The Scarab, T. P. Grimbard’s first novel, releases today on Amazon in Kindle ebook and 6×9 illustrated paperback.
A courier ducks a storm and climbs through an open window into an old house in Flatbush. He leaves at dawn with no bruises, no memory of choosing to stay, and a certainty he can’t shake. Something old and patient has just decided he’s worth the wait.
What Is The Scarab About?
The Scarab is a slow-burn occult horror novel told through fractured testimony — a courier, a private investigator, a hacker, and a handful of sources, each holding a piece of something none of them can prove and none of them can forget. No single narrator has the whole picture. That’s the structure the book runs on.
Half a world from Flatbush, an archaeologist in Cairo dies under a wall that came down a little too conveniently — the same week she refused to let a corporation move faster than the truth. A private security firm starts asking questions it won’t explain. A woman in Manhattan with more power than she’s comfortable holding starts receiving things she never ordered. A fifty-five-year-old private investigator, sharper than the diagnosis she’s been ignoring, starts pulling a thread that was never meant to be found.
Something has been keeping accounts for a very long time. It doesn’t take. It gives — hands its inheritance to whoever’s standing closest when the hour comes, whether they want it or not. Once you’re carrying it, there’s no putting it down.
Who Should Read The Scarab?
The Scarab is built for readers who want dread that builds in silence and doesn’t explain itself, told across institutions instead of a single haunted house. If you liked the patient, testimony-driven horror of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Silver Nitrate or Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory, this book is aimed at the same reading experience.
Three things define the book’s approach to horror:
- Restraint over reveal. The threat is never fully explained on the page — the book trusts the reader to sit with what’s withheld.
- Institutions as the real monster. The story is as much about what corporations, security firms, and private wealth do to bury the unbearable as it is about the entity at the center of it.
- Colonial theft with a body count. The Cairo thread ties the supernatural inheritance directly to what gets looted, buried, and quietly re-buried by the people with the resources to make it disappear.
Where Can You Buy The Scarab?
The Scarab is available today on Amazon in Kindle ebook and 6×9 illustrated paperback, and it’s enrolled in Kindle Unlimited. Because it’s part of KDP Select, the ebook is Amazon-exclusive — it will not appear on Gumroad or any other storefront while enrolled.
| Format | Where | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Kindle ebook | Amazon | $5.99 |
| 6×9 illustrated paperback | Amazon | $16.99 |
From Chapter One:
“I stood in the front room with my back to the window I’d come through and waited for my eyes to adjust and listened the way you listen in a space when you need to know if it’s actually empty. There’s a quality to empty that isn’t just quiet — the air hasn’t had a reason to move recently. Apartments where nobody’s been for a while have it. This house had the opposite.”
Who Is T. P. Grimbard?
T. P. Grimbard writes horror and dark fiction for readers who like their dread slow and their explanations withheld. The name splits two instincts down the middle: the Bard, a lifelong tabletop storyteller who’s run more campaigns than can be counted, and the Grim, the part that can’t walk past a haunted house without going in. Research trips to genuinely unexplained places — cemeteries, ghost tours, one particularly bad night in Galveston — tend to end up in the work in ways that are only partly fiction.
The Scarab is Grimbard’s first novel, following the short story collection There Be Monsters: Then and Now, its sequel There Be Monsters: Deep Down, and the standalone story Rabbit Season.
If institutions quietly burying something unbearable is what hooked you, The Collected Strange Stories is a natural next read — a similar appetite for dread that comes from what a system chooses not to see.
Get The Collected Strange Stories on Amazon
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