Shallow Graves by Kali Wallace

Shallow Graves by Kali Wallace

Breezy remembers leaving the party: the warm, wet grass under her feet, her cheek still stinging from a slap to her face. But when she wakes up, scared and pulling dirt from her mouth, a year has passed and she can’t explain how.

Nor can she explain the man lying at her grave, dead from her touch, or why her heartbeat comes and goes. She doesn’t remember who killed her or why. All she knows is that she’s somehow conscious—and not only that, she’s able to sense who around her is hiding a murderous past.

Haunted by happy memories from her life, Breezy sets out to find answers in the gritty, threatening world to which she now belongs—where killers hide in plain sight, and a sinister cult is hunting for strange creatures like her. What she discovers is at once empowering, redemptive, and dangerous.

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Ableism & ableist language
  • Racism
  • Victim blaming
  • Domestic abuse
  • Attempted suicide
  • Self-harm
  • Murder
  • Kidnapping
  • Stalking
  • Cults

Malice by Heather Walter

Malice by Heather Walter

Once upon a time, there was a wicked fairy who cursed a line of princesses to die, and could only be broken by true love’s kiss. You’ve heard this before, haven’t you? The handsome prince. The happily-ever-after. Utter nonsense.

Princess Aurora. The last heir to the throne. One who isn’t bothered that I am abhorred and feared for the mysterious dark magic that runs in my veins. Aurora says I should be proud of my gifts. That she . . . cares for me. But with less than a year until that curse will kill her, any future I might see with Aurora is swiftly disintegrating – and she can’t stand to kiss yet another insipid prince. I want to help her. If my power began her curse, perhaps it’s what can lift it. Perhaps, together, we could forge a new world.

Nonsense again. Because we all know how this story ends, don’t we? Aurora is the beautiful princess. And I- I am the villain.

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Lesbomisia
  • Suicide recounted
  • Torture mentioned

The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton

The Strange & Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton

Foolish love appears to be the Roux family birthright, an ominous forecast for its most recent progeny, Ava Lavender. Ava—in all other ways a normal girl—is born with the wings of a bird.

In a quest to understand her peculiar disposition and a growing desire to fit in with her peers, sixteen-year old Ava ventures into the wider world, ill-prepared for what she might discover and naïve to the twisted motives of others. Others like the pious Nathaniel Sorrows, who mistakes Ava for an angel and whose obsession with her grows until the night of the Summer Solstice celebration.

That night, the skies open up, rain and feathers fill the air, and Ava’s quest and her family’s saga build to a devastating crescendo.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Death of a queer character
  • Graphic rape
  • Emotional abuse
  • Alcoholism
  • Suicide
  • Stalking
  • Animal abuse
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The Price Guide to the Occult by Leslye Walton

The Price Guide to the Occult by Leslye Walton

When Rona Blackburn landed on Anathema Island more than a century ago, her otherworldly skills might have benefited friendlier neighbors. Guilt and fear instead led the island’s original eight settlers to burn “the witch” out of her home. So Rona cursed them.

Fast-forward one hundred–some years: All Nor Blackburn wants is to live an unremarkable teenage life. She has reason to hope: First, her supernatural powers, if they can be called that, are unexceptional. Second, her love life is nonexistent, which means she might escape the other perverse side effect of the matriarch’s backfiring curse, too. But then a mysterious book comes out, promising to cast any spell for the right price. Nor senses a storm coming and is pretty sure she’ll be smack in the eye of it.

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Child abuse
  • Rape
  • PTSD
  • Suicide
  • Self-harm
  • Blood & gore depiction
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The Night Watch by Sarah Waters

The Night Watch by Sarah Waters

This is the story of four Londoners – three women and a young man with a past, drawn with absolute truth and intimacy. Kay, who drove an ambulance during the war and lived life at full throttle, now dresses in mannish clothes and wanders the streets with a restless hunger, searching. Helen, clever, sweet, much-loved, harbours a painful secret. Viv, glamour girl, is stubbornly, even foolishly loyal, to her soldier lover. Duncan, an apparent innocent, has had his own demons to fight during the war.

Their lives, and their secrets connect in sometimes startling ways. War leads to strange alliances…

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Attempted suicide
  • Self-harm
  • Abortion
  • Blood & gore depiction
  • War themes
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Alice Payne Arrives by Kate Heartfield

Alice Payne Arrives by Kate Heartfield

It’s 1788 and Alice Payne is the notorious highway robber, the Holy Ghost. Aided by her trusty automaton, Laverna, the Holy Ghost is feared by all who own a heavy purse. It’s 1889 and Major Prudence Zuniga is once again attempting to change history―to save history―but seventy attempts later she’s still no closer to her goal. But in 2020 the Farmers and the Guides are locked in battle; time is their battleground, and the world is their prize. Only something new can change the course of the war. Or someone new. Little did they know, but they’ve all been waiting until Alice Payne arrives.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Period-typical misogyny
  • Sexual assault of a minor & statutory rape mentioned*
  • Depression mentioned
  • Suicide, suicidal ideation & suicide pacts discussed
  • Minor blood & gore depiction, including dead bodies
  • Gun violence
  • War themes, including refugee experiences & displacement

*Context : Mentions of sex between a seventeen-year-old girl and an adult man.

The Last True Poets of the Sea by Julia Drake

The Last True Poets of the Sea by Julia Drake

The Last True Poets of the Sea by Julia Drake book cover

The Larkin family isn’t just lucky—they persevere. At least that’s what Violet and her younger brother, Sam, were always told. When the Lyric sank off the coast of Maine, their great-great-great-grandmother didn’t drown like the rest of the passengers. No, Fidelia swam to shore, fell in love, and founded Lyric, Maine, the town Violet and Sam returned to every summer.

But wrecks seem to run in the family. Tall, funny, musical Violet can’t stop partying with the wrong people. And, one beautiful summer day, brilliant, sensitive Sam attempts to take his own life.

Shipped back to Lyric while Sam is in treatment, Violet is haunted by her family’s missing piece – the lost shipwreck she and Sam dreamed of discovering when they were children. Desperate to make amends, Violet embarks on a wildly ambitious mission: locate the Lyric, lain hidden in a watery grave for over a century.

She finds a fellow wreck hunter in Liv Stone, an amateur local historian whose sparkling intelligence and guarded gray eyes make Violet ache in an exhilarating new way. Whether or not they find the Lyric, the journey Violet takes-and the bridges she builds along the way-may be the start of something like survival.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Disordered eating
  • Suicide attempt, side character
  • Alcohol abuse
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Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? And Other Questions About Dead Bodies by Caitlin Doughty

Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? And Other Questions About Dead Bodies by Caitlin Doughty

Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? And Other Questions About Dead Bodies by Caitlin Doughty book cover

Everyone has questions about death. In Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?, best-selling author and mortician Caitlin Doughty answers the most intriguing questions she’s ever received about what happens to our bodies when we die. In a brisk, informative, and morbidly funny style, Doughty explores everything from ancient Egyptian death rituals and the science of skeletons to flesh-eating insects and the proper depth at which to bury your pet if you want Fluffy to become a mummy. Now featuring an interview with a clinical expert on discussing these issues with young people—the source of some of our most revealing questions about death—Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? confronts our common fear of dying with candid, honest, and hilarious facts about what awaits the body we leave behind.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Suicide mentioned
  • Graphic dead bodies, central theme
  • Funeral-related preperation of bodies discussed in detail
  • Medical conditions discussed
  • Medical procedures discussed
  • Death, central theme
  • Murder mentioned
  • Torture mentioned
  • Death by drowning mentioned
  • Animal death
  • Graphic animal dead bodies
  • Death of a pet discussed
  • Animal testing and other animal cruelty mentioned
  • Grave desecration
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The Wicked Deep by Shea Ernshaw

The Wicked Deep by Shea Ernshaw

The Wicked Deep by Shea Ernshaw book cover

Where, two centuries ago, three sisters were sentenced to death for witchery. Stones were tied to their ankles and they were drowned in the deep waters surrounding the town. Now, for a brief time each summer, the sisters return, stealing the bodies of three weak-hearted girls so that they may seek their revenge, luring boys into the harbor and pulling them under. Like many locals, seventeen-year-old Penny Talbot has accepted the fate of the town. But this year, on the eve of the sisters’ return, a boy named Bo Carter arrives; unaware of the danger he has just stumbled into. Mistrust and lies spread quickly through the salty, rain… Read more.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Ableist language
  • Misogyny & slut-shaming
  • Persecution for witchcraft
  • Dubious consent scenes & sexual assault (non-consensual kiss) (on-page)
  • Suicide & self-sacrifice (on-page, discussed)
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Injury & gore depiction including dead bodies
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a brother
  • Death of a father & husband
  • Death of a fiancé
  • Murder & kidnapping
  • Drowning (multiple scenes, on-page & recounted)
  • Fire

Context : The protagonist lies to her love interest about her identity and they have sex (on-page).

The Disasters by M. K. England

The Disasters by M. K. England

The Disasters by M. K. England book cover

Hotshot pilot Nax Hall has a history of making poor life choices. So it’s not exactly a surprise when he’s kicked out of the elite Ellis Station Academy in less than twenty-four hours.

But Nax’s one-way trip back to Earth is cut short when a terrorist group attacks the Academy. Nax and three other washouts escape—barely—but they’re also the sole witnesses to the biggest crime in the history of space colonization. And the perfect scapegoats.

On the run and framed for atrocities they didn’t commit, Nax and his fellow failures execute a dangerous heist to spread the truth about what happened at the Academy.

They may not be “Academy material,” and they may not get along, but they’re the only ones left to step up and fight.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Transmisia recounted
  • Ableism recounted
  • Child abuse
  • Anxiety
  • Anxiety/panic attacks, on-page
  • Nightmares
  • Suicide mentioned
  • Suicidal ideation
  • Nonconsensual drugging
  • Blood depiction
  • Physical injuries
  • Serious injury to a loved one
  • Hospital
  • Death of a mother recounted
  • Death of a father recounted
  • Murder and attempted murder
  • Gun violence
  • Plane crash
  • Car crash
  • Wrongful imprisonment
  • Colonialism themes
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