Dark Horror

Dream-Hunter Lydia has been charged with the most sacred and dangerous of missions: To descend into the Nether Realm and find the missing god of dreams before he betrays the secrets that could kill her and her kind. What she never expects is to be taken prisoner by the Realm's most vicious guardian.

Imagine a Depression-era town where it hasn't rained for years. A pale rainmaker with other-worldly eyes brings rain to the countryside and mesmerizes the townspeople, but the children begin to disappear one by one. Only young Robert Steelgate is able to resist the rainmaker's spell and begin the struggle to discover what has happened to his missing brother and the other children.

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.

A haunting recollection of a mysterious boyhood event, The Man in the Black Suit leads off this masterful collection from Stephen King. Other dark tales include: All That You Love Will Be Carried Away, in which a man checks into a Lincoln, Nebraska Motel 6 to find the meaning in his life; That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French, presents the ultimate case of deja vu; and The Death of Jack Hamilton, a blistering tale of Depression-era outlaws on the run.

Suffer the Children presents a terrifying tale of apocalyptic fiction, as listeners are introduced to Herod's Syndrome, a devastating illness that suddenly and swiftly kills all young children across the globe. Soon, they return from the grave, and ask for blood. And with blood, they stop being dead. They continue to remain the children they once were, but only for a short time, as they need more blood to live. The average human body holds 10 pints of blood, so the inevitable question for parents everywhere becomes: How far would you go to bring your child back?

Žaneta, an extraordinarily unique Khajiit living on the island of Vvardenfell, has her peaceful world turned upside down when her family - the most important part of her life - is violently attacked. With her husband murdered and her children missing, Žaneta makes the courageous decision to go after them herself. Traversing across a country full of political turmoil and on the brink of an unknown epidemic, Žaneta presses on to discover where her loved ones have been taken.

Out on the Yorkshire Moors lives a secret line of people for whom books are food, and who retain all of a book's content after eating it. To them, spy novels are a peppery snack; romance novels are sweet and delicious. Eating a map can help them remember destinations, and children, when they misbehave, are forced to eat dry, musty pages from dictionaries.

The government said the Variants were dying off.... That the beasts would be extinct in a matter of years.... That the Allied States had returned to prosperity and freedom.... The government was dead wrong. Deep under the cities, the Variants weren't just hiding, they were breeding. While the human survivors of the Extinction Cycle built outposts and brought back industries, the monsters were building something of their own.

Hundreds of thousands of miles away on the dark side of the moon, the Russian lunar base has self-destructed - all personnel are dead, except one. Olga Sobakin, the lone survivor, seeks refuge at the rival American base. Olga tells the Americans her base was attacked by a horrifying and nightmarish creature - the pattern was the same - people vanished, leaving nothing behind but shredded clothing and an unidentifiable waste product. The Americans are sceptical of her story at first, but then people begin to disappear.

In this enthralling third novel in the God's Lions series, Cardinal Leopold Amodeo is once again teamed with a group of scientists and archaeologists as they are led to the inescapable conclusion that a very real evil has arrived in the world. Based on recently declassified documents and real-life technological breakthroughs, John Lyman takes listeners on a wild ride into a future that is already here, where technology takes flight in the hands of one who has vowed to destroy mankind.

Bedeckt defined himself by the list of crimes he was unwilling to commit. It was such a short list. How could straying from it have gone so wrong? Now, Bedeckt must undo the damage caused by wandering from his precious list. The Geborene god seeks to remake the world with his obsessive need for cleanliness and perfection, but Bedeckt is going to bring him down. Nothing can stop him. Not even death. But the two friends he abandoned in the Afterdeath chase after him, bent on revenge.

A Heian-era mansion stands abandoned, its foundations resting on the bones of a bride and its walls packed with the remains of the girls sacrificed to keep her company. It’s the perfect venue for a group of thrill-seeking friends, brought back together to celebrate a wedding. A night of food, drinks, and games quickly spirals into a nightmare as secrets get dragged out and relationships are tested. But the house has secrets too. Lurking in the shadows is the ghost bride with a black smile and a hungry heart.

Il padre di Jim Hawkins, Hub, è scomparso. Suo figlio è distrutto dalla perdita e dal dolore: che cosa gli è successo? È morto o se n'è andato? Un giorno Ruth Rose, la figlia adottiva di Padre Fisher, il rispettabile e amatissimo pastore della comunità, capovolge la vita di Jim. "Fisher ha ucciso tuo padre" gli dice. Tuttavia, Ruth Rose è nota per essere una ragazza violenta, stramba e un po' pazza. Che lo stia facendo solo per odio nei confronti di Fisher? O forse davvero si immagina le cose?

Supernatural creatures create chaos across an unforgiving Western landscape in the first book of a propulsive and cinematic fantasy adventure starring ever fearless Nettie Lonesome. Nettie Lonesome dreams of a greater life than toiling as a slave in the sandy desert. But when a stranger attacks her, Nettie wins more than the fight. Now she's got friends, a good horse, and a better gun. But if she can't kill the thing haunting her nightmares and stealing children across the prairie, she'll lose it all - and never find out what happened to her real family.

Once he was a hero of the Great War, and then a member of the dreaded Black House. Now he is the criminal linchpin of Low Town. His name is Warden. He thought he had left the war behind him, but a summons from up above brings the past sharply, uncomfortably, back into focus. General Montgomery's daughter is missing somewhere in Low Town, searching for clues about her brother's murder. The General wants her found, before the stinking streets can lay claim to her, too.

Years after a harrowing war experience, ex-mercenary Jespar tre Moreste has taken to drifting. It’s a lonely existence, but barring the occasional bout of melancholia, he has found the closest thing to peace a man like him deserves. Life is “all right.”

As kids, outcasts Rebecca, Bobby, Spencer, and Ernie were inseparable friends in the idyllic town of Maple Grove. Three left to pursue lofty dreams—and achieved them. Only Ernie never left. When he falls into a coma, his three amigos feel an urgent need to return home. Don’t they remember people lapsing into comas back then? And those people always awoke…didn’t they?

A student’s investigation into a secret cult leads to madness.

At the heart of these stories, as with all the best of Lovecraft’s work, is the belief that the Earth was once inhabited by powerful and evil gods, just waiting for the chance to recolonise their planet. Cthulhu is one such god, lurking deep beneath the sea until called into being by cult followers who – like all humans – know not what they do.

From paranormal plots to stories of the supernatural, tales of the unfamiliar have always fascinated us humans. To keep the tradition alive, fantasy aficionado Paula Guran has gathered the most delightfully disturbing work from some of today's finest writers of the fantastique! No two mysterious shadows are alike, and the same can be said for the books in this series. The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Volume 4 contains more than twenty stories. Listener beware and indulge if you dare, because these chilling tales are sure to spook and surprise!