Readers who love thrillers and horror—genres that can seem a bit threadbare after countless iterations of familiar conventions—often find themselves asking, Is there anything new under the sun? In Indieland, the answer is a resounding yes, as the following titles reinvent tired tropes and let their freak flags fly.

In Eileen Kelly’s creepy thriller Small Wonder, the horror comes in a uniquely unsettling, taboo-baiting package: the psyches of very young children. Tina, a single mother and preschool teacher at a tony private school, is taken aback by the behavior of siblings Darla and Jonah, who recently lost their mother. While some acting out is to be expected under the circumstances, 3-year-old Jonah grows alarmingly violent as his 10-year-old sister wages vicious psychological warfare against her ill-equipped peers. Tina turns a blind eye to the red flags as she grows closer to the children’s attractive widowed father, but as Jonah and Darla’s sinister natures further reveal themselves, she begins to question the “accidental” nature of their mother’s death. Kelly deftly strikes a tricky tone that manages to locate the sly humor in the squirm-inducing scenario; our reviewer praises the novel as “an engrossing yarn” that is “by turns hilarious and haunting.”

Talk about a monster mash: John DeGuire’s delightfully berserk supernatural pastoral Holiday Spirit convenes a summit of classic creatures bent on wreaking havoc in a small New England town. The road to hell is paved with good intentions; so learns Bridgett Bishop, an elderly witch in Killington, Vermont, when her decorative efforts to celebrate Halloween are met with a vicious egging from disrespectful local youths. Furious and bent on revenge, Bridgett enlists all manner of nightmarish beasties—including a reanimated Egyptian mummy and renowned double-act Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—in a campaign of vengeful terror. Dracula himself, assorted werewolves, and Frankenstein’s monster round out the all-star cast of scarecters. (That’s an unforgivable pun, but DeGuire’s giddy romp inspires just this kind of morbid jocularity.) Our reviewer appreciates the novel’s unrelenting pace, which “keeps the pages turning at a satisfying clip,” and horror fans are sure to delight in the spectacle of so many icons of ignominy doing the devil’s business in one place, elbow-to-elbow and fang-to-fang.

In The Silver Castle, D.L. Barron turns the haunted house story not upside down, but on its side; the setting is an ultra-high-tech “urban-futurist enclave” nicknamed the Silver Castle that resembles nothing so much as a glass-and-steel skyscraper rendered horizontal. Within the gleaming techno-marvel, corporate intrigues conceal a deeper threat: an imminent vampire invasion. Luckily, the protagonist, a plucky hospice nurse, is immune to the undead. Our reviewer notes that, even before the arrival of the blood-sucking horde, the Silver Castle’s corporate overlord (who, let’s be honest, is as much a soulless existential threat as the fanged invaders) “exudes alarming dystopian vibes.” The inventive mashup of bleeding-edge tech and hoary horror tropes is “adventurously macabre fun,” per our reviewer, who reflects that “it’s been a while since a protagonist has kicked as much Nosferatu butt as Buffy the Vampire Slayer”; Barron effectively updates the model in this agreeably outré yarn.

Arthur Smith is an Indie editor.