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Mariana Enríquez's THINGS WE LOST IN THE FIRE (Hogarth; February 21, 2017) is an arresting collection of short stories by an exciting, new international talent. Reminiscent of Shirley Jackson and Julio Cortázar, THINGS WE LOST IN THE FIRE brings modern Argentina to vibrant life as a place where shocking inequality, violence, and corruption are the law of the land, and where military dictatorship and legions of desaparecidos loom large in the collective memory. Asking vital questions of the world as we know it, this unnerving debut signals the arrival of an astonishing and necessary voice in contemporary fiction.

Throughout THINGS WE LOST IN THE FIRE, Enríquez introduces us to a cast of compelling characters who find themselves grappling with the social and political fabric of Argentina, imbued with surreality and classic horror tropes. In these twelve tales, we meet street kids and social workers, hikikomori and practitioners of black magic. There is a young professional who encounters a homeless woman and her son begging for change outside her building--when they suddenly stop appearing, she can't help but connect this to the story of a decapitated little boy she sees on the news. A group of teenage girls begin an innocent experiment with drugs, but their friendship turns dangerous as they dare each other to continually up the stakes. A family opens a tourist hotel on the site of a former secret police barracks, where their guests get more than they bargained for on a trip to the country. When a pop star who rose from the slums turns up dead, his obsessive fans gather to dig up his body. And in the title story, as a protest against domestic violence, women begin to set themselves on fire in public.

Darkly entertaining and brilliantly subversive, Enríquez's collection of stories delivers bold originality. Macabre, disturbing, and magnificently composed, THINGS WE LOST IN THE FIRE is not to be missed.

Taking readers deep into a labyrinth of dark neurosis, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Table of Contents:

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

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

Table of Contents

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

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

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

I dream sometimes about a house I've never seen...

Opal is a lot of things--orphan, high school dropout, full-time cynic and part-time cashier--but above all, she's a determined to find a better life for her younger brother Jasper. One that gets them out of Eden, Kentucky, a town remarkable for only two things: bad luck and E. Starling, the reclusive nineteenth century author of The Underland, who disappeared over a hundred years ago.

All she left behind were dark rumors--and her home. Everyone agrees that it's best to ignore the uncanny mansion and its misanthropic heir, Arthur . Almost everyone, anyway.

I should be scared, but in the dream I don't hesitate.

Opal has been obsessed with The Underland since she was a child. When she gets the change to step inside Starling House--and make some extra cash for her brother's escape fund--she can't resist. But sinister forces are digging deeper into the buried secrets of Starling House, and Arthur's own nightmares have become far too real. As Eden itself seems to be drowning in its own ghosts, Opal realizes that she might finally have found a reason to stick around.

In my dream, I'm home.

And now she'll have to fight.

Welcome to Starling House: enter, if you dare.

M. R. James is probably the finest ghost-story writer England has ever produced. These tales are not only classics of their genre, but are also superb examples of beautifully-paced understatement, convincing background and chilling terror. As well as the preface, there is a fascinating tail-piece by M. R. James, Stories I Have Tried To Write , which accompanies these thirty tales. Among them are 'Casting the Runes', 'Oh, Whistle and I'll come to you, My Lad', 'The Tractate Middoth', 'The Ash Tree' and 'Canon Alberic's Scrapbook'.

• Canon Alberic's Scrapbook - (1895) - short story (variant of Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book)
• Lost Hearts - (1895) - short story
• The Mezzotint - (1904) - short story
• The Ash-Tree - (1904) - short story
• Number 13 - (1904) - short story
• Count Magnus - (1904) - short story
• "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad" - (1904) - novelette
• The Treasure of Abbot Thomas - (1904) - short story
• A School Story - (1911) - short story
• The Rose Garden - (1911) - short story
• The Tractate Middoth - (1911) - short story
• Casting the Runes - (1911) - novelette
• The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral - (1910) - short story
• Martin's Close - (1911) - short story
• Mr. Humphreys and His Inheritance - (1911) - novelette
• The Residence at Whitminster - (1919) - novelette
• The Diary of Mr. Poynter - (1919) - short story
• n Episode of Cathedral History - (1914) - short story
• The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance - (1913) - short story
• Two Doctors - (1919) - short story
• The Haunted Dolls' House - (1923) - short story
• The Uncommon Prayer-Book - (1925) - short story
• A Neighbour's Landmark - (1924) - short story
• A View from a Hill - (1925) - short story by
• A Warning to the Curious - (1925) - short story
• n Evening's Entertainment - (1925) - short story
• here Was a Man Dwelt by a Churchyard - (1924) - short story
• Rats - (1929) - short story
• After Dark in the Playing Fields - (1924) - short story
• Wailing Well - (1928) - short story
• Stories I Have Tried to Write - (1929) - essay

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

Night Shift-Stephen King's first collection of stories-is an early showcase of the depths that King's wicked imagination could plumb. In these 20 tales, we see mutated rats gone bad ("Graveyard Shift"); a cataclysmic virus that threatens humanity ("Night Surf," the basis for The Stand); a smoker who will try anything to stop ("Quitters, Inc."); a reclusive alcoholic who begins a gruesome transformation ("Gray Matter"); and many more. This is Stephen King at his horrifying best.

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.

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

Samantha Montgomery pulls into the driveway of her family home to find a massive black vulture perched on the mailbox, staring at the house.

Inside, everything has changed. Gone is the eclectic warmth Sam expects; instead the walls are a sterile white. Now, it's very important to say grace before dinner, and her mother won't hear a word against Sam's long-dead and little-missed grandmother, who was the first to put down roots in this small southern town.

The longer Sam stays, the stranger things get. And every day, more vultures circle overhead...

In life, not every sin goes unpunished.

For four aging men in the terror-stricken town of Milburn, New York, an act inadvertently carried out in their youth has come back to haunt them. Now they are about to learn what happens to those who believe they can bury the past -- and get away with murder.

Peter Straub's classic bestseller is a work of "superb horror" (The Washington Post Book World) that, like any good ghost story, stands the test of time -- and conjures our darkest fears and nightmares.

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

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

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

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

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

Erik, the Phantom of the Paris Opera House, is one of the great icons of horror literature. This tormented and disfigured creature has made his home in the labyrinthine cellars of this opulent building where he can indulge in his great passion for music, which is a substitute for the love and emotion denied him because of his ghastly appearance.

It is in the Opera House that he encounters Christine Daaé whom he trains in secret to become a great singer. Erik's passionate obsession with a beautiful woman beyond his reach is doomed and leads to the dramatic tragic finale.

Gaston Leroux's novel is a marvellous blend of detective story, romance and spine-tingling terror which has fascinated readers ever since the work was first published.

Bubbling potions can be bad for your health!Just ask Dr. Jekyll.By day, he's a kind doctor.But by night, he's the merciless kill Mr. Hyde.And all because of a magic formula.Will anybody find out the horrible secret of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?

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.

He is trying to poison me. You must come for me, Noemí. You have to save me.

After receiving a frantic letter from her newly-wed cousin begging for someone to save her from a mysterious doom, Noemí Taboada heads to High Place, a distant house in the Mexican countryside. She's not sure what she will find - her cousin's husband, a handsome Englishman, is a stranger, and Noemí knows little about the region.

Noemí is also an unlikely rescuer: She's a glamorous debutante, and her chic gowns and perfect red lipstick are more suited for cocktail parties than amateur sleuthing. But she's also tough and smart, with an indomitable will, and she is not afraid: Not of her cousin's new husband, who is both menacing and alluring; not of his father, the ancient patriarch who seems to be fascinated by Noemí; and not even of the house itself, which begins to invade Noemi's dreams with visions of blood and doom.

Her only ally in this inhospitable abode is the family's youngest son. Shy and gentle, he seems to want to help Noemí, but might also be hiding dark knowledge of his family's past. For there are many secrets behind the walls of High Place. The family's once colossal wealth and faded mining empire kept them from prying eyes, but as Noemí digs deeper she unearths stories of violence and madness.

And Noemí, mesmerized by the terrifying yet seductive world of High Place, may soon find it impossible to ever leave this enigmatic house behind.

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

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

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

Carmilla 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.

A classic ghost story: the chilling tale of a menacing specter haunting a small English town. Arthur Kipps is an up-and-coming London solicitor who is sent to Crythin Gifford--a faraway town in the windswept salt marshes beyond Nine Lives Causeway--to attend the funeral and settle the affairs of a client, Mrs. Alice Drablow of Eel Marsh House. Mrs. Drablow's house stands at the end of the causeway, wreathed in fog and mystery, but Kipps is unaware of the tragic secrets that lie hidden behind its sheltered windows. The routine business trip he anticipated quickly takes a horrifying turn when he finds himself haunted by a series of mysterious sounds and images--a rocking chair in a deserted nursery, the eerie sound of a pony and trap, a child's scream in the fog, and, most terrifying of all, a ghostly woman dressed all in black.

Seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland is one of ten children of a country clergyman. Although a tomboy in her childhood, by the age of 17 she is "in training for a heroine" and is excessively fond of reading Gothic novels, among which Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho is a favourite.

When Catherine Moorland is asked to go to Bath, she is immersed in the world of attentive men and elaborate balls. But when one of her suitors takes her to his family estate, Northanger Abbey, she becomes lost in the gothic mystery which surrounds it.

Besides exploring social and romantic themes, it also satirised the excesses of the 'gothic' novels that were popular at the time. In this context the famous horror writer H.P. Lovecraft described it as a "merited rebuke to a school which had sunk far towards absurdity".

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

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

Patricia Highsmith meets Patti Smith in this mesmerizing literary thriller.

Set in the rural wilderness of western Massachusetts, "The Dunwich Horror" follows one Wilbur Whateley, the bastard offspring of a family devoted to worshipping to "Great Old Ones" and to studying the Necronomicon, Lovecraft's fictional grimoire full of forsaken lore and magic. Whateley is ultimately defeated by Professor Warren Rice and Dr. Francis Morgan, two representatives of Lovecraft's many scholarly protagonists. "The Dunwich Horror" is notable not only for its use of anachronistic Yankee dialects, but also its numerous references to the fictional Miskatonic University and the superstition surrounding whip-poor-wills.

This short story originally appeared in Weird Tales in 1929. It has been anthologized many times, including the anthology Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, edited by Phyllis Fraser and Herbert A. Wise, and has also been included in a myriad of collections, including the collections Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H.P. Lovecraft and The Dunwich Horror and Others.

The Dunwich Horror is the basis for several films of the same name.

The April 1929 issue of Weird Tales containing "The Dunwich Horror" is available free on Internet Archives.

This is Oscar Wilde's tale of the American family moved into a British mansion, Canterville Chase, much to the annoyance its tired ghost. The family -- which refuses to believe in him -- is in Wilde's way a commentary on the British nobility of the day -- and on the Americans, too. The tale, like many of Wilde's, is rich with allusion, but ends as sentimental romance...

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.

One of the supreme masterpieces of Romantic fiction and Scottish literature, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is a terrifying tale of murder and amorality, and of one man's descent into madness and despair. James Hogg's sardonic novel follows a young man who, falling under the spell of a mysterious stranger who bears an uncanny likeness to himself, embarks on a career as a serial murderer. The memoirs are presented by a narrator whose attempts to explain the story only succeed in intensifying its more baffling and bizarre aspects. Is the young man the victim of a psychotic delusion, or has he been tempted by the devil to wage war against God's enemies? The authoritative and lively introduction by Ian Duncan covers the full range of historical and religious themes and contexts, offers a richer and more accurate consideration of the novel's relation to Romantic fiction than found elsewhere, and sheds new light on the novel's treatment of fanaticism. Copious notes identify the novel's historical, biblical, theological, and literary allusions.

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

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

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

Set in the sinister monastery of the Capuchins in Madrid, The Monk is a violent tale of ambition, murder, and incest. The great struggle between maintaining monastic vows and fulfilling personal ambitions leads its main character, the monk Ambrosio, to temptation and the breaking of his vows, then to sexual obsession and rape, and finally to murder in order to conceal his guilt.

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

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

Table of Contents:

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

One of the earliest major American novels, Wieland (1798) is a thrilling tale of suspense and intrigue set in rural Pennsylvania in the 1760s. Based on an actual case of a New York farmer who murdered his family, the novel employs Gothic devices and sensational elements such as spontaneous combustion, ventriloquism, and religious fanaticism.

A haunted castle and a ruined bloodline Manfred, wicked lord of Otranto Castle, is horrified when his son is crushed to death on his wedding day. But rather than witness the end of his line, as foretold in a curse, he resolves to send his own wife to a convent and marry the intended bride himself. However, Manfred's lustful greed will be disturbed by the terrifying omens that now haunt his castle: bleeding statues, skeletal ghouls and a giant sword - as well as the arrival of the rightful prince of Otranto.

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.

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.