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Carole and her lover thought they had committed the perfect crime, murdering Carole's abusive husband and making it look like an accident. Unfortunately there was a witness, someone more twisted than they are, with plans for a killing spree of his own.

This novel contains graphic content and is recommended for regular readers of horror novels.

New York City. A Hot summer evening.

A tanker on an unscheduled run lies like a huge cracked egg in the middle of Broadway, its unidentified spill spread wide across the street.

Its smell is cloyingly sweet. And it's everywhere

Night now, and Tom Braun is sitting in his neighborhood bar.

His wife and his boy are at home in their apartment just a few blocks away.

He's had yet another fight with her and is looking to steady his nerves and drown his sorrows and maybe-- if he's lucky--snaga little something on the side. It's happened before.

Earlier he'd witnesses a girl go suddenly and violently berserk at a rooftop party in his highrise apartment building. He assumed it was nothing but a bizarre isolated incident.

But the women in the bar are very strange tonight.

When her lover betrays her and dumps her coldly, Dora's mind begins to crack. She tracks down her old high school love to recapture what she might have had. He's married with a family, but Dora isn't about to let that stop her...

This landmark collection gathers more than thirty of Jack Ketchum's most thrilling stories. "Gone" and "The Box" were honored with the prestigious Bram Stoker Award. Whether you are already familiar with Ketchum's unique brand of suspense or are experiencing it for the first time, here is a book no aficionado of fear can do without. This novel contains graphic content and is recommended for regular readers of horror novels.

The old man hears them before he sees them, three boys coming over the hill, disturbing the peace by the river where he's fishing. He smells the gun oil too, too much oil on a brand new shotgun. These aren't hunters, they're rich kids who don't care about the river and the fish and the old man. Or his dog. Red is the name of the old man's dog, his best friend in the world. And when the boys shoot the dog - for nothing, for simple spite - he sees red, like a mist before his eyes. And before the whole thing is done there'll be more red. Red for blood...

Be fair warned... Right To Life is not for the faint of heart. It is the story of a woman, Sara Foster, three months pregnant, who is kidnapped in front of an abortion clinic. Her kidnappers somehow know every detail of her life, and inform her that she is now their slave. They graphically demonstrate to Sara what will happen if she chooses to disobey them. Having been brutalized and degraded beyond her most horrifying nightmares, Sara's captures then inform her of their plans. For both her and her baby.

This story is based on facts.

Also includes "Brave Girl" and "Returns."

Greece. Ancient land of mystery, legend and myth. It is here that businessman Jordan Chase visits a historic tomb, only to experience a dark vision of the future. And it is here, amidst the beauty of the landscape, that Lelia, a gorgeous but dangerous woman, befriends a group of tourists... to lure them into a nightmare of pain and terror. She lives to seduce and destroy, to feed off her human prey. Lelia is more than myth, more than superstition. Lelia is deadly.

Lydia McCloud meets Arthur Danse at a wedding party in Plymouth, NH, and she thinks he's a man she could grow to love. Arthur sees things differently. In Lydia, he sees the sort of woman people always want to protect. he decides he's going to show her "she wouldn't always be protected." Once their only child, Robert, is born, Arthur's behavior worsens. When the courts become involved, the nightmare really begins. This scathing novel is an indictment of a justice system that makes a mockery of its very name.

Winner of the 1994 Stoker award for Superior Achievement in Short Fiction.

This short story originally appeared in Cemetery Dance #20, Spring 1994. It has subsequently appeared in a number of other anthologies and collections.

This collection includes the following stories:

• Introduction (The Exit at Toledo Blade Boulevard) by Richard Laymon
• Chain Letter
• The Rifle
• The Exit at Toledo Blade Boulevard
• If Memory Serves
• Snakes
• The Great San Diego Sleasy Bimbo Massacre
• To Suit The Crime
• The Rose
• When the Penny Drops
• Mail Order
• Winter Child
• The Visitor
• Henry Miller
• Push

Suburbia. Shady, tree-lined streets, well-tended lawns and cozy homes. A nice, quiet place to grow up. Unless you are teenage Meg or her crippled sister, Susan. On a dead-end street, in the dark damp basement of the Chandler house, Meg and Susan are left captive to the savage whims and rages of a distant aunt who is rapidly descending into madness. It is a madness that infects all three of her sons and finally the entire neighborhood. Only one troubled boy stands hesitantly between Meg and Susan and their, cruel, torturous deaths. A boy with a very adult decision to make.

It was the summer of 1965. Ray, Tim, and Jennifer were just three teenage friends hanging out in the campgrounds, drinking a little. But Tim and Jennifer didn't know what their friend Ray had in mind. And if they'd known, they wouldn't have thought he was serious. Then they saw what he did to the two girls at the neighboring campsite--and knew he was dead serious.

Four years later, the 60s were drawing to a close. No one ever charged Ray with the murders in the campgrounds, but there was one cop determined to make him pay. Ray figured he was in the clear. Tim and Jennifer thought the worst was behind them, that the horrors were all in the past. They were wrong. The worst was yet to come.

A beautiful New York editor retreats to a lonely cabin on a hill in the quiet Maine beach town of Dead River, during the off season; awaiting her sister and friends. Nearby, a savage human family with a taste for flesh lurks in the darkening woods, watching, waiting for the moon to rise and night to fall. This novel appears for the first time in its original unexpurgated of the authors vision. The original publisher refused to publish it in this version in 1980. Now available only in this edition with an introduction by Douglas E. Winter.

The local sheriff of Dead River, Maine, thought he had killed them off ten years ago - a primitive, cave-dwelling tribe of cannibalistic savages. But somehow the clan survived. To breed. To hunt. To kill. To eat. And now the peaceful residents of this isolated town are fighting for their lives.

The Woman is the powerful story of the last survivor of a feral tribe of cannibals who have terrorized the east coast of Maine into Canada for years now. Badly wounded in a battle with police, she takes refuge in a cave overlooking the sea. Christopher Cleek is a slick, amoral--and unstable--country lawyer who, out hunting one day, sees her bathing in a stream. Fascinated, he follows her to her cave. Cleek has many dark secrets and to these he'll add another. He will capture her, lock her in his fruit celler, and tame her, civilize her. To this end he'ii enlist his long-suffering wife Belle, his teenage son and daughter Brian and Peg, and even his little girl Darlin', to aid him. So the question becomes, who is more savage? The hunter or the game?