Critical Blast's Top 10 Indie Books of 2024

Dozens of books are reviewed here at Critical Blast each year. Given that the site was founded upon the principle of exposing independently produced genre works to a wider audience, most featured books are of a decidedly science fiction, fantasy, or horror nature. This year was no different, and the submissions sent to us for review were as diverse and exciting as ever.

As with any list, some caveats are necessary. First, while it may say ‘Top 10 of 2024’ in the headline, not every book included was necessarily published in this calendar year; some were submitted to us in 2023 but were read and reviewed during 2024, thus making them eligible. Secondly, while we oftentimes review multiple books by a single author in any given twelve month period, in the name of fairness a writer may appear on our list just once, meaning that only their absolute best is chosen. With those things in mind, let our inaugural ‘Top 10 Indie Books of the Year’ countdown commence!

10: THE WAY OF MORTALS by Blake Carpenter (Blake Carpenter Books):

Fantasy novels are a dime a dozen, and amid the glut of sword-and-sorcery tomes standing out can be an arduous task even for bestselling authors. True success with the genre often comes down to world-building, something Blake Carpenter thoroughly mastered with The Way of Mortals.

Prem, second-youngest of the four royal Marantha sisters in the kingdom of Jaira, was kidnapped as a young girl. Renamed Sachin and trained to be a ruthless killer by a secret society of assassins, she became the catalyst for a gang war that consumed the capital city of Bhai Mandwa after she murdered her abusive overseer to protect a friend and spent the remaining years possessed by the elemental water demon Vati. Having broken the spiritual bond with Vati and escaped from the gangland underworld that held her captive, Prem returned to the pampered palace existence she was cheated out of, only to discover everything once-familiar has changed. Both her parents are long dead, and her youngest sister Priya has ascended to the throne in their place; when city policemen discover the corpse of a demon-possessed girl in an abandoned building surrounded by newspaper clippings about Prem and her siblings, however, the evidence points to a suspect from the shadowy life she left behind. Now Prem must reconcile her two extremely different halves—her deadly identity as a notorious murderer-for-hire and her regal birthright—before she loses everyone she cares about a second time.

As with his earlier Deathbringer, the careful world-building in The Way of Mortals is the novel’s backbone: the nation of Jaira and its metropolis of Bhai Mandwa are analogous to India at the turn of the twentieth century, and no detail has been spared regarding the society’s history, religion, technology or customs. Coupled with rich characterizations and some seriously furious action sequences, Carpenter’s take on fantasy is one to remember.  

9: FOLKTALE by Tony Evans (Dark Holler Press):

Lifelong friends and Chicago suburbanites Daryll and Preston have spent the last fifteen years traveling to allegedly haunted destinations looking for an authentic ghostly encounter, yet always return disappointed. Level-headed Preston believes he’s outgrown their phantom-hunting until the day Daryll shares an advertisement from remote Pleasant Grove, Kentucky, an unincorporated town nestled deep in the Appalachian wilds promising ‘Folktales that are GAURANTEED to scare!’. Preston reluctantly agrees to the venture, but their road trip odyssey flounders once the pair arrive and find little more than a convenience store owned by Jesse, an elderly backwoods bumpkin with a penchant for tall tales. Irritated by both Jesse’s gruff nature and dubious love of flies, they’re convinced to stay upon hearing the old man’s claims that a sorceress from centuries past with a connection to Beelzebub and a taste for babies still roams the local forests. When Daryll and Preston set up camp, however, they quickly learn Jesse’s stories were no bluff, and the pair must endure a harrowing night of fearsome hallucinations, psychological and physical torments, and a blood-soaked revelation that may cost them their lives. 

Folktale defines the term ‘slow-burn’. While some may find that off-putting, Evans loads his storytelling with a creepy-crawly campfire ambiance that pushes the narrative along, and once the characters enter the wilderness he rewards patient readers with unrelenting shocks, grotesque imagery and emasculating gore that continues literally until the last line. With its fevered talk of witchcraft, human sacrifice and Satanic covenants, sly wink-and-nod fright flick references, and a gut-wrenching, nihilistic finale, this is one entry written by a horror fan for horror fans. 

8: OOPS, I KILLED MY BOYFRIEND by Alana K. Drex and Billy Ray Middleton Jr (self-released):

Comedy and horror can be considered two sides of the same coin. Both require rising tension that ends in a payoff, whether it be laughs or screams. Alana K. Drex and Billy Ray Middleton Jr. accomplish both with their black comedy, the genre-blending paranormal romance/murder mystery/laugh out loud farce, Oops, I Killed My Boyfriend.

Lacey Todd is a fresh-faced and successful magazine writer. Her boyfriend Eddie Vale is an up-and-coming rock guitarist with the band Spiral Zero. When we first meet her, Lacey’s intrusive insecurities about Eddie’s fidelity in the face of constant adoration from his growing legion of female fans has driven her to distraction. In a bid to soothe her anxieties, Eddie agrees to an extended retreat at a remote lakeside cabin where, in a singular twist of fate, Lacey learns that Dahlia Silver, one-time romance author extraordinaire and Lacey’s own teenage literary hero, is vacationing nearby. Dahlia befriends Lacey with the intention of using her as the basis for a much-needed comeback bestseller, yet events take a bizarre turn when, during the course of an argument, Lacey apparently kills Eddie by bashing her antique Compaq laptop over his head. Despondent, guilt-ridden and worried she’ll be arrested for murder, Lacey begins doubting her own sanity once Eddie’s ghost inexplicably materializes at inopportune times. After it becomes clear her rambunctious rocker has indeed returned from beyond, Lacey rekindles what she can of their doomed-too-soon courtship. Complicating the awkward reunion, however, are the unwelcome advances made by sheriff’s deputy Ryle Franco, a closeted deviant with a fetish for female felons who has his psychosexual sights set firmly on Lacey. With Franco’s obsessive machinations mirrored by Dahlia’s increasingly erratic and violent behavior, it’s only a matter of time before the unlikely lovers are thrown into a madcap maelstrom of mayhem and murder.

While blood-soaked hilarity abounds in Oops, I Killed My Boyfriend, what truly makes the novel work are Drex and Middleton’s well-drawn characters. Lacey, Eddie, Ryle and Dahlia each evolve to become more than the sum of their parts during the course of the book, and their interaction serves as the root upon which the comedy—and horror—thrives.

7: SHADOWS OF CATHEDRAL LANE by M.G. Mason (M.G. Mason Books):

In his Salmonweird series of paranormal cozy mysteries, British author M.G. Mason has crafted a lighthearted world centered on Salmonweir, a cozy seaside village on England’s southwestern Cornish coast that’s inexplicably become the haven for over five-hundred ghosts who’ve returned to the earthly plane for reasons unknown and whose daily existences are occasionally interrupted by murder most foul. With three main novels and a short story collection already comprising series canon, Mason expanded the Salmon-verse in 2024 by spinning off Detective Inspector (DI) Nikki Sandford (first seen in last year’s Studio Salmonweird) in the inaugural volume of Shadows of Cathedral Lane.

After an ill-fated date that sees her new girlfriend unceremoniously break up with her, a despondent Nikki encounters the ghost of a man named Jack slumped along the titular lane with a telltale knife protruding from his belly. Unseen by all but her, Nikki reluctantly acquiesces to Jack’s plea for help, and over the course of the novel the pair become friends and allies in order to figure out why he’s so suddenly among the living and who was responsible for his death eighty years earlier. What they uncover is a supernatural menace far greater than either could imagine and that might end up turning Nikki into a ghost, too.

Shadows of Cathedral Lane is far scarier than the main Salmonweird books, but still retains the sense of whimsy Mason’s work is known for. It also explores Nikki’s burgeoning realization of her demisexuality, an angle handled with due tenderness and insight, as Mason (a demisexual himself), explains to the audience just what demisexuality is and how demisexuals experience the world. More than anything, though, this is a fun, spooky (downright terrifying in spots) ghost story.

6: THE SACRAMENT Edited by Kelly Brocklehurst and Jamie Stewart (DarkLit Press):

While indie publisher DarkLit Press suffered significant setbacks in 2024, this anthology represents what the company did best during its brief heyday, namely exposing a wide cross-section of diverse talent to the masses. Subtitled A Religious Horror Anthology, The Sacrament was DarkLit firing on all cylinders, an anthology of twelve fictional stories exploring religious belief in all its profound and often ugly glory. Obsession, fanaticism, repression, acceptance, devotion, denial, love, fate vs free will—each theme is presented with horrifying clarity.

The most harrowing tales in The Sacrament center on cult activity. Kay Hanifen’s ‘The Testimonials of Lana Blue’ is a particularly startling, strange, and heartbreaking transcript of an indoctrinated female cult member so brainwashed she turns her back on everyone who loves her. Yet without a doubt, the compilation’s jewel is ‘DandyAndy Fitness’ by Caitlin Marceau: when twenty-something Adriana deifies a social media exercise guru, it edges her into increasingly irrational, extreme (and extremely violent) behavior. The power in this story lies in its ultra-realistic premise and bone-chilling depiction of a person’s radicalization through personal belief. Adriana becomes so ensnared by her calling she develops a mindset no different than that of a medieval Crusader or modern-day suicide bomber. That so many give themselves so willingly to others on social media is perhaps the most potent warning in The Sacrament, and a meditative expansion on what, exactly, constitutes belief in the twenty-first century.

5: CHANGE & OTHER TERRORS by Jim Horlock (Quill & Crow Publishing House):

Change is perhaps the most horrifying reality of life, and the inevitability of time and its heinous effect is chronicled to near perfection in Welshman Jim Horlock’s debut book, the short story collection Change & Other Terrors. As an author, Horlock’s greatest single strength is undoubtedly the ability to concoct distinct, fully-realized worlds in only a handful of pages. Every story, no matter how short, exists in its own realm, unique from not only each other, but from the expected norms of conventional horror. He proves this best in ‘Into The Walls’, about a young girl whose family moves into a new apartment complex that gradually absorbs its tenants, and ‘The Seed’, a harrowing piece that follows four friends on a camping trip encountering a peculiar backwoods cult that uses humans to fertilize a grove of unusual trees.

While each of the thirteen entries in this collection are worthwhile, three in particular earn it a place on this list: ‘Imposter’, about a jet full of passengers that gets caught in a deadly time loop where everyone’s memories bleed into one another; ‘The Unseen’, a hazy near-future vision where citizens must protect themselves from a host of ravenous, invisible beings by using genetically-modified children as human shields; and the compilation’s concluding installment, ‘Epiphany’, where a woman is forced to endure seemingly endless physical and psychological torture inflicted by a fellowship interested in pushing her to become the ultimate artistic visionary. Like the protagonist in that story, Horlock has the enviable ability to transcend the boundaries of ordinary horror fiction. Definitely a writer to watch in 2025 and beyond.

4: WHAT PROTECTS OUR HERITAGE AND OTHER ABERRATIONS by Villimey Mist (Brigid’s Gate Publishing):

In some ways 2024 was the Year of the Short Story. Maybe it’s ever-shrinking audience attention spans; more likely it’s that authors the world over are turning out impressive short fiction in quantity. Case in point: Icelander Villimey Mist, who released not one, but two compilations this past autumn, the Macabre Maiden Press collection Visceral Discoveries and its folk-horror oriented companion tome, What Protects Our Heritage and Other Aberrations. While both are worth the time and money to read, utilizing her native Icelandic folklore is what edges the latter onto this list. The mythology of that isolated northern island lends an unmatched uniqueness to stories such as ‘The Girl With The Hooves’, ‘They Came From The Rocks’, ‘The Hag’s Gift’ and ‘The Yule Lads Are Coming’.

Even entries that don’t focus on folklore are knock-outs: American expat Ben lives and works in Japan and feels the pressure to join in his co-workers unusual after-hours partying in the subversively funny ‘All-You-Can-Drink Buffet’. And an ode to campy ‘80’s slasher flicks of yore, ‘The Tupperware Party’ is a fun balls-to-the-wall body count bloodbath in a serene suburban setting that’s sure to elicit as many sick grins as it does shrieks.

But by far the masterpiece of What Protects Our Heritage is ‘Survival Of The Fittest’. Told from the point of view of a blood-starved vampire survivor of a nuclear holocaust who unwittingly bonds with a radiation-poisoned disabled girl she intends to drain dry, it’s an unflinchingly earnest and moving meditation on life, death, friendship, forgiveness and, ultimately, self-acceptance. As in her Nocturnal series of bloodsucker novels, Mist takes the time to humanize her undead protagonist, and by placing them in a post-apocalyptic landscape transfuses new blood (pun intended) into an often overworked subgenre.

3: THE JETTY by Izzy Von (self-released):

Anyone who witnessed the notorious ‘bedroom scene’ in Damien Leone’s 2022 film Terrifier 2 is unlikely to forget it: a teenage girl is savagely and sadistically mutilated in shocking, graphic detail, only for it to be revealed later that she’s still alive. The Jetty, Izzy Von’s sophomore novel, is the literary equivalent of that scene, a knife to the heart and the guts that retains its intensity until the last page.

Alternately titled Don’t Fuck With A Transwoman From Texas With A Gun, the novel follows Jerri, a transgender woman planning a vacation to the Texas Gulf Coast who can’t believe her good fortune in cheaply renting a seaside bungalow. Encouraged by her therapist and eager for a retreat to deal with the emotional fallout of a shattered marriage and lingering childhood trauma inflicted by her bigoted, abusive father, Jerri’s holiday quickly goes downhill after she’s hassled by the town’s small-minded residents at a local bar. Unbeknownst to her, however, those same townies are members of a demon-worshiping cult and the jetty attached to her bungalow is a multidimensional doorway due to open during a rare celestial alignment. Chosen specifically by the cult’s hateful and charismatic leader, Leon, Jerri is first forced to confront the manifestation of her greatest fears before she’s captured and tortured on the demon’s black stone altar. This time, however, the cult may have bitten off more than they bargained for: unwilling to submit to Leon’s directive to join their ranks and bequeathed with astonishing healing abilities due to a shard of altar stone inadvertently becoming lodged in her ankle, Jerri breaks free and sets out for retribution. Armed only with a knife, her trusty .357 Magnum and a handful of bullets, she learns the secrets of her demonic captor and traverses space/time to bring the fight to her enemies. But how much bodily damage can one person endure? And can Jerri find her way out of the jetty’s otherworldly subterranean labyrinth before she’s killed or, worse, trapped for eternity?

Unlike Von’s debut 2024 novel, the humorous zombie apocalypse road trip romp A Dandy Among The Dead, The Jetty is a far darker work, more explicitly personal and intense. Shades of Lovecraft lurk in the cosmic backdrop, but at its heart the story is one person’s battle against ignorance and repression. And that battle is as brutal as horror can get, offering up some of the most gleeful gore to hit the printed page in some time. Emotionally cathartic and outrageously violent, The Jetty proves that going for the gross-out can be a boon for the soul.

2: BOUND IN FLESH: AN ANTHOLOGY OF TRANS BODY HORROR Edited by Lor Gislason (Ghoulish Books):

The horrors of the human body have been mined for scares in literature and on film for decades. Indie writer Lor Gislason possesses a singularly gruesome knack for the subgenre (previously displayed in the 2022 DarkLit Press novel Inside Out) that erupted full-force as editor of the Ghoulish Books multi-author fiction collection Bound In Flesh: An Anthology of Trans Body Horror.

Some of the book’s more disquieting highlights: Charles-Elizabeth Boyle’s ‘Lady Davelina’s Last Pet’, which chronicles the painful shape-shifting inflicted upon a captive for the recreational whims of their kidnapper; Hailey Piper’s bemusing ‘In The Garden Of Horn, The Naked Magic Thrives’, about a chaos magic practitioner who inadvertently buys a dead fertility god’s totem at a garage sale that causes phalluses to erupt from anyone who touches it in. A woman curious about the origins of the latest cosmetic fad discovers a terrifying truth in Bitter Karella’s grotesquely erotic ‘A Brief History of the Santa Carcossa Archipelago’, and a boorish bigot meets his match in the ghost of a 12-year-old trans girl haunting his new home in Lillian Boyd’s hilarious ‘Man of the House’.

The concluding installment, ‘Looking For The Big Death’ by Taliesin Neith, however, is the volume’s triumph. When a trans man’s suicide attempt is foiled after he unexpectedly resurrects in the morgue, he gains the ability to regenerate from any death and later finds the perfect partner in a budding murderer who’s urge to kill compliments his willingness to die, over and over again. Neith’s striking concept is buttressed by the unflinching description of the main character’s every dying bodily sensation and, combined with the pointedly sadomasochistic relationship that develops between killer and victim, serves as the crowning achievement in an overwhelmingly bold collection.

1: WHERE DARK THINGS GROW by Andrew K. Clark (Cowboy Jamboree Press):

Fifteen-year-old Leo lives a troubled, rustic life with his mother and siblings in a remote North Carolina valley during the early years of The Depression. With his younger sister Goldfish in increasingly ill health and his mother flirting with madness, Leo finds himself mysteriously bound to a dangerous spirit beast called a Wulver, and is able to call forth its shadowy teeth and pointed claws whenever his anger is aroused. Emboldened by this newfound supernatural gift, Leo sets out righting wrongs as he sees fit, settling old scores and vowing to find his missing alcoholic father. Joining the quest is Leo’s plucky tomboy-cum-girlfriend Lilyfax and Ezra, a pious youth others mockingly call the ‘Little Priest’, but unbeknownst to them a sinister pagan cult has been abducting young girls and women in the area, keeping them encased in amber-like stasis in a magically protected forest. Can Leo use his newfound powers to stop them, or will the otherworldy ability destroy him before the cult does?

North Carolina native Andrew K. Clark’s extraordinary debut novel Where Dark Things Grow is a breathless whirlwind read. Rife with thrills, chills, and pulse-pounding excitement, the author explores serious and important themes about family, friendship, loss, betrayal, forgiveness, and the misuse of power. With the Shadow Wulver as his beckon call, Leo’s first impulse is to reverse his dismal economic fortunes, but he quickly succumbs to the temptation for revenge, feeding into the Wulver’s ever-lustful destructive appetite. His descent mirrors that of the cultists, captains of industry and politics who’ve traded their souls for earthly gain but who treat others—particularly women—as mere objects for their whimsy. Unlike them, however, Leo is grounded by his connection to those around him, and in the end learns there’s truly no power stronger than love. Filled with danger, adventure, action, humor, horror, and heart to spare, Where Dark Things Grow is a superb novel, a stunning debut, and well-deserving of the title Best Indie Novel of 2024.

Here’s to the New Year, and here’s to another twelve months of provocative, thoughtful, inventive fiction told by people with passion and spirit. May there always be one more story to tell!