Dark Horror

From the haunted hills of Roman Britain to the sewers of occupied Warsaw … in the bloodied streets of Revolutionary Paris, and the anarchy World War II Shanghai … out of the wilds of America, India, Africa and Europe … down the long savage darkness of the centuries, monsters have fed upon us. They are shapeshifters, vampires, sorcerers and spirits—things named only in myth, and things for which we have no name. They are our demons, our reflections, our desires and our nightmares. And all too often, they are … only human.

A sudden burst of radiation is detected beneath the desert in Iran. Alex Hunter – code name Arcadian – and his highly trained incursion team are dropped into the ruins of Persepolis. All they find is an empty underground facility – nothing to explain the gamma spike. It is as if a black hole has swept everything away.... Israel is threatening nuclear war. And someone, or something, is draining the fluids from the bodies of Iranian soldiers in the desert.

Come home to the darkness. Kelly Rich, long estranged from her family, is forced to return home when her sister is involved in a mysterious accident. After years of suppressing the events that drove her away, she must struggle to unlock the mystery of her past in order to save her sister. But nothing is as it seems in her foreboding ancestral home, where cold hearts rule the hearth and deadly secrets lurk in the forest. Plunged back into the dream world of her youth, Kelly will have to face the dark reality of her own role in the horrors afflicting her family.

You may think you know how the fairytale goes: a mermaid comes to shore and weds the prince. But what the fables forget is that mermaids have teeth. And now, her daughters have devoured the kingdom and burned it to ashes. On the run, the mermaid is joined by a mysterious plague doctor with a darkness of their own. Deep in the eerie, snow-crusted forest, the pair stumble upon a village of ageless children who thirst for blood, and the three “saints” who control them. The mermaid and her doctor must embrace the cruelest parts of their true nature if they hope to survive.

Victorian London is a place of fluid social roles, vibrant arts culture, fin-de-siecle wonders...and dangerous underground diabolic cults. Fencer Evadne Gray cares for none of the former and knows nothing of the latter when she's sent to London to chaperone her younger sister, aspiring art critic Dorina. Unfortunately for Evadne, she soon learns too much about all of it when Dorina meets their uncle's friend, Lady Henrietta "Henry" Wotton. A semi-respectable aristocrat in public, in private she is secretly in the thrall of a demon.

Includes the stories "The Hunter", "Shadow People", and "The Harvest Moon".

Anita Blake is a vampire hunter. But when someone else sets his sights on her prey, she must save them both from the inferno.

Dubbed the greatest horror story in English by Stephen King, The Great God Pan is an eerie and otherworldly mystery about a diabolical operation and its terrifying repercussions. After rescuing a young woman from the streets of London, Dr. Raymond uses her as a test subject for brain surgery aimed at "lifting the veil" of reality, to see the supernatural and the "great god Pan". The operation is a disaster and leaves the subject lobotomized. Years later, London becomes afflicted with a strange series of male suicides connected to a beautiful but sinister woman.

The arrival of vast, alien, inhuman intelligences reshaped the landscape for human affairs across the world, and the United Kingdom is no exception. Things have changed in Britain since the dread elder god Nyarlathotep ascended to the rank of prime minister. In America, a thousand-mile-wide storm system has blanketed the Midwest, and the president is nowhere to be found. The government has been infiltrated by the shadowy Black Chamber, and the Pentagon and NASA have been refocused on the problem of summoning Cthulhu.

Kagen Vale—disgraced former palace guard, damned by his own gods, on the run from bounty hunters and assassins—discovers that no matter where you try to hide, evil can find you. In this standalone short story, Kagen the Damned squares off against a clan of ferocious supernatural predators in service to the Witch-king.

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.

Ever since Edgar Allan Poe looted a family's ignoble secret history for his classic story "The Fall of the House of Usher", living in the shadow of that sick dynasty has been an inescapable scourge for generations of Usher descendants. But not for horror novelist Rix Usher. Years ago he fled the isolated family estate of Usherland in the menacing North Carolina hills to pursue his writing career. He promised never to return. But his father's impending death has brought Rix back home to assume the role of Usher patriarch - and face his worst fears.

The series takes place in a world similar to our own but one where vampires, witches, werewolves and shape-shifters live among humans without their knowledge. These supernatural races make up a secret society known as the Night World, which enforces two fundamental laws to prevent discovery: 1) Never allow humans to gain knowledge of the Night World's existence and, 2) Never fall in love with one of them.

Without so much as a warning, humanity in its entirety was suddenly moved to another dimension. Every person, without exception. But this new world, with all its opportunities and gifts of wondrous abilities, was a stadium. A deadly arena of an unimaginable scale. And humanity was to be its latest gladiators. Every man, woman, and child was given a weapon and ordered to fight. Stuck in this dimension without a way out, only two options existed for the would-be hunters: Fight with monsters to complete the many trials ahead, or perish.

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.

The Dark: Horror Anthology Vol. 3 includes three stories: "Wenatchee Forest", "Kabul Night", and "The Gift".

When Del Lareaux leaves the St. Augustine orphanage, she is desperate to build a normal life for herself and Jimmy, the mentally handicapped boy she spent years protecting. But when a hellish spirit is raised from the dark swamps of Louisiana, abominations of unimaginable horror begin to prey on the lost souls of New Orleans, and Del’s soul is the most coveted.

What would you do if you were the most powerful dungeon deity in the world and the bindings keeping you trapped within your dungeon were broken? Would you escape? Would you acquire a party of beautiful female minions? Would you use your new minions to conquer other dungeon deities, consume their magic, and grow even more powerful? Would you take over the world? Would you then take over the heavens and destroy the gods? Yes, you would do all of the above.

Sandman Slim has been to Heaven and Hell and many places in between, but now he finds himself in an unknown land: the far, far edge of the Tenebrae, the desolate home of the lost dead. Making his way inland with nothing but his unerring instinct for trouble to guide him, he collides with a caravan of the damned on a mysterious crusade, led by the ruthless Magistrate. Alone and with no clue how to get back home, he throws in with this brutal bunch made up of human souls, Hellion deserters, rogue angels - and Father Traven.

Girls are dying in mysterious circumstances.... They are found dead in their beds, covered in blood, with a look of pure horror on their faces. Worse still, their ghosts are left to walk the Earth, just waiting for someone to hear the terror that has befallen them. Thomas Ward is the local spook - it’s his job to protect the county from things that go bump in the night. But this is no ordinary haunting, and he finds himself on the path of a dangerous beast that is looking to kill again.