J.H. Markert Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

J.H. Markert is the pseudonym of the bestselling suspense & thriller, paranormal fiction, gothic, and horror novelist James Markert. Outside of his novel writing endeavors, Markert is a father of two, husband, and screenwriter from Louisville Kentucky. He has also been a tennis professional coach and player for more than two dozen years before he left it all behind in 2020 to become an author. In his earlier years, J.H. went to the University of Louisville where he got his History degree. He was one of the university’s most outstanding history majors which earned him a scholarship. He published The Nightmare Man, his debut novel in 2023 and has been writing ever since. He now has at least four titles under his writing pseudonym J.H. Markert.

As a child, J.H. Markert was brought up in a household where creativity was the order of the day. The arts in all their genres and variances were commonplace in his house which often stood out in the neighborhood with its stained glass windows and paintings on the wall. As such, it was not surprising that he would become an author as an adult. He published his debut novel The Requiem Rose as James Markert in 2010 with Sourcebooks. The novel garnered much critical acclaim and would win the IPPY Award. But what most people do not know is that before he made his name as a contemporary fiction novelist J.H. Markert was better known for his historical novels. Back then he used to write historical fiction that was on a variety of themes and topics. His works during his earlier years have run the gamut from World War I to Jekyll and Hyde, the Sixties and Prohibition to the Dust Bowl.

J.H. Markert currently makes his home in Louisville Kentucky from where he writes all his novels. Whenever he wants to feel like a writer, he usually heads to a coffee shop with a moody and dark basement or at least something with a long communal table. Since Markert has always lived near colleges, most of the coffee shops in which he writes his fiction are in public settings and have the student feel. Nonetheless, he has also written a lot of his novels in his house in the living room or on the kitchen island whenever he finds himself all alone. For the most part, he writes his novels starting from 9 am, which is when everyone has left the house.

J.H. Markert’s novel The Nightmare Man is a work that he published in 2023. It is best described as a chilling horror novel that combines Cassandra Khaw and T. Kingfisher to showcase the fine line between monstrosity and humanity. The work is set in the Blackwood mansion, a massive house over the hill and overlooking the small town of New Haven. This is the place the heir of the estate and bestselling novelist Ben Bookman decided to stay for the weekend, as he puts the finishing touches to The Scarecrow, his latest horror fiction work. However, things get interesting when the horror story begins happening in real life and Detective Mills arrives to find a horrific murder scene that eerily mirrors the first chapter of Bookman’s fiction work. Not long after, another family is killed and the detective will do anything to solve the crime, even as he starts to believe Ben could be behind the killings. The complication is that Ben has forgotten much of what happened on the night he completed his novel. As he digs deeper into the history of the expansive estate, he realizes he may have reawakened an ancient monster when he worked in his novel in his grandfather’s atrium.

J.H. Markert published Mister Lullaby his second novel in 2023. It is a blockbuster novel in which the author brings our darkest nightmares and dreams to life. The lead in the novel is Mister Lullaby who is living in a world in which the boundary between the world and the dark brutes from the other side has been weakening. Harrods Reach is a small town that has experienced the macabre, particularly inside the old and decrepit tunnel around which the town was built. When Sully Dupree a young boy gets injured and left in a coma inside the tunnel, the residents are determined to wall off the tunnel once and for all time. Still, Beth Gardner the Deputy Sheriff does not believe in the superstitions until she stumbles upon two corpses at the entrance of the tunnel. Both bodies have on them some strange cards on which are inscribed some ancient lullabies. When Sully briefly comes to, he says his mind has been taken hostage in Lalaland, on the other side of the tunnel. He has been imprisoned in the unfamiliar and grotesque world alongside hundreds of other coma patients. A few weeks later, it is evident that something is awakening in the tunnel that is trying to get through the thinning boundaries.

Sleep Tight is a work that J.H. Markert published in 2024. Proving that his previous two titles were not a fluke, the author tells the story of a character named Father Silence. It is a story that has been called a propulsive thriller similar to The Whisper Man and The Black Phone. Father Silence was once the terror of Twisted Tree, the rural town where he disguised himself as a priest and preyed on society’s most vulnerable members. Ultimately, the police discovered his House of Horrors which had one survivor and nineteen dead bodies. The survivor is a little boy who is sent to a hospital for the criminally insane. Twenty years later, Father Silence is dead but by the following morning, the man who made the original discovery is found murdered in mysterious circumstances. There is a new serial killer in town who calls himself the Outcast who has taken credit for the killing. Tess Claibourne, the daughter of the slain man is haunted by the resurgence of the serial killer’s legacy, even as she is horrified by the death of her father and her childhood trauma. At some point, Tess goes missing after she is taken by the Outcast who forces her to confront long-buried memories and worst fears.