Search Worlds Without End

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

It was the basis for the 1987 movie Hellraiser.

Over the course of two award-winning collections and a critically acclaimed novel, The Croning, Laird Barron has arisen as one of the strongest and most original literary voices in modern horror and the dark fantastic. Melding supernatural horror with hardboiled noir, espionage, and a scientific backbone, Barron's stories have garnered critical acclaim and have been reprinted in numerous year's best anthologies and nominated for multiple awards, including the Crawford, International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy awards.

Barron returns with his third collection, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. Collecting interlinking tales of sublime cosmic horror, including "Blackwood's Baby," "The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven," and "The Men from Porlock," The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All delivers enough spine-chilling horror to satisfy even the most jaded reader.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Norman Partridge
• Blackwood's Baby - (2011)
• The Redfield Girls - (2010)
• Hand of Glory - (2012)
• The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven - (2011)
• The Siphon - (2011)
• Jaws of Saturn - (2013)
• Vastation - (2010)
• The Men from Porlock - (2011)
• More Dark - (2012)

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

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

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

Table of Contents:

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

Only Georges Bataille could write, of an eyeball removed from a corpse, that "the caress of the eye over the skin is so utterly, so extraordinarily gentle, and the sensation is so bizarre that it has something of a rooster's horrible crowing." Bataille has been called a "metaphysician of evil," specializing in blasphemy, profanation, and horror.

Jason Wilkes's life takes a turn for the worse when his wife fails to come home from her book club. Jason calls Kate's 'book buddy', Dave, who assures him she left hours ago. Contacting the police, Jason finds them equal parts sympathetic and suspicious. He tells them almost everything, except that he's been hearing Kate's voice, calling as if from far away. He certainly doesn't mention that he's seeing shadows that reach for him.

With the police getting nowhere fast, Jason takes matters into his own hands, even as nightmare images and Kate's distant cries continue to haunt his waking moments and his dreams, and the strange, grasping shadows persist. Jason begins to unravel the mystery, but he's at odds with the police, he's being lied to by Kate's book club friends, and his chances of finding Kate slip ever further away.

It seems that everything is going to go as wrong as it possibly can.

A criminal mastermind creates violent tableaus in abandoned Detroit warehouses in Lauren Beukes's new genre-bending novel of suspense.

Detective Gabriella Versado has seen a lot of bodies. But this one is unique even by Detroit's standards: half boy, half deer, somehow fused together. As stranger and more disturbing bodies are discovered, how can the city hold on to a reality that is already tearing at its seams?

If you're Detective Versado's geeky teenage daughter, Layla, you commence a dangerous flirtation with a potential predator online. If you're desperate freelance journalist Jonno, you do whatever it takes to get the exclusive on a horrific story. If you're Thomas Keen, known on the street as TK, you'll do what you can to keep your homeless family safe – and find the monster who is possessed by the dream of violently remaking the world.

If Lauren Beukes's internationally bestselling The Shining Girls was a time-jumping thrill ride through the past, her Broken Monsters is a genre-redefining thriller about broken cities, broken dreams, and broken people trying to put themselves back together again.

His name is Philip Dempster.

Where he goes, fire follows.

Investigating a number of phoney "churches," Dempster becomes caught up in a web of intrigue, arson, and murder. Shortly after he visits each tabernacle, the building goes up in flames--often with the preacher still inside.

Each time, Dempster is found near the fire, not knowing what he is doing there or why he is wandering the night-darkened streets.

Is Dempster the firbug or merely an innocent victim? He must learn the truth before his sanity crumbles to white-hot ash.

Welcome to a land Ray Bradbury calls "the Undiscovered Country" of his imagination--that vast territory of ideas, concepts, notions and conceits where the stories you now hold were born. America's premier living author of short fiction, Bradbury has spent many lifetimes in this remarkable place--strolling through empty, shadow-washed fields at midnight; exploring long-forgotten rooms gathering dust behind doors bolted years ago to keep strangers locked out.. and secrets locked in. The nights are longer in this country. The cold hours of darkness move like autumn mists deeper and deeper toward winter. But the moonlight reveals great magic here--and a breathtaking vista.

The October Country is many places: a picturesque Mexican village where death is a tourist attraction; a city beneath the city where drowned lovers are silently reunited; a carnival midway where a tiny man's most cherished fantasy can be fulfilled night after night. The October Country's inhabitants live, dream, work, die--and sometimes live again--discovering, often too late, the high price of citizenship. Here a glass jar can hold memories and nightmares; a woman's newborn child can plot murder; and a man's skeleton can war against him. Here there is no escaping the dark stranger who lives upstairs...or the reaper who wields the world. Each of these stories is a wonder, imagined by an acclaimed tale-teller writing from a place shadows. But there is astonishing beauty in these shadows, born from a prose that enchants and enthralls. Ray Bradbury's The October Country is a land of metaphors that can chill like a long-after-midnight wind...as they lift the reader high above a sleeping Earth on the strange wings of Uncle Einar.

Table of Contents:

• The Crowd - (1943) - short story
• The Emissary - (1947) - short story
• Jack-in-the-Box - (1947) - short story
• The Jar - (1944) - short story
• The Lake - (1944) - short story
• The Man Upstairs - (1947) - short story
• The Scythe - (1943) - short story
• Skeleton - (1945) - short story
• The Small Assassin - (1946) - short story
• There Was an Old Woman - (1944) - short story
• Uncle Einar - [The Elliott Family] - (1947) - short story
• The Dwarf - (1954) - short story
• The Next in Line - (1947) - novelette
• The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse - (1954) - short story
• The Wind - (1943) - short story
• The Cistern - (1947) - short story
• Homecoming - [The Elliott Family] - (1947) - short story (variant of The Homecoming 1946)
• The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone - (1954) - short story
• Touched with Fire - (1954) - short story

At first glance, Phil Pendleton and his son Adam are just an ordinary father and son, no different from any other. They take walks in the park together, visit county fairs, museums, and zoos, and eat overlooking the lake. Some might say the father is a little too accommodating given the lack of discipline when the child loses his temper in public. Some might say he spoils his son by allowing him to set his own bedtimes and eat candy whenever he wants. Some might say that such leniency is starting to take its toll on the father, given how his health has declined. What no one knows is that Phil is a prisoner, and that up until a few weeks ago and a chance encounter at a grocery store, he had never seen the child before in his life.

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

It was a freak accident. The man had suddenly stepped into the road, and the breaks had failed. Clare could only steer wildly, the car finally crashing into a tree and on to the kerb. Now her brother Rob was dead, silent in the passenger seat, slumped against the door. He died of massive head injuries.

But there was something else, something that at first she couldn't quite grasp, that seemed in explicable. His right arm was missing. Gone. Someone had taken it.

Twenty years after a game of Ouija ends in a ten-year-old's disappearance, Rose Tierney discovers that she has developed psychic powers that enable her to see into the future and travel without her body, but that make her vulnerable to an evil force.

Published in the UK as: The Parasite

"I already know all your names. As for me... you can call me Mr. Do-Good."

Five strangers have woken up in a white room. A room with no doors, no windows. A room with no hope. Because these strangers have been kidnapped, drugged...and brought here as the newest contestants in the world's most high-stakes scavenger hunt. Run by a madman named Mr. Do-Good the game offers only two options: win or die. All they have to do to survive is... complete every task... on time... and not break any of Do-Good's rules. Playing the game will bring the players to their breaking point and beyond. But play they will, because Do-Good has plans for these strangers, and their only chance to live through the night is to play his Scavenger Hunt.

Fifty years ago, the town of Gouldens Falls was evacuated, flooded, and submerged under two hundred feet of water. Along with its secrets. Just as well it was buried. There was always something not quite right about that town.

Today, on the anniversary of its watery fate, the man-made lake that was once Gouldens Falls is the source of fascination for a visiting journalist. And a cause for alarm. Because something else is down there. Something evil. And on this special anniversary, it's going to surface.

Maggie Caine and her family leave New York to visit the Caine family home, and old farmhouse in Ohio, which her husband has just inherited from a distant aunt. The house, ten miles away from the nearest neighbor, was once owned by a Civil War general reputed to have been a Satanist. But when strange and terrible things begin to happen it soon becomes clear that Satanic worship is still alive and well in the community, and so might be the General, who Maggie suspects is taking possession of her teenage son...

A rediscovered modern horror classic by Thomas Cullinan, author of the twice-filmed Civil War novel The Beguiled, The Bedeviled (1978) is an occult chiller whose suspenseful plot and surprising twists will keep readers on the edge of their seats until the shocking finale.

Our story begins in 1902, at The Brookhants School for Girls. Flo and Clara, two impressionable students, are obsessed with each other and with a daring young writer named Mary MacLane, the author of a scandalous bestselling memoir. To show their devotion to Mary, the girls establish their own private club and call it The Plain Bad Heroine Society. They meet in secret in a nearby apple orchard, the setting of their wildest happiness and, ultimately, of their macabre deaths. This is where their bodies are later discovered with a copy of Mary's book splayed beside them, the victims of a swarm of stinging, angry yellow jackets. Less than five years later, The Brookhants School for Girls closes its doors forever--but not before three more people mysteriously die on the property, each in a most troubling way.

Over a century later, the now abandoned and crumbling Brookhants is back in the news when wunderkind writer, Merritt Emmons, publishes a breakout book celebrating the queer, feminist history surrounding the "haunted and cursed" Gilded-Age institution. Her bestselling book inspires a controversial horror film adaptation starring celebrity actor and lesbian it girl Harper Harper playing the ill-fated heroine Flo, opposite B-list actress and former child star Audrey Wells as Clara. But as Brookhants opens its gates once again, and our three modern heroines arrive on set to begin filming, past and present become grimly entangled--or perhaps just grimly exploited--and soon it's impossible to tell where the curse leaves off and Hollywood begins.

Carlotta Moran, a young single mother with three children, suddenly has her life turned upside down when she begins to be attacked in her bed each night, violated by a spectral rapist. This brutal unseen force makes attempts on her life and terrorizes her children, but the worst part is that no one believes her. Among the skeptics is psychiatrist Dr. Sneidermann, who believes Carlotta is psychotic, a danger to herself and her children who should be committed. But two graduate students in parapsychology have a different theory: that Carlotta is being tormented by a powerful entity from beyond our reality, outside space and time. The tension builds to an electrifying conclusion, and the truth may be far more frightening than any of them ever imagined ...

Based on documented real-life events that happened to a California woman in 1974, Frank De Felitta's provocative and disturbing novel The Entity (1978) is a classic of occult literature.

The home that belonged to Angela Toussaint's late grandmother is so beloved that townspeople in Sacajawea, Washington, call it the Good House. But that all changes one summer when an unexpected tragedy takes place behind its closed doors... and the Toussaint's family history -- and future -- is dramatically transformed. Angela has not returned to the Good House since her son, Corey, died there two years ago. But now, Angela is finally ready to return to her hometown and go beyond the grave to unearth the truth about Corey's death. Could it be related to a terrifying entity Angela's grandmother battled seven decades ago? And what about the other senseless calamities that Sacajawea has seen in recent years? Has Angela's grandmother, an African American woman reputed to have "powers," put a curse on the entire community?

A thrilling exploration of secrets, lies, and divine inspiration, "The Good House" will haunt readers long after its chilling conclusion.

A young father and son set out on a road trip, devastated by the death of the wife and mother they both loved. United in grief, the pair travel to her ancestral home, where they must confront the terrifying legacy she has bequeathed: a family called the Order that commits unspeakable acts in search of immortality.

For Gaspar, the son, this maniacal cult is his destiny. As the Order tries to pull him into their evil, he and his father take flight, attempting to outrun a powerful clan that will do anything to ensure its own survival. But how far will Gaspar's father go to protect his child? And can anyone escape their fate?

Moving back and forth in time, from London in the swinging 1960s to the brutal years of Argentina's military dictatorship and its turbulent aftermath, Our Share of Night is a novel like no other: a family story, a ghost story, a story of the occult and the supernatural, a book about the complexities of love and longing with queer subplots and themes. This is the masterwork of one of Latin America's most original novelists, "a mesmerizing writer," says Dave Eggers, "who demands to be read."

St. Vincent's Orphanage for Boys.

Turn of the century, in a remote valley in Pennsylvania.

Here, under the watchful eyes of several priests, thirty boys work, learn, and worship. Peter Barlow, orphaned as a child by a gruesome murder, has made a new life here. As he approaches adulthood, he has friends, a future... a family.

Then, late one stormy night, a group of men arrive at their door, one of whom is badly wounded, occult symbols carved into his flesh. His death releases an ancient evil that spreads like sickness, infecting St. Vincent's and the children within. Soon, boys begin acting differently, forming groups. Taking sides.

Others turn up dead.

Now Peter and those dear to him must choose sides of their own, each of them knowing their lives -- and perhaps their eternal souls -- are at risk.

This Nebula Award nominated short story originally appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 21, March-April 2018.

Read the full story for free in Uncanny.

Open the door...

Holly Sherwin has been a struggling playwright for years, but now, after receiving a grant to develop her play Witching Night, she may finally be close to her big break. All she needs is time and space to bring her vision to life. When she stumbles across Hill House on a weekend getaway upstate, she is immediately taken in by the mansion, nearly hidden outside a remote village. It's enormous, old, and ever-so eerie--the perfect place to develop and rehearse her play.

Despite her own hesitations, Holly's girlfriend, Nisa, agrees to join Holly in renting the house for a month, and soon a troupe of actors, each with ghosts of their own, arrive. Yet as they settle in, the house's peculiarities are made known: strange creatures stalk the grounds, disturbing sounds echo throughout the halls, and time itself seems to shift. All too soon, Holly and her friends find themselves at odds not just with one another, but with the house itself. It seems something has been waiting in Hill House all these years, and it no longer intends to walk alone...

The year is 1988. High school sophomores Abby and Gretchen have been best friends since fourth grade. But after an evening of skinny-dipping goes disastrously wrong, Gretchen begins to act... different. She's moody. She's irritable. And bizarre incidents keep happening whenever she's nearby. Abby's investigation leads her to some startling discoveries--and by the time their story reaches its terrifying conclusion, the fate of Abby and Gretchen will be determined by a single question: Is their friendship powerful enough to beat the devil?

In the 1990s, heavy metal band Dürt Würk was poised for breakout success--but then lead singer Terry Hunt embarked on a solo career and rocketed to stardom as Koffin, leaving his fellow bandmates to rot in obscurity.

Two decades later, former guitarist Kris Pulaski works as the night manager of a Best Western--she's tired, broke, and unhappy. Everything changes when a shocking act of violence turns her life upside down, and she begins to suspect that Terry sabotaged more than just the band.

Kris hits the road, hoping to reunite with the rest of her bandmates and confront the man who ruined her life. It's a journey that will take her from the Pennsylvania rust belt to a celebrity rehab center to a music festival from hell. A furious power ballad about never giving up, even in the face of overwhelming odds, We Sold Our Souls is an epic journey into the heart of a conspiracy-crazed, pill-popping, paranoid country that seems to have lost its very soul... where only a lone girl with a guitar can save us all.

Big-band frontman Johnny Favorite was singing for the troops when a Luftwaffe fighter squadron strafed the bandstand, killing the crowd and leaving the singer near death. The army returned him to a private hospital in upstate New York, leaving him to live out his days as a vegetable while the world forgot him. But Louis Cyphre never forgets.

Cyphre had a contract with the singer, stipulating payment upon Johnny's death--payment that will be denied as long as Johnny clings to life. When Cyphre hires private investigator Harry Angel to find Johnny at the hospital, Angel learns that the singer has disappeared. It is no ordinary missing-person's case. Everyone he questions dies soon after, as Angel's investigation ensnares him in a bizarre tangle of black magic, carnival freaks, and grisly voodoo. When the sinister Louis Cyphre begins appearing in Angel's dreams, the detective fears for his life, his sanity, and his soul.

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

Table of Contents:

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

Eleven-year-old Jane Grandison, tormented by her stutter, sits in the back seat of a car, letter in hand inviting her to live and study at the Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing-Mouth Children. Founded in 1890 by Headmistress Sybil Joines, the school--at first glance--is a sanctuary for children seeking to cure their speech impediments. Inspired by her haunted and tragic childhood, the Headmistress has other ideas.

Pioneering the field of necrophysics, the Headmistress harnesses the "gift" she and her students possess. Through their stutters, together they have the ability to channel ghostly voices communicating from the land of the dead, a realm the Headmistress herself visits at will. Things change for the school and the Headmistress when a student disappears, attracting attention from parents and police alike.

Set in the overlapping worlds of the living and the dead, Shelley Jackson's Riddance is an illuminated novel told through theoretical writings in necrophysics, the Headmistress's dispatches from the land of the dead, and Jane's evolving life as Joines's new stenographer and central figure in the Vocational School's mysterious present, as well as its future.

This is a collection of more than 50 short horror stories, both classic and modern.

Table of Contents:

• "Introduction: In Search of Masterpieces", essay by Marvin Kaye
• "Fiends and Creatures", essay by Marvin Kaye
• "Dracula's Guest" [Dracula], short story by Bram Stoker (1914)
• "The Professor's Teddy Bear", short story by Theodore Sturgeon (variant of The Professor's Teddy-Bear) (1948)
• "Bubnoff and the Devil", short story by Ivan Turgenev (translation of 1916 story) (1975)
• "The Quest for Blank Claveringi", short story by Patricia Highsmith (1967)
• "The Erl-King", poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (translation of Der Erlkönig 1782) (1979)
• "The Bottle Imp", novelette by Robert Louis Stevenson (1891)
• "A Malady of Magicks", short story by Craig Shaw Gardner (1978)
• "Lan Lung", novelette by M. Lucie Chin (1980)
• "The Dragon Over Hackensack", poem by Richard L. Wexelblat (year unknown)
• "The Transformation", short story by Mary Shelley [as by Mary W. Shelley] (1830)
• "The Faceless Thing", short story by Edward D. Hoch (1963)
• "Lovers and Other Monsters", essay by Marvin Kaye
• "The Anchor", short story by Jack Snow (1947)
• "When the Clock Strikes", short story by Tanith Lee (1980)
• "Oshidori", short story by Lafcadio Hearn (1904)
• "Carmilla" [Martin Hesselius], novella by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [as by Sheridan LeFanu] (1872)
• "Eumenides in the Fourth Floor Lavatory", novelette by Orson Scott Card (variant of Eumenides in the Fourth-Floor Lavatory) (1979)
• "Lenore", poem by Gottfried August Bürger (translation of Lenore 1774) (1985)
• "The Black Wedding", short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer (1958)
• "Hop-Frog", short story by Edgar Allan Poe (variant of Hop-Frog: Or, The Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs) (1849)
• "Sardonicus", novelette by Ray Russell (1961)
• "Graveyard Shift", short story by Richard Matheson (1960)
• "Wake Not the Dead", novelette by Ludwig Tieck [as by Johann Ludwig Tieck] (1823)
• "Night and Silence", short story by Maurice Level (1922)
• "Acts of God and Other Horrors", essay by Marvin Kaye
• "Flies", short story by Isaac Asimov (1953)
• "The Night Wire", short story by H. F. Arnold (1926)
• "Last Respects", short story by Dick Baldwin (1975)
• "The Pool of the Stone God", short story by A. Merritt (1923)
• "A Tale of the Thirteenth Floor", poem by Ogden Nash (1955)
• "The Tree", short story by Dylan Thomas (1955)
• "Stroke of Mercy", novelette by Parke Godwin (1981)
• "Lazarus", short story by Leonid Andreyev (translation of 1906 story) (1921)
• "The Beast Within", essay by Marvin Kaye
• "The Waxwork", short story by A. M. Burrage [as by Ex-Private X] (1931)
• "The Silent Couple", short story by Pierre Courtois (1826)
• "Moon-Face", short story by Jack London (1902)
• "Death in the School-Room", short story by Walt Whitman (1841)
• "The Upturned Face", short story by Stephen Crane (1900)
• "One Summer Night", short story by Ambrose Bierce (1906)
• "The Easter Egg", short story by Saki [as by H. H. Munro ] (1930)
• "The House in Goblin Wood" (non-genre), novelette by John Dickson Carr (1947)
• "The Vengeance of Nitocris", short story by Tennessee Williams (1928)
• "The Informal Execution of Soupbone Pew", short story by Damon Runyon (1911)
• "His Unconquerable Enemy", short story by W. C. Morrow (1889)
• "Rizpah", poem by Lord Alfred Tennyson (1895)
• "The Question", short story by Stanley Ellin (variant of The Question My Son Asked) (1962)
• "Ghosts and Miscellaneous Nightmares", essay by Marvin Kaye
• "The Flayed Hand", short story by Guy de Maupassant (translation of La main d'écorché) (1875)
• "The Hospice", novelette by Robert Aickman (1975)
• "The Christmas Banquet", short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1843)
• "The Hungry House", novelette by Robert Bloch (1951)
• "The Demon of the Gibbet", poem by Fitz-James O'Brien (1881)
• "The Owl", shortfiction by Anatole Le Braz (year unknown)
• "No. 252 Rue M. Le Prince", short story by Ralph Adams Cram (1895)
• "The Music of Erich Zann", short story by H. P. Lovecraft (1922)
• "Riddles in the Dark", short story by J. R. R. Tolkien (1937)
• "Afterword: Is Terror a Dying Art?", essay by Marvin Kaye
• "Miscellaneous Notes (Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural)", essay by Marvin Kaye
• "Selected Bibliography (Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural)", essay by Marvin Kaye

Table of Contents:

• Lovecraft and I by Caitlin R. Kiernan
• Valentia (1994)
• So Runs the World Away
• From Cabinet 34, Drawer 6
• The Drowned Geologist (1898)
• The Dead and the Moonstruck
• Houses Under the Sea
• Pickman's Other Model (1929)
• The Thousand-and-Third Tale of Scheherazade
• The Bone's Prayer
• The Peril of Liberated Objects, or the Voyeur's Seduction
• At the Gate of the Deeper Slumber
• Fish Bride
• The Alchemist's Daughter (A Fragment)
• Hounwife
• Tidal Forces
• John Four
• On the Reef
• The Transition of Elizabeth Haskings
• A Mountain Walked
• Love is Forbidden, We Croak and Howl
• Pushing the Sky Away (Death of a Blasphemer)
• Black Ships Seen South of Heaven
• Pickman's Madonna
• The Peddler's Tale, or Isobel's Revenge
• The Cats of River Street
• M is for Mars

The Dandridge Cycle

• A Redress for Andromeda (2001)
• Nor the Demon Down Under the Sea (1957)
• Study for The Witch House (2013)
• Andromeda Among the Stones

• Publication History and Acknowledgments

In this masterful collection of short fiction, Joe Hill dissects timeless human struggles in thirteen relentless tales of supernatural suspense, including “In The Tall Grass,” one of two stories co-written with Stephen King, basis for the terrifying feature film from Netflix.

A little door that opens to a world of fairy tale wonders becomes the blood-drenched stomping ground for a gang of hunters in “Faun.” A grief-stricken librarian climbs behind the wheel of an antique Bookmobile to deliver fresh reads to the dead in “Late Returns.” In “By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain,” two young friends stumble on the corpse of a plesiosaur at the water’s edge, a discovery that forces them to confront the inescapable truth of their own mortality . . . and other horrors that lurk in the water’s shivery depths. And tension shimmers in the sweltering heat of the Nevada desert as a faceless trucker finds himself caught in a sinister dance with a tribe of motorcycle outlaws in “Throttle,” co-written with Stephen King.

Featuring two previously unpublished stories, and a brace of shocking chillers, Full Throttle is a darkly imagined odyssey through the complexities of the human psyche. Hypnotic and disquieting, it mines our tormented secrets, hidden vulnerabilities, and basest fears, and demonstrates this exceptional talent at his very best.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Who's Your Daddy? - essay by Joe Hill
• Throttle - novelette by Joe Hill and Stephen King
• Dark Carousel
• Wolverton Station
• By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain
• Faun
• Late Returns
• All I Care About Is You
• Thumbprint
• The Devil on the Staircase
• Twittering from the Circus of the Dead
• Mums
• In the Tall Grass - novella by Joe Hill and Stephen King
• You Are Released
• Story Notes and Acknowledgments
• A Little Sorrow

"Sometimes dead is better...."

When the Creeds move into a beautiful old house in rural Maine, it all seems too good to be true: physician father, beautiful wife, charming little daughter, adorable infant son -- and now an idyllic home. As a family, they've got it all...right down to the friendly cat.

But the nearby woods hide a blood-chilling truth -- more terrifying than death itself...and hideously more powerful.

Curse of the Old Gypsy Man...

Billy Halleck, good husband, loving father, is both beneficiary and victim of the American Good Life: he has an expensive home, a nice family, and a rewarding career as a lawyer. But he is also fifty pounds overweight and, as his doctor keeps reminding him, heading into heart attack country.

Then, in a moment of carelessness, Billy sideswipes an old gypsy woman as she is crossing the street--and her ancient father passes a bizarre and terrible judgment on him.

"Thinner," the old gypsy man whispers, and caresses his cheeks like a lover. Just one word... but six weeks later and ninety-three pounds lighter, Billy Halleck is more than worried. He's terrified. And desperate enough for one last gamble... that will lead him to a nightmare showdown with the forces of evil melting his flesh away.

From across strange aeons comes the long-awaited annotated edition of "the twentieth century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale" (Stephen King).

"With an increasing distance from the twentieth century... the New England poet, author, essayist, and stunningly profuse epistolary Howard Phillips Lovecraft is beginning to emerge as one of that tumultuous period's most critically fascinating and yet enigmatic figures," writes Alan Moore in his introduction to The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft. Despite this nearly unprecedented posthumous trajectory, at the time of his death at the age of forty-six, Lovecraft's work had appeared only in dime-store magazines, ignored by the public and maligned by critics. Now well over a century after his birth, Lovecraft is increasingly being recognized as the foundation for American horror and science fiction, the source of "incalculable influence on succeeding generations of writers of horror fiction" (Joyce Carol Oates).

In this volume, Leslie S. Klinger reanimates Lovecraft with clarity and historical insight, charting the rise of the erstwhile pulp writer, whose rediscovery and reclamation into the literary canon can be compared only to that of Poe or Melville. Weaving together a broad base of existing scholarship with his own original insights, Klinger appends Lovecraft's uncanny oeuvre and Kafkaesque life story in a way that provides context and unlocks many of the secrets of his often cryptic body of work.

Over the course of his career, Lovecraft--"the Copernicus of the horror story" (Fritz Leiber)--made a marked departure from the gothic style of his predecessors that focused mostly on ghosts, ghouls, and witches, instead crafting a vast mythos in which humanity is but a blissfully unaware speck in a cosmos shared by vast and ancient alien beings. One of the progenitors of "weird fiction," Lovecraft wrote stories suggesting that we share not just our reality but our planet, and even a common ancestry, with unspeakable, godlike creatures just one accidental revelation away from emerging from their epoch of hibernation and extinguishing both our individual sanity and entire civilization.

Following his best-selling The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Leslie S. Klinger collects here twenty-two of Lovecraft's best, most chilling "Arkham" tales, including "The Call of Cthulhu," At the Mountains of Madness, "The Whisperer in Darkness," "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," "The Colour Out of Space," and others. With nearly 300 illustrations, including full-color reproductions of the original artwork and covers from Weird Tales and Astounding Stories, and more than 1,000 annotations, this volume illuminates every dimension of H. P. Lovecraft and stirs the Great Old Ones in their millennia of sleep.

280 color illustrations

CLOSER...

They found the town silent, apparently abandoned. Then they found the first body strangely swollen and still wam. One hundred fifty were dead, 350 missing. But the terror had only begun in the tiny mountain town of Snowfield, California.

AND CLOSER...

At first they thought it was the work of a maniac. Or a terrorist. Or toxic contamination. Or a bizarre new disease.

AND CLOSER...

But they found the truth. And they saw it in the flesh. And it was worse than anything any of them had even imagined...

Benny is so nice they feel compelled to destroy him, but he has a friend who should scare the hell out of them.

Benny Catspaw's perpetually sunny disposition is tested when he loses his job, his reputation, his fiancée, and his favorite chair. He's not paranoid. Someone is out to get him. He just doesn't know who or why. Then Benny receives an inheritance from an uncle he's never heard of: a giant crate and a video message. All will be well in time.

How strange - though it's a blessing, his uncle promises. Stranger yet is what's inside the crate. He's a seven-foot-tall self-described "bad weather friend" named Spike whose mission is to help people who are just too good for this world. Spike will take care of it. He'll find Benny's enemies. He'll deal with them. This might be satisfying if Spike wasn't such a menacing presence with terrifying techniques of intimidation.

In the company of Spike and a fascinated young waitress-and PI-in-training named Harper, Benny plunges into a perilous high-speed adventure, the likes of which never would have crossed the mind of a decent guy like him.

Mary Bergen aids the police in solving crimes, those that have happened and those that are about to. Now this gifted clairvoyant is using her psychic gift to help track a serial killer. But something terrible from Mary's past has been invading her dreams and she is haunted by the sound of leathery wings. The killer knows secrets even she has locked away. Knows about the torture she was administered at the hands of a psycho when she was a little girl. And he is coming for her next.

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

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

Sturgeon and Hugo Award nominated novella.

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

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

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

The Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft collects the author's novel, four novellas, and fifty-three short stories. Written between the years 1917 and 1935, this collection features Lovecraft's trademark fantastical creatures and supernatural thrills, as well as many horrific and cautionary science-fiction themes, that have influenced some of today's writers and filmmakers, including Stephen King, Alan Moore, F. Paul Wilson, Guillermo del Toro, and Neil Gaiman. Included in this volume are The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, "The Call of Cthulhu," "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath," "At the Mountains of Madness," "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," "The Colour Out of Space," "The Dunwich Horror," and many more hair-raising tales.

"She did not want to be organised at all. She wanted to be solitary and free."

This is the story of Jenny Flower, London slum child, who one day, on an outing to the country, meets a Dark Stranger with horns on his head. It is the first day of August -- Lammas -- a witches' sabbath. Jenny was born on Hallowe'en, and possibly descended from witches herself...

After Craig Bellman is horrifically attacked, he and his wife Effie leave New York for the peace of the country, hoping to rebuild their damaged relationship. However, when Craig insists on buying a derelict mansion on a mountainside - despite Effie's serious reservations - their problems are only just beginning...

The house echoes with a terrible agonised sobbing, and Effie, trying to overcome her fears, recruits a spiritualist to deal with its threatening vibrations. But when a gruesome death occurs she starts to fear that the spirit of the past, and of the previous owner, notorious gambler Jack Belias, is back to haunt them for good...

Rolf Rudolph Deutsch is going die. But when Deutsch, a wealthy magazine and newpaper publisher, starts thinking seriously about his impending death, he offers to pay a physicist and two mediums, one physical and one mental, $100,000 each to establish the facts of life after death.

Dr. Lionel Barrett, the physicist, accompanied by the mediums, travel to the Belasco House in Maine, which has been abandoned and sealed since 1949 after a decade of drug addiction, alcoholism, and debauchery. For one night, Barrett and his colleagues investigate the Belasco House and learn exactly why the townfolks refer to it as the Hell House.

Maugham's enchanting tale of secrets and fatal attraction "The Magician" is one of Somerset Maugham's most complex and perceptive novels. Running through it is the theme of evil, deftly woven into a story as memorable for its action as for its astonishingly vivid characters. In fin de siecle Paris, Arthur and Margaret are engaged to be married. Everyone approves and everyone seems to be enjoying themselves--until the sinister and repulsive Oliver Haddo appears and the black arts come into play.

When a rifle range accident leaves Dean Howell disfigured and in a vegetative state, his wife Sarah finds her dreary life in Pine Cone, Alabama made even worse. After long and tedious days on the assembly line, she returns home to care for her corpselike husband while enduring her loathsome and hateful mother-in-law, Jo. Jo blames the entire town for her son's mishap, and when she gives a strange piece of jewelry to the man she believes most responsible, a series of gruesome deaths is set in motion. Sarah believes the amulet has something to do with the rising body count, but no one will believe her. As the inexplicable murders continue, Sarah and her friend Becca Blair have no choice but to track down the amulet themselves, before it's too late...

Onboard the Fidèle, a steamboat floating down the Mississippi to New Orleans, a confidence man sets out to defraud his fellow passengers. In quick succession he assumes numerous guises - from a legless beggar and a worldly businessman to a collector for charitable causes and a 'cosmopolitan' gentleman, who simply swindles a barber out of the price of a shave. Making very little from his hoaxes, the pleasure of trickery seems an end in itself for this slippery conman. Is he the Devil? Is his chicanery merely intended to expose the mercenary concerns of those around him? Set on April Fool's Day, The Confidence-Man (1857) is an engaging comedy of masquerades, digressions and shifting identity, and a devastating satire on the American dream.

Born out of the short story David Mitchell published on Twitter in 2014 and inhabiting the same universe as his latest bestselling novel The Bone Clocks, this is the perfect book to curl up with on a dark and stormy night.

Turn down Slade Alley - narrow, dank and easy to miss, even when you're looking for it. Find the small black iron door set into the right-hand wall. No handle, no keyhole, but at your touch it swings open. Enter the sunlit garden of an old house that doesn't quite make sense; too grand for the shabby neighbourhood, too large for the space it occupies.

A stranger greets you by name and invites you inside. At first, you won't want to leave. Later, you'll find that you can't.

This unnerving, taut and intricately woven tale by one of our most original and bewitching writers begins in 1979 and reaches its turbulent conclusion around Hallowe'en, 2015. Because every nine years, on the last Saturday of October, a 'guest' is summoned to Slade House. But why has that person been chosen, by whom and for what purpose? The answers lie waiting in the long attic, at the top of the stairs...

They emerge from the shadows, to claim the night.... Women from around the world delve into Lovecraftian depths, penning and illustrating a variety of Weird horrors. The pale and secretive Lavinia wanders through the woods, Asenath is a precocious teenager with an attitude, and the Ancient Egyptian pharaoh Nitocris has found a new body in distant America. And do you have time to hear a word from our beloved mother Shub-Niggurath? Defiant, destructive, terrifying, and harrowing, the women in She Walks in Shadows are monsters and mothers, heroes and devourers. Observe them in all their glory. Iä! Iä!

Table of Contents:

• "Bitter Perfume" by Laura Blackwell
• "Violet is the Color of Your Energy" by Nadia Bulkin
• "Body to Body to Body" by Selena Chambers
• "Magna Mater" by Arinn Dembo
• "De Deabus Minoribus Exterioris Theomagicae" by Jilly Dreadful
• "Hairwork" by Gemma Files
• "The Head of T'la-yub" by Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas (translated by Silvia Moreno-Garcia)
• "Bring the Moon to Me" by Amelia Gorman
• "Chosen" by Lyndsey Holder
• "Eight Seconds" by Pandora Hope
• "Cthulhu of the Dead Sea" by Inkeri Kontro
• "Turn out the Light" by Penelope Love
• "The Adventurer's Wife" by Premee Mohamed
• "Notes Found in a Decommissioned Asylum, December 1961" by Sharon Mock
• "The Eye of Juno" by Eugenie Mora
• "Ammutseba Rising" by Ann K. Schwader
• "Cypress God" by Rodopi Sisamis
• "Lavinia's Wood" by Angela Slatter
• "The Opera Singer" by Priya Sridhar
• "Provenance" by Benjanun Sriduangkaew
• "The Thing in The Cheerleading Squad" by Molly Tanzer
• "Lockbox" by E. Catherine Tobler
• "When She Quickens" by Mary Turzillo
• "Shub-Niggurath's Witnesses" by Valerie Valdes
• "Queen of a New America" by Wendy N. Wagner

Montserrat has always been overlooked. She's a talented sound editor, but she's left out of the boys' club running the film industry in '90s Mexico City. And she's all-but-invisible to her best friend Tristán, a charming if faded soap opera star, even though she's been in love with him since childhood.

Then Tristán discovers his new neighbour is the cult horror director Abel Urueta, and the legendary auteur claims he has a way to change their lives - even if his tales of a Nazi occultist imbuing magic into highly volatile silver nitrate stock sounds like sheer fantasy. The magic film was never finished, which is why, Urueta swears, his career vanished overnight. He is cursed.

Now the director wants Montserrat and Tristán to help him shoot the missing scene and lift the curse...but Montserrat soon notices a dark presence following her, and Tristán begins seeing the ghost of his ex-girlfriend...

As they work together to unravel the mystery of the film and the obscure occultist who once roamed their city, Montserrat and Tristan might find out that sorcerers and magic are not only the stuff of movies...

A compelling folk horror story of deadly rivalry and the oldest magic from the four times winner of The August Derleth Award for Best Horror Novel.

No home is heaven with hell next door.

Money's tight and their new home is a fixer-upper. Deep in rural South West England, with an ancient wood at the foot of the garden, Tom and his family are miles from anywhere and anyone familiar. His wife, Fiona, was never convinced that buying the money-pit at auction was a good idea. Not least because the previous owner committed suicide. Though no one can explain why.

Within days of crossing the threshold, when hostilities break out with the elderly couple next door, Tom's dreams of future contentment are threatened by an escalating tit-for-tat campaign of petty damage and disruption.

Increasingly isolated and tormented, Tom risks losing his home, everyone dear to him and his mind. Because, surely, only the mad would suspect that the oddballs across the hedgerow command unearthly powers. A malicious magic even older than the eerie wood and the strange barrow therein. A hallowed realm from where, he suspects, his neighbours draw a hideous power.

These selected terrors range from the speculative to supernatural horror, encompass the infernal and the occult, and include stories inspired by H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Aickman and Ramsey Campbell.

Hasty for the Dark is the second short story collection from the award-winning and widely appreciated British writer of horror fiction, Adam L. G. Nevill. The author's best horror stories from 2009 to 2015 are collected here for the first time.

The hardest journeys in life and death are taken underground.
No blackmail is as ghastly as extortion from angels.
A swift reckoning often travels in handheld luggage.
Once considered inhumane and now derelict, this zoo may not be as empty as assumed.
A bad marriage, a killer couple, and part of a wider movement.
No sign of life aboard an abandoned freighter, but what is left below deck tells a strange story.
The origin of our species is not what we think.
In destitution, the future for revolution and mass murder is so bright.
Your memories may not be your own, and your life nothing more than a ritual that will compel you to perform an atrocity...

Table of Contents:

• On All London Underground Lines - (2010) - short fiction
• The Angels of London - (2013) - novelette
• Always in Our Hearts - (2013) - short fiction
• Eumenides (The Benevolent Ladies) - (2017) - short story
• The Days of Our Lives - (2016) - short story
• Hippocampus - (2015) - short story
• Call the Name - (2015) - short fiction
• White Light, White Heat - (2016) - short fiction
• Little Black Lamb - (2017) - short story

Catherine's last job ended badly. Corporate bullying at a top television production company saw her fired and forced to leave London, but she was determined to get her life back. A new job and now things look much brighter. Especially when a challenging new project presents itself - to catalogue the late M H Mason's wildly eccentric cache of antique dolls and puppets. Rarest of all, she'll get to examine his elaborate displays of posed, costumed and preserved animals, depicting scenes from World War I. When Mason's elderly niece invites her to stay at the Red House itself, where she maintains the collection, Catherine can't believe her luck. Until his niece exposes her to the dark message behind her uncle's 'Art'. Catherine tries to concentrate on the job, but M H Mason's damaged visions raise dark shadows from her own past. Shadows she'd hoped had finally been erased. Soon the barriers between reality, sanity and memory start to merge. And some truths seem too terrible to be real.

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

One million years of evolution didn't change our nature. Nor did it bury the horrors predating civilisation. Ancient rites, old deities and savage ways can reappear in the places you least expect.

Lifestyle journalist Katrine escaped past traumas by moving to a coast renowned for seaside holidays and natural beauty. But when a vast hoard of human remains and prehistoric artefacts is discovered in nearby Brickburgh, a hideous shadow engulfs her life.

Helene, a disillusioned lone parent, lost her brother, Lincoln, six years ago. Disturbing subterranean noises he recorded prior to vanishing, draw her to Brickburgh's caves. A site where early humans butchered each other across sixty thousand years. Upon the walls, images of their nameless gods remain.

Amidst rumours of drug plantations and new sightings of the mythical red folk, it also appears that the inquisitive have been disappearing from this remote part of the world for years. A rural idyll where outsiders are unwelcome and where an infernal power is believed to linger beneath the earth. A timeless supernormal influence that only the desperate would dream of confronting. But to save themselves and those they love, and to thwart a crimson tide of pitiless barbarity, Kat and Helene are given no choice. They were involved and condemned before they knew it.

Under a Watchful Eye by Adam Nevill is a supernatural thriller from the award-winning writer of The Ritual and Last Days.

Seb Logan is being watched. He just doesn't know by whom.

When the sudden appearance of a dark figure shatters his idyllic coastal life, he soon realizes that the murky past he thought he'd left behind has far from forgotten him. What's more unsettling is the strange atmosphere that engulfs him at every sighting, plunging his mind into a terrifying paranoia.

To be a victim without knowing the tormentor. To be despised without knowing the offence caused. To be seen by what nobody else can see. These are the thoughts which plague his every waking moment.

Imprisoned by despair, Seb fears his stalker is not working alone, but rather is involved in a wider conspiracy that threatens everything he has worked for. For there are doors in this world that open into unknown places. Places used by the worst kind of people to achieve their own ends. And once his investigation leads him to stray across the line and into mortal danger, he risks becoming another fatality in a long line of victims...

The Naremores, a dysfunctional British nuclear family, seek to solve their problems and start a new life away from the city in the sleepy Somerset countryside. At first their perfect new home seems to embrace them, its endless charms creating a rare peace and harmony within the family. But as they grow closer, the house begins to turn on them, and seems to know just how to hurt them the most – threatening to destroy them from the inside out.

Cult horror director Stanislas Cordova hasn't been seen in public since 1971.

To his fans he is an enigma.

To journalist Scott McGrath he is the enemy.

To Ashley he was a father.

On a damp October night the young, beautiful Ashley Cordova is found dead in an abandoned warehouse in lower Manhattan. Her suicide appears to be the latest tragedy to hit a severely cursed dynasty.

For McGrath, another death connected the legendary director seems more than coincidence. Driven by revenge, curiosity and a need for the truth, he finds himself pulled into a hypnotic, disorientating world, where almost everyone seems afraid.

The last time McGrath got close to exposing Cordova, he lost his marriage and his career. This time he could lose his grip on reality.

After Edward, a rising young author, pens a savage review of the new novel by the world-famous O.M. Tyrell, he is surprised to receive an invitation to visit the old man at his villa in the south of France. The night of their meeting, Tyrell dies, and soon after, Edward's career mysteriously starts to soar as he earns fame, fortune and critical acclaim. But despite his achievements, Edward seems haunted, even tormented. His friend, the narrator, begins to put together the pieces of the story: an ancient, inscrutable manuscript, a beautiful, ageless woman who attaches herself to whatever writer possesses it, and a bargain to achieve success at a terrible price...

From the award-winning author of Hide Me Among the Graves, Last Call, Declare, and Three Days to Never, comes a phantasmagoric, thrilling, mind-bending tale of speculative fiction in which one man must uncover occult secrets of 1920s Hollywood to save his family.

In the wake of their Aunt Amity's suicide, Scott and Madeline Madden are summoned to Caveat, the eerie, decaying mansion in the Hollywood hills in which they were raised. But their decadent and reclusive cousins, the malicious wheelchair-bound Claimayne and his sister, Ariel, do not welcome Scott and Madeline's return to the childhood home they once shared. While Scott desperately wants to go back to their shabby South-of-Sunset lives, he cannot pry his sister away from this haunted "House of Usher in the Hollywood Hills" that is a conduit for the supernatural.

This psychological thriller follows a family to their Appalachian farmhouse, where they encounter an unimaginable horror.

In the summer of 1994, psychologist Daniel Hill buys a rustic farmhouse nestled in the rolling hills of West Virginia.

Along with his wife and teenage daughter, the family uproots their lives in Ohio and moves south. They are initially seduced by the natural beauty of the country setting. That soon changes when they discover a hidden room in the basement with a well, boarded shut and adorned with crucifixes.

Local legends about the previous owner being an exorcist come to light, but by then, all Hell has broken loose.

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

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

Seeking the immortality promised in an ancient manuscript, The Book of Skulls, four friends, college roommates, go on a spring break trip to Arizona: Eli, the scholar, who found and translated the book; Timothy, scion of an American dynasty, born and bred to lead; Ned, poet and cynic; and Oliver, the brilliant farm boy obsessed with death.

Somewhere in the desert lies the House of Skulls, where a mystic brotherhood guards the secret of eternal life. There, the four aspirants will present themselves–and a horrific price will be demanded.

For immortality requires sacrifice. Two victims to balance two survivors. One by suicide, one by murder.

Now, beneath the gaze of grinning skulls, the terror begins....

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

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

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

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

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

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

In a cottage overlooking the windswept Maine coast, Wilder Harlow has begun the last book he will ever write.

It is the story about the sun-drenched summer days of his youth in Whistler Bay, and the blood-stained path of the killer that stalked his small vacation town. About the terrible secret he and his companions, Nat and Harper, discovered entombed in the coves off the bay. And how the pact they swore that day echoed down the decades, forever shaping their lives.

But the more Wilder writes, the less he trusts himself and his memory. He starts to see things that can't be real -- notes hidden in the cabin, from an old friend now dead; a woman with dark hair drowning in the icy waters below, calling for help; entire chapters he doesn't recall typing, appearing overnight. Who, or what, is haunting Wilder?

No longer able to trust his own eyes, Wilder begins to fear that this will not only be his last book, but the last thing he ever does.

Sophie is trying to make a living in London as a journalist. Joining the Lodge of the Seven Stars could lead to a great article on the occult. When someone comes with a tale of having just met a wanderer whose story will curse the listener, the Lodge warns them all to stay away from the woman.

Angel of Ruin was published as Fallen Angel in the UK by Gollancz/Orion.

The unsettling dreams begin for small-town reporter Will Barbee not long after he first meets the mysterious and beautiful April Bell. They are vivid, powerful and deeply disturbing nightmares in which he commits atrocious acts. And, one by one, his friends are meeting violent deaths.

It is clear to Barbee that he is embroiled in something far beyond human understanding, something unspeakably evil. And it intimately involves the seductive, dangerously intoxicating April, and the question, 'Who is the Child of the Night?' When he discovers the answer to that, his world will change utterly.

A young child psychologist steps off a train, her destination a foggy seaside town. There, she begins a journey causing her to question everything she believes about life, death, memories, and reincarnation.

In 1925, Alice Lind steps off a train in the rain-soaked coastal hamlet of Gordon Bay, Oregon. There, she expects to do nothing more difficult than administer IQ tests to a group of rural schoolchildren. A trained psychologist, Alice believes mysteries of the mind can be unlocked scientifically, but now her views are about to be challenged by one curious child.

Seven-year-old Janie O'Daire is a mathematical genius, which is surprising. But what is disturbing are the stories she tells: that her name was once Violet, she grew up in Kansas decades earlier, and she drowned at age nineteen. Alice delves into these stories, at first believing they're no more than the product of the girl's vast imagination. But, slowly, Alice comes to the realization that Janie might indeed be telling a strange truth.

Alice knows the investigation may endanger her already shaky professional reputation, and as a woman in a field dominated by men she has no room for mistakes. But she is unprepared for the ways it will illuminate terrifying mysteries within her own past, and in the process, irrevocably change her life.

This stunning collection of novellas and short stories by masters of the macabre brings to fans and newcomers an unrelenting spell of horror and suspense. These are tales that strike beyond sheer terror, as their disturbing visions capture the dark reality we all fear. Features works by Stephen King, Clive Barker, Peter Straub, and more.

When Jessica marries David, he is everything she wants in a family man: brilliant, attentive, ever youthful. Yet she still feels something about him is just out of reach. Soon, as people close to Jessica begin to meet violent, mysterious deaths, David makes an unimaginable confession: More than 400 years ago, he and other members of an Ethiopian sect traded their humanity so they would never die, a secret he must protect at any cost. Now, his immortal brethren have decided David must return and leave his family in Miami. Instead, David vows to invoke a forbidden ritual to keep Jessica and his daughter with him forever.

Harrowing, engrossing and skillfully rendered, My Soul to Keep traps Jessica between the desperation of immortals who want to rob her of her life and a husband who wants to rob her of her soul. With deft plotting and an unforgettable climax, this tour de force reminiscent of early Anne Rice will win Due a new legion of fans.

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

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

Baines is a bored businessman with a taste for the macabre -- a munitions dealer accustomed to fomenting war wherever and whenever he can. But nuclear proliferation has, ironically, been bad for business, and Baines needs something, anything to reverse that trend. His restless mind conceives a notion that satisfies his desire for profit and amusement both -- a scheme for letting lose all the demons of Hell for one night of unfettered destruction -- and he commissions Theron Ware, the great Black Magician, to carry out the plan.

Ware alone has the ability -- and the power -- to call up those chained to the darkness. Crimes of violence, chiefly murder, are his specialty. He will arrange for demons to kill almost anyone...for a price. As his scruples are invoked, the fee rises. But for Baines' commission, the payment can't be high enough. For Theron Ware has never before attempted to work his evil skill on such a monstrous scale. And if he cannot call the demons home again, their liberation will be permanent -- a catastrophe for the entire human race.

Alex Verus is part of a world hidden in plain sight, running a magic shop in London. And while Alex's own powers aren't as showy as some mages, he does have the advantage of foreseeing the possible future--allowing him to pull off operations that have a million-to-one-chance of success.

But when Alex is approached by multiple factions to crack open a relic from a long-ago mage war, he knows that whatever's inside must be beyond powerful. And thanks to his abilities, Alex can predict that by taking the job, his odds of survival are about to go from slim to none...

Since his second sight made him infamous for defeating powerful dark mages, Alex has been keeping his head down. But now he's discovered the resurgence of a forbidden ritual. Someone is harvesting the life-force of magical creatures-destroying them in the process. And draining humans is next on the agenda. Hired to investigate, Alex realizes that not everyone on the Council wants him delving any deeper. Struggling to distinguish ally from enemy, he finds himself the target of those who would risk their own sanity for power...

On the borderland between this world and the world of Quiddity, the sea of our dreams, sits Everville.For years it has lived in ignorance of the gleaming shore on which it lies.But its ignorance is not bliss. Opening the door between worlds, Clive Barker delivers his characters into the heart of the human mystery; into a place of revelation, where the forces which have shaped our past--and are ready to destroy our future--are at work.

Punk photographer Cass Neary, "one of noir's great anti-heroes" (Katherine Dunn, author of Geek Love), rages back in the series that began with the award-winning novels Generation Loss and Available Dark. Fleeing Reykjavik and a cluster of cult murders, Cass lands in London to rendezvous with her longtime lover Quinn, a person of interest to both Interpol and the Russian mob.

Only Quinn doesn't show up. Alone in London and fearing the worst, Cass hooks up with a singer-songwriter with her own dark past, who brings her to the wrong party. Cass becomes entangled with the party's host, Mallo Tierney, an eccentric gangster with a penchant for cigar cutters and neatly-wrapped packages, and a trio of dissolute groupies connected to a notorious underground filmmaker.

Forced to run Mallo's contraband, Cass is suddenly enmeshed in a web of murder, betrayal, and artistic and sexual obsession that extends from London to the stark beauty of England's Land's End Peninsula, where she uncovers an archeological enigma that could change our view of human history?if she survives.

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.

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

Herald Childe has quit being a detective and gone back to college to study history. One day he sees one of the "people" from his adventure and decides to follow her. He gets caught and becomes their prisoner once again but this time things are different. It turns out that he is actually the son of Lord Byron, who was also one of "them". All of these monsters are aliens and there are two waring groups of them. Both sides want to control Childe because he is the only one who can get them back home. Childe, however, has other plans.

The phenomenal bestseller that inspired the classic motion picture.

Felix Castor is a freelance exorcist, and London is his stamping ground. It may seem like a good ghostbuster can charge what he likes and enjoy a hell of a lifestyle--but there's a risk: Sooner or later he's going to take on a spirit that's too strong for him. While trying to back out of this ill-conceived career, Castor accepts a seemingly simple ghost-hunting case at a museum in the shadowy heart of London--just to pay the bills, you understand. But what should have been a perfectly straightforward exorcism is rapidly turning into the Who Can Kill Castor First Show, with demons and ghosts all keen to claim the big prize. That's OK: Castor knows how to deal with the dead. It's the living who piss him off...

For those who still dream and remember, for those yet to experience the hypnotic power of its dark poetry: step inside - the show is about to begin...

It's the week before Hallowe'en, and Cooger and Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show has come to Green Town, Illinois. The siren song of the calliope entices all with promises of youth regained and dreams fulfilled, but everyone touched will be destroyed, for Mr Dark collects souls. And as two boys trembling on the brink of manhood set out to explore the mysteries of the dark carnival's smoke, mazes and mirrors, they will also discover the true price of innermost wishes . . .

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

The Scarlet Gospels takes readers back many years to the early days of two of Barker's most iconic characters in a battle of good and evil as old as time: The long beleaguered detective Harry D'Amour, investigator of all supernatural, magical, and malevolent crimes faces off against his formidable, and intensley evil rival, Pinhead, the priest of hell. Barker devotees have been waiting for The Scarlet Gospels with bated breath for years, and it's everyting they have begged for and more. Bloody, terrifying, and brilliantly complex, fans and newcomers alike will not be disappointed by the epic, visonary tale that is The Scarlet Gospels. Barker's horror will make your worst nightmares seem like bedtime stories. The Gospals are coming. Are you ready?

The sprawling tale of the Locke family and their mastery of the whispering iron thunders to new heights as the true history of the family is revealed to Tyler and Kinsey. Zack Wells assumes a new form, Tyler and Kinsey travel through time, and surprises beyond imagination will be revealed.

I see dead people. But then, by God, I do something about it. Odd Thomas never asked for his special ability. He's just an ordinary guy trying to live a quiet life in the small desert town of Pico Mundo. Yet he feels an obligation to do right by his otherworldly confidants, and that's why he's won hearts on both sides of the divide between life and death. But when a childhood friend disappears, Odd discovers something worse than a dead body and embarks on a heart-stopping battle of will and wits with an enemy of exceptional cunning. In the hours to come there can be no innocent bystanders, and every sacrifice can tip the balance between despair and hope.

You're invited on an unforgettable journey through a world of terror and transcendence to wonders beyond imagining. And you can have no better guide than Odd Thomas.

When Tom Rigby is commissioned to paint a young woman's portrait at Woolvercombe House, the offer is too lucrative to refuse. But from the moment of his arrival at the secluded country mansion strange and inexplicable events begin to transpire. Soon he is drawn into an impenetrable maze of horror, and by the time he discovers the role he is intended to play in a diabolical design, it will already be too late. For the seeds of evil have been sown, and the time to reap their wicked harvest is nigh!

The classic third novel by '70s and '80s horror master Bernard Taylor, The Reaping (1980) returns to print at last in this edition featuring a new introduction by Will Errickson and the original cover painting by Oliver Frey.

Queer Fear II builds on the successes of its predecessor, Queer Fear, the groundbreaking gay-themed horror anthology that Gothic.net called "the best horror anthology of [the year]," which won the Queer Horror Award, and was a finalist for a Spectrum Award and two Lambda Literary Awards.

This second volume includes among its stories new work by some stars of the previous volume--International Horror Guild Award winners Gemma Files and Michael Marano, Bram Stoker Award winners David Nickle and Edo van Belkom, and screenwriter Ron Oliver. Science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer, winner of the Aurora and Nebula Awards, crosses genres to appear alongside newer writers like Bram Stoker Award winner Brett Savory, novelist Sephera Giron, and classic British ghost story author Steve Duffy.

And if that's not enough, Queer Fear II will also feature a new, unpublished story by internationally acclaimed horror writer Poppy Z. Brite.

The dark pleasures and anxieties of the Queer Fear books have their roots in the nightmarish, viral machinations of AIDS and homophobia, as well as the ghoulish, old-fashioned thrills of confronting things that go bump in the night. Queer Fear II will keep you up long past the witching hour.

Contents:

• Acknowledgments (Queer Fear II) - (2002) - essay by uncredited
• Introduction: In Further Praise of Queer Fear - (2002) - essay by Michael Rowe
• Bugcrush - (2002) - shortstory by Scott Treleaven
• Polyphemus' Cave - (2002) - novelette by David Nickle
• Dead in the Water - (2002) - shortstory by C. Mark Umland
• Delicious Monster - (2002) - shortstory by Nalo Hopkinson
• Gaytown - (2002) - novelette by Robert Boyczuk
• Digging Up Graves - (1997) - shortstory by William J. Mann
• artGod - (2002) - shortstory by Joseph O'Brien
• Black Shapes in a Darkened Room - (2002) - shortstory by Marshall Moore
• Night of the Werepuss - (2002) - shortstory by Michael Thomas Ford
• On Being a Fetish - (2002) - shortstory by David Coffey
• I Stand Alone - (2002) - shortstory by Sèphera Girón
• Numbers - (2002) - shortstory by Steve Duffy
• Want - (2002) - shortstory by Ron Oliver
• Oh Yes, My Eyes - (2002) - shortfiction by David Quinn
• One of the Boys - (2002) - shortstory by Edo van Belkom
• Till Human Voices Wake Us - (2002) - shortstory by Stephen Dedman
• Slice - (2002) - shortstory by Warren Dunford
• Veggie Mountain - (2002) - shortstory by Thomas S. Roche
• Exit Wound - (2002) - shortstory by Michael Marano
• Freshets - (2002) - shortstory by Brett Alexander Savory
• Bayou de la Mère - (2002) - shortstory by Poppy Z. Brite
• The Narrow World - (2001) - novella by Gemma Files
• Contributors (Queer Fear II) - (2002) - essay by uncredited

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

Having survived sinister scarecrows and the malevolent smiling man in Small Spaces, newly minted best friends Ollie, Coco, and Brian are ready to spend a relaxing winter break skiing together with their parents at Mount Hemlock Resort. But when a snowstorm sets in, causing the power to flicker out and the cold to creep closer and closer, the three are forced to settle for hot chocolate and board games by the fire.

Ollie, Coco, and Brian are determined to make the best of being snowed in, but odd things keep happening. Coco is convinced she has seen a ghost, and Ollie is having nightmares about frostbitten girls pleading for help. Then Mr. Voland, a mysterious ghost hunter, arrives in the midst of the storm to investigate the hauntings at Hemlock Lodge. Ollie, Coco, and Brian want to trust him, but Ollie's watch, which once saved them from the smiling man, has a new cautionary message: BEWARE.

With Mr. Voland's help, Ollie, Coco, and Brian reach out to the dead voices at Mount Hemlock. Maybe the ghosts need their help--or maybe not all ghosts can or should be trusted.

Dead Voices is a terrifying follow-up to Small Spaces with thrills and chills galore and the captive foreboding of a classic ghost story.

Twenty-two years ago, Sam and Dean Winchester lost their mother to a mysterious and demonic supernatural force. In the years after, their father, John, taught them about the paranormal evil that lives in the dark corners and on the back roads of America...and he taught them how to kill it.

Sam and Dean have hit New York City to check out a local rocker's haunted house. But before they can figure out why a lovesick banshee in an '80s heavy-metal T-shirt is wailing in the bedroom, a far more macabre crime catches their attention. Not far from the house, two university students were beaten to death by a strange assailant. A murder that's bizarre even by New York City standards, it's the latest in a line of killings that the brothers soon suspect are based on the creepy stories of legendary writer Edgar Allan Poe.

Their investigation leads them to the center of one of Poe's horror classics, face-to-face with their most terrifying foe yet. And if Sam and Dean don't rewrite the ending of this chilling tale, a grisly serial killer will end their lives forevermore.

Twenty-two years ago, Sam and Dean Winchester lost their mother to a mysterious and demonic supernatural force. In the years after, their father, John, taught them about the paranormal evil that lives in the dark corners and on the back roads of America... and he taught them how to kill it.

Sam and Dean are headed for Key West, Florida, home to Hemingway, hurricanes, and a whole lot of demons. The tropical town has so many ghouls on the loose that one of its main moneymakers has long been a series of ghost tours. But the tours are no more, not since one of the guides was found dead of an apparent heart attack... his face frozen in mid-scream. No one knows what horrors he saw, but the Winchester brothers are about to find out.

Soon they'll be face-to-face with the ghosts of the island's most infamous residents, demons with a hidden agenda, and a mysterious ancient power looking for revenge. It's up to Sam and Dean to save the citizens of Key West... before the beautiful island is reduced to nothing more than a pile of bones.

Twenty-seven years ago, Sam and Dean Winchester lost their mother to a mysterious and demonic supernatural force. In the years after, their father, John, taught them about the paranormal evil that lives in the dark corners and on the back roads of America... and he taught them how to kill it.

On the hunt for Lucifer, the boys find themselves in a small town in South Dakota where they meet Don - an angel with a proposition... Don sends them a very long way from home, on a mission to uncover the secret Satan never wanted them to find out.

Dean believes that Sam is in Hell so he is trying to keep his promise to his brother and live a normal live with Lisa and Ben.

When he realizes that a spell in the Necronomicon could raise Lucifer and therefore Sam, he convinces his new family to travel with him on vacation to Salem.

Meanwhile Sam is not as far away as Dean thinks and is determined to protect his brother from the Salem witches...

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

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

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

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

Bob Howard - a T-shirt wearing computer geek and field agent for the super-secret British government agency The Laundry - must save the world from eldritch horrors, codenamed Jennifer Morgue, in this fast-paced spy thriller. Bob's current mission is to stop the evil Ellis Billington from achieving world domination, but he must overcome obstacles including the Gravedust device, which permits communication with the dead; destiny-entanglement protocol; banishment weapons; and Ramona Random, a lethal but beautiful agent for the U.S. counterpart to The Laundry. Billington plans to raise the eldritch horror Jennifer Morgue from the vasty deeps, and communicate with a dead warrior for the purpose of ruling the world.

Blending physics and applied mathematics with the practice of summoning and demonology, this spy-meets-horror novel will keep sci-fi fans on the edge of their seats.

This volume also includes a bonus story, "Pimpf," featuring The Laundry agent Bob Howard in the world of virtual gaming, as well as an afterword entitled "The Golden Age of Spying."

Bob Howard may be humanity's last hope.

Start praying...

For outstanding heroism in the field (despite himself), computational demonologist Bob Howard is on the fast-track for promotion to management within The Laundry, the super-secret British government agency tasked with defending the realm from occult threats. Assigned to "External Assets," Bob discovers the company-unofficially-employs freelance agents to deal with sensitive situations that may embarrass Queen and Country.

So when Ray Schiller-an American televangelist with the uncanny ability to miraculously heal the ill-becomes uncomfortably close to the Prime Minister, External Assets dispatches the brilliant, beautiful, and entirely unpredictable Persephone Hazard to infiltrate the Golden Promise Ministry and discover why the preacher is so interested in British politics. And it's Bob's job to make sure Persephone doesn't cause an international incident.

But it's a supernatural incident that Bob needs to worry about-a global threat even The Laundry may be unable to clean up...

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?

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.