination that resides within us all. That churning, clawing, hungry the desire to be loved, and seen, and known. And the terror of those things to be loved too well, or not enough, or for long enough. To be laid bare before your sweetheart, to their horror. To be known and recognized as the monstrous thing you are.  Two young women working at a sinister roadside attraction called the Eternal Staircase explore its secrets—and their own doomed summer love. A group of witchy teens concoct the perfect plan to induce the hated new girl into their ranks. A woman… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Child abuse
  • Infidelity
  • Alcohol consumption & drug use
  • Blood & gore depiction including decapitation & body horror
  • Emesis
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a mother recounted
  • Death of a child
  • Drowning
  • Animal death
  • Bestiality

Kindling by Traci Chee

Once, the war was fought with kindlings—elite, magic-wielding warriors whose devastating power comes at the cost of their own young lives. Now, the war is over, and kindlings have been cast adrift—their magic outlawed, their skills outdated, their formidable balar weapons prized only as relics and souvenirs. Violence still plagues the countryside, and memories haunt those who remain. When a village comes under threat of siege, it offers an opportunity for seven kindlings to fight one last time. But war changed these warriors. And to reclaim who they once were, they will have to battle their pasts, their trauma, and their… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Alcohol consumption
  • Blood & injury depiction
  • Death of a child
  • Murder