Mother's Little Helpers
Winner of the 2025 Pencraft Literary Award — Summer’s Best Book for Horror
"Awakening is a brilliant novel that fans of accomplished, surreal, dark paranormal comedies will enjoy from cover to cover." K.C. Finn, Readers' Favorite
If it helps you find love and happiness, is it really so bad that it wants to kill and eat you?
Rage Sutherland, an unemployed, foul-mouthed 30-year-old had never once made his dead parents proud – or tried to for that matter. Instead, he lives happily in his consequence-free forever-adolescence in the house his parents left him.
Down the hill behind his home, Mother, a massive underground fungus, is having an existential crisis. Starving and desperate, she births a new offspring—a mushroom that promises boundless love, followed by a slow, blissful death.
When the mushrooms pop up in his yard, Rage can’t resist. One bite, and his world explodes into overwhelming ecstasy.
Meanwhile, Emile Navarro, a long-dead murderer, is resurrected into a fungus-fueled hunter to find Mother fresh food. Navarro, a remorseless sexual deviant who never found satisfaction, is determined to get this new life “right” this time.
Rage enjoys his newfound love of everything, until he finds himself face-to-face with the creature, Navarro—and is forced to risk his happiness by making a choice between life and death.
After barely surviving the nightmare that unfolded in Awakening, ten-year-old Pippi should finally be safe.
But the horror beneath the hill isn’t finished with her.
The thing whispering in her mind is Emile Navarro—a murderer who refuses to stay dead, sustained by a strange fungal network spreading through the earth below her neighborhood.
Through it, Navarro is still watching… still waiting… and the corruption beneath the hills is beginning to spread.
Pippi wants only one thing: freedom from the monster that followed her out of the dark.
But she isn’t the only one who knows the nightmare never ended.
A small group of survivors now understands the truth—something ancient is still growing beneath their feet.
And Navarro didn’t come back just to haunt her.
He came back to possess her fully.
And if Pippi can’t silence the voice inside her head, the thing that once tried to devour her will finish what it started.
Perfect for fans of creeping supernatural horror, possession stories, and nightmares that refuse to stay buried.