Classic Horror Fiction

The classic vampire story by Bram Stoker revolves around a struggle between good and evil, tradition and modernity, and lust versus chastity. The author didn’t invent vampires, but his novel has so captured the public’s imagination that he is rightly considered their popularizer. Listen and you will meet not only the Count himself, but heroes Jonathan Harker and Abraham Van Helsing, plus an array of madmen, psychiatrists, and fair maidens who cross paths with the fanged menace.

“The Thing Invisible” is a story featuring Thomas Carnacki, a detective who investigates cases of an occult or supernatural nature. It is one of five tales of Carnacki's ghost hunting exploits that first appeared serially in The Idler magazine in 1910 and were published together with one more as a collection Carnacki the Ghost-Finder in 1913. After a good dinner, Mr. Carnacki relates his experiences of ghost-finding to his limited circle of four friends whom he has summoned to his home in Chelsea.

With its irrepressible heroine and playful literary games, Northanger Abbey is the most youthful and optimistic of Jane Austen's novels. It tells the story of young, impressionable Catherine Morland, whose first experience of fashionable society introduces her to the thrills of gothic romances, and to the sophisticated Tilneys, who invite her to their family home, Northanger Abbey. But there, influenced by novels of horror and intrigue, Catherine begins to think that terrible crimes are being committed, and her imagination threatens to run away with her.

Our story begins in 1785 when a young seafarer, Captain Thornhill, disappears while visiting the shop of a barber in London, a certain Sweeney Todd whose shop in Fleet Street is situated by St. Dunstan's church, just round the corner from the famous and popular meat pie shop run by Mrs. Lovett. Thornhill was carrying a string of pearls as a gift for Johanna Oakley, the sweetheart of his friend Mark Ingestrie who is missing, presumed lost at sea.

Featuring work by M. R. James, Edith Nesbit, Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Atherton and many more, this enhanced audio collection of eight enduring stories - some well-known, others less familiar - transport you to a candlelit fireside to hear tales of lonely coastlines, deadly rivers, dark, creaking corridors, horrific, everlasting love and unknown entities lurking in black velvet shadows.

In The Dunwich Horror, Lovecraft lays further ground in the Cthulu mythos. Alongside The Dunwich Horror are the stories "Dagon", "The Call of Cthulhu", "The Lurking Fear", "Imprisoned with the Pharoahs", "The Music of Erich Zann", "Randolph Carter", "In the Walls of Eryx", and "The Transition of Juan Romero".

Paru en 1887 avec d'autres récits, "Le Horla" est incontestablement le plus original et le plus effrayant de tous les contes fantastiques de Maupassant. Pour l'écrire, l'auteur s'est documenté auprès du docteur Charcot, célèbre spécialiste des névroses et des hystéries. Mais surtout, il s'est probablement inspiré des troubles nerveux qui commençaient alors à le détruire et qui allaient bientôt l'empoter.

Erin Wright and her best friend, Marty, love horror movies. Especially Shocker on Shock Street movies. All kinds of scary creatures live on Shock Street. The Toadinator. Ape Face. The Mad Mangler.

The Most Dangerous Game, also published as The Hounds of Zaroff, is the classic horror yarn about big-game hunter Sanger Rainsford, from New York City, who falls off a yacht and swims to what seems to be an abandoned and isolated island in the Caribbean, where a sadistic Russian aristocrat hunts humans for sport. Rainsford must fight for his life.

A chilling short story from the author of Dracula. In the Valley of the Shadow is a tale about a delirious man and his hallucinations while hospitalized.

Eager science student Victor Frankenstein uses body parts of the dead to bring a creature to life. Although initially excited that his experiment is a success, Frankenstein becomes horrified at the grotesque being that stands before him and flees. Angered by the rejection, the monster retaliates by taking the lives of those dearest to Frankenstein. The decision to play God torments both Frankenstein and the monster he created until the end of their days.

"In the Penal Colony" ("In der Strafkolonie") (also translated as "In the Penal Settlement") is a short story by Franz Kafka written in German in October 1914, revised in November 1918, and first published in October 1919. The story is set in an unnamed penal colony. Internal clues and the setting on an island suggest Octave Mirbeau's "The Torture Garden" as an influence

A very young woman's first job: governess for two weirdly beautiful, strangely distant, oddly silent children, Miles and Flora, at a forlorn estate...an 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, the governess discovers that Miles and Flora have no terror of the lurking evil.

The warning was inscribed on the entrance of the hidden tomb, forgotten for millennia in the sands of mystic Egypt. Then the archaeologists and grave robbers came in search of the fabled Jewel of Seven Stars, which they found clutched in the hand of the mummy. Few heeded the ancient warning, until all who came in contact with the Jewel began to die in a mysterious and violent way, with the marks of a strangler around their neck.

Volume ten launches with Doug Bradley's well-researched insight into the stories and their authors. This is followed by HP Lovecraft's evocative tale of exploration, "The Strange High House in the Mist". Next we hear Ambrose Bierce's truly chilling "A Diagnosis of Death", and Jeffery Combs reads Edgar Allan Poe's classic revenge tale, "The Cask of Amontillado".

"Marley was dead, to begin with...." And yet, he manages to visit his old partner, the miser Ebenezer Scrooge, and send him on a transformative journey, led by three ghosts. First to his own past, where he sees again the love he spurned. Then to the present, where he sees those around him going about their holiday preparations. And then into his own future, to see his just reward. A Christmas favorite, it will warm your heart with favorite memories, and remind you how the true Christmas spirit comes from giving with love.

The two stories in this collection, The Shunned House and The Dunwich Horror, are notable demonstrations of Lovecraft’s ability to build and sustain narratives permeated with a unique flavor of foreboding and horror.

Vincentio di Vivaldi has fallen in love with Ellena Rosalba. However, his proud and noble family vehemently oppose the match: they cannot allow him to wed someone with no money or social standing. Thus, his mother, the mean-spirited Marchesa, and her minion, the evil monk Father Schedoni, set in motion a malign plot that has Ellena kidnapped and imprisoned in a convent, to prevent a hasty marriage.

Long acknowledged as a master of nightmarish vision, H.P. Lovecraft established the genuineness and dignity of his own pioneering fiction in 1931 with his quintessential work of supernatural horror, "At the Mountains of Madness". The deliberately told and increasingly chilling recollection of an Antarctic expedition's uncanny discoveries - and their encounter with an untold menace in the ruins of a lost civilization - is a milestone of macabre literature.

Bram Stoker’s masterpiece, in which the instantly recognisable Count Dracula plans to sate his dreadful appetites in England only to be thwarted by an intrepid band of friends, remains an enthralling story. Exploring themes of sexuality, religion, technology and good versus evil, and told through journal entries, letters and telegrams, its cultural and literary significance is undisputed.