OCTOBER ANIMALS follows four teenage friends-Lizzie Bat, Owl, Spider, and Kat-who live in the riverside city of October, Illinois.
Lizzie Bat, still grieving the loss of her father and at odds with her mother, plans to rob the town’s Halloween store the night of October 31st, and intends to use the money to escape to a new life. And, her friends are all too eager to help.
Owl, best friend and confidant. If Lizzie Bat’s heart aches for her father, then Owl’s heart aches for Lizzie Bat. Spider, brave and loyal, had his secrets, and he kept them. Kat, adored, she was the newest member of the group and the object of Lizzie Bat’s affections. But their scheme threatens to tear the friends apart as they find themselves in the path of supernatural forces and monstrous local legends: haunted houses; doppelgängers; grave robbing; ghosts and vampires; monsters in the river and, even worse, monsters in the home.
October is a town that loves Halloween but no one realizes that their whole world is about to become Halloween forever.
5. Grind Your Bones to Dust
In his first novel, This Is Horror and Wonderland Award-nominated author Nicholas Day invites you to take a journey into a Hell that is at once uncomfortably familiar, yet unlike anything you’ve ever encountered before: a surveyor finds himself pursued by flesh-eating donkeys in the furthest reaches of Oregon’s desert; a mass-murderer leaves the sanctity of his mountain home to pursue a long-lost love, his guide an otherworldly raven possessed by a 19th century American humorist; in nearby Klamath Falls, two estranged childhood friends set off to find a missing father with the help of two aging cowboys; and, a prisoner in her own home sees a vision of death and knows there is no escape.
Pain is proselytizing.
Death is the one, true faith. And everyone worships in their due time.
The Gates of Nihil are wide open and waiting to…
GRIND YOUR BONES TO DUST.
“The brilliance of it all is breathtaking; literally, the most masterful climax and conclusion–I have never read its equal. He writes like a man possessed. As if the very story you’re reading has somehow taken over Day’s being and poured itself out onto the page. I don’t know if Nicholas Day sold his soul at a crossroads to bring us Grind Your Bones to Dust but this book feels like a pact made with the Devil to bring us the finest horror has to offer.”-Cemetery Dance, Sadie Hartmann
“Nicholas Day hooks you with a perfect trifecta of action, atmosphere, and character, setting you up like a pin in a bowling alley, only to mow you down with a perfect strike. Grind Your Bones to Dust is a symphony of violence rendered with a poet’s eloquent finesse and a madman’s ecstasy, a full frontal assault to the senses and a testament to the abilities of a master craftsman.”-InkHeist, Shane Douglas Keene
“With Grind Your Bones to Dust, Day takes us on a tense journey down a dark, desolate road. And the lights are out. Veer too much to one side and we are rewarded with unapologetic violence, both natural and supernatural. Pull to the other side and we experience the full range of human emotion through the eyes of wonderfully vivid characters, including one man gripped by madness and another who is haunted by it. And it isn’t our hands on the steering wheel. All we can do is sit back, put our faith in our guide, and enjoy the ride. The perfect blend of character, voice and setting, Grind Your Bones to Dust is cause for celebration; as is an author whose tremendous ability as a storyteller is only growing with every publication.”-This Is Horror, Thomas Joyce
“Grind Your Bones to Dust is very well-written and it is very, very dark. This book made me hurt for Nicholas Day, because it’s so painfully raw in the truth it tells about the world and the chastisement it lays out for those who really believe God is listening. Day’s writing etches his stories onto your mind in angry, bleeding strokes. Grind Your Bones to Dust might disgust you, will probably disturb you, and will burrow into the recesses of your mind. I loved it, but damned if I didn’t need a drink afterwards.”-Sci-Fi & Scary, Lilyn George
“Grind Your Bones to Dust is a visceral, unapologetic, and unforgettable beast of a book. Nicholas Day utilizes haunting, poetic prose between each vicious scene with impressive skill. The cast of characters are strange, wild, and emote a realm of pain that hooks you into their lives and refuses to let you go. Day spins us a world where the monstrous donkeys eat flesh and the characters embark on Godless quests, but the horrific sermon of human brutality is what will stay with you long after the book is closed. Say a prayer if you like, but no salvation or redemption will bother to save you from what Day has in store…”-Sara Tantlinger, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Devil’s Dreamland
“Holy demon donkeys! Grind Your Bones to Dust reads like Tarantino’s Hateful Eight if it had been written by William S. Burroughs on some modern-day synthetic…yet as much as it punches right into your guts, it manages to grab you by the heart with that same fist and twist.”-Michael Arnzen, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Grave Markings and Licker
4. Nobody Gets Hurt and Other Lies (OUT OF PRINT)
From riverside towns in the Midwest and a future Paris above the clouds, to ancient lycanthropes and vindictive pachyderms, this collection of supernatural terrors and heartbreaking reality from award-nominated Nicholas Day, author of Now That We’re Alone and At the End of the Day I Burst into Flames, explores identity, addiction, love, and death. Plunge headfirst into fifteen tales of monsters, madness, and all the darkness human hearts can carry. Danger lurks around every corner, every decision a step closer to demise. Everybody gets what’s coming to them in the end.
But, of course, Nobody Gets Hurt.
3. At the End of the Day I Burst into Flames
NOMINATED! for “Best Novella of the Year” (2018) by This Is Horror
From the first line of the tale that sees his eyes explode to–moments and pages later–his whole body being consumed by flame, Firecracker experiences his life and loves through a succession of memories, reveals his friendship with Death, and talks about the men in his family’s unfortunate predisposition.
The fire is coming, just like it came for his father, his grandfather, and who knows how many men. After all, folks in those parts have a short-term memory when it comes to history, and lots of stories have a tendency to go to the grave. Maybe the fire was always there. Maybe it came along when the oil refinery went up in 1907. Who can say? Sometimes, a yarn like this is as close to a history book as a Midwest community and its people are apt to get. When it happened to his father, the doctors only called it an accident.
But Firecracker’s mother had a name for it: spontaneous combustion.
2. Now That We’re Alone (OUT OF PRINT)
NOMINATED! for the Wonderland Award (Best Collection 2018)
Now That We’re Alone, 11 short stories from Nicholas Day, celebrating the weird, wicked, and wonderful monsters hiding in the dark, hiding behind their human masks.
Praise for Now That We’re Alone
“Often horrific, relentlessly stark, and truly unforgettable.” –Kirkus Review
“Those who aren’t familiar with Day’s work will be seeking him out after reading this collection. Its one hundred and thirty one pages of genius that will leave the reader hoping Nicholas will write a million more stories that are so packed with imagination and raw emotion to entertain their brains.” -Michelle Garza, This Is Horror
1. Necrosaurus Rex (OUT OF PRINT)
Necrosaurus Rex tells the tale of Martin, a simple janitor, who takes an unfortunate trip through time, becomes a violent mutant, and the father of us all. There’s 14 billion years crushed inside these pages, and most of them are pretty nasty. This book is a jet black rumination on the concept of miracles and the creation of the universe, a narrative whose lineage exists somewhere between Moravagine, Maldoror, and David Copperfield. Genesis, the Crucifixion, and Revelations reimagined as a transgressive nightmare.
Praise for Necrosaurus Rex
“There is not a misplaced word in all of the book, everything is working together to tell this story. As long as a reader goes in with an open mind and a tolerance for the absolutely disgusting and the absolutely beautiful, Necrosaurus Rex delivers. With more content and character than a thousand pages of your average book author Nicholas Day has achieved something amazing, something you have to experience to understand. “ -Tim Potter, Hellnotes
“Nicholas Day is a fantastic writer, he’s a thrilling, poetic, gruesome and balls to the wall in-your-face craftsman of twisted horror and bizarro.” – Jonathan Reitan, SCREAM magazine
“Instead of just spamming fatalities, or playing the gross-out game to elicit some kind of knee-jerk response, Day carefully weaves a compelling story around real characters who are surprisingly developed considering how short the book is.” -Mr. Pasty, AICN Horror
Nicholas Day 