Dark Horror

It has waited seven years for someone to come back to the rambling lakeside house called Pinecrest, which has stood empty since its last owner went missing. For upscale Chicago couple Dan and Merrill Brewster, the old midwestern manse is an ideal retreat, and for their kids, Eric and Marci, it's the perfect place to spend a lazy summer exploring.

Below the burning lakes of everlasting woe and the single, vast city of Hell, lies Sheol — the Hell below Hell. A place of absolute nothingness, occupied only by fallen demons, slain angels, and lost souls. No sight. No sound. Nothing but the infinite expanse of muted, inky blackness to serve as maddening companions for all of eternity. And that’s exactly where John must go to try and save those he loves, and those who trusted him.

Sixteen-year-old Sayers Wayte has everything. Popularity, good looks, perfect grades—there's nothing Sayers' family money can't buy. Until he's kidnapped by a man who tells him the privileged life he's been living is based on a lie. Trapped in a windowless room, without knowing why he's been taken or how long the man plans to keep him shut away, Sayers faces a terrifying new reality. To survive, he must forget the world he once knew, and play the part his abductor has created for him.

Kaerion Whitehart was once a mighty paladin, but sins of the past have cast him far from the light. Together with an elf mercenary, he now survives by the might of his sword alone. In exchange for a hefty purse, the two friends agree to accompany a band of patriots into a tomb haunted by fear and legend. They soon find the mission growing beyond their control. As warring factions vie for the ultimate prize of a long-dead wizard, Kaerion finds himself caught between death and redemption.

Wounds is a confounding, strange, and utterly entrancing collection of six stories, including one new novella from Shirley Jackson Award-winning author Nathan Ballingrud. From the eerie dread descending upon a New Orleans dive bartender after a cell phone is left behind in a rollicking bar fight in The Visible Filth to the search for the map of hell in “The Butcher’s Table”, Ballingrud’s beautifully crafted stories are riveting in their quietly terrifying depictions of the murky line between the known and the unknown.

In I Am Not a Serial Killer, John Wayne Cleaver saved his town from a murderer even more appalling than the serial killers he obsessively studies, using his own repressed homicidal proclivities to even the odds. But it turns out even demons have friends, and the disappearance of one has brought another to Clayton County. Soon there are new victims for John to work on at the mortuary, and a new mystery to solve. But this time something's different. John has tasted death, and the dark nature he used as a weapon might now be using him.

The night after her father's funeral, Claire meets Lucas in a bar. Lucas doesn't know it, but it's not a chance meeting. One thoughtless mistyped email has put him in the crosshairs of an extremely put-out serial killer. But before they make eye contact, before Claire lets him buy her a drink—even before she takes him home and carves him up into little pieces—something about that night is very wrong. Because someone is watching Claire. Someone who is about to discover her murderous little hobby.

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.

There is no escaping a Reaper. I am an elite assassin, part of a brotherhood that answers only to Death. And when Death says your time is up, I am coming for you.... My whole existence is based on taking what Death wants. Born to eliminate Fae guilty of unforgivable crimes, my reckless, wild nature makes me the perfect assassin to carry out Death's bidding. I've seen more sinister and violent dealings than anyone could ever imagine. But it was the sight of her face that stopped me cold.

I’m the son of Liam O’Reagan, next in line to wear the crown. And when I prove myself worthy, I will RULE over the Irish Mafia. I don’t have time for distractions - much less time for a woman who has always been the bane of my existence. When Maeve comes back into my life, I fight like hell to resist the pull she has on me. An attraction that has only grown stronger with time.

Give your kids a fright! Haunted houses, prowling monsters, vengeful ghosts, and more are waiting for you. Inside you’ll find 35 original short scary stories for kids, including a room where everything is wrong and you can never leave, a forest guide who leads people on a walk they won’t forget, a monster dining in a graveyard, a ghost ship that hunts down treasure seekers, and a statue that comes to life—for a price. And many more! Just make sure you listen to these stories with the lights on.

Michael Gallatin is a British spy with a peculiar talent: the ability to transform himself into a wolf. Although his work in North Africa helped the Allies win the continent in the early days of World War II, he quit the service when a German spy shot his lover in her bed. Now, three years later, the army asks him to end his retirement and parachute into occupied Paris. A mysterious German plan called the Iron Fist threatens the D-Day invasion, and the Nazi in charge is the spy who betrayed Michael’s lover. The werewolf goes to France for king and country, hoping for a chance at bloody vengeance.

The Dark Legion have been beaten back, and for the first time, the brothers are allied against the savagery that the UnderVerse has thrown at them, but the storm clouds of war are gathering, and not everyone will see the sun rise again. Jax has one chance to keep his people safe from the storm and the war that's building on the horizon, but it'll take balls of steel, brains of mince—and he's really going to need to be lucky as hell to pull this one off.

There's an underground black market for arcane things. Akin to the trade in rhino horns or tiger bones, this network traffics in remains of gryphons, faeries, goblins, and other fantastic creatures. When her fiance Vince goes missing, Angela Gough, an American criminology student, discovers he was a part of this secretive trade. It's a big-money business-shadowy, brutal, and sometimes fatal. As the trail leads her deeper into London's dark side, she crosses paths with a crime lord whose life is dedicated to collecting such relics.

I played all those cool video games. I watched all those movies. I even read the books. In most of 'em, the hero shoots the bad guys, drives a sweet car, never gets hungry, and always seems to get laid by the end. Yeah. Whatever. I gotta be straight with you about why I wrote this journal, and it comes down to one thing, the apocalypse kinda sucks. It doesn’t meet my expectations at all.

Bob Howard's career in the Laundry, the secret British government agency dedicated to protecting the world from unspeakable horrors from beyond spacetime, has entailed high combat, brilliant hacking, ancient magic, and combat with indescribably repellent creatures of pure evil. It has also involved a wearying amount of paperwork and office politics, and his expense reports are still a mess. Now, following the invasion of Yorkshire by the Host of Air and Darkness, the Laundry's existence has become public.

Having been abandoned on the steps of an orphanage as an infant, lovable car thief and Dublin charmer Mahony assumed all his life that his mother had simply given him up. But when he receives an anonymous note suggesting that foul play may have led to his mother's disappearance, he sees only one option: to return to the rural Irish village where he was born and find out what really happened 26 years ago.

The incomparable master of horror and suspense returns with a powerful, brilliantly terrifying novel that redefines the genre in original and unexpected ways. The charismatic and cunning Spenser Mallon is a campus guru in the 1960s, attracting the devotion and demanding sexual favors of his young acolytes. After he invites his most fervent followers to attend a secret ritual in a local meadow, the only thing that remains is a gruesomely dismembered body - and the shattered souls of all who were present.

In this horror story set in colonial New England, a law-abiding Puritan woman goes missing. Or perhaps she has fled or abandoned her family. Or perhaps she's been kidnapped, and set loose to wander in the dense woods of the north. Alone and possibly lost, she meets another woman in the forest. Then everything changes.

While sheltered in the clan's stronghold, Syssi is unaware that Kian and Amanda are not human, and neither are the supposedly religious fanatics that are after her. She feels a powerful connection to Kian, and as he introduces her to a world of pleasure she never dared imagine, his dominant sexuality is a revelation. Considering that she's completely out of her element, Syssi feels comfortable and safe letting go with him. That is, until she begins to suspect that all is not as it seems.