The world stirs reluctantly on Mondays — coffee brews stronger, shadows linger longer, and everything feels just a little off-kilter. Instead of resisting the gloom, let’s lean in. After all, what better way to survive the start of the week than by sinking into stories that echo with whispers, blood, and the soft thud of something unspeakable moving just out of sight?
This Macabre Monday, we’re feasting on tales that dig under your skin — haunting, brutal, and beautiful in all the wrong ways.
📖 1. House of Hunger by Alexis Henderson
If you like your gothic dripping in decadence and danger, this one’s your poison. House of Hunger sinks its teeth into themes of power, obsession, and the hunger that’s never quite satisfied. A young woman enters a manor of nobles who feast on blood — and discovers that luxury can be just as cruel as it is beautiful. Henderson’s prose glitters like a blade, all elegance and menace.
📖 2. The September House by Carissa Orlando
Think The Haunting of Hill House meets suburban horror. When a woman refuses to move out of her undeniably haunted home, we get a grimly witty look at denial, trauma, and domestic dread. It’s both chilling and darkly clever — a ghost story that knows how to smirk.
📖 3. What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher
A grotesque, fungal retelling of Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher — earthy, unsettling, and shockingly tender in its morbidity. Kingfisher balances decay with wry humor, giving you rot you can almost smell and characters you’d die to protect.
📖 4. Sundial by Catriona Ward
Family secrets, psychological horror, and the slow unraveling of a woman’s sanity under the desert sun. Ward’s writing is razor-sharp, poetic, and deeply disturbing — a domestic nightmare that hides its teeth until you’re too close to pull away.
⚰️ Reader’s Ritual:
Before opening tonight’s book, turn off one light too many. Sit in the hush. Feel the air shift — subtle, almost playful — and listen for the sound of the story breathing beside you.
What’s your macabre mood this Monday? Drop your favorite unsettling reads in the comments — the ones that made your pulse race and your coffee go cold. Let’s make the start of the week deliciously dreadful together.
literary gluttony 
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