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To the long tradition of eldritch horror pioneered and refined by writers such as H.P. Lovecraft, Peter Straub, and Thomas Ligotti, comes Laird Barron, an author whose literary voice invokes the grotesque, the devilish, and the perverse with rare intensity and astonishing craftsmanship. Collected here for the first time are nine terrifying tales of cosmic horror, including the World Fantasy Award-nominated novella "The Imago Sequence," the International Horror Guild Award-nominated "Proboscis," and the never-before published "Procession of the Black Sloth." Together, these stories, each a masterstroke of craft and imaginative irony, form a shocking cycle of distorted evolution, encroaching chaos, and ravenous insectoid hive-minds hidden just beneath the seemingly benign surface of the Earth.

Table of Contents:

• 1 - Old Virginia - (2003) - novelette
• 19 - Shiva, Open Your Eye - (2001) - short story
• 31 - Procession of the Black Sloth - novella
• 77 - Bulldozer - (2004) - novelette
• 101 - Proboscis - (2005) - novelette
• 119 - Hallucigenia - (2006) - novella
• 169 - Parallax - (2005) - short story
• 189 - The Royal Zoo Is Closed - (2006) - short story
• 199 - The Imago Sequence - (2005) - novella

Clark Ashton Smith's influential Zothique sequence of stories, the majority of which were orignally published during the 1930s, collected in a signle volume. Number 16 in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, edited by Lin Carter.

Contents:

• About Zothique, and Clark Ashton Smith: When the World Grows Old - essay by Lin Carter
• Map of Zothique
• Zothique (1951 poem)
• Xeethra (1934)
• Necromancy in Naat (1936)
• The Empire of the Necromancers (1932)
• The Master of the Crabs (1948)
• The Death of Ilalotha (1937)
• The Weaver in the Vault (1934)
• The Witchcraft of Ulua (1934)
• The Charnel God (1934)
• The Dark Eidolon (1935)
• Morthylla (1953)
• The Black Abbot of Puthuum (1936)
• The Tomb-Spawn (1934)
• The Last Hieroglyph (1935)
• The Isle of the Torturers (1933)
• The Garden of Adompha (1938)
• The Voyage of King Euvoran (1933)
• Epilogue: The Sequence of the Zothique Tales - essay by Lin Carter

The phenomenal bestseller that inspired the classic motion picture.

After attacking Devil's Reef in 1928, the U.S. government rounded up the people of Innsmouth and took them to the desert, far from their ocean, their Deep One ancestors, and their sleeping god Cthulhu. Only Aphra and Caleb Marsh survived the camps, and they emerged without a past or a future.

The government that stole Aphra's life now needs her help. FBI agent Ron Spector believes that Communist spies have stolen dangerous magical secrets from Miskatonic University, secrets that could turn the Cold War hot in an instant, and hasten the end of the human race.

Aphra must return to the ruins of her home, gather scraps of her stolen history, and assemble a new family to face the darkness of human nature.

Includes bonus Aphra Marsh novelette "The Litany of Earth".

WFA nominated novella. It originally appeared in the anthology Night Visions 3 (1986), edited by George R.R. Martin.

It was the basis for the 1987 movie Hellraiser.

Frank Cotton's insatiable appetite for the dark pleasures of pain led him to the puzzle of Lemarchand's box, and from there, to a death only a sick-minded soul could invent. But his brother's love-crazed wife, Julia, has discovered a way to bring Frank back-though the price will be bloody and terrible... and there will certainly be hell to pay.

Rosemary Woodhouse and her struggling actor husband Guy move into the Bramford, an old New York City apartment building with an ominous reputation and mostly elderly residents. Neighbors Roman and Minnie Castavet soon come nosing around to welcome the Woodhouses to the building, and despite Rosemary's reservations about their eccentricity and the weird noises that she keeps hearing, her husband takes a special shine to them. Shortly after Guy lands a plum Broadway role, Rosemary becomes pregnant, and the Castavets start taking a special interest in her welfare. As the sickened Rosemary becomes increasingly isolated, she begins to suspect that the Castavets' circle is not what it seems.

This mind-blowing classic conjures a universe of unrelenting sexual degradation and horror. Private dick Herald Childe is sent a snuff movie of his partner being hideously murdered. His pursuit of the killers leads him into a waking nightmare of sexual brutality and supernatural bestiality, as he becomes entangled with sex-starved she-ghosts, libidinous snake-women, a filthy human sow, and a she-creature who gives birth to an ectoplasmic simulacrum of Satanic child-killer Gilles de Rais.

Strange things exist on the periphery of our existence, haunting us from the darkness looming beyond our firelight. Black magic, weird cults and worse things loom in the shadows. The Children of Old Leech have been with us from time immemorial. And they love us...

Donald Miller, geologist and academic, has walked along the edge of a chasm for most of his nearly eighty years, leading a charmed life between endearing absent-mindedness and sanity-shattering realization. Now, all things must converge. Donald will discover the dark secrets along the edges, unearthing savage truths about his wife Michelle, their adult twins, and all he knows and trusts. For Donald is about to stumble on the secret of The Croning.

For aeons, the forces of darkness had tampered from afar with the earth and its inhabitants, until, in the ominously near future, Theron Ware, Doctor of Theology and Black Sorcerer of fiendish powers, conjures the fallen angels into the world of the flesh to deal more directly with those who would enlist the aid of the Evil One.

Retained by shadowy megalomaniac industrialist Baines to assassinate the Governor of California, Theron finds the means to unleash the demons of the underworld for one night of apocalyptic horror - to reign unopposed over heaven and earth, or to fall before the magic of the Monk of Monte Albano.

Sturgeon and Hugo Award nominated novella.

People move to New York looking for magic and nothing will convince them it isn't there.

Charles Thomas Tester hustles to put food on the table, keep the roof over his father's head, from Harlem to Flushing Meadows to Red Hook. He knows what magic a suit can cast, the invisibility a guitar case can provide, and the curse written on his skin that attracts the eye of wealthy white folks and their cops. But when he delivers an occult tome to a reclusive sorceress in the heart of Queens, Tom opens a door to a deeper realm of magic, and earns the attention of things best left sleeping.

A storm that might swallow the world is building in Brooklyn. Will Black Tom live to see it break?

A chilling thriller that brilliantly blends domestic drama, psychological suspense, and a touch of modern horror, reminiscent of Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, John Ajvide Lindqvist's Let the Right One In, and Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House.

The lives of the Barretts, a normal suburban New England family, are torn apart when fourteen-year-old Marjorie begins to display signs of acute schizophrenia.

To her parents' despair, the doctors are unable to stop Marjorie's descent into madness. As their stable home devolves into a house of horrors, they reluctantly turn to a local Catholic priest for help. Father Wanderly suggests an exorcism; he believes the vulnerable teenager is the victim of demonic possession. He also contacts a production company that is eager to document the Barretts' plight. With John, Marjorie's father, out of work for more than a year and the medical bills looming, the family agrees to be filmed, and soon find themselves the unwitting stars of The Possession, a hit reality television show. When events in the Barrett household explode in tragedy, the show and the shocking incidents it captures become the stuff of urban legend.

Fifteen years later, a bestselling writer interviews Marjorie's younger sister, Merry. As she recalls those long ago events that took place when she was just eight years old, long-buried secrets and painful memories that clash with what was broadcast on television begin to surface--and a mind-bending tale of psychological horror is unleashed, raising vexing questions about memory and reality, science and religion, and the very nature of evil.

The story of an adventure in time and space that spans all of creation. A building, constructed across an invisible chasm of space-time, fated to witness the very end of the world, is waiting with open doors for anyone who dares to enter it.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: "And Yet": The Antinomies of William Hope Hodgson - essay by China Miéville
• The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" - (1907) - novel
• The House on the Borderland - (1908) - novel
• The Ghost Pirates - (1909) - novel
• The Night Land - (1912) - novel
• The Hog - (1947) - novelette

Built on the Upper West Side, the elegant Breviary claims a regal history. But despite 14B's astonishingly low rental price, the recent tragedy within its walls has frightened away all potential tenants . . . except for Audrey Lucas.

No stranger to tragedy at thirty-two-a survivor of a fatherless childhood and a mother's hopeless dementia- Audrey is obsessively determined to make her own way in a city that often strangles the weak. But is it something otherworldly or Audrey's own increasing instability that's to blame for the dark visions that haunt her . . . and for the voice that demands that she build a door? A door it would be true madness to open . . .

In upstate New York, in the woods around Woodstock, Dutchman's Creek flows out of the Ashokan Reservoir. Steep-banked, fast-moving, it offers the promise of fine fishing, and of something more, a possibility too fantastic to be true. When Abe and Dan, two widowers who have found solace in each other's company and a shared passion for fishing, hear rumors of the Creek, and what might be found there, the remedy to both their losses, they dismiss it as just another fish story. Soon, though, the men find themselves drawn into a tale as deep and old as the Reservoir. It's a tale of dark pacts, of long-buried secrets, and of a mysterious figure known as Der Fisher: the Fisherman. It will bring Abe and Dan face to face with all that they have lost, and with the price they must pay to regain it.

On a Midwestern campus in the 1960s, a charismatic guru and his young acolytes perform a secret ritual in a local meadow. What happens is a mystery-all that remains is a gruesomely dismembered body and the shattered souls of all who were present. Forty years later, one man seeks to learn about that horrifying night, and to do so he'll have to force those involved to examine the unspeakable events that have haunted them ever since.

Unfolding through their individual stories, A Dark Matter is an electric, chilling, and unpredictable novel that proves Peter Straub to be the master of modern horror.

When guerrilla documentary maker, Kyle Freeman, is asked to shoot a film on the notorious cult known as the Temple of the Last Days, it appears his prayers have been answered. The cult became a worldwide phenomenon in 1975 when there was a massacre including the death of its infamous leader, Sister Katherine. Kyle's brief is to explore the paranormal myths surrounding an organization that became a testament to paranoia, murderous rage, and occult rituals. The shoot's locations take him to the cult's first temple in London, an abandoned farm in France, and a derelict copper mine in the Arizonan desert where The Temple of the Last Days met its bloody end. But when he interviews those involved in the case, those who haven't broken silence in decades, a series of uncanny events plague the shoots. Troubling out-of-body experiences, nocturnal visitations, the sudden demise of their interviewees and the discovery of ghastly artifacts in their room make Kyle question what exactly it is the cult managed to awaken - and what is its interest in him?