darcy coates
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Darcy is the USA Today Bestselling author of Hunted, The Haunting of Ashburn House, Craven Manor, and more than a dozen horror and suspense titles. She lives on the Central Coast of Australia with her family, cats, and a garden full of herbs and vegetables.
Darcy loves forests, especially old-growth forests where the trees dwarf anyone who steps between them. Wherever she lives, she tries to have a mountain range close by. You can hear about her next book by joining her newsletter: www.darcycoates.com/subscribe/ |
check out some of her work
Ghosts and shadows series
book 1 - house of shadows
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Sophie’s world is shattered when disaster bankrupts her family. She’s still reeling from the news when she’s offered an unexpected solution: Mr Argenton, a wealthy stranger, asks for her hand in marriage.
Marrying Mr Argenton will restore her family’s fortunes and save them from scandal, but condemns Sophie to a life in Northwood, a vast and unnaturally dark mansion situated hours from civilisation. Sophie struggles to adjust to her new position as mistress over the desolate house. Mr Argenton’s relatives are cold, and Mr Argenton himself is keeping secrets. Even worse, the house is more than it seems. The piano plays in the middle of the night. Blood drips from the ceiling. Sophie is pulled towards the terrifying truth: Northwood’s ancient halls are haunted. The malevolent spirits—produced by grisly deaths—resent her intrusion into their home. |
book 2 - house of secrets
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Sophie and Joseph’s escape from Northwood is short-lived.
The beast survived, and attached itself to Joseph’s young cousin, Elise. Garrett writes to beg for their help. Joseph and Sophie travel to meet him at Kensington, a long-abandoned mansion that overlooks a dead town. The house offers a small hope: its original owner had dedicated her life to researching the monster that possesses Elise. Garrett hopes to find a way to kill the creature without harming his daughter. But Kensington is a dangerous building. Once the carriage leaves, they’re trapped inside the collapsing walls and forced to confront the horrors within. Shrouded figures stalk them. Whispers echo through the night. Unmarked graves dot the property. And the dead are not as restful as they seem… |
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craven manor
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Daniel is desperate for a job. When someone slides a note under his door offering him the groundskeeper’s position at an old estate, it seems too good to be true.
Alarm bells start ringing when he arrives at Craven Manor. The mansion’s front door hangs open, and leaves and cobwebs coat the marble foyer. It’s clear no one has lived there in a long time. But an envelope waits for him inside the doorway. It contains money, and promises more. Daniel is desperate. Against his better judgement, he moves into the groundskeeper’s cottage behind the crypt. He’s determined to ignore the strange occurrences that plague the estate. But when a candle flickers to life in the abandoned tower window, Daniel realises Craven Manor is hiding a terrible secret… one that threatens to bury him with it. |
dead lake
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Keep the door locked...
Sam is excited to spend a week at her uncle's remote lake cabin. It's a chance for her to focus on her art without distractions: no neighbours, no phone, and a small radio as her only contact with the outside world. But there's something deeply unnatural lingering in the lake. The radio's news reports talk about disappearances on a nearby hiking trail. The car won't start. And Sam starts to believe she's being stalked when she catches glimpses of a tall, strange man standing at the end of her dock, staring intently into the swirling waters below... |
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ghost camera
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When Jenine finds an abandoned camera in a lighthouse, she takes a photo for fun. But there's something very, very wrong with the picture: it contains ghosts.
Jenine and her best friend, Bree, realise the camera is capable of capturing the dead. But with each new photo taken, the spectres become more aware and more alert, and begin following the friends. Desperate, Jenine seeks the help of a paranormal researcher. He only has bad news, though: they've meddled with something far beyond their control, and the ghosts won't stop... not until Jenine and Bree are dead. |
hunted
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Her disappearance wasn't an accident. Her rescue will be a mistake.
Twenty-two-year-old Eileen goes missing while hiking in the remote Ashlough Forest. Five days later, her camera is discovered washed downriver, containing bizarre photos taken after her disappearance. Chris wants to believe his sister is still alive. When the police search is abandoned, he and four of his friends create their own search party to scour the mountain range. As they stray further from the hiking trails and the unsettling discoveries mount, they begin to believe they’re not alone in the forest… and that Eileen’s disappearance wasn’t an accident. By that point, it’s too late to escape. |
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parasite: an alien horror novel
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A guard discovers an unusual lifeform on her remote moon outpost. She disregards protocol to investigate it, with catastrophic consequences.
The parasitic alien wears its victims' skins and adopts their personalities. It's a perfect disguise, and allows the creature to spread without being detected. By the time humanity realises it's facing extinction, a third of its six hundred space stations have already gone dark. As the alien's ruthless progress collapses communication networks, wipes out defences, and leaves hundreds of stations to fend for themselves, a handful of remarkable individuals must find a way to battle the greatest threat the universe has ever encountered. |
small horrors:
a collection of fifty creepy stories
quarter to midnight:
fifteen tales of horror and suspense
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You discover a door behind your bedroom’s wallpaper. It's probably just a small crawlspace. There's nothing unusual about it... except for the quiet tapping noise you hear late at night.
A young child went missing while exploring a disused cemetery in 1965. More than fifty years later you face the gate to the abandoned graveyard, armed with a clue that could lead to answers about the boy's fate. A mannequin is stored in the back of your rented basement room. Sometimes its dust cloth falls off. Sometimes you feel it watching you. And sometimes it moves while you're asleep... |
The Carrow Haunt
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"The dead are restless here..."
Remy is a tour guide for Carrow House, a notoriously haunted building. When she's asked to host seven guests for a week-long stay to research Carrow's phenomena, she hopes to finally experience some of the sightings that made the house famous. At first, it's everything they hoped for. Then a storm moves in, cutting off their contact with the outside world, and things quickly become twisted. Doors open on their own. Seances go disastrously wrong. Red liquid seeps from behind the wallpaper. Their spirit medium wanders through the house during the night, seemingly in a trance. Then one of the guests dies under strange circumstances, and Remy is forced to consider the possibility that the ghost of the house's original owner, a twisted serial killer, still walks the halls. But by then it's too late to escape. |
The Folcroft Ghosts
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Tara and her brother Kyle are sent to stay with their estranged grandparents. May and Peter Folcroft seem warm and loving at first, and the house, hidden in the base of the mountains, is idyllic.
But strange things keep happening. Figures watch them through the fog. Objects move on their own. Tara begins to believe the unbelievable... that the house could be haunted. When a storm cuts the phone line, May shifts from doting to obsessive. Tara and Kyle try to keep up the pretext of a happy family, but a forgotten journal and a locked room provide clues to the desperate lies and secrets entwined with the Folcrofts' legacy. Something is horribly wrong with this family. |
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The Haunting of Ashburn house
People whisper rumors about a family murdered at Ashburn House. They say its old owner, Edith, went mad in the building, and that restless ghosts walk the halls at night.
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When Adrienne arrives on the gothic house’s doorstep, all she has is a suitcase, twenty dollars, and her pet cat. She doesn't know why her estranged Aunt Edith bequeathed Ashburn to her, but it's a lifeline she can't afford to refuse. Adrienne doesn't believe in ghosts, but it’s hard to rationalize what she sees. Strange messages have been etched into the wallpaper. Furniture moves when she leaves the room. And a grave hidden in the forest hints at a terrible, unforgivable secret. Something twisted and evil lives in her house, and Adrienne must race to unravel the decades-old mystery… before she becomes Ashburn’s latest victim. |
The Haunting of BlackWood house
Could you spend a week in a haunted house?
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Mara is the daughter of spiritualists. Her childhood was filled with séances, scam mediums, and talk of ghostly presences. When Mara left her family’s home, she vowed she would never allow superstition into her life again. She’s ready to start over with her fiancé, Neil, in a world based on rationality and facts. But her past isn’t ready to let her go just yet. Mara and Neil purchase Blackwood House, a derelict property outside of town. They’re warned about strange occurrences in the crumbling building. Doors open by themselves, voices whisper in the night, bloody handprints appear on the walls, and cold spots linger in the basement, where the house’s original owner was murdered. But Blackwood was dirt-cheap. Mara loves her new home, and she disregards the warnings. Because ghosts aren’t real… |
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The haunting of gillespie house
Some houses breathe..
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Elle is thrilled to spend a month minding the beautiful Gillespie property. More than an hour's drive from town and surrounded by forests, the aging mansion is ideal for someone seeking solitude.
But things start to go very wrong, very quickly. Elle discovers a crumbling graveyard nestled in the woods. It contains a generation of the house's residents, all with an identical year of death. Scratching in the walls... slamming doors... whispers in the night... a locked room... As Elle explores deeper into the house, she begins to unravel the property's dark history. At its centre is Jonathan Gillespie, a tyrannical cult leader and the house's original owner. And as Elle soon learns - just because he's dead, doesn't mean he's gone. |
the haunting of rookward house
She's always watching...
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When Guy finds the deeds to a house in his mother’s attic, it seems like an incredible stroke of luck. Sure, the building hasn’t been inhabited in forty years and vines strangle the age-stained walls, but Guy is convinced he can clean it up and sell it. He’d be crazy to turn down free money. Right?
The house is hours from any other habitation, and Guy can't get phone reception in the old building. He decides to camp there while he does repairs. Surely nothing too bad can happen in the space of a week. But there’s a reason no one lives in Rookward House, and the dilapidated rooms aren’t as empty as they seem… A deranged woman tormented a family in Rookward forty years before. Now her ghost clings to the building like rot. She’s bitter, obsessive, and jealous… and once Guy has moved into her house, she has no intention of ever letting him leave. |
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