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A Monster Calls

Patrick Ness

An unflinching, darkly funny, and deeply moving story of a boy, his seriously ill mother, and an unexpected monstrous visitor.

At seven minutes past midnight, thirteen-year-old Conor wakes to find a monster outside his bedroom window. But it isn't the monster Conor's been expecting-- he's been expecting the one from his nightmare, the nightmare he's had nearly every night since his mother started her treatments. The monster in his backyard is different. It's ancient. And wild. And it wants something from Conor. Something terrible and dangerous. It wants the truth. From the final idea of award-winning author Siobhan Dowd-- whose premature death from cancer prevented her from writing it herself-- Patrick Ness has spun a haunting and darkly funny novel of mischief, loss, and monsters both real and imagined.

The Tragedy of Macbeth

William Shakespeare

Macbeth is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy and it's writing was, perhaps, finished in 1606.

It tells the story of a brave Scottish general named Macbeth who receives a prophecy from a trio of witches that one day he will become King of Scotland. Consumed by ambition and spurred to action by his wife, Macbeth murders King Duncan and takes the throne for himself. He is then wracked with guilt and paranoia, and he soon becomes a tyrannical ruler as he is forced to commit more and more murders to protect himself from enmity and suspicion. The bloodbath and consequent civil war swiftly take Macbeth and Lady Macbeth into the realms of arrogance, madness, and death.

House of Leaves

Mark Z. Danielewski

Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth -- musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies -- the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children.

Now, for the first time, this astonishing novel is made available in book form, complete with the original colored words, vertical footnotes, and newly added second and third appendices.

The story remains unchanged, focusing on a young family that moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.

Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story -- of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Patrick Suskind

The year is 1738; the place, Paris. A baby is born under a fish-monger's bloody table in a marketplace, and abandoned. Orphaned, passed over to the monks as a charity case, already there is something in the aura of the tiny infant that is unsettling. No one will look after him; he is somehow too demanding, and, even more disturbing, something is missing: as his wet nurse tries to explain, he doesn't smell the way a baby should smell; indeed, he has no scent at all.

Slowly, as we watch Jean-Baptiste Grenouille cling stubbornly to life, we begin to realize that a monster is growing before our eyes. With mounting unease, yet hypnotized, we see him explore his powers and their effect on the world around him. For this dark and sinister boy who has no smell himself possesses an absolute sense of smell, and with it he can read the world to discover the hidden truths that elude ordinary men. He can smell the very composition of objects, and their history, and where they have been, he has no need of the light, and darkness is not dark to him, because nothing can mask the odors of the universe.

As he leaves childhood behind and comes to understand his terrible uniqueness, his obsession becomes the quest to identify, and then to isolate, the most perfect scent of all, the scent of life itself.

At first, he hones his powers, learning the ancient arts of perfume-making until the exquisite fragrances he creates are the rage of Paris, and indeed Europe. Then, secure in his mastery of these means to an end, he withdraws into a strange and agonized solitude, waiting, dreaming, until the morning when he wakes, ready to embark on his monstrous quest: to find and extract from the most perfect living creatures-the most beautiful young virgins in the land- that ultimate perfume which alone can make him, too, fully human. As his trail leads him, at an ever-quickening pace, from his savage exile to the heart of the country and then back to Paris, we are caught up in a rising storm of terror and mortal sensual conquest until the frenzy of his final triumph explodes in all its horrifying consequences.

Told with dazzling narrative brilliance and the haunting power of a grown-up fairy tale, Perfume is one of the most remarkable novels of the last fifty years.

From Hell

Alan Moore
Eddie Campbell

FROM HELL is the story of Jack the Ripper, perhaps the most infamous man in the annals of murder. Detailing the events leading up to the Whitechapel killings and the cover-up that followed, FROM HELL is a meditation on the mind of a madman whose savagery and violence gave birth to the 20th century. The serialized story, presented in its entirety in this volume, has garnered widespread attention from critics and scholars. Often regarded as one of the most significant graphic novels ever published, FROM HELL combines meticulous research with educated speculation, resulting in a masterpiece of historical fiction both compelling and terrifying.

Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe

This single volume brings together all of Poe's stories and poems, and illuminates the diverse and multifaceted genius of one of the greatest and most influential figures in American literary history.

Table of Contents

  • "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" [Chevalier Dupin] (1841) novelette
  • The Mystery of Marie Rogêt (non-genre) [Chevalier Dupin] (1842) novella
  • "The Black Cat" (1843) short story
  • The Gold-Bug (non-genre) (1843) novella
  • "Ligeia" (1838) short story
  • "A Descent Into the Maelström" (1841) short story
  • "The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843) short story
  • "The Purloined Letter" (non-genre) [Chevalier Dupin] (1844) novelette
  • "The Assignation" (The Visionary) [Tales of the Folio Club] (1834) short story
  • "MS. Found in a Bottle [Tales of the Folio Club] (1833) short story
  • "William Wilson" (1839) short story
  • "Berenice" (1835) short story
  • "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839) novelette
  • "The Cask of Amontillado [Fortunato] (1846) short story
  • "The Pit and the Pendulum" (1842) short story
  • "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" (1844) short story
  • "The Man of the Crowd" (1840) short story
  • "Morella" (1835) short story
  • "Thou Art the Man" (1844) short story
  • "The Oblong Box" (1844) short story
  • "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion" (1839) short story
  • "Metzengerstein [Tales of the Folio Club] (1832) short story
  • "The Masque of the Red Death" (1845) short story
  • "The Premature Burial" (1844) short story
  • "The Imp of the Perverse" (1845) short story
  • "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" (1845) short story
  • "Hop-Frog" (1850) short story
  • "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether" (1845) novelette
  • "The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq." (1844) short story
  • "How to Write a Blackwood Article" (1838) short story
  • "A Predicament" (1838) short story
  • "Mystification" (1837) short story
  • "Loss of Breath [Tales of the Folio Club] (1832) short story
  • "The Man That Was Used Up: A Tale of the Late Bugaboo and Kickapoo Campaign" (1839) short story
  • "Diddling: Considered as One of the Exact Sciences" (1843) essay
  • "The Angel of the Odd: An Extravaganza" (1844) short story
  • "Mellonta Tauta" (1849) short story
  • "The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade" (1845) short story
  • "X-ing a Paragrab" (1849) short story
  • "The Business Man" (1840) short story
  • "A Tale of Jerusalem [Tales of the Folio Club] (1832) short story
  • "The Sphinx" (1846) short story
  • "Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling" (1840) short story
  • "Bon-Bon [Tales of the Folio Club] (1832) short story
  • "The Duc de L'Omelette [Tales of the Folio Club] (1832) short story
  • "Three Sundays in a Week" (1841) short story
  • "The Devil in the Belfry" (1839) short story
  • "Lionizing [Tales of the Folio Club] (1835) short story
  • "Some Words with a Mummy" (1845) short story
  • "The Spectacles" (1844) novelette
  • "Four Beasts in One: The Homo-Camelopard [Tales of the Folio Club] (1836) short story
  • "Never Bet the Devil Your Head: A Tale with a Moral" (1841) short story
  • "The Balloon-Hoax" (1844) short story
  • "Mesmeric Revelation" (1844) short story
  • "Eleonora" (1841) short story
  • The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall (1850) novella
  • "King Pest: A Tale Containing an Allegory" (1835) short story
  • "The Island of the Fay" (1841) short story
  • "The Oval Portrait" (1845) short story
  • "The Domain of Arnheim" (non-genre) (1842) short story
  • "Landor's Cottage" (non-genre) (1849) short story
  • "The Power of Words" (1845) short story
  • "The Colloquy of Monos and Una" (1841) short story
  • "Shadow—A Parable [Tales of the Folio Club] (1835) short story
  • "Silence—a Fable [Tales of the Folio Club] (1838) short story
  • "Von Kempelen and His Discovery" (1849) short story
  • "Narrative of A. Gordon Pym of Nantucket [Pym 1] (1966) novel
  • "Annabel Lee" (1849) poem
  • "Hymn" (1835) poem
  • "To My Mother" (1849) poem
  • "Fairy-Land" (1845) poem
  • "A Valentine" (1846) poem
  • "To Helen" (non-genre) (1831) poem
  • "Israfel" (1831) poem
  • "The City in the Sea" (1850) poem
  • "The Sleeper" (1841) poem
  • "Lenore" (1843) poem
  • "The Valley of Unrest" (1850) poem
  • "The Coliseum" (1833) poem
  • "Bridal Ballad: To —— ——" (1837) poem
  • "Sonnet to Zante" (1837) poem
  • "Sonnet — Silence" (1840) poem
  • "Dream-Land" (1844) poem
  • "Eulalie—A Song" (1845) poem
  • "To F——s S. O——d" (1850) poem
  • "To F——" (1835) poem
  • "The Raven" (1845) poem
  • "To M. L. S—" (1847) poem
  • "Ulalume" (1847) poem
  • "To —— ——" (Not long ago,...) (1848) poem
  • "To Helen" (1852) poem
  • "An Enigma" (1848) poem
  • "For Annie" (non-genre) (1849) poem
  • "The Bells" (1849) poem
  • "Eldorado" (1849) poem
  • "Stanzas" (1827) poem
  • "A Dream Within a Dream" (1849) poem
  • "A Dream" (1827) poem
  • "The Happiest Day, the Happiest Hour" (1827) poem
  • "Sonnet—To Science" (1829) poem
  • "The Lake: To —" (unknown)) poem
  • "Al Aaraaf" (1829) poem
  • "Romance" (1845) poem
  • "To the River ——" (1829) poem
  • "To ——" (The bowers whereat...) (1829) poem
  • "Tamerlane" (1827) poem
  • "To ——" (I heed not...) (1829) poem
  • "Dreams" (1827) poem
  • "To __ __" (I saw thee on the bridal day...) (1827) poem
  • "Spirits of the Dead" (1827) poem
  • "Evening Star" (1827) poem
  • "Serenade" (1833) poem
  • "Elizabeth" (1911) poem
  • "Imitation" (1827) poem
  • "Hymn to Aristogeiton and Harmodius" (1938) poem
  • "Scenes from "Politian": An Unpublished Drama" (1835) poem
  • "A Paean" (1831) poem
  • "To Isadore" (1845) poem
  • "Alone" (1875) poem
  • "To One in Paradise" (1834) poem
  • "Edgar Allan Poe—A Biographical Note" (1966) essay

Tales of Mystery and Imagination

Edgar Allan Poe

This collection of Poe's best stories contains all the terrifying and bewildering tales that characterise his work. As well as the Gothic horror of such famous stories as 'The Pit and the Pendulum', 'The Fall of the House of Usher', 'The Premature Burial' and 'The Tell-Tale Heart', all of Poe's Auguste Dupin stories are included. These are the first modern detective stories and include 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', 'The Mystery of Marie Roget' and 'The Purloined Letter'.

Table of Contents:

  • Ms. Found in a Bottle
  • Berenice
  • Morella
  • Some Passages in the Life of a Lion (Lionizing)
  • The Assignation
  • Bon-Bon
  • King Pest
  • Metzengerstein
  • Silence
  • A Descent into the Maelstrom
  • Ligeia
  • The Fall of the House of Usher
  • William Wilson
  • The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion
  • The Man of the Crowd
  • The Murders in the Rue Morgue
  • The Mystery of Marie Rogèt
  • The Colloquy of Monos and Una
  • The Masque of the Red Death
  • The Pit and the Pendulum
  • The Tell-Tale Heart
  • The Gold Bug
  • The Black Cat
  • The Spectacles
  • The Premature Burial
  • The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
  • The Oblong Box
  • The Cask of Amontillado
  • Landor's Cottage

The Last House on Needless Street

Catriona Ward

This is the story of a murderer. A stolen child. Revenge. This is the story of Ted, who lives with his daughter Lauren and his cat Olivia in an ordinary house at the end of an ordinary street.

All these things are true. And yet some of them are lies.

You think you know what's inside the last house on Needless Street. You think you've read this story before. But you're wrong. In the dark forest at the end of Needless Street, something lies buried. But it's not what you think...

Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë

Wuthering Heights is a wild, passionate story of the intense and almost demonic love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, a foundling adopted by Catherine's father. After Mr Earnshaw's death, Heathcliff is bullied and humiliated by Catherine's brother Hindley and wrongly believing that his love for Catherine is not reciprocated, leaves Wuthering Heights, only to return years later as a wealthy and polished man. He proceeds to exact a terrible revenge for his former miseries.

The action of the story is chaotic and unremittingly violent, but the accomplished handling of a complex structure, the evocative descriptions of the lonely moorland setting and the poetic grandeur of vision combine to make this unique novel a masterpiece of English literature.

Misery

Stephen King

After an automobile accident, novelist Paul Sheldon meets his biggest fan. Annie Wilkes is his nurse-and captor. Now, she wants Paul to write his greatest work-just for her. She has a lot of ways to spur him on. One is a needle. Another is an ax. And if they don't work, she can get really nasty...

The Haunting of Hill House

Shirley Jackson

First published in 1959, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House has been hailed as a perfect work of unnerving terror. It is the story of four seekers who arrive at a notoriously unfriendly pile called Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of a "haunting"; Theodora, his lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, a friendless, fragile young woman well acquainted with poltergeists; and Luke, the future heir of Hill House. At first, their stay seems destined to be merely a spooky encounter with inexplicable phenomena. But Hill House is gathering its powers-and soon it will choose one of them to make its own.

Doctor Faustus

Christopher Marlowe

One of the most durable myths in Western culture, the story of Faust tells of a learned German doctor who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and power. Early enactments of Faust's damnation were often the raffish fare of clowns and low comedians. But the young Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) recognized in the story of Faust's temptation and fall the elements of tragedy.

In his epic treatment of the Faust legend, Marlowe retains much of the rich phantasmagoria of its origins. There are florid visions of an enraged Lucifer, dueling angels, the Seven Deadly Sins, Faustus tormenting the Pope, and his summoning of the spirit of Alexander the Great. But the playwright created equally powerful scenes that invest the work with tragic dignity, among them the doomed man's calling upon Christ to save him and his ultimate rejection of salvation for the embrace of Helen of Troy.

With immense poetic skill, and psychological insight that foreshadowed the later work of Shakespeare and the Jacobean playwrights, Marlowe created in Dr. Faustus one of the first true tragedies in English. Vividly dramatic, rich in poetic grandeur, this classic play remains a robust and lively exemplar of the glories of Elizabethan drama.

The Red Tree

CaitlĂ­n R. Kiernan

Sarah Crowe left Atlanta, and the remnants of a tumultuous relationship, to live alone in an old house in rural Rhode Island. Within its walls she discovers an unfinished manuscript written by the house's former tenant-a parapsychologist obsessed with the ancient oak growing on a desolate corner of the property. And as the gnarled tree takes root in her imagination, Sarah risks her health and her sanity to unearth a revelation planted centuries ago...

The Wasp Factory

Iain M. Banks

"Two years after I killed Blyth, I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different reasons and more fundamental reasons than I'd disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did my young cousin Esmeralda, more or less on a whim. That's my score to date. Three. I haven't killed anybody for years, and don't intend to ever again. It was just a stage I was going through."

What Moves the Dead

Sworn Soldier: Book 1

T. Kingfisher

A gripping and atmospheric retelling of Edgar Allan Poe's classic "The Fall of the House of Usher."

When Alex Easton, a retired soldier, receives word that their childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying, they race to the ancestral home of the Ushers in the remote countryside of Ruritania.

What they find there is a nightmare of fungal growths and possessed wildlife, surrounding a dark, pulsing lake. Madeline sleepwalks and speaks in strange voices at night, and her brother Roderick is consumed with a mysterious malady of the nerves.

Aided by a redoubtable British mycologist and a baffled American doctor, Alex must unravel the secret of the House of Usher before it consumes them all.

Needful Things

Stephen King

In Castle Rock, Maine, Leland Gaunt is a stranger. He runs a shop called Needful Things, where there's something for everyone-and a price for everyone, too. For Gaunt, the pleasure of doing business lies in seeing how much people will pay for their most secret desires. When two townspeople oppose him, it becomes an epic clash of good vs. evil.

Exquisite Corpse

Poppy Z. Brite

To serial slayer Andrew Compton, murder is an art, the most intimate art. After feigning his own death to escape from prison, Compton makes his way to the United States with the sole ambition of bringing his "art" to new heights. Tortured by his own perverse desires, and drawn to possess and destroy young boys, Compton inadvertently joins forces with Jay Byrne, a dissolute playboy who has pushed his "art" to limits even Compton hadn't previously imagined. Together, Compton and Byrne set their sights on an exquisite young Vietnamese-American runaway, Tran, whom they deem to be the perfect victim.

Swiftly moving from the grimy streets of London's Piccadilly Circus to the decadence of the New Orleans French Quarter, and punctuated by rants from radio talk show host Lush Rimbaud, a.k.a. Luke Ransom, Tran's ex-lover, who is dying of AIDS and who intends to wreak ultimate havoc before leaving this world, Exquisite Corpse unfolds into a labyrinth of murder and love. Ultimately all four characters converge on a singular bloody night after which their lives will be irrevocably changed -- or terminated.

Poppy Z. Brite dissects the landscape of torture and invites us into the mind of a killer. Exquisite Corpse confirms Brite as a writer who defies categorization. It is a novel for those who dare trespass where the sacred and profane become one.

Carmilla

Ron Miller Science Fiction Classics: Book 63

Sheridan Le Fanu

Carmilla is a Gothic novella by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. First published in 1871 as a serial narrative in The Dark Blue, it tells the story of a young woman's susceptibility to the attentions of a female vampire named Carmilla. Carmilla predates Bram Stoker's Dracula by 26 years, and has been adapted many times for cinema.

Generation Loss

Cass Neary: Book 1

Elizabeth Hand

Cass Neary made her name in the seventies as a photographer embedded in the burgeoning punk movement in New York City. Her pictures of the musicians and the hangers-on, the infamous, the damned, and the dead, earned her a brief moment of fame.

Thirty years later she is adrift, on her way down, and almost out when an old acquaintance sends her on a mercy gig to interview a famously reclusive photographer who lives on an island in Maine. When she arrives Down East, Cass stumbles across a decades-old mystery that is still claiming victims, and she finds one final shot at redemption.

Patricia Highsmith meets Patti Smith in this mesmerizing literary thriller.

The Turn of the Screw

Henry James

A very young woman's first job: governess for two weirdly beautiful, strangely distant, oddly silent children, Miles and Flora, at a forlorn estate haunted by a beckoning evil.

Half-seen figures who glare from dark towers and dusty windows- silent, foul phantoms who, day by day, night by night, come closer, ever closer. With growing horror, the helpless governess realizes the fiendish creatures want the children, seeking to corrupt their bodies, possess their minds, own their souls.

But worse - much worse - the governess discovers that Miles and Flora have no terror of the lurking evil. For they want the walking dead as badly as the dead want them.

The King in Yellow

Robert W. Chambers

With its strange, imaginative blend of horror, science fiction, romance and lyrical prose, Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow is a classic masterpiece of weird fiction. This series of vaguely connected stories is linked by the presence of a monstrous and suppressed book which brings fright, madness and spectral tragedy to all those who read it. An air of futility and doom pervade these pages like a sweet insidious poison. Dare you read it?

This collection has been called the most important book in American supernatural fiction between Poe and the moderns. H. P. Lovecraft, creator of the famed Cthulu mythos, whose own fiction was greatly influenced by this book stated that The King in Yellow 'achieves notable heights of cosmic fear'.

Table of Contents:

  • The Repairer of Reputations
  • The Mask
  • In the Court of the Dragon
  • The Yellow Sign
  • The Demoiselle d'Ys
  • The Prophets' Paradise
  • The Street Of The Four Winds
  • The Street of the First Shell
  • The Street of Our Lady of the Fields
  • Rue Barrée

The Ritual

Adam Nevill

It was the dead thing they found hanging from a tree that changed the trip beyond recognition. When four old University friends set off into the Scandinavian wilderness of the Arctic Circle, they aim to briefly escape the problems of their lives and reconnect. But when Luke, the only man still single and living a precarious existence, finds he has little left in common with his well-heeled friends, tensions rise. A shortcut meant to ease their hike turns into a nightmare scenario that could cost them their lives.

Lost, hungry, and surrounded by forest untouched for millennia, things couldn't possibly get any worse. But then they stumble across an old habitation. Ancient artefacts decorate the walls and there are bones scattered upon the floors. The residue of old rites for something that still exists in the forest. Something responsible for the bestial presence that follows their every step. And as the four friends stagger in the direction of salvation, they learn that death doesn't come easy among these ancient trees...