Search Worlds Without End

Simon and Laura Armstrong's marriage is on the rocks. His drinking and abuse of prescription drugs are getting worse and blackouts and violence are occurring with greater frequency. Laura believes things are going to get better: Simon has just been appointed to an important post in the university's English department, the couple are adopting a daughter, and Simon has almost finished work on an important new book, The Cult of the Vampire. Knowing of Simon's vampire fixation, his friend Dr Charles Abbott introduces him to a patient of his, a beautiful and bewitching young woman named Stella Johnson, who is convinced she has been bitten by a vampire and can no longer see her reflection in a mirror. But Abbott cannot foresee the ultimate consequences of bringing Simon and Stella together, or the violence and tragedy that will ensue....

Zach is a computer hacker who looks like Edward Scissorhands, and Trevor, a comics artist, is traumatized by his father's murder of his mother and brother 20 years previously. Both on the run from their pasts, they end up as lovers in the town of Missing Mile.

In the French Quarter of New Orleans the Mardi Gras celebrations conceal a different group of pleasure-seekers. For Zillah, Molochai and Twig, the party has been going on for centuries, fuelled by sexual frenzy, green Chartreuse and innocent blood. Born in horror and brought up in suburban Maryland, Nothing has always suspected he's different from other teenagers - and when he has his first taste of human blood, he knows he is right. Ghost is the singer of the band Lost Souls. When Nothing is drawn into Zillah's fatal circle, Ghost has to decide whether to save the boy - or abandon him to his bloody birthright. "Lost Souls" is a dark, decadent and delicious work of fantasy from the mistress of modern horror.

Born over a century ago, Agyar was once a frivolous young man, before he found unwanted immortality in a woman's blood-red lips. Now he goes from woman to woman, and decade to decade, finding himself at last in an Midwestern college town, where he must choose between the seductions of salvation-and of destruction.

"Rising horror star"* Christopher Buehlman, author of The Lesser Dead, returns with a chilling and thrilling tale of dark evil lurking on the lonely, open road...

Bram Stoker, quoting the ballad "Lenore," said, "The dead travel fast."

Those words have never rung more true...

Remember that car that passed you near midnight on Route 66, doing 105 with its lights off? You wondered where it was going so quickly on that dark, dusty stretch of road, motor roaring, the driver glancing out the window as he blew by.

Did his greedy eyes shine silver like a coyote's? Did he make you feel like prey?

You can't remember now.

You just saw the founder of the Suicide Motor Club. Be grateful his brake lights never flashed. Be grateful his car was already full.

They roam America, littering the highways with smashed cars and bled-out bodies, a gruesome reflection of the unsettled sixties. But to anyone unlucky enough to meet them in the lonely hours of the night, they're just a blurry memory.

That is--to all but one...

Two years ago, they left a witness in the mangled wreck of her family car, her husband dead, her son taken. She remembers their awful faces, despite their tricks and glamours. And she's coming for them--her thirst for vengeance even more powerful than their hunger for blood.

On the deserted highways of America, the hunters are about to become the hunted...

In these exsanguinating stories, Ronald Chetwynd-Hayes masterfully reinvents the vampire genre as he introduces the reader to a cleaning woman who discovers she is working for Dracula's son; a couple trapped in a house created by the mind of a centuries-old vampire; a young boy whose ancestor is depressed by his undead existence; a creature of darkness that sucks the life-force from its victims, and the unusual offspring of a werewolf and a vampire who is threatened by an obsessed clergyman.

Contents:

• A Family Welcome - (1971) - short story by R. Chetwynd-Hayes
• Acquiring a Family - (1986) - novelette by R. Chetwynd-Hayes
• Amelia - (1980) - short story by R. Chetwynd-Hayes
• Birth - (1974) - short story by R. Chetwynd-Hayes
• Great-Grandad Walks Again - (1973) - short story by R. Chetwynd-Hayes
• Keep the Gaslight Burning - (1976) - short story by R. Chetwynd-Hayes
• Looking for Something to Suck - (1969) - short story by R. Chetwynd-Hayes
• Louis - (1987) - novelette by R. Chetwynd-Hayes
• My Mother Married a Vampire - (1978) - short story by R. Chetwynd-Hayes
• Rudolph - (1987) - novelette by R. Chetwynd-Hayes
• The Books of R. Chetwynd-Hayes - (1997) - essay by uncredited
• The Buck - (1980) - shortfiction by R. Chetwynd-Hayes
• The Fundamental Elemental - (1997) - short story by R. Chetwynd-Hayes
• The Labyrinth - (1974) - novelette by R. Chetwynd-Hayes
• The Sad Vampire - (1975) - short story by R. Chetwynd-Hayes
• The Vampire Stories of R. Chetwynd-Hayes - (1997) - interior artwork by Jim Pitts
• The Werewolf and the Vampire - (1975) - novelette by R. Chetwynd-Hayes
• Foreword: Never Beastly to Vampires - essay by Stephen Jones

An avid reader of Dracula and a fan of old Hammer horror films, Chris Callaway has always fantasized about becoming a vampire--and the idea of immortality is even more alluring now that he has been diagnosed with a terminal illness. So when a vampire appears at his apartment and offers him eternal life as one of the undead, Chris jumps at the opportunity.

But unexpected terrors await him in the world of the night. A new enemy, relentless and insatiable, is hunting vampires for his own evil purposes. And unless Chris can stop him, he will face a fate even worse than death...

One night in 1980, a man becomes a monster.

Haunted by his past, Travis Stillwell spends his nights searching out women in West Texas honky-tonks. What he does with them doesn't make him proud, just quiets the demons for a little while. But after Travis crosses paths one night with a mysterious pale-skinned girl, he wakes weak and bloodied in his cabover camper the next morning--with no sign of a girl, no memory of the night before.

Annabelle Gaskin spies the camper parked behind her motel and offers the cowboy a few odd jobs to pay his board. Travis takes her up on the offer, if only to buy time, to lay low and heal. By day, he mends the old motel, insinuating himself into the lives of Annabelle and her ten-year-old son. By night, in the cave of his camper, he fights an unspeakable hunger. Before long, Annabelle and her boy come to realize that this strange cowboy is not what he seems.

Half a state away, a grizzled Texas Ranger is hunting Travis for his past misdeeds, but what he finds will lead him to a revelation far more monstrous. A man of the law, he'll have to decide how far into the darkness he'll go for the sake of justice.

When these lives converge on a dusty autumn night, an old evil will find new life--and new blood.

A mysterious disease claims the world's children before bringing them back. To continue surviving, however, they need to ingest human blood. As the blood supply wanes, parents struggle and compete to keep their children alive. In the end, the only source left will be each other. For them, the ultimate question will be: How far would you go for someone you love?

From time immemorial they have stalked the night - Creatures of legend - or something all too real? For centuries people have whispered about the creatures of darkness, those who wear the guise of humans to prey upon their all-to-mortal kin, of those neither dead nor alive, who exist in a sort of immortal twilight and attain both the semblance and substance of life by drinking the blood of their helplessly mesmerized victims.

Here then are eighteen, original tales of vampires down through history, from the eras of ancient Greece and Rome up to the modern day, some traditionally horrifying, some poignant, some with a humorous touch. From a vampire blessed by Christ to the truth about the notorious Oscar Wilde to a rollicking tale of vamparism and the Bow Street Runners, these memorable stories by such top tale-weavers as Tanya Huff, P.N. Elrod, and Lois Tilton are sure to appeal to anyone who's ever been bitten by an interest in those mysterious, seductive, and deadly rulers of the night

Table of Contents:

• 9 - Introduction (The Time of the Vampires) - essay by P. N. Elrod
• 11 - A Vision of Darkness - short story by Lois Tilton
• 21 - Scent of Blood - short story by Susan Booth
• 39 - The Gift - short story by Teresa Patterson
• 56 - Oaths - short story by Bradley H. Sinor
• 74 - The Blood of the Lamb - short story by Lillian Stewart Carl
• 94 - The Devil's Mark - short fiction by P. N. Elrod
• 104 - Bloodthirsty Tyrants - novelette by Catt Kingsgrave-Ernstein
• 132 - What Manner of Man - [Henry Fitzroy] - novelette by Tanya Huff
• 159 - A Matter of Taste - short story by Nick Pollotta
• 166 - Voice from the Void - [Vanishing Breed] - novelette by Margaret L. Carter
• 189 - In Memory of - short story by Nancy Kilpatrick
• 202 - Death Mask - novelette by Rebecca Ann Brothers
• 233 - Faith Like Wine - novelette by Rachel Caine
• 265 - Black Sounds - short story by Lawrence Schimel
• 274 - The Ghost of St. Mark's - short story by Elaine Bergstrom
• 292 - Walking Tour - short story by Jean Graham
• 305 - Night of the Vampire Scare - short story by Julie Barrett
• 311 - Toothless Vampires Can Still Give Hickeys - short story by James Schutte

"La Morte amoureuse" (in English: "The Dead Woman in Love") is a short story written by Théophile Gautier and published in La Chronique de Paris in 1836.

A terrifying tale written in first person. It narrates the story of a young priest, Romuald, who falls in love with a mysterious woman called Clarimonde, a beautiful woman who turns out to be a vampire. He goes through strange experiences after meeting her and she haunts him in his dreams.

This deliciously dark retelling of Dracula is a sensual story of obsession, desire, and the lengths we will go to protect the ones we love.

This is my last love letter to you, though some would call it a confession...

Saved from the brink of death by a mysterious stranger, Constanta is transformed from a medieval peasant into a bride fit for an undying king. But when Dracula draws a cunning aristocrat and a starving artist into his web of passion and deceit, Constanta realizes that her beloved is capable of terrible things.

Finding comfort in the arms of her rival consorts, she begins to unravel their husband's dark secrets. With the lives of everyone she loves on the line, Constanta will have to choose between her own freedom and her love for her husband. But bonds forged by blood can only be broken by death.

Vlad has grown distant from his wife. His son has trouble at school. And he has to keep his sharp teeth hidden.

This story can also be found in the anthologies The New Voices of Fantasy (2017), edited by Peter S. Beagle and Jacob Weisman, and Worlds Seen in Passing: Ten Years of Tor.com Short Fiction (2018), edited by Irene Gallo.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Table of Contents:

• 9 - Introduction (Vampire Detectives) - essay by Ed Gorman
• 11 - Vampire Dollars - novelette by William F. Nolan
• 41 - This Town Ain't Big Enough - novelette by Tanya Huff
• 65 - Girl's Night Out - short story by Kathe Koja and Barry N. Malzberg
• 82 - Home Comforts - short story by Peter Crowther
• 92 - Origin of a Species - novelette by J. N. Williamson
• 114 - Fangs - novelette by Michael Prescott
• 136 - The Night of Their Lives - short story by Max Allan Collins
• 151 - Night Tidings - novelette by Gary Alan Ruse
• 177 - God-Less Men - short story by James Kisner
• 193 - No Blood for a Vampire - short story by Edward D. Hoch
• 211 - The Count's Mailbox - short story by William Sanders
• 220 - Tom Rudolph's Last Tape - short story by John Maclay
• 228 - The Turning- short story by Jack Ketchum
• 233 - You'll Catch Your Death - novelette by P. N. Elrod
• 256 - Shell Game - short story by John Lutz
• 262 - The Secret - short story by Barbara Paul
• 282 - Blind Pig on North Halsted - short fiction by Wayne Allen Sallee
• 285 - Phil the Vampire - short story by Richard Laymon
• 305 - Undercover - short story by Nancy Holder

Patricia Campbell's life has never felt smaller. Her ambitious husband is too busy to kiss her good-bye in the morning, her kids are wrapped up in their own lives, and she's always a step behind on thank-you notes and endless chores. The one thing she has to look forward to is her book club, a close-knit group of Charleston women united by their love of true crime and suspenseful fiction.

This predictable pattern is upended when Patricia is viciously attacked by an elderly neighbor, bringing the neighbor's handsome relative, James Harris, into her life. Sensitive and well-read, James makes Patricia feel things she hasn't felt in twenty years. But there's something... off... and then Patricia's senile mother-in-law insists she knew him back when she was a girl.

When local children go missing, Patricia has reason to believe that James may be more Bundy than Beatnik. But once she and the book club members investigate further, the true monster emerges--and he's far more terrifying than any serial killer they've ever read about.

First published in 1999, this dramatic retelling of the legend of Count Dracula deals with issues of friendship, passion and betrayal. Over a hundred years ago, a young man known as The Ox is called into domestic service. It is not a summons he can ignore, as it comes from Castle Dracula. Inside the castle, Ox meets the Count, who is no supernatural monster, but a man driven by passions that are all too real. In his service, Ox finds sheer survival a challenge. Yet the two form the least likely of friendships: a bonding of night and day, of cruelty and kindness. But when a woman they both want - and both need - is is seduced into a life not of her choosing, Ox and the Count become locked in a passionate duel...

There's nothing like home renovation for finding skeletons in the closet. Now here's the perfect treat for any homeowner who's ever wondered, 'What's that creaking sound?' Editors Charlaine Harris and Toni L. P. Kelner return with an all-new collection, this time on the paranormal perils of Do-It-Yourself.

As well as a brand-new Sookie Stackhouse story there are 13 more cautionary tales of home renovation by bestselling authors Patricia Briggs, Heather Graham and Melissa Marr, amongst others. This is an outstanding line-up of frightening and funny fixer-upper tales guaranteed to shake the foundations.

• "If I Had a Hammer" by Charlaine Harris
• "Wizard Home Security" by Victor Gischler
• "Gray" by Patricia Briggs
• "Squatters' Rights" by Rochelle Krich
• "Blood on the Wall" by Heather Graham
• "The Mansion of Imperatives" by James Grady
• "The Strength Inside" by Melissa Marr
• "Woolsley's Kitchen Nightmare" by E. E. Knight
• "Through this House" by Seanan McGuire
• "The Path" by S. J. Rozan
• "Rick the Brave" Stacia Kane
• "Full-Scale Demolition" Suzanne McLeod
• "It's All in the Rendering" by Simon R. Green
• "In Brightest Day" by Toni L.P. Kelner

Japan has always had its own vampire tradition, and has eagerly naturalized Western vampires and vampire literature to produce exotic new hybrids and species of horror, of terror, and of sensual, exquisite beauty. Here are a few of their masterpieces.

The Japanese word for vampire is kyuketsuki, which translates literally to "blood-sucking monster," but the literary tradition is far, far more complex.

The practice of Buddhism permeates Japan, and burials are almost always by cremation... leaving the Count and his relatives with no coffins to sleep in! But there is more than one way to sip a little blood, as these authors reveal. Thanks to Bram Stoker, Christopher Lee, and countless others who have popularized the Western vampire, modern Japanese authors have an extensive range of traditions and tales to weave into their own creations.

Contents:

• Masaya SHIMOKUSU -- "A Cultural Dynasty of Beautiful Vampires: Japan's Acceptance, Modifications, and Adaptations of Vampires"
• INOUE Masahiko -- "Blue Lady"
• ASUKABE Katsunori -- "Kingdom"
• KIKUCHI Hideyuki -- "The Stone Castle"
• OKAMOTO Kido -- "The One-Legged Woman"
• HIKAGE Jokichi -- "Vampire"
• ASAMATSU Ken -- "The Crimson Cloak"
• SUNAGA Asahiko -- "Vow"
• KAJIO Shinji -- "The Husk Heir"
• KAMON Nanami -- "A Piece of Butterfly's Wing"
• OKUDA Tetsuya -- "Unnatural"
• IINO Fumihiko -- "Paradise Missing"
• FUKUZAWA Tetsuzo -- "Dracula's House"
• KONAKA Chiaki -- "Birth of a Vampire"
• MIKAWA Yu -- "Halvires"
• INOUE Masahiko -- "Parasol"

NOS4A2 is a spine-tingling novel of supernatural suspense from master of horror Joe Hill, the New York Times bestselling author of Heart-Shaped Box and Horns.

Victoria McQueen has a secret gift for finding things: a misplaced bracelet, a missing photograph, answers to unanswerable questions. On her Raleigh Tuff Burner bike, she makes her way to a rickety covered bridge that, within moments, takes her wherever she needs to go, whether it's across Massachusetts or across the country.

Charles Talent Manx has a way with children. He likes to take them for rides in his 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith with the NOS4A2 vanity plate. With his old car, he can slip right out of the everyday world, and onto the hidden roads that transport them to an astonishing – and terrifying – playground of amusements he calls "Christmasland."

Then, one day, Vic goes looking for trouble-and finds Manx. That was a lifetime ago. Now Vic, the only kid to ever escape Manx's unmitigated evil, is all grown up and desperate to forget. But Charlie Manx never stopped thinking about Victoria McQueen. He's on the road again and he's picked up a new passenger: Vic's own son.

Exclusive to the print editions of NOS4A2 are more than 15 illustrations by award-winning Locke & Key artist Gabriel Rodríguez.

With numerous unforgettable movies based on his short stories--including Shawshank Redemption, 1408, and The Green Mile--readers will be delighted to rediscover this classic collection, also released as a television mini-series and on DVD. Featuring twenty short horror stories, a television script, an essay, and a poem, Nightmares and Dreamscapes contains unique and chilling plots including everything from dead rock star zombies to evil toys seeking murderous revenge. It will be treasured by King fans new and old.

Table of Contents:

• Dolan's Cadillac
• The End of the Whole Mess
• Suffer the Little Children
• The Night Flier
• Popsy
• Masques II
• It Grows on You
• Chattery Teeth
• Dedication
• The Moving Finger
• Sneakers
• You Know They Got a Hell of a Band
• Home Delivery
• Rainy Season
• My Pretty Pony
• Sorry, Right Number
• The Ten O'Clock People
• Crouch End
• The House on Maple Street
• The Fifth Quarter
• The Doctor's Case
• Umney's Last Case
• Head Down
• Brooklyn August
• The Beggar and the Diamond

Stephen King's second novel, Salem's Lot, is the story of a mundane town under siege from the forces of darkness. Considered one of the most terrifying vampire novels ever written, it cunningly probes the shadows of the human heart -- and the insular evils of small-town America.

Zoe is wary when, in the dead of night, the beautiful yet frightening Simon comes to her house. Simon seems to understand the pain of loneliness and death and Zoe's brooding thoughts of her dying mother.

Simon is one of the undead, a vampire, seeking revenge for the gruesome death of his mother three hundred years before. Does Simon dare ask Zoe to help free him from this lifeless chase and its insufferable loneliness?

Late one night, exploring her father's library, a young woman finds an ancient book and a cache of yellowing letters. The letters are all addressed to "My dear and unfortunate successor", and they plunge her into a world she never dreamed of: a labyrinth where the secrets of her father's past and her mother's mysterious fate connect to an inconceivable evil hidden in the depths of history.

The letters provide links to one of the darkest powers that humanity has ever known, and to a centuries-long quest to find the source of that darkness and wipe it out. It is a quest for the truth about Vlad the Impaler, the medieval ruler whose barbarous reign formed the basis of the legend of Dracula. Generations of historians have risked their reputations, their sanity, and even their lives to learn the truth about Vlad the Impaler and Dracula. Now one young woman must decide whether to take up this quest herself, to follow her father in a hunt that nearly brought him to ruin years ago, when he was a vibrant young scholar and her mother was still alive.

What does the legend of Vlad the Impaler have to do with the modern world? Is it possible that the Dracula of myth truly existed, and that he has lived on, century after century, pursuing his own unknowable ends? The answers to these questions cross time and borders, as first the father and then the daughter search for clues, from dusty Ivy League libraries to Istanbul, Budapest, and the depths of Eastern Europe. In city after city, in monasteries and archives, in letters and in secret conversations, the horrible truth emerges about Vlad the Impaler's dark reign, and about a time-defying pact that may have kept his awful work alive down through the ages.

"I want to be like John Langan when I grow up, okay? He blends meticulously crafted traditional narratives with joyous genre-bending and narrative rule-breaking. His stories are fiercely smart, timely, timeless, heartbreaking, and of course, flat-out scary. Langan fearlessly commits to his monsters, his characters, his readers, to his vision of the horror story and the messed-up, broken, frightening world we inhabit. Wide, Carnivorous Sky, indeed."-Paul Tremblay, author of The Little Sleep and Swallowing a Donkey's Eye.

John Langan has, in the last few years, established himself as one of the leading voices in contemporary horror literature. Gifted with a supple and mellifluous prose style, an imagination that can conjure up clutching terrors with seeming effortlessness, and a thorough knowledge of the rich heritage of weird fiction, Langan has already garnered his share of accolades. This new collection of nine substantial stories includes such masterworks as "Technicolor," an ingenious riff on Poe's "Masque of the Red Death"; "How the Day Runs Down," a gripping tale of the undead; and "The Shallows," a powerful tale of the Cthulhu Mythos. The capstone to the collection is a previously unpublished novella of supernatural terror, "Mother of Stone." With an introduction by Jeffrey Ford and an afterword by Laird Barron.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Reading Langan, by Jeffrey Ford
• Kids
• How the Day Runs Down
• Technicolor
• The Wide, Carnivorous Sky
• City of the Dog
• The Shallows
• The Revel
• June, 1987. Hitchhiking. Mr. Norris.
• Mother of Stone
• Story Notes
• Afterword: Note Found in a Glenfiddich Bottle, by Laird Barron
• Acknowledgments

When the one-night-only Traveling Vampire Show arrives in town, promising the only living vampire in captivity, beautiful Valeria, three local teenages venture where they do not belong, and discover much more than they bargained for.

Five stories, which belong to the gothic horror and mystery genres, are presented as selections from the posthumous papers of the occult detective Dr. Martin Hesselius.

1. "Green Tea" An English clergyman named Jennings confides to Hesselius that he is being followed by a demon in the form of an ethereal monkey, invisible to everyone else, which is trying to invade his mind and destroy his life.
2. "The Familiar"A revised version of The Watcher (1851). A sea captain, living in Dublin, is stalked by "The Watcher,", a strange dwarf who resembles a person from his past.
3. "Mr. Justice Harbottle" A revised version of An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street (1853). A cruel judge in the Court of Common Pleas, Elijah Harbottle, finds himself under attack by vengeful spirits, and in a disturbing dream he is condemned to death by a monstrous doppelgänger.
4. "The Room in the Dragon Volant" Not a ghost story but a notable mystery story in which a naïve young Englishman in France attempts to save a mysterious countess from her intolerable situation.
5. "Carmilla" A tale of a lesbian vampire, set in Styria, Austria. This story was to greatly influence Bram Stoker in the writing of Dracula.

The army had said it was a training accident. But why had the coffin they sent home been sealed?

On a dark night, in a deserted field, Tom begins to unearth the mass grave where he hopes - and fears - that he will find his son's remains. He finds instead madness: corpses in chains and dead bodies that still move and grasp and clutch.

And one little girl, dead and rotting, who promises to help Tom find what he's looking for, if only he will free her.

WFA nominated novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology The Dodd, Mead Gallery of Horror (1983), edited by Charles L. Grant. It has been rerprinted many times. The story can be found in:

• The Year's Best Science Fiction: First Annual Collection (1984), edited by Gardner Dozois
• Killing Me Softly: Erotic Tales of Unearthly Love (1995), edited by Gardner Dozois
• Rivals of Dracula (1996), edited by Stefan Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg and Martin H. Greenberg
• By Blood We Live (2009), edited by John Joseph Adams
• Obsession: Tales of Irresistible Desire (2012), edited by Paula Guran

It is included in the collections Dreams of Dark and Light: The Great Short Fiction of Tanith Lee (1986) and Blood 20: Tales of Vampire Horror (2015).

It is autumn 1981 when the inconceivable comes to Blackeberg, a suburb in Sweden. The body of a teenage boy is found, emptied of blood, the murder rumored to be part of a ritual killing. Twelve-year-old Oskar is personally hoping that revenge has come at long last---revenge for the bullying he endures at school, day after day.

But the murder is not the most important thing on his mind. A new girl has moved in next door---a girl who has never seen a Rubik's Cube before, but who can solve it at once. There is something wrong with her, though, something odd. And she only comes out at night....

Sweeping top honors at film festivals all over the globe, director Tomas Alfredsson's film of Let the Right One In has received the same kind of spectacular raves that have been lavished on the book. American readers of vampire fiction will be thrilled!

Miss Harriet Brandt, daughter of a mad scientist and a voodoo priestess, comes of age and leaves her home in Jamaica for the first time, travelling to Europe. Beautiful and talented, Harriet will gain the affections of many of the men and women she meets and a bright future seems assured for her.

But there is something strange about Harriet. Everyone she gets close to seems to sicken or die. Doctor Phillips has a theory: the blood of the vampire flows through Harriet's veins, and she is draining the life out of those she loves. Are the misfortunes that seem to follow Harriet merely coincidence? Or is she really afflicted with the curse of the vampire?

One of the strangest novels by the prolific Florence Marryat (1837-1899), The Blood of the Vampire was the "other vampire novel" of 1897, appearing the same year as Dracula. Marryat's novel is fascinating not only for its sensational plot and bizarre characters, but also because of its engagement with many of the issues that haunted the late Victorian imagination, such as race, heredity, women's roles, Spiritualism, and the occult. This edition includes the unabridged text of the exceedingly rare 1897 first edition and a new introduction by Brenda Hammack.

Californian James Falcon's compelling Romanian mother told him so many folk stories that by the time he reaches college in 1943, he is something of an expert on the strigoi, the legendary, undying vampires who infested the most isolated forests of Wallachia. Mostly as a joke, he writes a term paper on the strigoi.

But the joke turns serious when US counterintelligence approach him to recruit his expertise. James hunts down strigoi murderers in war-ravaged Europe, Nazi assassins hired to run down run down the French and Belgian resistance in exchange for Transylvanian independence, although the principal one, the terrible Dorin Duca, continues to elude him. In the Cold War, he must fight once more, as Duca goes on the rampage, spreading his strigoi infection all across London, England.

An Unattractive Vampire, is a darkly comic urban fantasy of ancient horrors in suburban cities.

After three centuries trapped underground, thousand-year-old Yulric Bile - also known as the Curséd One, the Devil's Apprentice, He Who Worships the Slumbering Horrors - awakens only to find that no one believes he is a vampire. Apparently he's just too ugly - modern vampires, he soon discovers, are pretty, weak, and, most disturbing of all, good. Determined to reestablish his bloodstained reign, Yulric sets out to correct this disgusting turn of events or, at the very least, murder the person responsible. With the help of pert vampire-wannabe Amanda; Simon, the eight-year-old reincarnation of his greatest foe; and a cadre of ancient and ugly horrors, Yulric prepares to battle the glamorous undead. But who will win the right to determine, once and for all, what it truly means to be a vampire?

All of the protagonists of the eight horror tales here are gay, allowing McMahan both a new twist on chiller standbys, such as vampirism and spirit possession, and an intriguing perspective on the complexities of gay life. Devilish energy and macabre wit glitter throughout. One vampire, for example, is an unwillingly undead ghoul with a heart of gold who pities the beautiful men he kills--yet he is reluctant to bestow the dubious gift of a vampire's immortality lest his liaisons with them grow tiresome over the millennia. A few stories teeter precariously between effective shock and the merely grisly: gory details menace the exposition of "Two-faced Johnny," in which a vain young man at a strange Halloween party is transformed permanently into the gruesome being of his costume. "Fantasyland," about a young boy who takes refuge in daydreams from his brutal rape until he rescues another boy from the same assailants, is the richest entry, a trenchant meditation on coming out as gay in a hostile society. This is McMahan's first book.

Welcome to Mexico City... An Oasis In A Sea Of Vampires...

Domingo, a lonely garbage-collecting street kid, is busy eeking out a living when a jaded vampire on the run swoops into his life.

Atl, the descendant of Aztec blood drinkers, must feast on the young to survive and Domingo looks especially tasty. Smart, beautiful, and dangerous, Atl needs to escape to South America, far from the rival narco-vampire clan pursuing her. Domingo is smitten.

Her plan doesn't include developing any real attachment to Domingo. Hell, the only living creature she loves is her trusty Doberman. Little by little, Atl finds herself warming up to the scrappy young man and his effervescent charm.

And then there's Ana, a cop who suddenly finds herself following a trail of corpses and winds up smack in the middle of vampire gang rivalries.

Vampires, humans, cops, and gangsters collide in the dark streets of Mexico City. Do Atl and Domingo even stand a chance of making it out alive?

Seeking to salvage their foundering marriage, Melanie and Richard retreat to an isolated beach house on a remote Queensland island.

Intrigued by a chance encounter with a stranger, Melanie begins to drift away from her husband and towards Helena, only to discover that Helena has her own demons, ageless and steeped in blood.

As Richard's world and Helena's collide, Melanie must choose which future she wants, before the dark tide pulls her under... forever.

This book was a finalist for the Aurealis Best Horror Novel Award in 2012.

A plague of vampirism has crept across the country, reducing once-thriving cities to ghost towns. In Chicago, a few scattered survivors hide behind the fortified walls of office buildings and museums, raiding deserted stores for dwindling supplies of clothing and food. Meanwhile a hungry vampire population also struggles for survival as their prey grows scarce, forcing them to capture alive the last remaining humans as breeding stock for the blood farms that will ensure their future. Now a small band of humans makes a despearate last stand against their vampire masters, fighting back with the only weapon that can kill the dead...

There's a new addition to the Hamilton family. The adoptive parents couldn't love Baby more if he was their own flesh and blood.

But isn't it strange for an infant to have such sharp teeth? And what nourishment makes Baby grow so big and strong so fast? Not mother's milk...

Now, Mommy's so pale and weak, so drained, as if she's being bled dry. Daddy's entranced by his wif's live-in nurse, whose hypnotic eyes and pointed teeth are just like Baby's. Grandma's disppeared- but she'll be back after dark. Unfortunately.

Only teenage Colleen senses the gathering evil that will turn a sleepy little town into a kingdom of vampires, No one will believe her. Not a living soul...

Only the undead ones.

"The Caretakers" by David Nickle is a strange tale about a group of people called to a meeting with their intimidating boss. The newest member of their organization is not so sure she wants to even be there.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Princeton, New Jersey, at the turn of the twentieth century: a genteel town for genteel souls. But something dark and dangerous lurks at its edges, corrupting and infecting its residents. Vampires and ghosts haunt the dreams of the innocent and a powerful curse besets the families of the elite–their daughters begin disappearing. And in the Pine Barrens that border the town, a lush and terrifying underworld opens up.

When a shape-shifting, vaguely European prince, who might just be the devil, abducts a young bride on the verge of the altar, her brother sets out against all odds to find her. His path will cross those of Princeton's most formidable people, including Grover Cleveland, fresh out of his second term in the White House, soon-to-be commander in chief Woodrow Wilson, a complex individual obsessed to the point of madness with his need to retain power, the young idealist Upton Sinclair and his charismatic comrade Jack London, and the most famous writer of the era, Mark Twain–all of whom are plagued by "accursed" visions.

Baltimore isn't safe. Not even for the predatory meat that stalks its nights. Searching for victims who won't be missed, meat doesn't feel regret or pain--only thirst. But the meat remembers something more... doesn't it? is there more to eternal life than finding another drink?

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

John Polidori's classic tale "The Vampyre"(1819), was a product of the same ghost-story competition that produced Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The present volume selects thirteen other tales of mystery and the macabre, including the works of James Hogg, J.S. LeFanu, Letitia Landon, Edward Bulwer, and William Carelton. The introduction surveys the genesis and influence of "The Vampyre" and its central themes and techniques, while the Appendices contain material closely associated with its composition and publication, including Lord Byron's prose fragment "Augustus Darvell."

The town of Carruthers, Texas, has seen its share of drifters and lowlifes. But never anyone like Steven and Earl. Theymove from town to town, hustling the pool halls. Raising a little hell. Drinking a little blood. They sleep by day and hunt by night - the ultimate predators The perfect life. Until now. A barroom brawl ends in disaster. The soil from Steven's grave has been stolen. A young boy's death sparks an all-out war between vampires and mortals that will turn the local Frontier Day celebration into a bloodbath...

It's time to paint the town red.

Deep in the mountains of nineteenth-century Carpathia lies the mysterious and mythic land of Transylvania, a world where evil is ever-present, where danger rises as the sun sets, and where monsters such as Count Dracula, the Wolf Man, and Frankenstein's Monster take form and inhabit man's deepest nightmares -- terrifying legends who outlive generations, defying repeated attacks from the doomed brave souls that challenge them in their never-ending war upon the human race.

On order of a secret society, only a lone force of good stands against them -- the legendary monster hunter Van Helsing, a man revered by some and feared by many. In his ongoing battle to rid the earth of these fiendish beings, Van Helsing must now travel to Transylvania to bring down the lethally seductive, enigmatically powerful Count Dracula, and joins forces with the fearless Anna Valerious, a woman out to rid her family of a generations-old curse by defeating the vampire. But unknown to all, the immortal Dracula will stop at nothing to unleash his master plan of subverting human civilization and ruling over a world of havoc, fear, and darkness...

Bannerworth Hall, Hampshire. Midnight. The night is woken by screams, from the bedroom of the beautiful and noble-hearted Flora. To their horror, her family discover that she has been the victim of a murderous attack. The Bannerworths are about to lose their home, to pay the debts of their dead father. The hunt is on for his missing gold, but then they begin to have doubts about their repulsive, hissing new neighbour, Sir Francis Varney, who is so eager to purchase the hall - and to marry the fair Flora!

Their quest will take them from hall to charnel-house, and from village inn to deserted chancel. Can the Bannerworths - aided by Flora's fiance Charles Holland, Charles's uncle Admiral Bell, and the indomitable British Tar, Jack Pringle - defeat their terrible foe? and can they decipher the strange letter left by old Marmaduke Bannerworth, that seems to promise so much?

Varney, the Vampyre is one of the greatest of the Victorian penny romances, by one of its finest exponents -- the inimitable James Malcolm Rymer. First serialised between 1845 and 1847, it is one of the world's most enjoyable reads. It is also one of the major sources for Stoker's later masterpiece, Dracula.

Lawrence M. Schoen's "Sweet Potato Pie" laughs at labels and caused me to reread several early sentences, just to make sure that psychedelic drugs weren't at work (on me, I'm sure Schoen's mind is in an alternate state of reality)... Here's a rural, fantasy, horror, maybe science fiction, cooking story. As chances are you've never read one of those, you should grab this one as quick as you can. It starts with Zachary gathering up some of the sweet potatoes that rained down from the sky, as they are like to do, in order to make a pie. Yes, he wants a pie, not a mess of zombies and... Perhaps I should stop right there. This is a tale that defies summarizing. It's weird and wonderful and will dig into you more with its strangeness than with its deep meaning. - Tangent Online

In "Fries with That," a fast-food restaurant manager explains the advantages of hiring zombies for the late-night shift. In "The Novice," a noncharismatic vampire discovers that he can attract unwitting blood donors at a role-playing-game convention. In "Thirst for Knowledge," a cultured vampire assumes the identity of a college professor and selects students for his private wine cellar. More impressive and entertaining are a couple of longer pieces: "The Sky's the Limit," a deft Damon Runyon pastiche, and "Golem Summer," whose animated characters will make readers smile. - Publishers Weekly

• Sweet Potato Pie - (2005)
• A Fool's Death - (2006)
• The Figurative Gryphon - (2002) Poetry
• The Amulet of Winter - (2008)
• Snowball - (1999) Poetry
• Candeloro's Magic - (1999)
• Cat Futures - (2006)
• Dragon Math - (2000) Poetry
• Chasing the Bear - (2002)
• Death and Loss - (2010)
• Just Add Water - (2010)
• Coyote Librarian - (2002) Poetry
• Schroedinger's Closet - (2010)
• Fries with That - (2010)
• The Epistemology of Bread - (2005)
• Fitzwell's Oracle - (2007)
• Every Janitor's a Goblin - (2000) Poetry
• In Case - (2010)
• The Novice - (1999)
• Choral Reef - (2000) Poetry
• Past Waves - (1990)
• The Sky's the Limit - (2004)
• Golem Summer - (2003)
• Brown Bagging - (1999) Poetry
• Solitaire - (2001)
• Thirst for Knowledge - (1999)
• The Grapes of Rathbone - (2010)
• The Gargoyle and the Bully - (2000) Poetry
• What Doesn't Stay in Vegas - (2007)
• The Vampire Jamboree - (2010) Poetry
• The Wrestler and the Spear Fisher - (2010)
• Historical Trolls - (2001) Poetry
• Names - (1998)
• The Game of Leaf and Smile - (2005)

The first novel for adults by hugely acclaimed YA writer Marcus Sedgwick: a gripping saga of love, revenge, and obsession?and vampires.

In 1944, just days after the liberation of Paris, Charles Jackson sees something horrific: a man in a dark tunnel, apparently drinking the blood of a murdered woman. Terrified, he does nothing, telling himself afterward that worse tragedies happen during war.

Seven years later he returns to the city?and sees the same man dining in the company of a fascinating, beautiful young woman. When they leave the restaurant, Charles decides to follow...

A Love Like Blood is a dark, compelling thriller about how a man's life can change in a moment and about where the desire for truth?and revenge?can lead.

Winner of the Locus Award.

In the mid nineteenth century, vampires gather at Castle Banat, one of their most sprawling and ancient warrens. Their five-hundred-year breeding project has produced the Golden, a mortal of perfect blood, and they've come to drink from her in a ceremony that will incidentally make her one of the Family. When the girl is found murdered, the clan's shadowy patriarch calls on the detective Michel Beheim to solve the crime. But Michel has been a vampire for only a short while, and though he was a talented investigator among mortals, he is ill-prepared for the task. Soon he is fighting to survive the bizarre terrors of the labyrinthine castle and the schemes of vampires who guard a secret that may forever alter the world of the undead.

Mike, a friendly Vietnam vet driving a hearse for his uncle, picks up Angela, a half-frozen hitchhiker on her way back to college. When a blizzard makes the road impassable, Mike and Angela spend a night of terror and passion at Blut Farm--a night they will never forget--if they survive.

SHE is a mistress of darkness--coldly sensual and dangerously seductive. She uses her body to possess her victims as she plots her revenge against the man who sentenced her to immorality.

HE is a master of manipulation with the power to take life and grant unlife. Women are his victims. Men are his pawns. But his thirst for the death of the woman he once loved is his sole consuming passion.

THEY are two ancient vampires who have sworn to eliminate each other, driven through the centures by a raging desire to be drenched in their enemy's dying blood. Now the time hs come for a face-to-face confrontation--vampire against vampiress--and neither will rest until one of them is destroyed!

The year is 1899. At the dawn of a new century, London physician Dr. Andrew Quimby has witnessed much pain and suffering in the city's infamous East End. When a series of murders leaves the victims drained of blood, neither Andrew nor his lover, La Contessa di Rospo, believes the rumors that the killer is not human. But the Contessa's expertise in such matters belies a secret that will place them both in grave danger.

Three elderly friends, who possess supernatural powers and who feed off of emotions generated during the murders they orchestrate, meet every year to discuss their game--an ongoing competition of mass murder and vampirism.

When a string of decapitated murder victims is discovered, vampire detective Nick Knight suspects a recently released former inmate who had killed his wife the same way, but he wonders if one of his own kind is really responsible.

Original work; TV tie-in.

Since the sixteenth century, England has been a land ruled by the Undead. Vampires rule with terror and the darkly-seductive promise of life eternal for the lucky few. Edmund Cordery, member of the cabal pledged to penetrate the mysteries of the vampires and destroy them, strikes the first blow. But it will fall to his son. Noell, to carry on the crusade of human against inhuman. And it will fall to those who come after Noell to keep the struggle alive for over three centuries--from England to Malta to modern-day America, where destiny will decide finally whether the forces of horror or humanity will hold sway over all....

They are cool to the touch and alluringly beautiful in their ageless youth. Their laughter seduces, their brilliance beguiles. They guard the secrets of science and history, and the answers to the mysteries of life and death lie within their vastly superior knowledge. In centuries past, they were known as the Illuminati. They are the vampire.

Dr. John Gladstone, a scientist in Victorian London, is thrust into their world after his carriage runs over a young man of angelic beauty named Niccolo. When Niccolo kidnaps Gladstone's child and vanishes, the doctor must go in pursuit, with the help of his daughter, Ursula, who is enticed by the lure of eternal life, and Lady Hespeth, whose demure exterior hides a dangerous obsession. Why are the vampires taking children, and what is the connection to Gladstone's experiments with a deadly virus? And how can he possibly prevail against a race of immortal beings with power and intelligence infinitely beyond his own?

Step into the dark and eerie world of "The House of the Vampire" by George Sylvester Viereck, a spine-chilling classic that will have you on the edge of your seat! This hauntingly beautiful tale takes you on a journey through the mysterious and labyrinthine halls of an old mansion where secrets, shadows, and creatures of the night lurk around every corner.

You'll follow the story of a young man who becomes enamored with the allure of the supernatural, as he encounters a charismatic and enigmatic vampire who captivates his imagination and draws him into a web of danger and desire. Will he succumb to the temptation of immortality and become a creature of the night, or will he resist the call of the undead and escape the clutches of the vampire's seductive power?

With vivid descriptions that bring the eerie setting to life and heart-pumping action that will keep you on the edge of your seat, "The House of the Vampire" is a must-read for lovers of horror, suspense, and Gothic literature.

In 1897, aliens observing Earth accidentally unleash a horde of zombies across the planet. Anita Hemmings joins Samuel Clemens and Edith Wharton in a desperate fight for their lives, while the aliens seek assistance from Voltaire, Caravaggio, and Alexander Hamilton to help save Earth from an ignominiously chewy death.

This Nebula nomited short story originally appaered in the Nightmare special edtiont Queers Destroy Horror in october 2015. It can also be found in the anthologies Heiresses of Russ 2016: The Year's Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction (2016), edited by A. M. Dellamonica and Steve Berman, Nebula Awards Showcase 2017, edited by Julie E. Czerneda, and The New Voices of Fantasy (2017), edited by Peter S. Beagle and Jacob Weisman.

Read the full story for free at Nightmare.

The Adventure of the Golden Woman is the concluding novella of the author's Blood-Thirsty Agent series.

Lesbian vampire spies at the cabaret!

It's 1931, and conquest of the earth isn't enough for the British Empire. But the demi-mondaine of occupied Berlin harbors a resistance movement, and the double agents Lucy Harker--Dracula's daughter--and her lover, the vampire Carmilla, steal England's spaceship plans. Then the handoff to American agent Adolph Hitler is foiled by an impossibly advanced mechanical woman, and the lovers are imprisoned on a lunar spaceship scheduled for imminent launch. Now Lucy and Carmilla's only hope of saving the solar system is to overcome the ship's robot crew and outthink England's greatest espionage agent: Sherlock Holmes.

Geopolitical babysitting while arresting preternatural killers - it's just the daily grind for Scion Rowan Brady.

Brash and sarcastic, Rowan has sold her life, her career and her very blood to the controlling paranormal ruling class of America, all to make sure her kid brother can eat. Now she uses her powers as a scion to kick the ass of any preternatural creature idiotic enough to break the rules and prey upon humanity without a license. All it costs her is her freedom and a pint or two per week to her new Master.

But juggling her job and duties becomes even tougher when she is tasked with keeping a contingency of diplomats from Canada from getting gnawed on. However, negotiations for an International Blood Exchange are interrupted when bodies start showing up. Now Rowan must rely on her talent and wit to defend the society she despises to save the lives she's sworn to protect.

But as she stumbles into the truth, she chances becoming a target of not only these killers, but of her own government. With shifters, ghosts, vampires and psychics all watching her, can she stop the killings before she is silenced?

In Lee Killough's Blood Games Vampire Garreth Mikaelian thought he had his existence all arranged. He is comfortably settled in a town where, his nature unknown to those around him, he works the night shift as a police officer. His blood comes in bottles. He has a routine and friends. But that peace is shattered when his fellow officer and sometime lover Maggie Lebekov is killed by a lethal trio playing ever escalating blood games.

Garreth finds himself racing to locate the suspects before other law enforcement officers do, to be sure they are captured alive. Because if they are not yet vampires, and the leader may already be a very old and powerful vampire, they have drunk vampire blood and if killed will rise again even more deadly.

For Marion and Roland, a casual holiday in Cornwall begins to take on the proportions of a nightmare when they meet the gaunt, reclusive Keith Sharwood.

Marion's growing and half-unwilling involvement with Keith leads to a chain of macabre events--a mutilated dog half-buried in sand dunes, a compelling telepathic call at the dead of night, a golden statue with the power to obsess, and an insane and bloody murder that finally brings Marion face to face with the power of an Assyrian demon, four thousand years old.

The white, ghastly face staring from the garden was unmistakably Sarah Bailey's. And Sarah had been killed a month ago.

When Keith Sharwood tried to exorcise what he believed to be a ghost he found himself up against the one thing in the world of the supernatural that could truly terrify him -- for Sarah carried the mark of the vampire.

Keith knew what it was to be cursed with the mark, and he had been desperately trying to forget the nightmare of his own experiences. But now it seemed that his only hope of destroying the power that had brought Sarah back from the dead was to fight fire with fire.

1918. A First World War battlefield becomes the cosmic battleground for two vampires, as Karl von Wultendorf struggles to free himself from his domineering maker, Kristian.

1923. Charlotte Neville watches as her father, a Cambridge professor, fills Parkland Hall with guests for her sister Madeleine's 18th birthday party. Among them is his handsome new research assistant Karl - the man Madeleine has instantly decided will be her husband. Charlotte, shy and retiring, is happy to devote her life to her father and her dull fiance Henry - until she sees Karl...

For Charlotte, it is the beginning of a deadly obsession that sunders her from her sisters, her father and even her dearest friend. As their feverish passion grows, Karl faces the dilemma he fears the most. Only by deserting Charlotte can his passion for her blood be conquered. Only by betraying her can he protect her from the terrifying attentions of Kristian - for Kristian has decided to teach Karl a lesson in power, by devouring Charlotte.

Then she opened her mouth to scream-and recognised me. It was what I'd been waiting for. She froze. She looked into my eyes. She said, "It's you."

Meet Jake. A bit on the elderly side (he turns 201 in March), but you'd never suspect it. Nonstop sex and exercise will do that for you-and a diet with lots of animal protein. Jake is a werewolf, and after the unfortunate and violent death of his one contemporary, he is now the last of his species. Although he is physically healthy, Jake is deeply distraught and lonely.

Jake's depression has carried him to the point where he is actually contemplating suicide-even if it means terminating a legend thousands of years old. It would seem to be easy enough for him to end everything. But for very different reasons there are two dangerous groups pursuing him who will stop at nothing to keep him alive.

Here is a powerful, definitive new version of the werewolf legend-mesmerising and incredibly sexy. In Jake, Glen Duncan has given us a werewolf for the twenty-first century-a man whose deeds can only be described as monstrous but who is in some magical way deeply human.

One of the most original, audacious, and terrifying novels in years.

Since 1978, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro has produced about two dozen novels and numerous short stories detailing the life of a character first introduced to the reading world as Le Comte de Saint-Germain. We first meet him in Paris during the reign of Louis XV when he is, apparently, a wealthy, worldly, charismatic aristocrat, envied and desired by many but fully known to none. In fact, he is a vampire, born in the Carpathian Mountains in 2119 BC, turned in his late-thirties in 2080 BC and destined to roam the world forever, watching and participating in history and, through the author, giving us an amazing perspective on the time-tapestry of human civilization. In Hôtel Transylvania Saint-Germain makes his first appearance in a story that blends history and fiction as Saint-Germain is pitted against Satanists to preserve Madelaine de Montalia from ruin.

Austria during the 1920s is the setting for the fifth of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's novels about the elegant and mysterious Count Ragoczy Saint-Germain. In Tempting Fate, the Count becomes guardian to a spirited and talented young girl named Laisha, a Russian war orphan. Traveling frequently to the great cities of Europe, the pair move in a world whose days are numbered, as the landed nobility of Europe face the shocks of the future. Saint-Germain must come to the aid of three women: a Russian duchess who has to make a new life for herself in Paris after the revolution, a beautiful young widow who sees her family fortune squandered and her centuries-old home menaced by a new order of violence, and Madelein de Montaila, the entrancing Frenchwoman who shares Saint-Germain's long memory and his secret.

After a horribly cruel crime, Saint-Germain decides on a desperate course of action that could lead, even for him, to a lasting death. Tempting Fate is the richest, most passionate, and most poignant of the Saint-Germain series.

Focusing on Saint-Germain—one of the genre's most memorable vampires—this collection follows the dark immortal from ancient Greece to the present as tales of his timeless life are recounted. Also included is a brief essay by the author about her world-renowned vampire, with an Introduction by Sharon A. Russell.

Table of Contents

• Introduction - essay by Sharon A. Russell
• Harpy - (2007)
• A Gentleman of the Old School - (2005)
• Intercession - (2003)
• Lost Epiphany - (2008)
• Tales Out of School - (2008)

Davey's on the down and out when he loses his girl, his job and practically his sanity. While some men drown themselves in a forgiving bottle, Davey believes it's much more profitable to sink into Times Square's nightlife and lose himself inside Live Girls. They are the free ravishing pleasures who beckon Davey into a world of irresistible fantasy and ecstasy. One of them propositions him with a kiss, an insatiable kiss that leads him far from the misery he once felt to a demonic place where body and soul are sacrificed for obsessions.

When Ray Garton's Live Girls was published in 1987, it changed the face of vampire fiction. The gritty, urban story of Davey Owen's dark seduction and reluctant transformation into a creature of the undead has become a classic of the genre.

In Night Life, nearly two decades after battling the vampires of the Midnight Club in New York City, Davey is a marked man. He lives a quiet life in Los Angeles with the love of his life, Casey Thorne. The vampires he did not destroy back then have been hunting him ever since, eager to take their revenge--and now they have found him. For what he did to them, they are determined to make him pay with his last drop of blood. With the help of old friends and new allies, Davey and Casey must face the bloodthirsty nightmare of their past. This time, they may not have a future.

Powers of Darkness is an incredible literary discovery: In 1900, Icelandic publisher and writer Valdimar Ásmundsson set out to translate Bram Stoker's world-famous 1897 novel Dracula. Called Makt Myrkranna (literally, "Powers of Darkness"), this Icelandic edition included an original preface written by Stoker himself. Makt Myrkranna was published (as a book) in Iceland in 1901 but remained undiscovered outside of the country until 1986, when Dracula scholarship was astonished by the discovery of Stoker's preface to the book. However, no one looked beyond the preface and deeper into Ásmundsson's story.

In 2014, literary researcher Hans de Roos dove into the full text of Makt Myrkranna, only to discover that Ásmundsson hadn't merely translated Dracula but had penned an entirely new version of the story, with all new characters and a totally re-worked plot. The resulting narrative is one that is shorter, punchier, more erotic, and perhaps even more suspenseful than Stoker's Dracula. Incredibly, Makt Myrkranna has never been translated or even read outside of Iceland until now.

Powers of Darkness presents the first ever translation into English of Stoker and Ásmundsson's Makt Myrkranna. With marginal annotations by de Roos providing readers with fascinating historical, cultural, and literary context; a foreword by Dacre Stoker, Bram Stoker's great-grandnephew and bestselling author; and an afterword by Dracula scholar John Edgar Browning, Powers of Darkness will amaze and entertain legions of fans of Gothic literature, horror, and vampire fiction.

Ravaged by the Nazi Secret Service during World War II, Romanian resistance forces turn to one of their leaders, Professor Van Helsing for any way out. To fight these monstrous forces, Van Helsing raises a legendary monster from centuries of slumber... Prince Dracula himself.

Once he was the ruler of Transylvania. Prince Vlad Dracul, is, above all else, a patriot. He proves more than willing to once again drive out his country's invaders. Upshot: No one minds if he drinks all the German blood he desires.

In Berlin, when Hitler hears about the many defeats his forces are suffering at the hands of an apparent true vampire, he is seduced by the possibility of becoming immortal. Thus two forces are set upon a collision course, the ultimate confrontation: Superpower against superpower.

In his first work since his best-selling The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Leslie S. Klinger returns with this spectacular, lavishly illustrated homage to Bram Stoker's Dracula. With a daring conceit, Klinger accepts Stoker's contention that the Dracula tale is based on historical fact. Traveling through two hundred years of popular culture and myth as well as graveyards and the wilds of Transylvania, Klinger's notes illuminate every aspect of this haunting narrative (including a detailed examination of the original typescript of Dracula, with its shockingly different ending, previously unavailable to scholars). Klinger investigates the many subtexts of the original narrative?from masochistic, necrophilic, homoerotic, "dentophilic," and even heterosexual implications of the story to its political, economic, feminist, psychological, and historical threads. Employing the superb literary detective skills for which he has become famous, Klinger mines this 1897 classic for nuggets that will surprise even the most die-hard Dracula fans and introduce the vampire-prince to a new generation of readers.

35 color; 400 black & white illustrations

For the first time in English comes a remarkable literary discovery. In 1928, Turkish author Ali Riza Seyfioglu pirated Bram Stoker's Dracula, rewriting it with new material, patriotic overtones, and Islam. A rare example of a "bootleg" novel, it's also the first adaptation to plainly identify Dracula as the historical warlord Vlad the Impaler.

When a modern Istanbul is threatened by the invasion of an ancient vampire, three veterans of the Turkish War of Independence are thrust into a conflict with their nation's hereditary enemy. Seyfioglu boldly reworks Stoker's classic tale, retelling it from the unique perspective of a people once routed by the real-life Dracula.

Dracula in Istanbul: The Unauthorized Version of the Gothic Classic also includes a foreword by Anno Dracula author Kim Newman, an introduction by Turkish translation scholar Sehnaz Tahir Gurcaglar, an afterword on the 1953 movie adaptation by film scholar Iain Robert Smith, and several rare photos from the film. From movie and vampire buffs to literary scholars, there's enough here to delight all the children of the night.

It is 1868, and a twenty-one-year-old Bram Stoker waits in a desolate tower to face an indescribable evil. Armed only with crucifixes, holy water, and a rifle, he prays to survive a single night, the longest of his life. Desperate to record what he has witnessed, Bram scribbles down the events that led him here...

A sickly child, Bram spent his early days bedridden in his parents' Dublin home, tended to by his caretaker, a young woman named Ellen Crone. When a string of strange deaths occur in a nearby town, Bram and his sister Matilda detect a pattern of bizarre behavior by Ellen--a mystery that deepens chillingly until Ellen vanishes suddenly from their lives. Years later, Matilda returns from studying in Paris to tell Bram the news that she has seen Ellen--and that the nightmare they've thought long ended is only beginning.

When Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to help Count Dracula with the purchase of a London house, he makes a series of horrific discoveries about his client. Soon after wards, various bizarre incidents unfold in England: an apparently unmanned ship is wrecked off the coast of Whitby; a young woman discovers strange puncture marks on her neck; and the inmate of a lunatic asylum raves about the 'Master' and his imminent arrival.

In "Dracula", Bram Stoker created one of the great masterpieces of the horror genre, brilliantly evoking a nightmare world of vampires and vampire hunters and also illuminating the dark corners of Victorian sexuality and desire.

The authoritative sequel to Bram Stoker's original horror classic.

A quarter of a century after Count Dracula "crumbled into dust," Quincey Harker-the son of Jonathan and Mina Harker-leaves law school to pursue a career on stage, only to stumble upon the troubled production of Dracula, directed and produced by Bram Stoker himself.

As the play plunges Quincey into the world of his parents' terrible secrets, death begins to stalk the original band of heroes that defeated Dracula a quarter-century ago. Could it be that the count survived and is now seeking revenge? Or is there another, far more sinister force at work whose relentless purpose is to destroy anything and anyone associated with Dracula, the most notorious vampire of all time?

In an alternate history of the nineteenth century, Queen Victoria has married Vlad Tepes, better known as Count Dracula, leading to a reign of terror, while, in Whitechapel, Silver Knife, a murderer of vampire girls, threatens the new regime.

While Graf von Dracula commands the German army and Baron von Richthofen spreads terror in the skies during World War I, a resurrected Edgar Allan Poe is commissioned by the Germans to write a fabulous biography of the Red Baron.

Bram Stoker's immortal Dracula told us about Count Dracula as an undead vampire. But how did this come to be? Who was Dracula in real life? There has always been speculation, but The Dracula Papers now offers the ultimate answer. It takes us back to the year 1576, to the wild land of Transylvania and to the early life of Prince Vladimir who came to be the horror known as Dracula. The result is a story as remarkable and extraordinary as the Bram Stoker classic. Battles, intrigues, sorcery, sexual passion, hauntings, a mechanical tortoise and a burning rhinoceros all have their part to play in a thrilling narrative that nevertheless plunges deep into the mystery of Evil. With The Dracula Papers Reggie Oliver presents a grand tour of the sixteenth century, and of every variety of occult lore surrounding the vampire myth, that is rollicking, wise, macabre, but always unexpected. The Scholar's Tale is the first volume of a scholarly and picaresque Gothick Extravaganza.

A hundred years ago Count Dracula, Vlad Tepes to some, joined forces with Sherlock Holmes in a pact of blood and honor. Now the thread of the Count's adventures is picked up by his biographer. This title has been published in parts as "An Old Friend of the Family" and "Thorn".

The immortal Count Dracula--Bram Stoker portrayed him as a terrifying creature of the night, preying upon the pure and innocent. The truth is far different. For Dracula is no villain, but a noble, powerful tower of strength. And it is those who hunt him who are the true villains!

The Southerland family left the old world to start anew in America, but little did they know that a blood-feud, older than history itself, would follow them through the generations to come.

Kate Southerland, the first born of the latest generation of Southerlands, has been murdered, but she is not dead. Her little brother, Johnny, has also vanished, a severed, bloody finger the only clue.

But the Southerlands have no clue what they've fallen into. Their enemy is no mortal madman, but the undying mistress of evil enchantment, Morgan Le Fay, and the Southerlands are not her true target. She seeks to do battle with their protector, their defender, the only man who is capable of saving this mortal family from a war they've never realized was waged.

Fortitude Scott's life is a mess. A degree in film theory has left him with zero marketable skills, his job revolves around pouring coffee, his roommate hasn't paid rent in four months, and he's also a vampire. Well, sort of. He's still mostly human.

But when a new vampire comes into his family's territory and young girls start going missing, Fort can't ignore his heritage anymore. His mother and his older, stronger siblings think he's crazy for wanting to get involved. So it's up to Fort to take action, with the assistance of Suzume Hollis, a dangerous and sexy shape-shifter. Fort is determined to find a way to outsmart the deadly vamp, even if he isn't quite sure how.

But without having matured into full vampirehood and with Suzume ready to split if things get too risky, Fort's rescue mission might just kill him....

Born into a life of secrets and service, Chrysabelle's body bears the telltale marks of a comarré -- a special race of humans bred to feed vampire nobility. When her patron is murdered, she becomes the prime suspect, which sends her running into the mortal world...and into the arms of Malkolm, an outcast vampire cursed to kill every being from whom he drinks.

Now, Chrysabelle and Malkolm must work together to stop a plot to merge the mortal and supernatural worlds. If they fail, a chaos unlike anything anyone has ever seen will threaten to reign.

A country house murder mystery with a supernatural twist (An Ishmael Jones Mystery).

Ishmael Jones is someone who can't afford to be noticed, someone who lives under the radar, who drives on the dark side of the road. He's employed to search out secrets, investigate mysteries and shine a light in dark places. Sometimes he kills people. Invited by his employer, the enigmatic Colonel, to join him and his family for Christmas, Ishmael arrives at the grand but isolated Belcourt Manor in the midst of a blizzard to find that the Colonel has mysteriously disappeared. As he questions his fellow guests, Ishmael concludes that at least one of them - not least Ishmael himself - is harbouring a dangerous secret, and that beneath the veneer of festive cheer lurk passion, jealousy, resentment and betrayal. As a storm sets in, sealing off the Manor from the rest of the world, Ishmael must unmask a ruthless murderer before they strike again.

Who's been killing the vampires of London, tearing open their coffins to let in lethal sunshine as they sleep--and then drinking their blood?

After a career spying for Queen Victoria, James Asher enjoyed a quiet retirement until he met the vampire Don Simon, an immortal Spaniard who taught him about the secret society of bloodsucking undead.

Now, one of the vampires, the Earl of Ernchester, has turned his back on Britain. When Asher spots him boarding a train for Paris in the company of an Austrian spy, he springs into action. If the immortals can forge an alliance with England's enemies, then the Empire is doomed. Asher tails the Earl to Paris and across the continent, plunging into the heart of a terrifying conspiracy of the undead - with the fate of the British Empire at stake.

The new 'James Asher' vampire novel from the best-selling author - It's 1911. War is coming, and according to one of the vampires of St. Petersburg, the Kaiser is trying to recruit vampires. James Asher, Oxford don and formerly on His Majesty's Secret Service, is forced to team up again with his vampire partner Don Simon Ysidro for a journey to the subarctic Russian capital. Are they on the trail of a rogue vampire with a plan to achieve the power to walk in daylight? Asher wonders. Or is Ysidro's real agenda to seek the woman he once loved?

James Asher finds himself once more in alliance with vampire Don Simon Ysidro, as their investigations takes them to far-off Peking . . . October, 1912. James Asher, his wife Lydia, and the old occultist and vampire-hunter Dr Solomon Karlebach have journeyed to the new-born Republic of China to investigate the rumour that the mindless Undead – the Others that even the vampires fear – have begun to multiply in the caverns of the hills west of Peking. Alongside his old vampire partner, Don Simon Ysidro, Asher embarks on a sinister hunt, while somewhere in the city’s cold gray labyrinth lurk the Peking vampires, known as the Magistrates of Hell – with an agenda of their own . . .

When James Asher and his wife Lydia's baby daughter Miranda is kidnapped by the Master Vampire of London, the stakes are high: blindly follow the Master Vampire's instructions, keep out of the way of the human networks that serves the vampires, destroy the interloper who seeks to seize control of the London Nest, and find the key to the Nest's tortuous inner workings: The Book of the Kindred of Darkness.

Even with the vampire Don Simon Ysidro on their side, there's no guarantee that anything - or anyone - is who or what they appear to be. Nor is there any certainty that they'll see their child again - or survive the experience themselves.

When James Asher is found unconscious in the cemetery of the Church of St. Clare Pieds-Nus with multiple puncture-wounds in his throat and arms, his wife, Lydia, knows of only one person to call: the vampire Don Simon Ysidro. Old friend and old adversary, he is the only one who can help Lydia protect her unconscious, fevered husband from the vampires of Paris.

Why James has been attacked - and why he was called to Paris in the first place - Lydia has no idea. But she knows that she must find out, and quickly. For with James wavering between life and death, and war descending on the world, their slim chance of saving themselves from the vampires grows slimmer with each passing day...

During the carnage of World War One, James Asher joins forces with the vampires of Europe to counter an even deadlier threat.

The vampires call them 'The Others'. Neither living nor dead, the revenants are mindless and unstoppable--and in the carnage of the First World War, governments already running short of men to throw into battle might be very interested in soldiers who don't ask questions and are hard to kill. Front-line volunteer nurse Lydia Asher is horrified to learn that someone has found a way to control revenants, and is creating them for this purpose.

Back in London, Lydia's husband, former spy James Asher, is even more appalled to learn that revenants are beginning to show up in England, on the loose. Since revenants devour vampires, the vampires of Europe--most of whom are at the Front, feeding completely unnoticed on the dying--join forces with the Ashers to find the source of the threat before the world is overwhelmed.

Vampire Don Simon Ysido has been captured and held aboard a ship heading to the US to act as a slave, and Dr Lydia Asher must stop it... at any cost.

March, 1917. The goal of every government involved in the Great War has been achieved: industrialist Spenser Cochran has drugged and enslaved a vampire, Don Simon Ysidro, to do his bidding, and is now on the way to the US aboard a luxury ship.

Horrified, Dr Lydia Asher secures her passage on the vessel to rescue her friend from Cochran's chemical thrall. Meanwhile, her husband makes a dangerous alliance with the vampires of Paris to send Lydia the information she needs about the drug.

As they cross the Atlantic evidence mounts that another vampire is hiding aboard the ship, indiscriminately murdering passengers. Lydia knows she must solve both cases before the ship docks, and that breaking Cochran's hold on Don Simon will not be enough... She must kill him.

They live among us, abhorred, marginalised, despised. They are vampires, known politely as Sunless. The job of policing their community falls to the men and women of the Sunless Housing and Disclosure Executive – SHADE. Captain John Redlaw is London’s most feared and respected SHADE officer.

But when the vampires start rioting in their ghettoes, and angry humans respond with violence of their own, even Redlaw may not be able to keep the peace. Especially when political forces are aligning to introduce a radical answer to the Sunless problem, one that will resolve the situation once and for all...

Redlaw is New York Times best selling author James Lovegrove at his very best.

All the official reports say they are dead-extinct since the late ’80s, when a fed named Arkeley nailed the last vampire in a fight that nearly killed him. But the evidence proves otherwise.

When a state trooper named Caxton calls the FBI looking for help in the middle of the night, it is Arkeley who gets the assignment-who else? He’s been expecting such a call to come eventually. Sure, it has been years since any signs of an attack, but Arkeley knows what most people don’t: there is one left. In an abandoned asylum she is rotting, plotting, and biding her time in a way that only the undead can.

Caxton is out of her league on this case and more than a little afraid, but the fed made it plain that there is only one way out. But the worst thing is the feeling that the vampires want more than just her blood. They want her for a reason, one she can’t guess; a reason her sphinxlike partner knows but won’t say; a reason she has to find out-or die trying.

Now there are only 13 bullets between Caxton and Arkeley and the vampires. There are only 13 bullets between us, the living, and them, the damned.

Laura Caxton vowed never to face them again. The horror of what the vampires did is too close, the wounds too fresh. But when Jameson Arkeley, broken and barely recognizable, comes to her with an unfathomable, unholy discovery, her resolve crumbles.

Arkeley leads Caxton to a tomb in Gettysburg recently excavated by a local archaeology professor. While the town, with its legendary role in the Civil War's worst battle, is no stranger to cemeteries, this one is remarkably, eerily different. In it lie 100 coffins--99 of them occupied by vampires, who, luckily, are missing their hearts. But one of the coffins is empty and smashed to pieces.

Who is the missing vampire? Does he have access to the 99 hearts that, if placed back in the bodies of their owners, could reanimate an entire bloodthirsty army? How did the vampires end up there, undisturbed and undiscovered for 150 years? The answer lies in Civil War documents that contain sinister secrets about the newly found coffins--secrets that Laura Caxton is about to uncover as she is thrown into a deadly, gruesome mission of saving an entire town from a mass invasion of the undead...

One man stood between them and us.

U.S. Marshal Jameson Arkeley--the country's foremost authority on vampires--taught police investigator and vampire fighter Laura Caxton everything she knows about monsters. After a bloody war visited upon Gettysburg by an army of vampires, Arkeley gave up his own life to save others. Except he didn't exactly die...

Arkeley accepted the curse and is now a vampire himself. What's worse, he's the savviest vampire ever--he knows all the tricks better than anyone. Caxton is now faced with the task of destroying him. But Arkeley knows all her tactics too; after all, he taught them to her. Caxton realizes she must finish Arkeley before he succeeds in his quest to exterminate his own family, one member at a time. But even more important, she has to prevent him from becoming a beast exponentially more dangerous--a Vampire Zero.

In the next 23 hours, there will be no reprieve, no mercy, and no time off for good behavior.

When vampire hunter Laura Caxton is locked up in a maximum-security prison, the cop-turned-con finds herself surrounded by countless murderers and death-row inmates with nothing to lose... and plenty of time to kill.

Caxton's always been able to watch her own back-even when it's against a cell-block wall-but soon she learns that an even greater threat has slithered behind the bars to join her. Justinia Malvern, the world's oldest living vampire, has taken up residence, and her strength grows by the moment as she raids the inmate population like an open bar with an all-you-can-drink supply of fresh blood. The crafty old vampire knows just how to pull Caxton's strings, too, and she's issued an ultimatum that Laura can't refuse.

Now Laura has just 23 hours to fight her way through a gauntlet of vampires, cons, and killers... 23 hours to make one last, desperate attempt at protecting the world from Justinia's evil.

The Final Reckoning...

Laura Caxton's battles against the ancient vampire Justinia Malvern have cost her nearly everything--her badge, her freedom, her friends and family... maybe even her humanity.

And as she hides out in the deepest backwoods of Pennsylvania, pursued by the cops who were once her colleagues, Laura certainly looks beaten. But as Laura sees it, what little is left of her soul is perfectly adapted to the job of ridding the world of its last vampire. And thanks to the terrible clarity she's found, Laura's come up with a plan--one that will finish Malvern once and for all.

But the ever-wily Malvern has a few last aces left to play and is quietly dealing a hand that will involve a terrible fate for the few friends Laura's got left. When the two adversaries meet for the last time in their most epic battle, the vampires will force Laura to pay a price far beyond anything she's sacrificed before.

One is a heartless, bloodthirsty killer. The other is a vampire.

College freshman, Amanda Colt knows few people and wants to know fewer still. She enjoys fencing and prefers facing a challenge every once in a while. She is beautiful, smart, and possibly the most interesting person on campus.

Then she finds tall, intense Marco Catalano in her fencing class. With a mind like a computer and manners of a medieval knight, he scares most people - but not Amanda. They both have secrets, for they are both monsters.

As they draw closer, they must find the line between how much they can trust each other, and how much they can care for each other. Each carries a secret that can destroy the other. But they must come to grips with their personal drama soon because a darkness rises around them. Bodies keep turning up all over New York, and an army of vampires closes in on all sides.

They have only one hope - each other.

After saving Brooklyn from a nest of vampires, Amanda Colt and Marco Catalano are a little banged up. He's been given a job offer to deal with vampires in San Francisco, and it's a tempting offer would get him away from Amanda, his feelings for her, and get her away from the darkness inside him. When a death in the family compels Marco to move to the West Coast, they're both left to fend for themselves.

But when a creature known only as Mister Day leaves their world in tatters, they must once more join forces against the darkness. Only "Day" is no vampire, but a creature beyond their experience. It will take the combined might of Marco, Amanda, and all of their allies just to slow it down. They have no weapons that can kill him. They have no ways to imprison him. To even fight him is death. But they have to try, or face the end of everything they love.

Merlin Merle Kraft has been fighting the darkness for months. He left San Francisco in the capable hands of Marco Catalano and his anti-vampire team to defend them against vampires. With a special operators at his command, Kraft has been killing every vampire he can find in the Middle East. After clearing out a nest in Tora Bora, he is finally brought back to New York, and the investigation that led him to vampires in the first place.

Marco is starting to spiral. He knows it. His team knows it. Everyone around him can see that he's just a bomb waiting to explode. The only woman who can bring him back from the brink might be the only woman who can bring him back from the edge is also the woman who lit his fuse. Ever since the demon Asmodeus tried to murder Marco, Amanda Colt has been hunting down every lead to find the one ultimately behind the attempt. After months of investigation, she learns that something in the dark is colder than the dark. It is a vampire assassin that Amanda has faced once before, and Amanda lost. This assassin is stronger than anything they've faced before, and it isn't alone.

With Marco ready to self-destruct, and the armies of Hell ready to descend, the three of them must come together and stop a thousand-year-old assassin that has has never been stopped, and has never failed to kill her target.

The final war is about to begin, in this conclusion to the Dragon Award Nominated series...

Merle Kraft, Marco Catalano and Amanda Colt have battled against the mythical Council, a supernatural conspiracy that monsters fear. This war has brought them up against vampires, minions, and demons from Hell.. Along the way, they have accumulated allies among the police, the military, the mafia, college students, lowly street gangs, and even other vampires.Marco and Amanda have overcome their biggest terror -- their passion for each other.But now, they face the final threat, one that is the culmination of every threat before them. This creature from Hell has powers beyond anything they've ever seen before, and has allies of his own: including SpecOps minions, an army of vampires, and packs of werewolves. And that was before Marco got bit.

Theodore Sturgeon's dark and foreboding look at the vampire myth was an instant classic when originally published in 1956. When George Smith is arrested for assaulting a senior officer, a military psychiatrist is assigned to the case. The secret of George's past is unearthed, and a history of blood lust and murder. Innovatively told through letters, interviews, and traditional narrative, Some of Your Blood effectively portrays the tragic upbringing of George Smith to his attempts at a stable life and the great love of his life to his inevitable downfall. Millipede Press is proud to present this masterpiece of macabre literature in a brand new edition.

In his powerful novel, Motherless Child, Bram Stoker Award-nominee Glen Hirshberg, author of the International Horror Guild Award-winning American Morons, exposes the fallacy of the Twilight-style romantic vampire while capturing the heart of every reader.

It's the thrill of a lifetime when Sophie and Natalie, single mothers living in a trailer park in North Carolina, meet their idol, the mysterious musician known only as "the Whistler." Morning finds them covered with dried blood, their clothing shredded and their memories hazy. Things soon become horrifyingly clear: the Whistler is a vampire and Natalie and Sophie are his latest victims. The young women leave their babies with Natalie's mother and hit the road, determined not to give in to their unnatural desires.

Hunger and desire make a powerful couple. So do the Whistler and his Mother, who are searching for Sophie and Natalie with the help of Twitter and the musician's many fans. The violent, emotionally moving showdown between two who should be victims and two who should be monsters will leave readers gasping in fear and delight.

Originally published in a sold-out, limited edition, Motherless Child is an extraordinary Southern horror novel that Tor Books is proud to bring to a wider audience.

Three-time International Horror Guild and Shirley Jackson Award Winner Glen Hirshberg brings his flair for the grim, grisly, and emotionally harrowing to this standalone sequel to Motherless Child.

Reeling from the violent death of her daughter and a confrontation with the Whistler--the monster who wrecked her life--Jess has fled the South for a tiny college town in New Hampshire. There she huddles in a fire-blackened house with her crippled lover, her infant grandson, and the creature that was once her daughter's best friend and may or may not be a threat.

Rebecca, a college student orphaned in childhood, cares for Jess's grandson, and finds in Jess's house the promise of a family she has never known, but also a terrifying secret.

Meanwhile, unhinged and unmoored, the Whistler watches from the rooftops and awaits his moment.

And deep in the Mississippi Delta, the evil that spawned him stirs...

Harry Keogh: Necroscope and Other Weird Heroes! is a collection of eight long short stories featuring Brian Lumley's most popular characters and includes three brand-new stories of Harry Keogh, the original Necroscope!

Titus Crow: Psychic detective, master magician, destroyer of the ancient Chthulian gods. In "Inception," we see the infant Titus at the moment his destiny falls upon him. In "Lord of the Worms," a simple secretarial job lands Crow on a sacrificial altar. And in "Name and Number," Henri Laurent de Marigny details a battle between Titus Crow and malevolent, occult winds which can rip living flesh from bone.

David Hero and Eldin the Wanderer: once men of the waking world, now agents for King Kuranes of the Dreamlands. Sips of "The Weird Wines of Naxas Niss" send the pair on a tumultuous journey from a buxom beauty's bed to the depths of a wizard's dungeon. Then, seeking his missing friend, David Hero boards an ill-fated airship that is home to "The Stealer of Dreams."

Harry Keogh, Necroscope: vampire killer without peer, capable of conversing with the dead. A sudden windfall brings Harry to Las Vegas, where he meets "Dead Eddie," a gambler who can't resist trying for one last big win from beyond the grave. In "Dinosaur Dreams, Harry's interest in fossils leads him to uncover the truth behind the death of a young amateur paleontologist... and to discover that it's not just dead people he can call on in a crisis.... Harry's undying love for his mother leads him down a dangerous path in "Resurrection."

Four of Lumley's greatest heroes. Three of his most popular worlds. Tales to chill and to delight. Open the book and be swept away.

DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES... Except to Harry Keogh, Necroscope. And what they tell him is horrifying.

In the Balkan mountains of Rumania, a terrible evil is growing. Long buried in hallowed ground, bound by earth and silver, the master vampire schemes and plots. Trapped in unlife, neither dead nor living, Thibor Ferenczy hungers for freedom and revenge.

The vampire's human tool is Boris Dragosani, part of a super-secret Soviet spy agency. Dragosani is an avid pupil, eager to plumb the depthless evil of the vampire's mind. Ferenczy teaches Dragosani the awful skills of the necromancer, gives him the ability to rip secrets from the mind and bodies of the dead.

Dragosani works not for Ferenczy's freedom but world domination. he will rule the world with knowledge raped from the dead.

His only opponent: Harry Koegh, champion of the dead and the living.

To protect Harry, the dead will do anything - even rise from their graves!

Not the end of life, Harry Keogh discovered--and not the end of his battle against he terrible evil of vampires. -- In a secluded English village, Yulian Bodescu plots his takeover of the world. Imbued with a vampire's powers before his birth, Bodescu rules men's minds and bodies with supernatural ease. He is secretly creating an army of vampiric monsters, things that once were men but were now walking masses of destructive hunger!

Harry Keogh, Necroscope, thought that the war with the vampires had ended with the destruction of Boris Dragasani--and of Harry's body! But the man who talks to the dead lives on, more powerful than ever, able to transport himself instantly to any spot on the globe and to speak mind-to-mind with both the living and the dead.

Are Harry's new powers enough to defeat Yulian Bodescu and his legion of monsters--or will the vampire army overrun the living earth?

The third book in the Necroscope series traces the battle between Harry Keogh and the horrifying Vamphyri on their home ground, an alien landscape of looming towers, impossible cliffs, and ravenous vampire-beasts.

Russia's Ural Mountains hide a deadly secret: a supernatural portal to the country of the vampires. Soviet scientists and ESP-powered spies, in a secret military base, study the portal--and the powerfully evil creatures that emerge from it, intent on ravaging mankind.

When Jazz Simmons, a British agent sent to infiltrate the base, is captured by the KGB espionage squad and forced through the portal, his last message tells Harry Keogh, the Necroscope, that the vampires are preparing for a mass invasion.

Harry has only one option--to strike first. He must carry the human-vampire war to the vampire's own lands. But his strongest psychic power will be useless there. What good is the power to summon the dead in a country where nothing ever dies, where every man, woman, and child become half-dead servants of the Vamphyri?

A new vampire stalks the earth, and only Harry Keogh can defeat him!

The silence of the grave is not silent at all. In their millions, the dead are screaming... but no one can hear them!

Atop a perilous cliff, deep in the Balkan mountains, rises the castle of the Ferenczy. Once it was a stronghold of the Vamphyri... and now it will be so again, for Janos Ferenczy, vampire and black magician, has risen from his ages-long sleep. Powerful and evil, Janos conjures dead men and women into a semblance of life and subjects them to fiendish tortures.

But the shrieks of the dead do not satisfy Janos's lust for blood-- for that he needs living humans. His terrifying armies of the risen dead will soon overwhelm a helpless, defenseless mankind....

Helpless and defenseless because a terrible battle against the vampires has destroyed Harry Keogh's deadspeak, leaving the Necroscope deaf to the teeming dead... and to their warnings of Janos's reign of terror.

To save the world, Harry must join forces and link minds with the most powerful, and deadliest, vampire of all!

There's a maniacal murderer on the loose, brutally slaughtering young women with a ferocity that rivals that of vampires Harry Koegh has spent his life combatting. The Necroscope's been asked to solve the crimes... asked by the dead spirits of the madman's victims.

Harry cannot turn down a request from the dead... even if it costs him his soul. In the climactic battle with the vampires, mankind prevailed and purged the vampires from earth--thanks to Harry, his team of psychically-gifted spies, and Faethor Ferenczy, long-dead 'father' of the world's vampires, who betrayed his own kind.

But Harry's alliance with Faethor has a terrible cost--Harry's very humanity is under attack from the vampire evil coiled in his mind!

The vampires have been vanquished! Harry Keogh and the armies of the dead have destroyed the evil that once plagued the world. Nathan and Nestor, secret twin sons of the Necroscope and a proud gypsy woman, were children when their father, his humanity poisoned by his fearsome struggles, sacrificed himself to save mankind.

Yet there are vampires still, vampires crueler and stranger than any the Necroscope had faced. When these new, merciless killers swoop out of the sky, Nathan and Nestor are men--but they have few of Harry Keogh's miraculous powers.

Torn from each other by battle, the sons of the Necroscope journey across the vampire world, exploring its mysteries, each seeking the powerful, terrible vampires, his missing brother...and the woman they both love!

Nestor and Nathan Kiklu are the twin sons of Harry Keogh, the Necroscope. United by blood, they also share some of their father's awesome powers--but what they do with those gifts cannot be more different!

Nathan takes up the struggle against the metamorphic vampires, while Nestor, fascinated by the vampires' eerie evil, has become his twin's worst nightmare: a Wamphyri Lord!

Harry Keogh's sons have become the bitterest of enemies, each determined to destroy the other. When next they meet, one will surely die!

The twin sons of Harry Keogh, the Necroscope, have taken very different paths. Nathan as his father's powers--to talk to the dead, to travel instantly through space. Like Harry, this new Necroscope fights evil wherever he finds it.

His twin, Nestor, has become the most horrifying evil imaginable: a shape-shifting, blood sucking Wamphyi Lord! Devoid of human feeling, Nestor and his companion, the beautiful, malevolent Wratha the Risen, hunt without mercy.

The battle between the brothers mirrors the war between vampires and humans. On mankind's side: terrible weapons brought from Earth by Nathan's allies. But the vampires are numerous and powerful, and neither side has a clear advantage...until Nathan and his legions of the dead discover a way to destroy the vampires forever.

In the midst of a titanic battle, Nathan makes a desperate move that forever changes millions of lives and two worlds: the vampire world... and earth.

Vampires never rest, and neither does Harry Keogh, the world's greatest vampire hunter, the Necroscope, the man who can talk to the dead. Right now, he's desperately searching for his wife and son, who disappeared in the midst of Harry's war against the undead monsters that plague mankind. Others will to carry on that fight until the Necroscope has been reunited with his beloved family.

But it's not that easy to leave the vampire war behind. The bloodsuckers know that the Necroscope is their deadliest enemy and will do anything to destroy him.

Harry struggles to locate his missing family, not realizing that he has become a pawn in the battle between two powerful vampires. When one has slain the other, the Necroscope will be the next to die.

Harry Keogh, the Necroscope, the man who can talk to the dead, and Earth's greatest vampire hunter, has been searching for his wife and infant son, gone missing during Harry's war against the vampires. This obsession has left him open to subtle influence by an ancient vampire, Radu. Entombed in amber, trapped in undeath, Radu plans for his resurrection and plots the destruction of other vampires who might challenge his supremacy.

Thus, Radu's enemies are now Harry's--and Harry cannot properly defend himself. His powers--his deadspeak and his ability to transport himself through the Mobius Continuum--are locked away in the recesses of his vampire-clouded mind.

But Harry is not without allies, living and dead. E-Branch, the psychic spy organization, is worried about Harry. So is harry's long-dead Ma, and the ancient philosopher and prophet Nostradamus, whose centuries-old quatrain make eerie sense in the modern world.

Right now, Harry Keogh doesn't even know he's the Necroscope. But Earth's teeming dead won't let him forget them for long--and won't let him forget that Radu and his vampire kind are humanity's deadliest enemies.

Three great vampires--two Lords and a Lady--arrive on an unsuspecting Earth that teems with defenseless humans, easy prey for the marauding vampires. But humanity has defenders. Though the necroscope is gone, the psychically gifted men and women of E-Branch move swiftly against the vampire infestation.

Jake Cutter is running for his life through the streets of Turin when he vanishes, appearing moments later inside the triply locked "Harry's room" in E-Branch's London HQ. Jake's dreams are very strange, filled with the voices of the dead--the Great majority, the Necroscope, Harry Keogh, even a dead vampire. He hears them all, but he doesn't truly understand.

If Jake is the new Necroscope, he has to learn--fast!--how to control his powers and speak to the dead. E-Branch, with the reluctant Jake along for the ride, is about to go head-to-head with Malinari the Mind, a vampire Lord who psychic abilities are second to none.

But the dead don't trust Jake, not like they trusted Harry. Jake's got personal revenge on his mind, and he's spending too much time talking that dead vampire. He's got to start thinking about the future--or he won't have one!

Jake Cutter is reluctantly learning how to be a Necroscope--how to use the Mobius continuum to travel instantaneously from place to place, how to talk to the dead--but dead humans don't like him much. It seems Jake's got a hitchhiker named Korath. Since Korath holds the key to the Mobius equations, Jake can't just kick him out... though he's certainly trying.

Jake's not sure he really wants to be a member of E-Branch, the supersecret ESP-powered organization that's dedicated to eradicating the vampire infestation of Earth. To the freewheeling, passionate Jake, the E-Branchers seem a little stuffy and hidebound--except for the lovely Liz, whom Jake wants to get to know better, body and mind. But Liz is a telepath, and if Jake's not careful, she'll find out about Korath. And that will likely be the end of Jake Cutter.

In Australia, Jake helped E-Branch destroy the aerie of the mind-master , Nephtam Malinari, one of a trio of Great Vampires who came to Earth from the vampire world. Malinari escaped and went to ground with the hideously beautiful Lady Vavara. Vavara has taken over a holy monastary on a beautiful Greek island and turned the nuns into most unholy creature with fearsome appetites for all things carnal.

Jake wants revenge against the Italian mobsters who killed the woman he loved and nearly killed him. As far as he's concerned, E-Branch can search for Malinari, Vavara, and the metamorphic Lord Szwart without him until he's satisfied his own bloodlust. But it seems vampire hunting is truly Jake's job now--the men he's trying to kill aren't men at all, but vampire spawn, hidden for two generations in human guise! To defeat them, Jake will need every weapon in a Necroscope's arsenal, including the power to all the unsleeping dead out of their moldering graves.

The packed cruise ship is a terrific nesting ground for a Lord and Lady of the Wamphyri on the run from E-Branch and the new Necroscope, Jake Cutter. By the time the ship is reported missing, the few beings still living on board will no longer be human... and the Wamphyri will be long fled to their next conquest.

Korath, the vampire who lurks in Jake Cutter's mind, is determined to gain control of Jake's life, and Jake is equally determined not to let him have it. But to win this struggle Jake must confide in Ben Trask-and Trask, the head of E-Branch, is likely to want Jake dead the minute he learns of Jake's intrusive passenger!

The spore garden planted under London by the third Wamphyri, Lord Swartz, is bearing bitter fruit indeed as a mysterious sleeping sickness-with a vampiric taint-slowly spreads among the population of Great Britain.

E-Branch action teams have more on their plates than they can handle. They must locate terrorists who threaten the world with nuclear homicide; permanently close the Gate between the Wamphyri world and Earth; analyze the spore plague; and locate and destroy the three Wamphyri.

In Brian Lumley's Necroscope: Avengers, even the powers of Harry Keogh, the original Necroscope, summoned from the Great Beyond via the combined powers of E-Branch's strongest agents, may not be enough to defeat the monsters who have brought Earth to the brink of total destruction.

Harry Keogh is moving on. Though the search for his missing wife and child continues, his heart now lies in Edinburgh with Bonnie Jean--a beautiful Scottish werewolf whose friendly pack and flourishing pub have given him a place he can almost call home.

But from the rocky heights of Sicily, the diabolical Francezci brothers plot the wolf-pack's destruction; and down in the terrible Pit beneath Le Manse Madonie, an ancient evil schemes.

The vampires conspire. They reach a decision. They choose a vector. Mafia thug Mike Milazzo is no good to anyone, anytime, anywhere... which makes him perfect. Disposable.

The brothers infect him with a deadly poison--an engineered plague that even a werewolf could never survive--and they offer him a terrible bargain: successfully contaminate the wolf-pack, and receive the antidote. Fail, and die!

Mike has everything to lose. So does Harry Keogh. But the Necroscope lost everything once before, and he isn't about to do it again...

MATT RICHTER MAY BE DEAD, BUT HE'LL STILL CRACK THIS CASE

Meet Matt Richter. Private Eye. Zombie. His mean streets are the city of the dead, the shadowy realm known as Nekropolis.

This place has always been ruled by the vampire overlords. Now they're plotting to destroy the city.

... over his dead body.

The return of Matt Richter. Private Eye. Zombie.

MATT RICHTER'S GOING TO PIECES - LITERALLY.

You've got to keep your head to survive in the teeming undead city known as Nekropolis. It's a pity crazed genius Victor Baron couldn't manage that. Now everyone wants a piece of him.

Zombie detective Matt Richter and his glamorous she-vampire companion Devona are back on the case, with another wild and wonderful investigation.

Meet Matt Richter. Zombie. PI.

From his arrival at Nekropolis, Matt has found himself embroiled in disputes with the city's vampire lords, shapeshifters, golems and other monstrosities.

Nothing has prepared him for the Dark War.

As a soldier in the jungle of Vietnam, Chris Stiles learned how to fight against a deadly enemy. Now the war is over, but when his brother is slaughtered in Central Park, Chris finds himself called back into action, this time to battle a different kind of foe: an army of the undead!

His quest for the creature that killed his brother brings him to Isherwood, Indiana, home to 800 people--and one ancient vampire. As all hell breaks loose and the townspeople are turned one by one into blood-sucking monsters, will Chris's tactical skills and his arsenal of automatic weapons be enough to stop the vampire menace?

Winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel

From a new master of horror comes an apocalyptic showdown between the residents of a secluded, rural town and the deadly evil that confronts them wherever they turn . . .

Evil Doesn't Die

The cozy little town of Pine Deep buried the horrors of its past a long time ago. Thirty years have gone by since the darkness descended and the Black Harvest began, a time when a serial killer sheared a bloody swath through the quiet Pennsylvania village. The evil that once coursed through Pine Deep has been replaced by cheerful tourists getting ready to enjoy the country's largest Halloween celebration in what is now called "The Spookiest Town in America."

It Just Grows Stronger

But then--a month before Halloween--it begins. Unspeakably desecrated bodies. Inexplicable insanity. And an ancient evil walking the streets, drawing in those who would fall to their own demons and seeking to shred the very soul of this rapidly fracturing community. Yes, the residents of Pine Deep have drawn together and faced a killer before. But this time, evil has many faces--and the lust and will to rule the earth. This struggle will be epic.

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.

Here are two great, neglected horror novels by Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, together in one volume for the first time. It is a double treat for lovers of blood-curdling fantasy fiction.

The Lady of the Shroud, published here in its full and unabridged form, is a fascinating and engrossing concoction of a vampire tale, Ruritanian adventure story and science fiction romance. The novel fully demonstrates the breadth and ingenuity of Stoker's imagination.

The spine-chilling The Lair of the White Worm features a monstrous worm secreted for thousands of years in a bottomless well and able to metamorphose into a seductive woman of a reptilian beauty who survives on her victim's life blood. The novel contains some of Stoker's most graphic and grisly moments of horror.

When centuries-old vampire Baron Rudolfo Zginski was staked in Wales in 1915, the last thing he expected was to reawaken in Memphis, Tennessee, sixty years later. Reborn into a new world of simmering racial tensions, the cunning nosferatu realizes he must adapt quickly if he is to survive.

Finding willing victims is easy, as Zginski possesses all the powers of the undead, including the ability to sexually enslave anyone he chooses. Hoping to learn how his kind copes with this bizarre new era, Zginski tracks down a nest of teenage vampires. But these young vampires have little knowledge of their true nature, having learned most of what they know from movies like Blacula.

Forming an uneasy alliance with the young vampires, Zginski begins to teach them the truth about their powers. They must learn quickly, for there's a new drug on the street--a drug created to specifically target and destroy vampires. As Zginski and his allies track the drug to its source, they may unwittingly be stepping into a fifty-year-old trap that can destroy them all . . .

Listen to what I tell you, son, every word is true
The sisters haunt the night, and might fight over you
Nothing can steal your soul and stamp it in the mud
Like being the new play-pretty for the girls with the games of blood...

The old song warns of the beautiful Bolade sisters, Patience and Prudence, whose undying rivalry was said to stretch even beyond the grave. But Count Rudolfo Vladimir Zginski has never heard the song. A suave Continental vampire, staked to death more than sixty years ago, he has risen to stalk the Southern nights of Memphis, Tennessee, circa 1975. Although new to the modern world, he has quickly developed a taste for its hot blood, willing women, and high-speed automobiles.

Yet the seventies are not without their perils, even for so cunning and ruthless a predator. Zginski’s insistent pursuit of a cherry 1973 Mach 1 Ford Mustang soon brings him into conflict with a legendary redneck sheriff with a short temper and a big baseball bat. His dangerous fascination with an enticing undead chanteuse and her equally seductive sister, threatens not only his own ageless existence, but that of the small group of modern-day vampires he has grudgingly taken under his wing. Zginski has already escaped limbo once, but can he free himself from the tangled web of the girls who play games of blood?

Alex Bledsoe, author of Blood Groove, returns to he world of the undead with a tale of fast cars and vengeance that never dies....

Does a Romanian infant's blood hold the key to a cure for AIDS? The Hugo Award-winning author of Summer of Night brings an evil legacy to life in the ultimate vampire novel.

A debut horror novel featuring a vampire, Sonja Blue, who escapes from a mental hospital leaving a trail of corpses in her wake. As we learn about her early life, we are taken on a nightmarish tour of a world inhabited by other types of non-humans - ogres, zombies and, of course, vampires.

"Something is murdering my men."

Thus reads the message received from a Nazi commander stationed in a small castle high in the remote Transylvanian Alps. Invisible and silent, the enemy selects one victim per night, leaving the bloodless and mutilated corpses behind to terrify its future victims.

When an elite SS extermination squad is dispatched to solve the problem, the men find something that's both powerful and terrifying. Panicked, the Nazis bring in a local expert on folklore--who just happens to be Jewish--to shed some light on the mysterious happenings. And unbeknownst to anyone, there is another visitor on his way--a man who awoke from a nightmare and immediately set out to meet his destiny.

The battle has begun: On one side, the ultimate evil created by man, and on the other... the unthinkable, unstoppable, unknowing terror that man has inevitably awakened

Katie is on the verge of her Rumspringa, the time in Amish life when teenagers can get a taste of the real world. But the real world comes to her in this dystopian tale with a philosophical bent. Rumors of massive unrest on the "Outside" abound. Something murderous is out there. Amish elders make a rule: No one goes outside, and no outsiders come in. But when Katie finds a gravely injured young man, she can't leave him to die. She smuggles him into her family's barn-at what cost to her community? The suspense of this vividly told, truly horrific thriller will keep the pages turning.

After a plague of vampires was unleashed in the world, Katie was kicked out of the safe haven of her Amish community for her refusal to adhere to the new rules of survival. She enters an outside world of unspeakable violence with only her two friends and a horse by her side.

And yet through this darkness come the shining ones: luminescent men and women with the power to deflect vampires and survive the night. But can they be trusted, and are they even people at all?

In this sequel to The Hallowed Ones, it's up to one Amish girl to save her family, her community, and the boy she loves... but what will she be asked to sacrifice in return?

After stumbling upon the algorithm that turned him and his fellow merchant bankers into vampires, Alex Schwartz was drafted by The Laundry, Britain's secret counter-occult agency that's humanity's first line of defense against the forces of darkness. Dependent on his new employers for his continued existence -- as Alex has no stomach for predatory bloodsucking -- he has little choice but to accept his new role as an operative-in-training.

Dispatched to Leeds, Alex's first assignment is to help assess the costs of renovating a 1950s Cold War bunker into The Laundry's new headquarters. Unfortunately, Leeds is Alex's hometown, and the thought of breaking the news to his parents that he's left banking for civil service, while hiding his undead condition, is causing more anxiety than learning how to live as a vampire secret agent preparing to confront multiple apocalypses.

Alex's only saving grace is Cassie Brewer, a drama student appearing in the local Goth Festival who is inexplicably attracted to him despite his awkward personality and massive amounts of sunblock.

But Cassie has secrets of her own -- secrets that make Alex's night life behaviors seem positively normal...

"It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born."

First, the unthinkable: a security breach at a secret U.S. government facility unleashes the monstrous product of a chilling military experiment. Then, the unspeakable: a night of chaos and carnage gives way to sunrise on a nation, and ultimately a world, forever altered. All that remains for the stunned survivors is the long fight ahead and a future ruled by fear-of darkness, of death, of a fate far worse.

As civilization swiftly crumbles into a primal landscape of predators and prey, two people flee in search of sanctuary. FBI agent Brad Wolgast is a good man haunted by what he's done in the line of duty. Six-year-old orphan Amy Harper Bellafonte is a refugee from the doomed scientific project that has triggered apocalypse. He is determined to protect her from the horror set loose by her captors. But for Amy, escaping the bloody fallout is only the beginning of a much longer odyssey-spanning miles and decades-towards the time and place where she must finish what should never have begun.

With The Passage, award-winning author Justin Cronin has written both a relentlessly suspenseful adventure and an epic chronicle of human endurance in the face of unprecedented catastrophe and unimaginable danger. Its inventive storytelling, masterful prose, and depth of human insight mark it as a crucial and transcendent work of modern fiction.

At the end of The Passage, the great viral plague had left a small group of survivors clinging to life amidst a world transformed into a nightmare. In the second volume of this epic trilogy, this same group of survivors, led by the mysterious, charismatic Amy, go on the attack, leading an insurrection against the virals: the first offensives of the Second Viral War.

To do this, they must infiltrate a dozen hives, each presided over by one of the original Twelve. Their secret weapon: Alicia, transformed at the end of book one into a half human, half viral—but whose side, in the end, is she really on?

The world we knew is gone. What world will rise in its place?

The Twelve have been destroyed and the terrifying hundred-year reign of darkness that descended upon the world has ended. The survivors are stepping outside their walls, determined to build society anew--and daring to dream of a hopeful future.

But far from them, in a dead metropolis, he waits: Zero. The First. Father of the Twelve. The anguish that shattered his human life haunts him, and the hatred spawned by his transformation burns bright. His fury will be quenched only when he destroys Amy--humanity's only hope, the Girl from Nowhere who grew up to rise against him.

One last time light and dark will clash, and at last Amy and her friends will know their fate.

Stephen King returns to the characters and territory of one of his most popular novels ever, The Shining, in this instantly riveting novel about the now middle-aged Dan Torrance (the boy protagonist of The Shining) and the very special twelve-year-old girl he must save from a tribe of murderous paranormals.

On highways across America, a tribe of people called The True Knot travel in search of sustenance. They look harmless-mostly old, lots of polyester, and married to their RVs. But as Dan Torrance knows, and spunky twelve-year-old Abra Stone learns, The True Knot are quasi-immortal, living off the "steam" that children with the "shining" produce when they are slowly tortured to death.

Haunted by the inhabitants of the Overlook Hotel where he spent one horrific childhood year, Dan has been drifting for decades, desperate to shed his father's legacy of despair, alcoholism, and violence. Finally, he settles in a New Hampshire town, an AA community that sustains him, and a job at a nursing home where his remnant "shining" power provides the crucial final comfort to the dying. Aided by a prescient cat, he becomes "Doctor Sleep."

Then Dan meets the evanescent Abra Stone, and it is her spectacular gift, the brightest shining ever seen, that reignites Dan's own demons and summons him to a battle for Abra's soul and survival. This is an epic war between good and evil, a gory, glorious story that will thrill the millions of devoted readers of The Shining and satisfy anyone new to the territory of this icon in the King canon.

The visionary creator of the Academy Award-winning Pan's Labyrinth and a Hammett Award-winning author bring their imaginations to this bold, epic novel about a horrifying battle between man and vampire that threatens all humanity. It is the first installment in a thrilling trilogy and an extraordinary international publishing event.

The Strain

They have always been here. Vampires. In secret and in darkness. Waiting. Now their time has come.

In one week, Manhattan will be gone. In one month, the country.

In two months--the world.

A Boeing 777 arrives at JFK and is on its way across the tarmac, when it suddenly stops dead. All window shades are pulled down. All lights are out. All communication channels have gone quiet. Crews on the ground are lost for answers, but an alert goes out to the CDC. Dr. Eph Goodweather, head of their Canary project, a rapid-response team that investigates biological threats, gets the call and boards the plane. What he finds makes his blood run cold.

In a pawnshop in Spanish Harlem, a former professor and survivor of the Holocaust named Abraham Setrakian knows something is happening. And he knows the time has come, that a war is brewing . . .

So begins a battle of mammoth proportions as the vampiric virus that has infected New York begins to spill out into the streets. Eph, who is joined by Setrakian and a motley crew of fighters, must now find a way to stop the contagion and save his city--a city that includes his wife and son--before it is too late.

The vampiric virus unleashed in The Strain has taken over New York City. It is spreading across the country and soon, the world. Amid the chaos, Eph Goodweather—head of the Center for Disease Control’s team—leads a small band out to stop these bloodthirsty monsters. But it may be too late.

Ignited by the Master’s horrific plan, a war erupts between Old and New World vampires, each vying for total control. Caught between these warring forces, humans—powerless and vulnerable—are no longer the consumers, but the consumed.

Though Eph understands the vampiric plague better than anyone, even he cannot protect those he loves from the invading evil. His ex-wife, Kelly, has been turned by the Master, and now she stalks the city, in the darkness, looking for her chance to reclaim Zack, Eph’s young son.

With the future of the world in the balance, Eph and his courageous team, guided by the brilliant former professor and Holocaust survivor Abraham Setrakian and exterminator Vasiliy Fet, must combat a terror whose ultimate plan is more terrible than anyone first imagined—a fate worse than annihilation.

From the authors of the instant New York Times bestsellers The Strain and The Fall comes the final volume in one of the most electrifying thriller series in years.

It’s been two years since the vampiric virus was unleashed in The Strain, and the entire world now lies on the brink of annihilation. There is only night as nuclear winter blankets the land, the sun filtering through the poisoned atmosphere for two hours each day—the perfect environment for the propagation of vampires.

There has been a mass extermination of humans, the best and the brightest, the wealthy and the influential, orchestrated by the Master—an ancient vampire possessed of unparalleled powers—who selects survivors based on compliance. Those humans who remain are entirely subjugated, interred in camps, and separated by status: those who breed more humans, and those who are bled for the sustenance of the Master’s vast army.

The future of humankind lies in the hands of a ragtag band of freedom fighters—Dr. Eph Goodweather, former head of the Centers for Disease Control’s biological threats team; Dr. Nora Martinez, a fellow doctor with a talent for dispatching the undead; Vasiliy Fet, the colorful Russian exterminator; and Mr. Quinlan, the half-breed offspring of the Master who is bent on revenge. It’s their job to rescue Eph’s son, Zack, and overturn this devastating new world order. But good and evil are malleable terms now, and the Master is most skilled at preying on the weaknesses of humans.

Now, at this critical hour, there is evidence of a traitor in their midst. . . . And only one man holds the answer to the Master’s demise, but is he one who can be trusted with the fate of the world? And who among them will pay the ultimate sacrifice—so that others may be saved?

Here are the confessions of a vampire. Hypnotic, shocking, and chillingly erotic, this is a novel of mesmerizing beauty and astonishing force--a story of danger and flight, of love and loss, of suspense and resolution, and of the extraordinary power of the senses.

It is a novel only Anne Rice could write....

As the novel opens, Lestat, having risen from the earth after a fifty-five years' sleep, and infatuated with the modern world, presents himself in all his vampire brilliance as a rock star, a superstar, a seducer of millions. And, in this blaze of adulation, daring to break the vampire oath of silence, he determines to tell his story, to rouse the generations of the living dead from their slumbers and to penetrate the riddle of his own existence.

As he speaks we are plunged back into eighteenth-century France, into the castle where we meet the young Lestat: child of impoverished aristocrats, heroic hunter of wolves, at odds with his tyrannical father, running away to join a traveling troupe of actors. We see him in the licentious Paris of the day, first apprentice at a boulevard theater, then its most celebrated actor, idolized, adored by many and--night after night--watched by one... until, in a sleep filled with dreams of the wolves he killed as a boy, he is shocked awake by a dark figure and suddenly, horribly, eternally joined to the unholy brotherhood.

We follow Lestat as he searches for others like him--in churches and brothels, in gambling houses, huts and palaces--sometimes joined by the vampire-angel Gabrielle, who is bound to him both by blood and by passion; sometimes traveling with his adored Nicolas, the violinist whose music and beauty are equally transcendent. We follow Lestat as he travels from the snowcapped mountains of the Auvergne and the primeval forest of ancient Gaul to Sicily, Istanbul, Venice and Cairo, searching for his origins, sometimes finding clues to the birth of the vampire race, knowing always that the central truth eludes him.

But all the while, throughout his travels, through many lands and many times, Lestat has made enemies among his brethren--vampires who are in terror of his questions, who fear he will disturb the uneasy balance in which they exist with the mortal world, and who suspect in him a desire to rule. And when, in the caves below a craggy Greek island, in a sanctuary whose walls are covered with gold-flecked murals, the very first of the living dead awake, the truth at the heart of his quest is at last revealed. Ancient forces held immobile through the ages are irreversibly set in motion, and as the novel rushes to its stunning climax, Lestat's vampire foes converge in pursuit of him on the demonic freeways of the twentieth century.

Three brilliantly colored narrative threads intertwine as the story unfolds:

- The rock star known as Vampire Lestat, worshipped by millions of spellbound fans, prepares for a concert in San Francisco. Among the audience--pilgrims in a blind swoon of adoration--are hundreds of vampires, creatures who see Lestat as a "greedy fiend risking the secret prosperity of all his kind just to be loved and seen by mortals," fiends themselves who hate Lestat's power and who are determined to destroy him . . .

- The sleep of certain men and women--vampires and mortals scattered around the world--is haunted by a vivid, mysterious dream: of twins with fiery red hair and piercing green eyes who suffer an unspeakable tragedy. It is a dream that slowly, tauntingly reveals its meaning to the dreamers as they make their way toward each other--some to be destroyed on the journey, some to face an even more terrifying fate at journey's end . . .

- Akasha--Queen of the Damned, mother of all vampires, rises after a 6,000 year sleep and puts into motion a heinous plan to "save" mankind from itself and make "all myths of the world real" by elevating herself and her chosen son/lover to the level of the gods: "I am the fulfillment and I shall from this moment be the cause" . . .

These narrative threads wind sinuously across a vast, richly detailed tapestry of the violent, sensual world of vampirism, taking us back 6,000 years to its beginnings. As the stories of the "first brood" of blood drinkers are revealed, we are swept across the ages, from Egypt to South America to the Himalayas to all the shrouded corners of the globe where vampires have left their mark. Vampires are created--mortals succumbing to the sensation of "being enptied, of being devoured, of being nothing." Vampires are destroyed. Dark rituals are performed--the rituals of ancient creatures prowling the modern world. And, finally, we are brought to a moment in the twentieth century when, in an astonishing climax, the fate of the living dead--and perhaps of the living, all the living--will be decided.

Lestat, the vampire-hero, enchanter and seducer of mortals, speaks in the new book in the bestselling Vampire Chronicles that began with Interview with the Vampire and continued with The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the Damned. For centuries Lestat has been a courted prince in the dark universe of the living dead. But now he is alone, and everything he has come to believe in is called into question. Soon he will embark on the most dangerous enterprise he has ever undertaken.

In Anne Rice's extraordinary novel, the Vampire Lestat--outsides, canny monster, hero-wanderer--is at last offered the chance to be redeemed.

He is brought into direct confrontation with both God and the Devil, and into the land of Death.

We are in New York. The city is blanketed in snow. Through the whiteness Lestat is searching for Dora, the beautiful and charismatic daughter of a drug lord, the woman who arouses Lestat's tenderness as no mortal ever has.

While torn between his vampire passions and his overwhelming love for Dora, Lestat is confronted by the most dangerous of adversaries he has yet known.

He is snatched from the world itself by the mysterious Memnoch, who claims to be the Devil. He is invited to be a witness at the Creation. He is taken like the ancient prophets into the heavenly realm and is ushered into Purgatory.

He must decide if he can believe in the Devil or in God. And finally, he must decide which, if either, he will serve.

In the first four Vampire Chronicles, Anne Rice summoned up for us worlds that are fantastic and distant, making them as resonant, real, and immediate as our own. In this, her most daring and darkest novel, she takes us, with Lestat, into the mythical world that is most important to us--into the realms of our own theology.

In the latest installment of The Vampire Chronicles, Anne Rice summons up dazzling worlds to bring us the story of Armand - eternally young, with the face of a Botticelli angel. Armand, who first appeared in all his dark glory more than twenty years ago in the now-classic Interview with the Vampire, the first of The Vampire Chronicles, the novel that established its author worldwide as a magnificent storyteller and creator of magical realms.

Now, we go with Armand across the centuries to the Kiev Rus of his boyhood - a ruined city under Mongol dominion - and to ancient Constantinople, where Tartar raiders sell him into slavery. And in a magnificent palazzo in the Venice of the Renaissance we see him emotionally and intellectually in thrall to the great vampire Marius, who masquerades among humankind as a mysterious, reclusive painter and who will bestow upon Armand the gift of vampiric blood.

As the novel races to its climax, moving through scenes of luxury and elegance, of ambush, fire, and devil worship to nineteenth-century Paris and today's New Orleans, we see its eternally vulnerable and romantic hero forced to choose between his twilight immortality and the salvation of his immortal soul.

In this mesmerizing new novel, Anne Rice demonstrates once again her gift for spellbinding storytelling and the creation of myth and magic, as she weaves together two of her most compelling worlds -- those of the Vampire Chronicles and the Mayfair witches.

Once a proud Senator in Imperial Rome, Marius is kidnapped and forced into that dark realm of blood, where he is made a protector of the Queen and King of the vampires–in whom the core of the supernatural race resides. Through his eyes we see the fall of pagan Rome to the Emperor Constantine, the horrific sack of the Eternal City at the hands of the Visigoths, and the vile aftermath of the Black Death. Ultimately restored by the beauty of the Renaissance, Marius becomes a painter, living dangerously yet happily among mortals, and giving his heart to the great master Botticelli, to the bewitching courtesan Bianca, and to the mysterious young apprentice Armand. But it is in the present day, deep in the jungle, when Marius will meet his fate seeking justice from the oldest vampires in the world. . . .

Welcome to Blackwood Farm: soaring white columns, spacious drawing rooms, bright, sun-drenched gardens, and a dark strip of the dense Sugar Devil Swamp. This is the world of Quinn Blackwood, a brilliant young man haunted since birth by a mysterious doppelgänger, Goblin, a spirit from a dream world that Quinn can't escape and that prevents him from belonging anywhere. When Quinn is made a Vampire, losing all that is rightfully his and gaining an unwanted immortality, his doppelgänger becomes even more vampiric and terrifying than Quinn himself.

As the novel moves backwards and forwards in time, from Quinn?s boyhood on Blackwood Farm to present day New Orleans, from ancient Athens to 19th-century Naples, Quinn seeks out the legendary Vampire Lestat in the hope of freeing himself from the spectre that draws him inexorably back to Sugar Devil Swamp and the explosive secrets it holds.

Fiery, fierce, and erotic, Blood Canticle marks the triumphant culmination of Anne Rice’s bestselling Vampire Chronicles, as Lestat tells his astounding tale of the pleasures and tortures that lie between death’s shadow and immortality. . . .

Surrounded by its brooding swampscape, Blackwood Farm is alive with the comings and goings of the bewitched and the bewitching. Among them is the ageless vampire Lestat, vainglorious enough to believe that he can become a saint, weak enough to fall impossibly in love.

Gripped by his unspeakable desire for the mortal Rowan Mayfair and taking the not so innocent, new-to-the-blood Mona Mayfair under his wing, Lestat braves the wrath of paterfamilias Julien Mayfair and ventures to a private island off the coast of Haiti. There, Saint Lestat will get his chance to slay his dragon. For Mona and the Mayfairs share an explosive, secret blood bond to another deathless species: a five-thousand-year-old race of Taltos, strangers held in the throes of evil itself.

The vampire world is in crisis - their kind have been proliferating out of control and, thanks to technologies undreamed of in previous centuries, they can communicate as never before. Roused from their earth-bound slumber, ancient ones are in thrall to the Voice: which commands that they burn fledgling vampires in cities from Paris to Mumbai, Hong Kong to Kyoto and San Francisco. Immolations, huge massacres, have commenced all over the world.

Who - or what - is the Voice? What does it desire, and why?

There is only one vampire, only one blood drinker, truly known to the entire world of the Undead. Will the dazzling hero-wanderer, the dangerous rebel-outlaw Lestat heed the call to unite the Children of Darkness as they face this new twilight?

Anne Rice's epic, luxuriant, fiercely ambitious new novel brings together all the worlds and beings of the legendary Vampire Chronicles, from present-day New York and Ancient Egypt to fourth-century Carthage and Renaissance Venice; from Louis de Pointe du Lac; Armand the eternally young; Mekare and Maharet; to Pandora and Flavius; David Talbot, vampire and ultimate fixer from the Secret Talamasca; and Marius, the true child of the Millennia. It also introduces many other seductive supernatural creatures, and heralds significant new blood.

From Anne Rice, conjurer of the beloved best sellers Interview with the Vampire and Prince Lestat, an ambitious and exhilarating new novel of utopian vision and power

"In my dreams, I saw a city fall into the sea. I heard the cries of thousands. I saw flames that outshone the lamps of heaven. And all the world was shaken..." --Anne Rice, Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis

At the novel's center: the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt, hero, leader, inspirer, irresistible force, irrepressible spirit, battling (and ultimately reconciling with) a strange otherworldly form that has somehow taken possession of Lestat's undead body and soul. This ancient and mysterious power and unearthly spirit of vampire lore has all the force, history, and insidious reach of the unknowable Universe.

It is through this spirit, previously considered benign for thousands of vampire years and throughout the Vampire Chronicles, that we come to be told the hypnotic tale of a great sea power of ancient times; a mysterious heaven on earth situated on a boundless continent--and of how and why, and in what manner and with what far-reaching purpose, this force came to build and rule the great legendary empire of centuries ago that thrived in the Atlantic Ocean.

And as we learn of the mighty, far-reaching powers and perfections of this lost kingdom of Atalantaya, the lost realms of Atlantis, we come to understand its secrets, and how and why the vampire Lestat, indeed all the vampires, must reckon so many millennia later with the terrifying force of this ageless, all-powerful Atalantaya spirit.

A homebody's worst nightmare!

Three years into her life as a shut-in, vampire Terakomari Gandesblood (Komari for short), awakens to find she's been appointed as a Commander in the Mulnite Imperial Army! The thing is, her new unit consists solely of belligerent ruffians who revolt against their superiors at the slightest hint of weakness. Although Komari hails from a line of vampires as powerful as they are prestigious, her refusal to drink blood has made her the picture of mediocrity--scrawny, un-coordinated, and inept at magic. With the odds stacked against her, will the help of her trusty (and slightly infatuated) maid Vill be enough for this recluse to blunder her way to success? Or will Komari rue the day she ever left the safety of her room?

This means war!

When Komari unintentionally disrespects one of her fellow Crimson Lords, Flöte Mascarail, things escalate until she finds herself pitted against the other generals in a deadly competition where the loser gets fired (read: blown up).Though most of her opponents are as tough as nails, Komari finds an unlikely ally in Sakuna Memoir, a newly appointed Crimson Lord who shares both her timidity and love of reading. If only Vill weren't so jealous! But while all this is playing out, a sinister plot involving the assassination of key politicians in the Empire brews. With so much going on, will this shut-in vampire ever get a moment's peace?!

Can a murderer be a pacifist?

Komari has finally earned a vacation, and she's soaking it all in at a beach resort. That's when Nelia Cunningham, a commander from the Gerra-Aruka Republic, appears before her with an outrageous proposal: Together, they'll take over the world.

At the same time, a commander from the Heavenly Paradise named Karla Amatsu shows up and offers Komari the exact opposite proposition: Together, they'll usher in world peace. Before long, the two nations' clashing agendas drag the whole world into war! Rudely pulled from her summer holiday, Komari holds the key to the conflict in her hands. Without it, the war may never end.

Fresh off her success in the Six Nations War, Komari is invited to the Heavenly Paradise, a Far Eastern nation where cherry blossoms dance in perpetuity. There, she learns that one of her new allies, Karla Amatsu, is participating against her will in a weeklong ritual to determine the next ruler of the country. Always looking to shirk her duties, Komari writes the whole thing off as someone else's problem... until Karla announces that the vampire girl will be assisting her in a battle to the death against the opposing candidate on the final day of the competition! But with multiple foreign parties attempting to influence the outcome of the proceedings and a terrorist plot developing in the background, can these two reluctant commanders really come out on top?!

A hot springs whodunit!

As the Imperial Capital recovers from the rebellion stoked by Inverse Moon, Komari learns that an honors student from the Mulnite Military Academy will be joining her unit as an officer. Esther Claire is kind, considerate, and very excited to be working under the commander she idolizes... but can a straitlaced girl like her really gain the respect of the Seventh Unit's unruly rank and file? Meanwhile, Komari's friends meet in secret to plan her birthday celebration at a hot springs resort in Esther's hometown. But shortly after everyone arrives, a blizzard puts the hotel on lockdown, and a murderer starts killing off the guests one by one! Does Komari have what it takes to find the culprit before she meets a grisly end?

A VAMPIRE IN ZOMBIELAND

You wouldn't like Coburn. People don't, as a rule. And that's okay, because he doesn't like people much either. People are food.

Five years ago, Coburn went to sleep -- wasn't exactly planned -- and he's just woken up to find most everybody in the world dead. Not dead like him; he looks human, drinks blood. He's smart. They're... none of those things. They outnumber him by about a million to one, and their clotted blood cannot sustain him.

Now he's starving, and on the run. He has to find blood, soon, and -- like it or not -- he's gonna have to keep an eye on the frail flesh-bags he finds it in. Time for the wolf to turn shepherd.

No, Coburn doesn't like people. But he'll have to learn to.

Now acknowledged as one of the most important classics of twentieth-century gothic literarture, S.P. Somtow's tale of a twelve-year-old rock star vampire, his Jungian analyst, and the Wagnerian conductor who is his nemesis turned the entire genre upside down in the 1980s and is considered the ancestor of the "splatterpunk" movement. Vampire Junction has been voted one of the top forty horror books of all time. Timmy Valentine: "He'll steal your heart - and have it for breakfast!" 21st anniversary edition of this unforgettable classic of high-intensity horror.

It is the year 7000 by Noble reckoning, and the vampire rulers of the world have grown complacent. When the Outer Space Beings invade, the Noble warrior Greylancer must pit his skills and magic against the technology of the OSBs, quash an anti-Noble rebellion, and, when he is critically injured, turn to mere humans for help. The Three Thousand Year War of Vampire Hunter D begins here!

12,090 A.D. It is a dark time for the world. Humanity is just crawling out from under three hundred years of domination by the race of vampires known as the Nobility. The war against the vampires has taken its toll; cities lie in ruin, the countryside is fragmented into small villages and fiefdoms that still struggle against nightly raids by the fallen vampires-and the remnants of their genetically manufactured demons and werewolves.

Every village wants a Hunter-one of the warriors who have pledged their laser guns and their swords to the eradication of the Nobility. But some Hunters are better than others, and some bring their own kind of danger with them...

Vampires: murderous creatures in the shape of humans, they stalk the night feeding on the blood of innocents. Seemingly immortal, they can be destroyed only by the use of a stake through the heart, severing of their heads, or exposure to sunlight. By the year 12, 090 A.D. vampires have ruled the Earth for almost 300 years, and it is only these weaknesses that have kept these foul monsters from totally overrunning the world.

But what happens when those rules no longer apply? The village of Tsepesh sits in the eternal shadow of an abandoned castle, a onetime stronghold of the Nobility, the vampire lords who rule the devastated wasteland of the future. Ten years ago four children disappeared while playing near the castle, only to mysteriously reappear a month later. Now vampires have begun to hunt in the daylight. Are the two events connected? The villagers turn to the vampire hunter known only as D, but as he follows the children, now adults, the answers he finds may be more terrifying than anything he could ever imagine.

The vampire hunter known only as D has been hired by a wealthy, dying man to find his daughter, who was kidnapped by the powerful vampire Lord Meierlink. Though humans speak well of Meierlink, the price on his head is too high for D to ignore and he sets out to save her before she can be turned into an undead creature of the night. In the nightmare world of 12090 A.D., finding Meierlink before he reaches the spaceport in the Clayborn States and gets off the planet will be hard enough, but D has more than just Meierlink to worry about. The dying man is taking no chances, and has also enlisted the Marcus family, a renegade clan of four brothers and a sister who don't care who they kill as long as they get paid. Beautiful illustrations by Yoshitaka Amano complement the post-apocalyptic plot, filled with chilling twists.

When a floating city becomes the target of a rash of vampire attacks, only one man can restore the oasis. "The City," a tiny metropolis of a few hundred sheltered citizens floating serenely on a seemingly random course a few feet above the ground, has long been thought safe from the predation of marauding monsters. It seemed like a paradise. A paradise shattered when an invasion of apparent vampires threatens the small haven. While the Vampire Hunter known only as "D" struggles to exterminate the scourge, a former denizen of the city, the attractive Raleigh Knight, and the brash John M. Brassalli Pluto VIII seize control of the city lurching it onto a new and deadly course. D's travails are just beginning.

In a world where even the smallest and most remote village is being terrorized by the monsters that stalk the night, there is a hamlet, prosperous and peaceful, where mortals and vampires have lived in harmony for years. It is there that 17-year-old Sheavil Schmidt has slept, neither waking nor aging, for 30 years since first receiving the vampire's immortal kiss. The mysterious Vampire Hunter D is lured to the tranquil oasis by recurrent dreams of the beautiful, undying girl bathed in an eerie blue light and dancing in a ghostly chateau.

Granny Viper is a "people finder," a searcher for lost souls along the roads of a forbidding wasteland. Her latest mission: the safe return of a young woman named Tae, kidnapped eight years ago by vampire Nobility and held in Castle Gradinia on the Frontier's far border. But rescuing Tae is only half the battle--Viper knows she and the girl can't cross the formidable expanse to the town of Barnabas alone. After making the fatal mistake of hiring the mercenary Bullow Brothers to help her, Granny turns to the legendary Vampire Hunter D for salvation. As they traverse the bleak desert between the Inner and Outer Frontier, the two women and D find themselves in a race for their lives. And they soon discover how cruel the desert is--and how very ruthless the Bullow Brothers are...

A girl's dying wish sends D on an impossible quest in this riveting prose novel.

Even a reluctant hero can't refuse the last request of a beautiful woman. On her deathbed, the mortally wounded woman gives him a strange gem and asks him to deliver the priceless stone to her sister, far off in a North Sea fishing village. D's journey is made ever more perilous by a series of scoundrels and rogues hired by the girl's murderer. They'll stop at nothing to claim the jewel. Will they catch him? Hideyuki Kikuchi's crackling narrative and Yoshitaka Amano's imaginative artwork make this a must-read entry in the series.

The picturesque coastal town of Florence was known for millennia as a pleasure resort for the Nobility. As retribution for their decadence, the cruel and beautiful vampire inhabitants were "punished," driven out more than a thousand years ago by a solitary traveler in black. Only one-Baron Meinster-refused to leave, only to be thrown to the waves by the mysterious assassin.

Summoned to contemporary Florence by Su-in, sister of a murdered village girl, the enigmatic Vampire Hunter D discovers a vampire curse ravaging the town's human inhabitants. The plague apparently originating, impossibly, from the unforgiving sea-could it be Meinster's Revenge?

In Sakuri, a young woman is about to be sacrificed to the vampiric Noblewoman who reigns over the village. But before the princess can drain the life from the woman, a young man tries to slay the vampire. He fails and manages to escape, but in doing so incurs the wrath of the entire town. The citizens of Sakuri have entered into a pact with the Undead princess and her monstrous bodyguards. With the ritual offering disrupted, the vampire's armored bodyguards vow to murder the villagers one by one until the would-be hero is captured.

When Vampire Hunter D learns of the villagers' bargain he knows he faces several almost impossible challenges-can he rid the town of the parasitic demons that plague it? What if Sakuri's inhabitants don't want to be rescued? And can he uncover the secret that even the vampire Noble is afraid to speak?

In the title story, "Dark Nocturne", D is hired to unlock the secret of a siren's song that is drawing men in their twenties to their deaths in the hills outside Anise Village.

In "Notes on Imagined Autumn" D finds himself caught between two lovers during a ritualistic sacrifice in the village of Shirley's Door, but if D can't stop the sacrifice will all in the village be doomed?

And in "Legend of the War Demons" two living weapons, genetically engineered creatures who are the last remnants of a war waged hundreds of years in the past, find that battle is not so easily forgotten. It's up to D to stop their unending conflict before it consumes the present as it did the past.

Pale Fallen Angels Parts One and Two, the first two novels of Hideyuki Kikuchi's groundbreaking epic four-part Vampire Hunter D tale, are presented here in one affordable omnibus collection!

Krauhasen: A mysterious land under the control of Lord Vlad Balarge, a member of the vampire Nobility. When Lord Vlad's son, Baron Byron Balarge, needs to make a long and treacherous journey to faraway Krauhasen, he commissions the help of the infamous Vampire Hunter D, promising a princely sum and a solemn vow-no feasting on any humans for the duration of their journey!

Still, D finds his work cut out for him as the duo encounters an ongoing parade of thugs, rogues, and runaways, all with riot and revenge in mind. The pair are joined by the teenage tumbling act, May and Hugh, and the haughty Noblewoman Miska, recently spared death by the stake. But when D discovers the Baron's plans to murder Lord Vlad, he quickly finds his own life in danger.

Baron Byron Balazs nears the end of his arduous journey; his bodyguard-the enigmatic and deadly Vampire Hunter D -- has delivered him to his faraway home in Krauhausen. Having survived the near-epic journey, and many attempts on his life -- ordered by his father, the dread Vampire Noble Lord Vlad -- the baron thinks he is ready for his final battle, whatever the cost. But Lord Vlad is not so easily vanquished, as he unleashes yet another host of nefarious killers on his son, not least of whom is a mad doctor who was enlisted to perform sinister experiments on the young baron's mother years before!

When Vampire Hunter D entered the town of Sedoc it was in search of answers to the meaning of a dying vampire's last words: "Find Muma." But when he meets Mia, the daughter of the local fortuneteller, he learns the mists emanating from a smoking crater on the outskirts of Sedoc have reanimated thousands of corpses, compelling them to crawl from their graves and hurl themselves into the smoking chasm. When D goes to investigate, he finds himself split in two: a second Vampire Hunter D, full of passion and lust and hunger for the company of women, is born!

D has crossed over the southern border, into the domain of the cruelest and most evil of the royalty, General Gaskell. On the way, he picks up a "victim" -- one of few survivors in the villages-and makes way with her and the Deliverers. Along the way, he is attacked by the Drowned, and fights many more unspeakably horrible enemies. All of this suggests that Gaskell -- who was supposed to have been put to death under the light of the sun -- is still very much alive. But why?

Vampire Hunter D takes on his greatest challenge yet! The ruthless vampire Noble General Gaskell commands the loyalty of some of the most infamous and deadly vampires in history, and Gaskell has no patience for D's interference, heroic or not! With the odds stacked against him, D must prevail or perish.

In this chilling adventure, Vampire Hunter D has been dispatched to vanquish the ancient vampiric Noble Count Braujou, guardian of an ancient buried treasure. But when a mysterious object crashes into the earth, destroying half of the northern Frontier, D faces an even more terrifying opponent-the renegade vampire Valcua, the Ultimate Noble! Having been exiled to outer space, Valcua took his entire kingdom of strange and deadly creatures with him, and swore that when the time was right they would return to have their revenge. Unfortunately for D, that time is now...

Vampire Hunter D continues his quest to overcome the interstellar evil brought to Earth by the ultimate Noble, the terrifying renegade vampire Valcua! Wielding a sword that can cut through the fabric of space and time, Valcua has a score to settle with the bloodline of humans responsible for his exile. The family has enlisted D to protect them from Valcua's wrath, and the Vampire Hunter might be their only chance at survival.

D, the ageless, supernatural Vampire Hunter, takes charge protecting the survivors of an aircraft that has crash-landed in a deadly zone known as "the Playground." But before D can assist them, he must first battle a legion of undead warriors swarming from the fortress of the Sacred Ancestor, the oldest vampire in existence!

When a quartet of robbers leaves a trail of slaughter through a town, the mayor looks to hire a pair of bounty hunters to bring them to justice. But their path is blocked by an army of soldiers! If they want to survive the journey, they must enlist the help of the Vampire Hunter known only as D.

In a village on the edge of the Frontier, D is among the warriors and mercenaries hired to defend the village from the Black Death, a notorious bandit gang. But the bandits don't arrive, and the village mayor dismisses the mercenaries. As D leaves the scene, he's struck by "sunlight syndrome" -- the deadly ailment unique to dhampirs! While D is recovering, and his sentient left hand is running the show, D is again called on to help. It seems the Black Death is coming after all...

D accompanies a convoy delivering a vampire Noble to face public trial for his crimes against humanity. However, the Noble's enemies have targeted the men and women of the convoy, and they are out for vengeance! Can D bring himself to kill humans in order to protect the Noble under his charge?

Commissioned by a vampire ancient to recover the coffin containing the body of the demonic Gilzen, hated even by his own kind, D travels to a frightening mountain landscape perennially shrouded in snow. Within a castle piercing the mountainside, D discovers a group of knights tasked to protect Gilzen at any cost. It's time for D to use all the forces and powers at his command to prevent Gilzen's resurrection!

She might just look like an ordinary-if beautiful-young woman, but Iriya is anything but ordinary! A ruthless warrior clad in red armor, Iriya is a Hunter determined to exterminate the vampires that were once her parents and siblings. Now, half-vampire, half-human D has to decide to offer his assistance, get out of the way, or have a dangerous battle on his hands!

After a Frontier village's monitoring station fails, deadly vampire Nobles return to life, swearing vengeance on the descendants of the family that defeated them three hundred years ago. The mayor of the village hires five vampire hunters, including the legendary D, but as the mayor returns from the Capital, he finds that his daughter has been targeted by vicious human enemies! In this brewing three-way battle of life and death, no one's survival is assured...

On an isolated island, vampire Nobility run a mysterious laboratory, continuously pumping out a white mist which compels the inhabitants of a nearby fishing village to become the vampire's slaves! When the village tries to retaliate, their fighters never return. The vampire hunter known only as D has been sighted on the island, but how did he come to be there, and whose side is he on, and will any mortals survive the brewing conflict?

In a fleeting last breath, a beautiful woman on her deathbed hands a strange gemstone to D and asks that he deliver it to her sister in a remote North Sea fishing village. As D cuts across never-ending expanses of Frontier in search of his seaside destination, he is relentlessly attacked by wave after wave of mercenary and monster... all employed by the man who murdered the young girl. In order to grant a dying wish, D must find a way to keep this priceless jewel out of everyone's covetous reach, and all without sacrificing his own life!

A mixed band of travelers from an inn, spared by seeming chance from a bizarre landslide that rushed and receded like a wave, find shelter in an ancient village older even than the most forsaken settlements on the Frontier! Indeed, for fearful rumor has it that once long ago the village was a testing ground of the Sacred Ancestor...that sought to twist the genes of aliens, humans, and Nobles into a new form of life! What was formed here in the distant past seeks to nourish itself on the travelers and rise again.

Can D save them and destroy the evil legacy--or is his arrival exactly what the village requires for its nightmare to awaken at last?

D is a vampire hunter--and he's just been paid ten times his asking price to do exactly that, an assignment to destroy Duke Van Doren, administrator of the northern Frontier.

Among the complications are that no less than three other groups, each with their own agenda, are headed for the Duke themselves... and D's supposed to hang back from striking until his target has eliminated all three! The question is, will the Duke oblige the terms of the contract--or does he actually want to be destroyed?

Out on the Frontier, the killers called the "Nameless" have no wanted posters--because everyone they go after winds up dead. Now D must measure his sword against these grotesque and deadly freaks!

Hired by the mayor of Schwartzen to stop a corrupt political ploy that would sacrifice human lives to appease the local Noble, Grand Duke Bergenzy, the vampire hunter arrives in town to find his client has himself dropped dead under suspicious circumstances. His widow, wanting no more bloodshed, begs D to simply forget the job--but D's interest in the job is just beginning...

Marquis Verenis--he's a powerful Noble... he's in possession of antimatter technology... and he's three hundred million dalas in debt to Old El, the lender of last resort out on the Frontier!

The vampire lord even put up his castle as collateral--but not a single collection agent dispatched by El has returned, so it's time to call in an outside consultant, named D! But the mooching Marquis isn't the only one who owes the financier big time and would rather kill Old El than pay up--and those debtors too mean deadly trouble ahead for D... even if they are only human!

Bad things happen when Kevin Matheson, an outback mechanic, gets caught in the crossfire of an outlaw vampire motorcycle gang and a big city vampire gang.

This book was a finalist for the Aurealis Best Horror Novel Award in 2012.

WELCOME TO LEPPINGTON

Not far from the coastal town of Whitby is Leppington, nestling in the purple hills of the North Yorkshire Moors. Quiet, unassuming, a forgotten backwater yet beneath Leppington's streets terrifying creatures stir. They are driven by ancient passion that has become obsession. They are united in their burning hunger. They share an unending craving. They are Nosferatu. And they have the power to drain your will to resist. To drain it so utterly that you will cheerfully, gladly, eagerly surrender yourself to their sharp, brutal teeth.

AND IN LEPPINGTON DEATH ISN'T ALWAYS FOREVER...

A vampiric romantic comedy...?

After a lifetime of hardship due to a curse placed on him by his grandfather, all Ryouta wants is to be left alone. However, when he wanders into the mountains to find some peace and quiet, instead he finds a town taken over by vampires! To make matters worse, one of its residents, a haughty (and rather eccentric) girl, soon sets her sights on him with the goal of making him her servant. Now, Ryouta has a choice to make-escape back to his old life in Japan or live out his days as the minion of Shiren Fuyukura in the quirky town of Akinomiya.

Nothing like a little sibling rivalry!

Women want him! Men want to beat him! And Ryouta just wants two minutes to himself... But there's little chance of that happening while he's cursed to be irresistible to the opposite sex-especially when two of the girls fighting over him are Ouka, the ruler of the Sacred Blood Empire, and her little sister, Shiren! What ever happened to the Sacred Blooded being immune to the curse?! ...And why is Shiren such a terrible student? While she's busy trying to improve her grades, Ouka has no trouble swooping in and snatching Ryouta away! Is Shiren in danger of losing her minion to his childhood crush?!

Tamaki's big chance!

An upcoming autumn festival has everyone excited--most of all girls like Shiren and Tamaki, who can't wait to show Ryouta how great they look in yukata. However, things take an unfortunate turn for poor Tamaki (surprise, surprise) when her family's convenience store is robbed, leaving her short on cash to buy the perfect outfit! Looks like she'll have to work during the festival to earn the money--but what's this? Ryouta volunteered to help her with the job?! Could this be a fated opportunity for the ever-unlucky Tamaki? It certainly seems that way, but not everyone is keen on the two winding up together...

A date with... Sasara?!

When Sasara suddenly finds herself in marriage talks with another noble, the only way out is to find a different potential mate--and Ryouta, who can't stand seeing someone in need, volunteers for the role. Unfortunately, this means he'll have to defeat a swordsman in a duel and trick Sasara's parents into believing he and and their daughter are really dating--and neither looks likely. Will Ryouta have to get engaged just to help his friend?!

One minion... Two masters?!

Diplomatic relations between Japan and the Sacred Blood Empire are stabilizing, and the news has taken the vampire community by storm. Meanwhile, something strange is happening to Ryouta--he's transforming into a minion! It turns out that Archbishop Alfoncina's prayer for his safety had some serious side effects, and they can only be cured with an herbal remedy sold exclusively in Japan. As luck would have it, the archbishop was already planning on traveling there for business, so she invites Ryouta to tag along. Needless to say, some people are none too pleased with the arrangement...

A Big Decision for Shiren...

Shiren receives a letter from her mother promising to whisk her away so the two can start a new life together back in Japan. The thing is, her mother is a wanted criminal in the empire, and now she's taken control of the Virginal Father! Despite her vocal refusals, Shiren may be more tempted by this offer than she's letting on... Meanwhile, Ouka surprises everyone with a dramatic proposal for Ryouta should Shiren change her mind.

Shiren has left the Sacred Blood Empire--and Ryouta--to become Emperor of the newly founded Holy Sacred Blood Empire! With her sister out of the way, Ouka takes the chance to make Ryouta her minion, and he begins a new life without Shiren. Shiren, on the other hand, is living in the lap of luxury, but is this what she really wants?

The boy-meets-vampire girl comedy draws to a close in this final volume.