The Dread List · by Shigeru Brody

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The daily board

Today’s Dread Deals

Hand-picked this morning by Shigeru Brody himself — he vets and skims every pick before it makes the board. When the price crawls back up, the deal comes off the board — usually within a day or two.

Deal of the Day — One book worth paying for

Deal of the Day

The one paid pick today — everything above is free. This is the book worth opening your wallet for.

Prices are as listed when checked this morning, Monday, November 2, 2026 — Amazon changes them without asking anyone, so confirm the price at checkout. Kindle editions; most titles also lend through Kindle Unlimited.

Only here

Tales from Beyond the Firelight

Deals can be copied. This can’t. Every issue closes with three kinds of account — one invented, two sworn to — all of them read the same way Brody reads everything: carefully, and without rushing to the easy answer.

01 The Brody micro-story — fiction, exclusive to this list

Every issue of The Dread List carries an exclusive Shigeru Brody micro-story — a short, complete piece of fiction written for this list and published nowhere else. Not a chapter teaser. Not a reprint. A new nightmare, in every email.

They grow out of the same work as the novels: old encounter reports, sighting locations, the one detail in a witness’s account that refuses to fit. Some read like field notes. Some are the thing itself, standing at the treeline. All of them are Brody’s — and subscribers are the only people who will ever read them.

Get the next issue

From a recent issue

Field Note: The Treeline at Cedar Wash

The dog found it first — or found where it had been. She stopped at the treeline the way she stops for nothing else, hackles up, and would not cross for the smell of bacon in my hand.

Whatever passed through in the night had pressed the frost flat in a line too straight for weather and too wide for any boot I own. I measured. I photographed. I wrote down the wind, the hour, the state of the moon. Then I stood a long while, listening to the woods decide whether to tell me more.

They didn’t. They rarely do, the first night.

One of the exclusive micro-stories sent only to Dread List subscribers. The next one goes out at dawn.

02 From the readers — first-hand accounts

What you saw out there

Each issue also runs a short first-hand sighting account sent in by a reader — your words, lightly edited for length, printed with your permission and credited the way you ask. Brody reads every submission the way he once read a witness statement: listen carefully, test the details, look for corroboration, resist the easy answer. The accounts that hold up get published.

The file is open. If something happened to you that still doesn’t fit, send it in.

Share your sighting

03 From across the world — curated account

The Kelly–Hopkinsville Encounter — Kentucky, 1955

On the night of August 21, 1955, Billy Ray Taylor came in from the well at the Sutton family farmhouse near Kelly, Kentucky, saying he had seen a bright object settle in a gully behind the house. Within the hour, the family reported small figures at the windows and the screen door — roughly three feet tall, with oversized heads, long arms, and eyes that glowed in the dark.

Over the next several hours, the Suttons said the figures kept returning no matter how much shot was fired at them; a hit, they claimed, sounded like a bullet striking a metal bucket, and the figure would float back into the trees unharmed. Near 11 p.m. the family gave up the house and drove to the Hopkinsville police station. Officers who went out to the farm confirmed the household’s terror — and found no creatures, only a farmhouse shot full of holes.

The official explanations have never quite closed the file. Great horned owls, aggressive in late summer, account for the shape and the glowing eyes — but not, the witnesses insisted to every investigator who asked, for figures that walked up to the door on the ground. Seventy years on, the case remains what it was that night: eleven frightened people, one damaged farmhouse, and a detail that refuses to fit. Resist the easy answer.

A curated account from the historical record — not reader-submitted. Sources: Kentucky New Era reporting, August 1955; Isabel Davis’s 1956 investigation for Civilian Saucer Intelligence; U.S. Air Force Project Blue Book case file.

The method

How the List works

Brody digs.

Every night, the new price drops, publisher sales, and indie releases get worked through the way he once worked a case file — looking for the detail that matters.

He tests it.

Every pick is hand-picked by Shigeru Brody — vetted and skimmed before it’s listed. If the opening chapters don’t hold up under questioning, the book doesn’t run — no algorithmic slush, no pay-to-play filler.

You get the file.

One email at dawn: the day’s free horror ebooks, and an exclusive micro-story found nowhere else. Read it with coffee. Read it with the lights on.

The curator

“Listen carefully. Test the details. Look for corroboration. Resist the easy answer.”

That is how Shigeru Brody approached a case in his years as a trial lawyer — and how he approaches a sighting report, and a book, now. The Dread List is his: the picks, the standards, and the fiction in every issue.

About Shigeru Brody

A new way in

The Founding 100

Brody is weighing a fiction subscription — his stories, delivered monthly, in your inbox or your mailbox. It doesn’t exist yet. This waitlist decides whether it ever does.

Digital

$49 / year

Founding price — locked forever for the first 100.

A monthly exclusive Brody story, delivered by email
The full archive of subscriber-only fiction
Everything in the free Dread List, a step ahead

Mailed

$97 / year

Founding price — locked forever for the first 100.

Everything in Digital
The month’s best story printed and mailed to you as a letter
A Cryptid File card in every mailing — the artifact for the shelf

Open case files

Had an encounter?
Share your story.

Brody’s novels begin as other people’s accounts — read the way he once read a witness statement: listen carefully, test the details, look for corroboration, resist the easy answer. If something happened to you out there that still doesn’t fit, he wants to hear it.

This form is for publication, not just correspondence. Use it to share your sighting for possible publication in Tales from Beyond the Firelight — the reader-accounts feature that runs in every issue of The Dread List. Tell it plainly: where it happened, when, what the weather was doing, and the one detail you have never been able to explain away. Details are evidence. Every account is read personally, and nothing is ever published without your permission — though the ones that hold up have a way of finding their way into the books, too.

For authors

Horror is an afterthought everywhere else. Here it’s the whole store.

Your readers are already here. Put your book in front of people who read only horror, on a list curated by one of your own — Shigeru Brody, author of the Black Pine series and The Anomaly Files — at a founding rate that undercuts every deal site in the business.

The landscape

Nobody owns horror. Until now.

Book Barbarian

The best genre deal site running — for science fiction and fantasy. It has no horror arm at all. Its readers came for starships and swords, not your haunted house.

Bargain Booksy

Files horror under “Fantasy / Horror / Sci-Fi” — the weakest genre list in the business — and charges $25 a slot to reach readers who mostly showed up for something else.

Freebooksy

Will promote your free horror book for $40–$65. Read that again. Sixty-five dollars to give a book away to a general audience.

ENT & Robin Reads

Solid lists, opaque pricing, and review-count gates that quietly lock out debut and indie authors — exactly the writers with the most interesting nightmares.

Deal site	Standard slot	Who actually sees your book
The Dread List by Shigeru Brody — founding rate	$19	Horror readers. Only horror readers. That is the entire list.
Bargain Booksy — Horror	$25	A mixed Fantasy / Horror / Sci-Fi audience.
Freebooksy — Horror	$40–$65	Free books only, general freebie hunters.
Book Barbarian	$40–$60	Excellent — if you write sci-fi or fantasy. No horror, ever.

Founding author pricing

Cheap because we’re young. Locked because you were early.

The list is new, so the rates are low — deliberately under every competitor above. Founding authors keep their launch rate on every future booking while the list is young. When the audience grows, the price follows it. Yours won’t.

Standard Slot

$19 / feature

Regular rate $39 once founding slots close.

Your book in the daily email, with cover and hook line
A full day on the Today’s Dread Deals board
Direct buy link to your Amazon page
No review-count minimum — debuts welcome

Headliner

$39 / feature

Regular rate $79 once founding slots close.

Everything in Standard, in the top position of the email
An editorial hook line written by Brody, from your sample
Two days on the deals board
A short results note after your run — sends and what we can share

What you get

A small list of the damned, paying attention

A horror-only audience

Every subscriber signed up for horror and nothing else. No cozy-mystery tourists, no freebie grazers — people who finish the scary book and immediately want another.

Hand-picked by Shigeru Brody

Brody vets and skims your opening chapters before confirming — the same standard he once applied to a witness account. That gate is why readers trust the list, and why a slot here means something.

No review gate

Three reviews or three thousand, the sample decides. Debut authors are not locked out for the crime of being new.

A hook that sells

Your listing runs with a one-line hook written to make a horror reader stop scrolling — not a copy-paste of your back-cover blurb.

Submission guidelines

Before you knock

Horror only. Every subgenre is welcome — gothic, cosmic, folk, creature feature, splatterpunk, quiet literary dread. If it isn’t horror, it isn’t listed.
Price it to move. Your ebook must be free for the full day of the feature, with the free price live before the email goes out at dawn.
Look the part. A professional cover and a clean, edited manuscript. We skim the opening chapters of everything; typos in chapter one are where submissions go to die.
Give us a week. Submit at least 7 days before your price drop starts so we can vet it, schedule, and write your hook.
One haunting per month. One book per author per 30 days keeps the list fresh and your fellow authors honest.
No charge until you’re in. If the book isn’t a fit, we’ll tell you straight — and you pay nothing. Payment is only due once your date is confirmed.

Submit your book

Knock three times

About

Shigeru Brody

Author of the Black Pine series and The Anomaly Files. Former trial lawyer. Amateur cryptozoologist. The man who reads the encounter reports — and picks every book on this list.

Welcome guys! I’m Shigeru Brody, author of the Black Pine series and The Anomaly Files. Before I wrote horror, I spent years as a trial lawyer. I learned to question witnesses, test stories against evidence, and pay attention when one small detail refused to fit. Those habits followed me into fiction.

My interest in unexplained creatures began much earlier. When I was young, something happened to me in the woods that I still can’t explain. I’ve replayed it for years and tested every ordinary explanation I can think of. None accounts for all of it. That experience changed the way I look at the wilderness and left me far less certain about what might be living beyond the reach of the firelight.

Since then, I’ve become a devoted amateur cryptozoologist. I read old encounter reports, travel to places where sightings occurred, and speak with people who say they witnessed something impossible. I approach their stories the way I once approached a case: listen carefully, test the details, look for corroboration, and resist the easy answer. Many of those accounts eventually find their way into my books.

I live in southern Utah, where I can reach the backcountry within minutes. I still go looking. If I ever find a clear answer, you will probably read about it first. Feel free to reach out if you’ve had an encounter and want to share, and thank you for reading!

House rules

Hand-picked by Shigeru Brody. Every pick is vetted and skimmed first — if the opening chapters don’t grab, the book doesn’t run. No exceptions, no matter who asks.

Horror only, always. Thrillers in a fake mustache get shown the door. If it isn’t trying to scare you, unsettle you, or haunt you a little, it belongs somewhere else.

Price honesty. If we say free, it was free when we checked that morning. Prices rise like the dead — fast and without warning — so the board only ever shows today’s.

Readers first. Authors pay for slots, and that’s what keeps the lights on — but the day this list stops being useful to readers, it’s just another ad sheet with better fonts. Readers win every tie.

Had an encounter?

As the bio says: reach out. If you’ve had an encounter and want to share it, the case file is open — tell it plainly, with the details, and it will be read the way Brody reads everything.

Share your story Today’s Deals

Welcome to The Dread List

You’re in. Here’s your first nightmare.

An exclusive Shigeru Brody micro-story — written for this list, published nowhere else. Yours for joining.

Exclusive micro-story

The Hollow Below the Trail

I was out before first light on Saturday, up the wash past the second cattle gate, to pull the card from a trail cam I’d left on a game trail three weeks ago.

The cam had 214 photos. The first 200 were what you’d expect — mule deer, a coyote, one very annoyed skunk. Then the sequence from Tuesday night.

Four frames, forty seconds apart. In the first, a deer is looking left, ears up — the posture deer get when they’ve heard something they don’t like. In the second, the deer is gone. In the third, nothing but empty trail and sagebrush. In the fourth —

In the fourth, the sagebrush is wrong. I don’t know how else to put it. Something had pressed through it recently, and the branches were still bent, and the bent part was roughly the height of a man and roughly the width of two.

There were no tracks. The ground under the cam is soft dust that takes a print beautifully — the deer’s prints were all over it. Whatever bent that brush didn’t touch the ground.

I stood there a long time. I checked the timestamps twice. I keep telling myself there’s an ordinary explanation I haven’t thought of yet.

I haven’t thought of it yet.

By Shigeru Brody — an exclusive micro-story for Dread List subscribers, found nowhere else.

Every morning: the day’s best horror ebook deals, hand-picked by me — plus a new nightmare in every issue. If something’s ever happened to you out there that you can’t explain, reply to any issue and tell me about it. I read every account.

— Brody

See today’s deals

Most of today’s deals are free to read inside Kindle Unlimited. New here? Try Kindle Unlimited free.