Malice Compendium

From New York Times bestselling author Megan Shepherd comes a complex tale of dark magic, family secrets, and monsters that don't stay on the page. Of all the things aspiring artist Haven Marbury expected to find while clearing out her late father's remote seaside house, Bedtime Stories for Monsters was not on the list. This secret handwritten manuscript is disturbingly different from his Pulitzer-winning works: its interweaving short stories crawl with horrific monsters and enigmatic humans that exist somewhere between this world and the next. The stories unsettle but also entice Haven, practically compelling her to illustrate them while she stays in the house that her father warned her was haunted. Clearly just dementia whispering in his ear... right? Reeling from a failed marriage, Haven hopes an illustrated Bedtime Stories can be the lucrative posthumous father-daughter collaboration she desperately needs to jump-start her art career. However, everyone in the nearby vacation town wants a piece of the manuscript: her father's obsessive literary salon members, the Ink Drinkers; her mysterious yet charming neighbor, who has a tendency toward three a.m. bonfires; a young barista with a literary forgery business; and of course, whoever keeps trying to break into her house. But when a monstrous creature appears under Haven's bed right as grisly deaths are reported in the nearby woods, she must race to uncover dark, otherworldly family secrets, completely rewriting everything she ever knew about herself in the process.

Discovering her father's strange final manuscript has brought only mayhem and darkness to Haven Marbury's life. In Book Two of the “Malice Compendium”, what has leapt of the page threatens everybody. Now both hunter and prey, Haven travels far and wide to discover the contours of her family curse and escape the worst of her late father's creations. Constantly looking over her shoulder, she fears Uncle Arnold the most. His irresistible whispers compel victims to commit horrifying deeds, and he's hungry to use Haven's abilities to rewrite the world to his liking. Drawn to the desert scrublands and Hollywood mansions of California, Haven discovers a string of murders that point directly to members of her family. Given shelter by a mysterious benefactor, Haven and her sister forge questionable allegiances, using some otherworldly creatures to hunt down others. And when the trail of death ends at a studio from the Golden Age of horror films, reality and fiction become the strangest of bedfellows indeed.