Need inspiration for the Indie Voices Read-a-thon? These bite-sized indie books prove that great stories can come in small packages. At fewer than 200 pages, they're a quick way to fit an indie book into your November reading.
Tell us what book you picked and share your progress with #IndieVoicesReadathon
2026 indie read-a-thon recommendations: books under 200 pages
Sunday's Best
by Bailey Hannah
A summer on the road.
A relationship on the rocks.
And the one man she shouldn't want.
Sunday thought this summer would be simple: follow her boyfriend and his brother from rodeo to rodeo, enjoy the freedom of the open road, and confirm what she already suspects-Logan is cheating.
What she doesn't expect is Holden.
Holden's steady where Logan is careless, quiet where Logan is loud, and impossible to ignore when sharing close-quarters.
As the miles pass and the nights grow long, the tension between them escalates. Every glance, every accidental touch feels like a risk-and crossing the line could jeopardize everything Holden and Logan have worked for. But the reward is starting to feel impossible to walk away from.
The Dark Sweetness at the Bottom of the Well
by Chandra Fisher
Elana Allard has been relentlessly, desperately drawn to the well since she was a child. Even in her sleep, she walks toward the final resting place of the shadow eating creature who lies at the bottom.
Her family has kept her safe, ensuring she's lashed to her bed each night, leather cuffs tight around her ankles. They wish she'd marry a man who could keep her in bed, but Elana has never felt the spark of love the bards sing about with any man she's met.
When a once in a century storm cracks the stone off the well, Elana's desire to go there carves her out. She hungers, growing pale and sick, until at last she relents and goes to the well on her own.
There she finds the monster isn't what she'd thought it was. The Darkness-Nessa-wants what many young women want: a nice place to stay, a nice dress to wear, and a trip into town with Elana.
And Elana feels things with Nessa that she's never felt for a man. Most of all, she realizes there is no cure for the force that drew her toward the well. Toward the monster.
Toward the darkness.
With her brother's suspicions plaguing her every move and the threat of banishment from her family to marry a man chosen for her, Elana must choose: a normal life that will keep her a prisoner forever, or a monstrous love unlike anything she's ever felt that will ensure her alienation from everyone and everything she's ever known.
Carnalis
by Tiffany Morris
Wealthy party girl Lauren hungers for human flesh. Her girlfriend Alex, a recently injured dancer, is trapped in Lauren's toxic and deadly spiral. The looming threat of capture may prove to be less dangerous than Lauren herself and the lengths she will go to satiate her needs. Will Alex be next on the menu?
Drive Me to the Moon
by Ramona Soojun Lee
He desperately needs a driving licence to get out of unemployment, but he fails his test. So he kidnaps the examiner.
Because this isn't just about passing a test. This is about life or death.
Just like driving, right?
A brutal, satirical examination of modern survival, asking how much pressure a person can endure before breaking-and what it means when a society creates the conditions for that break, then looks away.
Whiskey Cowboy
by Walker Rose
The woman I spent one hot night with ends up being my boss's daughter, and if I want to keep my job, I won't touch her again.
I work with my two brothers on Hawthorne Guest Ranch. We do the behind-the-scenes stuff with the real ranch and have strict orders to stay away from the guests, the staff, and especially the boss's daughters. I do what I'm told, but when a woman comes into the bar and says she's passing through, well... I give her a night to remember and try not to think about how I'd like to see her again.
I do see her again. The very next day, when she's introduced not only as Jamison Hawthorne, but our newest staff member.
I try to stay away from her, but she has a way of making a guy want more. Only I don't have more to give her. All that's in my name is an old mine some whiskey CEO wants to turn into his next distillery. Yet if I keep sneaking around with Jamison, I'll lose my job and get my brothers fired too. So it's up to me to figure out how to be more for Jamison than some whiskey cowboy.
Grief Eater
by Emma Osborne
Visceral, gritty, and unforgiving, GRIEF EATER is a zombie story like you've never read before.
When Kristina rises from her violent death, she's not the same fragile woman her family once abandoned. She's rageful, powerful, and hungry-for the blood of the ones who were supposed to love her. With a newfound craving to see vengeance and grief served, she launches into a once-in-an-undead-lifetime journey across blood-slicked highways to the scorched Australian bush and her hometown. As her body fails and her mind fractures, she's left with one final question: Is she here to forgive, or to feed?
A transgressive, gory examination of queer identity and found family, GRIEF EATER sinks its teeth into trauma and what it means to be devoured by grief.
Epic
by Sarina Bowen - Elle Kennedy
They're back! Epic is a novella about your favorite hockey duo!
Jamie and Wes are having a blast living and working in Toronto. Until a scout for another team swoops in to make one of them an offer that might complicate the life they've built together.
Magical Midlife Flowers
by K F Breene
This is a bonus story that plays into elements in Magical Midlife Battle. It isn't necessary to the overall series ARC, but rather a fun little aside into the lives of the Ivy House Crew.
Edgar does not cheat in flower shows. He might use a magically enhanced serum, but anyone could do that. It's not his fault the other competitors don't know magic exists!
But when the Ivy House crew goes to the pre-show to support him, it becomes clear that someone should've been watching Edgar much more carefully. What he's done is way worse than overgrown flora.
While Jessie is dealing with that, she gets a shock as she discovers photos of her ex with his girlfriend...turned fiancée. And while the flood of emotions can be ignored, the desire to show off Austin on social media is not.
After putting Mr. Tom in charge of the flower fiasco, she decides to take Austin on his perfect date. Her goal: to have one thing go right in her life. Just one thing!
Neon Moon
by Grace R Reynolds
Darlene Boone is a survivor. For more than a year, she's been bartending at the famous Teegarden Saloon, a honky tonk in the Texas Hill Country, while attempting to put her life back together in the wake of an abusive past. But when an axe-wielding maniac descends on The Teegarden during one of the bar's busiest nights of the year, Darlene, along with everyone else in the crowded establishment, will have to put down their whiskeys and take up the nearest weapon if they're to survive this unexpected night from hell. No one knows if they'll make it out alive, least of all Darlene, but one thing's for sure no matter what: Texans don't go down without a fight.
Dark & Darker Still: A Vane and Roc Origin Story
by Nikki St Crowe
Vane and the Crocodile AKA the Madd Brothers, have been stripped of their titles and their assets after their father's failed coup of the Darkland Court. Immortal, powerful and monstrous, it doesn't take them long to make their way back up the ladder, but this time it's not in the manors and mansions of the Darkland elite, it's the dark underbelly known as the Umbrage.
Years later, they now rule the Umbrage and they are ruthless, destroying anyone who gets in their way. But even monsters have hearts, and when Roc and Vane find theirs broken, there's only one choice: get revenge.
Content warnings can be found on the author's website.
Eat Your Heart Out
by Sybil Knight
I didn't eat people. Just men.
First of all, I'd like to set the record straight. I wasn't a cannibal, ʼkay?
I didn't eat people. Just men. I ate their hearts out before they ever saw me coming. Figuratively, of course. Most of the time.
Sometimes a girl had to do what a girl had to do. And sometimes what I had to do was fry those suckers up with a little bit of buttermilk and enough shortening to give ya coronary.
I wouldn't ever apologize for it.
Which was something else you should know about me. I was unapologetic. Then again, so was he. Else the hotshot with a blade bigger than his d*ck wouldn't have barged his way into my little apartment without so much as a “my bad, sorry for disturbing you, ma'am.”
And I wouldn't have been forced to tie him to a chair and teach him some manners. But here we are, ain't we?
Just a sweet little Southern girl and the big bad pickle-diddler who thought he was about to get his rocks off.
Guess it wasn't his lucky day. Sure was mine, though.
Eat Your Heart Out is a dark standalone novella with a HEA. Please heed the trigger warnings at the beginning of the book.
Wine for Roses
by Emily O'Malley Liu
They say the stolen rose blooms best.
When Ethan Keating Mendoza is hired as a gardener at an old Victorian residence in central Indiana, he has one clear mission: make the roses bloom. Ethan's life is roses--he's the son of a hedge witch and a partner in his father's rose growing business--but he has no magic himself.
The Kilbride estate is wild and overgrown. The roses have not bloomed in decades, and Ethan fears he may be in over his head. Worse still is Louis, the peculiar trustee of the property, who lives under a bloodthirsty curse that ties him to the garden. But Louis gives Ethan a chance, and Ethan is determined to do right by the suffering roses. As Ethan and Louis grow closer, Ethan becomes increasingly desperate to save the man he loves from the garden's curse.
But the garden isn't letting them go without a fight.
Fruits of Our Labor
by Ian Patterson
A new world is emerging, one parthenogenetic birth at a time.
It's 2049 and American women have legally recognized human asexual reproduction. Samara yearns for freedom from her dying relationship, and a child of her own-fully her own. Yet as parthenogenetic birth takes hold and the role of men in the survival of the species wanes, protest and outcry sweep across the nation.
It's 2062 and Sierra, one of the first "partho princesses", is bullied relentlessly as she grows up and seeks her own place in this new pressure cooker of evolving gender roles and norms.
It's 2085-the aftermath of the "Days of Horror", a period of violent backlash from displaced men-and a professor of history looks back on the rise of PG birth in an attempt to understand, and communicate, the full impact of this era of genetic and political upheaval.
Together, these three converging perspectives tell the story of a profound societal transformation that asks what it means to have autonomy, who reaps the rewards, and who the future is for.
The Widows of Winding Gale
by Kealan Patrick Burke
For the people on the rugged Irish island of Winding Gale, life has always been hard. Now in the wake of the second World War, the island is dying, the young taken away by death or the appeal of better lives elsewhere, leaving behind only a handful of adults.
But on the night the men of the island disappear while fishing in uncharted waters, the women of Winding Gale are forced into a conflict with something both new and unfathomably old.
A strange greenish mist rolls in, cutting the island off from the mainland. Spiral symbols appear in the sand, fashioned from dead fish and stones. Seductive voices lure people from their homes to walk into the sea. Ancient ships materialize in the fog. And specters of the past will rise to take their vengeance in blood.
Because this is Samhain, a time when the veil between the living and the dead is thinnest, and there is something rising from the deep that will thrust the women of Winding Gale into a war against an unspeakable evil few of them may survive.
From Kealan Patrick Burke, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Kin and Sour Candy, The Widows of Winding Gale is a nightmarish homage to the seminal work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hope Hodgson, Arthur Machen, and John Carpenter.
No Bones About It: A Halloween Sentient Object Romance
by Cassandra Elizzabeth
This Halloween, Tori Graves is celebrating her divorce by finally buying the one thing her ex-husband never let her have.
The viral twelve-foot skeleton.
The HOA promptly loses its collective mind and declares war.
When Tori's desperate plea to save her beloved Halloween decoration goes viral, she's forced to get creative. Suddenly, Mr. Bonejangles becomes the best thing that's ever happened to her photography business.
And her heart.
Somewhere between pumpkin carving, horror movie marathons, and pumpkin porter beneath the autumn stars, Tori falls for the skeleton.
And somehow, he falls right back.
But Lois, the self-appointed queen of the HOA, is determined to get rid of Mr. Bonejangles once and for all. As Halloween approaches and the feud spirals into something far more destructive, Tori realizes that loving him is the easy part.
Keeping him may be impossible without a Halloween miracle.
My Name Isn't Paul: A Cosmic Horror Novella
by Drew Huff
He pretended to be human for seven years. Until he couldn't.
He's a traveling salesman named Paul Cattaneo, except he isn't. Because he's a Mirror Person--a hyper empathetic eldritch abomination capable of mimicking any human. 'Paul' found the human Paul Cattaneo's mangled corpse seven years ago and decided to mimic it. It's just what Mirror People do. Mimic. Absorb. Control. Desperate to ignore what he is, 'Paul' represses his inhuman traits and stays far away from others of his kind.
But breeding season for Mirror People comes around every seven years, inducing an involuntary sociopathic state...and it's time for Paul to go into heat. Now unable to avoid the reality of what he truly is, Paul has a mental breakdown, goes on a cross-country road trip...and runs afoul of something far, far more inhuman and dangerous than himself.
My Name Isn't Paul weaves an emotionally raw story about an eldritch being struggling to retain his humanity in the face of impossible odds, while grieving the loss of his only friend, and also dealing with the existential crisis of becoming a parent.
A cosmic horror tale like nothing you've ever read before.
Fervor
by Meg Smitherman
has called to her all her life, but she could never reply. . .
Midonia, a freelance interplanetary transporter, is on thin ice after a fatal accident on the job. So she doesn't argue when she's given the tedious task of flying devout Sister Irena to a remote fringe planet, where a tiny religious colony worships a strange deity called Anguish.
Until now.
When a solar flare grounds her ship, Midonia finds herself stuck with the cult-like sisters. Even worse, he comes to her in the night, his familiar voice louder than ever. He invades her mind with his hunger, sparking a ravenous obsession that will be near-impossible to escape.
The Guy Sure Looks Like Plant Food To Me
by Santana Knox
♪ ♬ THE FLOWERS THAT KILL IN THE SPRING - TRA - LA - LA ♬ ♪
From the best-selling author of Heartless Heathens, TGSLLPFTM is a killer rom-com, feel-good, magical short story about fated love blooming in the most unexpected of places.
I'VE GIVEN HER SUNSHINE
I've given her dirt
She's given me much more
Than I ever deserved.
I'm begging you sweetly
I'm down on my knees
Oh, please,
KILL FOR ME
TGSLLPFTM Is a novella inspired by Roger Corman's The Little Shop of Horrors
No Way Apart
by Santana Knox
"She is the marrow in my bones, without her I am hollow."From the Amazon best selling author of "Heartless Heathens" and "No Way Out" comes the final conclusion to the "Darkling, beloved." Series:
THERE IS NO WAY INTO HER MIND
There has never been.
There is only us;
Darkling
Beloved
Soulmates
Her mind is the asylum, and we have delved too deep into the darkness to see light again.
There is no way out: not when the odds are against us. There is no way back: not when the prison is her own creation.
For bette or worse, in sickness, in health, to love, to cherish
Not parted, even in death
That is my solemn vow.
No Way Apart is Book 3 in the Darkling, beloved.collection, completing the Dark Horror/Romance that begs the question: "what if love could kill us?". This is a toxic pairing that cares only about the survival of their relationship above all. No sin goes unchecked between this couple, please leave your sanity with the Kindle overlords before diving in and please, for the love of your own mother, check the content warnings.
Eat, Slay, Love: A Demon and Slayer Paranormal Romance Novella
by Ana Kirk Shaw
I'm demon slayer royalty desperate for my first kill in years. He's the demon I'm hunting through Manhattan... and the forbidden temptation who proves I'm spectacularly bad at my job.
I'm a terrible demon slayer-I need a kill, or else my legendary slayer family might finally decide I'm not worthy of the name.
So when I catch one feeding in a dark alley, I attack. But something is... wrong.
He escapes. (Certainly not because I let him.)
So I hunt him. Jonah.
Except Jonah isn't... behaving like a demon. He protects people who can never know what he is and somehow makes me feel safe. Worse, the truth about what he was taking from that human in the alley-and the impossible magic he awakens in me-shatters everything slayers have believed about demons for centuries.
I should kill him anyway.
Instead, I save his life... and end up in his bed.
So, the hunt is going great.
Now I'm hiding Jonah from the people who raised me to kill him. But when something far more dangerous begins hunting the people he'd die to protect, neither of us can stop it alone.
I was trained to put a blade through Jonah's heart. Instead, I'm going to give him mine.