Forever shelf
Favorite books
The author is still arranging this shelf.
LanternLantern author
Carly Black
🏮Lantern BuilderWeekly referral champion
How to earn it: Bring new readers or writers to Lantern and finish the week as the referral champion.
Stories about the things people bury, and what happens when they surface. Psychological thrillers and horror that get under your skin and stay there.
MysteryPsychological ThrillersHorror
4,401published words across 1 Lantern story
Behind the byline
About the author
Carly Black writes psychological suspense and dark thrillers about secrets that rot, choices that haunt, and ordinary people pushed past the edge. Her stories blend slow-burning tension, emotional fallout, and enough twists to make readers question who they trust.
When she isn’t writing, Carly is usually watching true crime documentaries, reading indie authors, or collecting ideas from the unsettling little cracks in everyday life. She believes the scariest stories are the ones that feel like they could happen next door.
⌖ Rural Kentucky
Visit the author’s website →Author marginalia
The fun stuff.
The little things readers always want to know after the last page.
In the headphones
Writing soundtrack
- I need complete silence.
Tiny author lore
Things to know
This margin is waiting for secrets.
On Lantern
Stories by Carly Black
Psychological Suspense
Welcome to Pine Ridge
Corinne swore she'd never set foot in Pine Ridge again. Then her father starts dying in the farmhouse at the edge of the orchard, and she has two weeks to sign the papers, sell the land, and disappear back to the life she built where nobody knows her name means anything.
The first night home, she finds a ribbon tied to the fence post. Faded pink satin. Sadie Brennan's ribbon, from the girl who vanished into that orchard eleven years ago, the summer they were both fifteen.
More follows. A ring. A photograph with Sadie's face scratched out. Someone has kept Sadie's things since the night she disappeared, and now they're leaving them where Corinne can't look away.
Corinne knows exactly what happened in that orchard. She's known for eleven years. And the closer the truth climbs to the surface, the clearer it becomes: she wasn't the only one standing in the trees that night.
She ran once. This time, there's nowhere left to go.
Beyond Lantern
More books by Carly Black
Finished books, full-length worlds, and other stories waiting wherever you buy books.
Published book
Bloodlines
Alyssa Carter just wanted to fill in the blanks on her family tree. A DNA test was supposed to offer roots, not rot.
When the results arrive, they shatter everything she thought she knew about herself. Her frantic research leads her down a dark path that starts with the FBI at her door, asking questions about a serial killer she's never heard of. But the DNA doesn't lie. The connection is real.
The deeper Alyssa digs, the more the past unearths itself. Gruesome crimes staged like theater. Bodies left as messages. A family she never knew existed.
But someone is watching. And they don't want her to find the truth.
For readers who crave the twisted family dynamics of Sharp Objects, the moral ambiguity of Gone Girl, and the slow-burn dread of The Good Girl.
Buy or learn more →Published book
Sealed in Silence
Derby City Paranormal Investigations has been chasing evidence for years. Most cases end with logical explanations and disappointed clients. Hillcrest Sanatorium might finally be different.
A ball that moves on its own. A girl who appears only through camera lenses, pointing with desperate urgency at something they can't see. Financial ledgers that don't add up. Patients marked deceased who somehow kept receiving treatment for weeks afterward.
Brooke Montoya and her team follow the evidence deeper into the abandoned hospital's crumbling halls. Every answer leads to darker questions. What they discover has been hidden for over six decades, buried by people who'd do anything to keep their secrets quiet.
Some silences were never meant to be broken.
But the dead don't always stay quiet when they have something to say.
Buy or learn more →Published book
The Hollow Space
The Hollow Space is based on the High Priestess Tarot Card.
Some families pass down heirlooms. Hers passed down a curse.
On the night she turns thirty-five, librarian Tess Davis discovers a hidden book concealed inside her library’s antique shelves. The journal tells an impossible story—one that traces back to 1855, when a desperate mother bargained with a demon to save her child. The price was blood. Every woman born into the family would live long enough to raise a daughter, then die at thirty-five.
Tess has one lunar month to uncover the truth hidden in books her ancestors left behind. As the demon’s influence grows stronger, reality fractures. Time slips. Reflections move on their own. The line between madness and truth disappears.
The answer is terrifyingly simple and devastatingly final. To save her daughter, Tess must destroy the library that anchors the curse—burning history, reputation, and her own future to the ground.
A haunting, emotionally driven horror short story about inherited trauma, motherhood, and the terrible cost of survival.
Buy or learn more →Published book
Written in Malice
Daniel Park hasn't written a sentence in fourteen months.
His agent has stopped pretending. His advance is spent. He has six weeks to deliver the novel he's owed his publisher or surrender money he no longer has. So he does what writers like him do when their lives are on fire — he retreats to a cabin in the woods. October on a ridge in LaRue County, Kentucky. Gravel road. Dead cell signal. Fog so thick in the hollow that the road back disappears at sundown.
On the second night, he finds the journal in the attic.
Leather. Warm to the touch. Pages thick and waiting.
"Quiet enough to hear your own thoughts. If you can stand what they're saying."
He tells himself he won't open it.
He opens it.
He writes one page. He sleeps better than he has in months. In the morning, he writes another. The cabin is silent. The woods are silent. The journal is silent. Everything in Daniel's life is finally, terribly, working.
He should know better.
Written in Malice is a slow-burn literary thriller about a man, a cabin, and the patient cost of finally writing something true. A complete standalone novella for readers of A Head Full of Ghosts, Home Before Dark, and The Twisted Ones.
Buy or learn more →Published book
Digital Sin
Stephanie wanted to feel beautiful.
Glow made it easy.
After her marriage falls apart, Stephanie downloads a beauty app that promises the one thing she can’t seem to find on her own: confidence. A softer face. Better photos. More attention. For the first time in a long time, men are looking.
Then Stephanie becomes Poison Ivy.
Bold. Seductive. Desired. Untouchable.
At first, it feels like freedom. Every like is proof she still matters. Every message pulls her deeper into a world where fantasy is currency and attention can feel dangerously close to love.
But the more Stephanie gives to the persona, the harder it becomes to tell where she ends and Poison Ivy begins.
And Glow is always there.
Watching.
Waiting.
Learning what Stephanie wants most.
Dark, intimate, and deeply unsettling, Digital Sin is a psychological tech thriller about loneliness, desire, and the terrifying cost of becoming someone people can’t look away from.
Buy or learn more →Found a new favorite?