Search Worlds Without End

Ben and Marian Rolfe are desperate to escape a stifling summer in their tiny Brooklyn apartment, so when they get the chance to rent a mansion in upstate New York for the entire summer for only $900, it's an offer that's too good to refuse. There's only one catch: behind a strange and intricately carved door in a distant wing of the house lives elderly Mrs. Allardyce, and the Rolfes will be responsible for preparing her meals.

But Mrs. Allardyce never seems to emerge from her room, and it soon becomes clear that something weird and terrifying is happening in the house. As the suspense builds towards a revelation of what really lies behind that locked door, the Rolfes will discover that their cheap vacation rental comes at a terrible cost...

The basis for a classic 1976 film adaptation and an acknowledged influence on Stephen King's The Shining, Burnt Offerings is one of the most original and scariest haunted house novels ever written.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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 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 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

Songs of a Dreamer was Thomas Ligotti's first collection of supernatural horror stories. When originally published in 1985 by Harry Morris's Silver Scarab Press, the book was hardly noticed. In 1989, an expanded version appeared that garnered accolades from several quarters. Writing in the Washington Post, the celebrated science fiction and fantasy author Michael Swanwick extolled: "Put this volume on the shelf right between H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe. Where it belongs."

Contents:

• ix - Introduction (Songs of a Dead Dreamer) - (1985) - essay by Ramsey Campbell
• 3 - The Frolic - (1982) - shortstory by Thomas Ligotti
• 19 - Les Fleurs - (1981) - shortstory by Thomas Ligotti
• 28 - Alice's Last Adventure - (1985) - shortstory by Thomas Ligotti
• 49 - Dream of a Mannikin - (1982) - shortstory by Thomas Ligotti
• 66 - The Chymist - [The Nyctalops Trilogy - 1] - (1981) - shortstory by Thomas Ligotti
• 79 - Drink to Me Only with Labyrinthine Eyes - [The Nyctalops Trilogy - 2] - (1982) - shortstory by Thomas Ligotti
• 90 - Eye of the Lynx - [The Nyctalops Trilogy - 3] - (1983) - shortstory by Thomas Ligotti
• 100 - Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story - (1985) - novelette by Thomas Ligotti
• 125 - The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise: A Tale of Possession in Old Grosse Pointe - (1983) - shortstory by Thomas Ligotti
• 135 - The Lost Art of Twilight - (1986) - shortstory by Thomas Ligotti
• 155 - The Troubles of Dr. Thoss - (1985) - shortstory by Thomas Ligotti
• 168 - Masquerade of a Dead Sword: A Tragedie - (1986) - novelette by Thomas Ligotti (variant of Masquerade of a Dead Sword)
• 191 - Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech - (1983) - shortstory by Thomas Ligotti
• 202 - Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror - (1985) - shortstory by Thomas Ligotti
• 213 - Dr. Locrian's Asylum - (1987) - shortstory by Thomas Ligotti
• 224 - The Sect of the Idiot - [Azathoth] - (1988) - shortstory by Thomas Ligotti
• 236 - The Greater Festival of Masks - (1985) - shortstory by Thomas Ligotti
• 244 - The Music of the Moon - (1987) - shortstory by Thomas Ligotti
• 253 - The Journal of J. P. Drapeau - (1987) - shortstory by Thomas Ligotti
• 260 - Vastarien - (1987) - shortstory by Thomas Ligotti

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

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.

One of the great works of the twentieth century, Kafka's The Trial has been read as a study of political power, a pessimistic religious parable, or a crime novel where the accused man is himself the problem. In it, a man wakes up one morning to find himself under arrest for an offence which is never explained. Faced with this ambiguous but threatening situation, Josef K. gradually succumbs to its psychological pressure. One of the iconic figures of modern world literature, Kafka writes about universal problems of guilt, responsibility, and freedom. He offers no solutions, but provokes his readers to arrive at meanings of their own.

A caver on a foreign planet finds herself on a terrifying psychological and emotional journey for survival.

When Gyre Price lied her way into this expedition, she thought she'd be mapping mineral deposits, and that her biggest problems would be cave collapses and gear malfunctions. She also thought that the fat paycheck--enough to get her off-planet and on the trail of her mother--meant she'd get a skilled surface team, monitoring her suit and environment, keeping her safe. Keeping her sane.

Instead, she got Em.

Em sees nothing wrong with controlling Gyre's body with drugs or withholding critical information to "ensure the smooth operation" of her expedition. Em knows all about Gyre's falsified credentials, and has no qualms using them as a leash--and a lash. And Em has secrets, too...

As Gyre descends, little inconsistencies--missing supplies, unexpected changes in the route, and, worst of all, shifts in Em's motivations--drive her out of her depths. Lost and disoriented, Gyre finds her sense of control giving way to paranoia and anger. On her own in this mysterious, deadly place, surrounded by darkness and the unknown, Gyre must overcome more than just the dangerous terrain and the Tunneler which calls underground its home if she wants to make it out alive--she must confront the ghosts in her own head.

But how come she can't shake the feeling she's being followed?

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 Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort--a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other "Bunny," and seem to move and speak as one.

But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies' fabled "Smut Salon," and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door--ditching her only friend, Ava, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the Bunnies' sinister yet saccharine world, beginning to take part in the ritualistic off-campus "Workshop" where they conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision.

The spellbinding new novel from one of our most fearless chroniclers of the female experience, Bunny is a down-the-rabbit-hole tale of loneliness and belonging, friendship and desire, and the fantastic and terrible power of the imagination.

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...

Geek Love is the story of the Binewskis, a carny family whose mater- and paterfamilias set out–with the help of amphetamine, arsenic, and radioisotopes–to breed their own exhibit of human oddities. There’s Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan . . . Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins . . . albino hunchback Oly, and the outwardly normal Chick, whose mysterious gifts make him the family’s most precious–and dangerous–asset. 

As the Binewskis take their act across the backwaters of the U.S., inspiring fanatical devotion and murderous revulsion; as its members conduct their own Machiavellian version of sibling rivalry, Geek Love throws its sulfurous light on our notions of the freakish and the normal, the beautiful and the ugly, the holy and the obscene. Family values will never be the same.

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.

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

"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."

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.

On an entirely normal, beautiful fall day in Chester's Mill, Maine, the town is inexplicably and suddenly sealed off from the rest of the world by an invisible force field. Planes crash into it and fall from the sky in flaming wreckage, a gardener's hand is severed as "the dome" comes down on it, people running errands in the neighboring town are divided from their families, and cars explode on impact. No one can fathom what this barrier is, where it came from, and when -- or if -- it will go away.

Dale Barbara, Iraq vet and now a short-order cook, finds himself teamed with a few intrepid citizens -- town newspaper owner Julia Shumway, a physician's assistant at the hospital, a select-woman, and three brave kids. Against them stands Big Jim Rennie, a politician who will stop at nothing -- even murder -- to hold the reins of power, and his son, who is keeping a horrible secret in a dark pantry. But their main adversary is the Dome itself. Because time isn't just short. It's running out.

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.

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.

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

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

Patricia Highsmith meets Patti Smith in this mesmerizing literary thriller.

The 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

Ever heard of a culling song? It's a lullaby sung in Africa to give a painless death to the old or infirm. The lyrics of a culling song kill, whether spoken or even just thought. You can find one on page 27 of Poems and Rhymes from Around the World, an anthology that is sitting on the shelves of libraries across the country, waiting to be picked up by unsuspecting readers.

Reporter Carl Streator discovers the song's lethal nature while researching Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, and before he knows it, he's reciting the poem to anyone who bothers him. As the body count rises, Streator glimpses the potential catastrophe if someone truly malicious finds out about the song. The only answer is to find and destroy every copy of the book in the country. Accompanied by a shady real-estate agent, her Wiccan assistant, and the assistant's truly annoying ecoterrorist boyfriend, Streator begins a desperate cross-country quest to put the culling song to rest.

Written with a style and imagination that could only come from Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby is the latest outrage from one of our most exciting writers at work today.

Creating George Stark was easy. Getting rid of him won't be...

The sparrows are flying again. The idea - unbidden, inexplicable - haunts the edge of Thad Beaumont's mind.

Thad should be happy. For years now it is his secret persona 'George Stark', author of super-violent pulp thrillers, who has paid the family bills. But now, Thad is writing seriously again under his own name, and his menacing pseudonym has been buried forever.

And yet... the sparrows are flying again, and something is terribly wrong in Thad Beaumont's world.

The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted. Trisha McFarland discovered this when she was nine years old. Lost in the woods.

Trisha has only veered a little way off the path. But in her panic to get back to her family, she takes a turning that leads into the tangled undergrowth, deeper into the woods.

At first it's just the bugs, midges and mosquitoes. Then comes the hunger. For comfort she tunes her Walkman into broadcasts of the Red Sox baseball games and the performances of her hero Tom Gordon.

As darkness begins to fall and Trisha struggles for survival and a way out, she realises that she is not alone. There's something else in the woods--watching. Waiting...

Two terrifying classics by "the best kept secret in contemporary horror fiction" (The Washington Post)

Thomas Ligotti's debut collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, and his second, Grimscribe, permanently inscribed a new name in the pantheon of horror fiction. Influenced by the strange terrors of Lovecraft and Poe and by the brutal absurdity of Kafka, Ligotti eschews cheap, gory thrills for his own brand of horror, which shocks at the deepest, existential, levels.

Ligotti's stories take on decaying cities and lurid dreamscapes in a style ranging from rich, ornamental prose to cold, clinical detachment. His raw and experimental work lays bare the unimportance of our world and the sickening madness of the human condition. Like the greatest writers of cosmic horror, Ligotti bends reality until it cracks, opening fissures through which he invites us to gaze on the unsettling darkness of the abyss below.

For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

New Hyde Hospital's psychiatric ward has a new resident. It also has a very, very old one.

Pepper is a rambunctious big man, minor-league troublemaker, working-class hero (in his own mind), and, suddenly, the surprised inmate of a budget-strapped mental institution in Queens, New York. He's not mentally ill, but that doesn't seem to matter. He is accused of a crime he can't quite square with his memory. In the darkness of his room on his first night, he's visited by a terrifying creature with the body of an old man and the head of a bison who nearly kills him before being hustled away by the hospital staff. It's no delusion: The other patients confirm that a hungry devil roams the hallways when the sun goes down. Pepper rallies three other inmates in a plot to fight back: Dorry, an octogenarian schizophrenic who's been on the ward for decades and knows all its secrets; Coffee, an African immigrant with severe OCD, who tries desperately to send alarms to the outside world; and Loochie, a bipolar teenage girl who acts as the group's enforcer. Battling the pill-pushing staff, one another, and their own minds, they try to kill the monster that's stalking them. But can the Devil die?

The Devil in Silver brilliantly brings together the compelling themes that spark all of Victor LaValle's radiant fiction: faith, race, class, madness, and our relationship with the unseen and the uncanny. More than that, it's a thrillingly suspenseful work of literary horror about friendship, love, and the courage to slay our own demons.

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.

Hugo Award nominated novella.

In a remote house on a hilltop, a lonely boy witnesses a traumatic event. He tries - and fails - to flee. Left alone with his increasingly deranged parent, he dreams of safety, of joining the other children in the town below, of escape.

When at last a stranger knocks at his door, the boy senses that his days of isolation might be over.

But by what authority does this man keep the meticulous records he carries? What is the purpose behind his questions? Is he friend? Enemy? Or something else altogether?

Filled with beauty, terror and strangeness, This Census-Taker is a poignant and riveting exploration of memory and identity.

For more than two decades, Clive Barker has twisted the worlds of horrific and surrealistic fiction into a terrifying, transcendent genre all his own. With skillful prose, he enthralls even as he horrifies; with uncanny insight, he disturbs as profoundly as he reveals. Evoking revulsion and admiration, anticipation and dread, Barker's works explore the darkest contradictions of the human condition: our fear of life and our dreams of death.

Table of Contents:

• Cabal - novel
• The Life of Death - (1985) - novelette
• How Spoilers Bleed - (1985) - novelette
• Twilight at the Towers - (1985) - novelette
• The Last Illusion - (1985) - novella