The Dead Girls Club

Red Lady, Red Lady, show us your face…

In 1991, Heather Cole and her friends were members of the Dead Girls Club. Obsessed with the macabre, the girls exchanged stories about serial killers and imaginary monsters, like the Red Lady, the spirit of a vengeful witch killed centuries before. Heather knew the stories were just that, until her best friend Becca began insisting the Red Lady was real–and she could prove it.

That belief got Becca killed.

It’s been nearly thirty years, but Heather has never told anyone what really happened that night–that Becca was right and the Red Lady was real. She’s done her best to put that fateful summer, Becca, and the Red Lady, behind her. Until a familiar necklace arrives in the mail, a necklace Heather hasn’t seen since the night Becca died.

The night Heather killed her.

Now, someone else knows what she did…and they’re determined to make Heather pay.

“Especially appealing to readers who grew up with R.L. Stine’s Fear Street series, Walters’ novel will find fans among a wide range of horror readers.”
++++Booklist

“Ghosts, literal or not, haunt the core of this novel…Walters ramps up the tension and thrills (and twists) as the novel careens towards its conclusion.”
++++The Nerd Daily

“[Damien’s] writing talent and horror roots are on display…A solid debut mystery.”
++++Mystery Scene Magazine

“In The Dead Girls Club, Walters has written a modern tale destined to pull thriller lovers through cold winter nights.”
++++Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Walters offers a rich and complex picture of childhood and the traumas found within it.”
++++Cultured Vultures

“Psychological and disturbing…In the frightening world of The Dead Girls Club, women’s lives are shaped by violence, but there may be a haunting way out.”
++++Foreword Reviews

“With The Dead Girls Club, Damien Angelica Walters gives us a disturbing, compelling, twisty, feminist, coming of age/horror hybrid that feeds off our obsessions and anxieties. The Red Lady abides.”
++++Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Cabin at the End of the World.

“Damien Angelica Walters once again proves why she’s a major voice in the horror and thriller genres. A mystery that’s as breathtakingly constructed as it is heartbreaking, The Dead Girls Club is proof positive that we need more female coming-of-age stories, especially unforgettable ones like this. Put this on your reading list now, as it’s sure to be among the top books of 2019.”
++++Gwendolyn Kiste, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Rust Maidens

“Life can be a gauntlet of nightmares when you’re a girl. For an unlucky few, however, the terrors follow you into adulthood. Painful secrets lie just below the surface in Damien Angelica Walters unsettling The Dead Girls Club. If you like twists, it will keep you guessing to the very last page.”
++++Alma Katsu, author of The Hunger

“Feeding on classic coming-of-age horror themes of blood and awakening, The Dead Girls Club becomes a stifling portrait of the adolescent trauma that hides behind suburban veneers, tracing the haunting ripples of guilt that never fade.”
++++Louis Greenberg, author of Green Valley, and half of S.L. Grey, author-duo of The Apartment

“[A] twisty supernatural thriller.”
++++Kirkus Reviews

The Dead Girls Club effortlessly combines [Damien’s] artistic, literary flair with a supernatural story that’s equally familiar and unexpected.”
++++Grit Daily

Available in hardcover, ebook, and audio from:
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Penguin Random House
Your local independent bookstore via IndieBound

 

Cry Your Way Home

Sometimes things are not what they appear to be. DNA doesn’t define us, gravity doesn’t hold us, a home doesn’t mean we belong. From circus tents to space stations, Damien Angelica Walters creates stories that are both achingly familiar and chillingly surreal. Within her second short story collection, she questions who the real monsters are, rips families apart and stiches them back together, and turns a cell phone into the sharpest of weapons.

Cry Your Way Home brings together seventeen stories that delve deep into human sorrow and loss, weaving pain, fear, and ultimately resilience into beautiful tales that are sure to haunt you long after you finish the collection.

Includes the Bram Stoker Award-nominated story “The Floating Girls: A Documentary”

“A hauntingly beautiful collection and an emotional rollercoaster. Tender, brutal, gentle, harrowing. I loved it.”
++++Brian Keene, author of The Rising and Pressure

“Short sharp shocks, finely developed settings, and eloquent prose make this collection a standout.”
++++ Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Available from:
Amazon
Apex Publications
Barnes & Noble

 

Paper Tigers Hi-ResPaper Tigers – Out of Print

In this haunting and hypnotizing novel, a young woman loses everything—half of her body, her fiancé, and possibly her unborn child—to a terrible apartment fire. While recovering from the trauma, she discovers a photo album inhabited by a predatory ghost who promises to make her whole again, all while slowly consuming her from the inside out.

Read an excerpt in Cemetery Dance.

Read an excerpt in Apex Magazine.

Paper Tigers is full of hauntings of every sort, a modern ghost story of the very best kind, combining the delicate mania of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the subtlety of Shirley Jackson and the raw dynamism of Joyce Carol Oates. But what Walters delivers here is thoroughly her own creation: a starkly beautiful tale of what it means to survive.”
++++Helen Marshall, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Gifts for the One Who Comes After

Paper Tigers gathers the best from every childhood scary story—creepy antiques, haunted houses, seemingly friendly ghosts—and repackages them with the worst and most isolating of adult fears. Walters’ prose is vivid and gripping, luring you in, feeding you images that will leave you comforted by the light of your bedside nightstand; horror nostalgia at its finest.”
++++Rebecca Jones-Howe, author of Vile Men

“With Paper Tigers, Damien Angelica Walters has created a hauntingly elegant portrait of loneliness and longing for healing. But where she confronts real terror is in answering the question of what it costs the wounded to be whole again. This book is at once as beautiful and frightening as a scar on smooth skin or a scream with perfect pitch.”
++++Bracken MacLeod, author of Mountain Home and Stranded

“Damien Angelica Walters pulls you into the heart of her characters and traps you there until you’re not sure if the story is haunting you, or you’re haunting it. Wonderfully creepy and heartwarming, fear and sadness alternate and blend throughout in a story that’s packed with atmosphere. Keep the lights on and the tissues close.”
++++Sarah Read, editor of Pantheon Magazine

Secondhand copies may be available from:
Abe Books
Amazon

 

SMYS_largeSing Me Your Scars – Out of Print

Sometimes a thread pulled through the flesh is all that holds you together. Sometimes the blade of a knife or the point of a nail is the only way you know you’re real. When pain becomes art and a quarter is buried deep within in you, all you want is to be seen, to have value, to be loved. But love can be fragile, folded into an origami elephant while you disappear, carried on the musical notes that build a bridge, or woven into an illusion so real, so perfect that you can fool yourself for a little while. Paper crumples, bridges fall, and illusions come to an end. Then you must pick up the pieces, stitch yourself back together, and shed your fear, because that is when you find out what you are truly made of and lift your voice, that is when you Sing Me Your Scars.

In her first collection of short fiction, Damien Angelica Walters weaves her lyrical voice through suffering and sorrow, teasing out the truth and discovering hope.

Named Short Story Collection of the Year in the 2015 This is Horror Awards
Title story nominated for a 2015 Bram Stoker Award

Read the title story free online in Apex Magazine.

Sing Me Your Scars revolves in the mind’s eye in a kaleidoscope of darkness and wonder. Walters is impressive.”
++++Laird Barron, author of The Croning and The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All

“Damien Angelica Walters writes prose as sharp as a scalpel. With surgical precision, she slices through her characters’ veneers to lay bare the secret scars underneath, the knots of fear and desire twisting them. The women and men in these stories struggle against their own, oddly-beautiful damage, and even when they succumb to it, the narrative is never less than compelling. Anatomist of dreams and nightmares, Walters is a writer to watch.”
++++John Langan, author of The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies

Secondhand copies may be available from:
Abe Books
Amazon