Dark Horror

Aspiring musician Ruby Tucker has had enough of her small rural town and dysfunctional family. But a falling out with her best friend and bandmate has killed her dreams of escaping and making it big in the Atlanta punk scene. While helping her eccentric neighbor organize his religious artifacts, an ancient ring clamps down on her finger—possessing her with the spirit of a blood-thirsty demon. There’s no exorcizing it unless hundreds of people chant a spell to set Ruby free.

29 Brand-New Sci-Fi Horror Stories. The future is now, and it's not what we were promised. The optimistic science fiction of old was wrong. Progress is not linear, technology creates as many problems as it solves, and the concept of a better tomorrow has become an abstraction that is in no way guaranteed. When looking at the future now, we no longer ask what is possible, we wonder how we'll cope. Contained within this anthology are 29 never-before-published works by supremely talented authors.

Charlie Hall has never found a lock she couldn’t pick, a book she couldn’t steal, or a bad decision she wouldn’t make. She's spent half her life working for gloamists, magicians who manipulate shadows to peer into locked rooms, strangle people in their beds, or worse. Gloamists guard their secrets greedily, creating an underground economy of grimoires. And to rob their fellow magicians, they need Charlie Hall.

New York City in 1978 is a dirty, dangerous place to live - and die. Joey Peacock knows this as well as anybody - he has spent the last forty years as an adolescent vampire, perfecting the routine he now enjoys: womanizing in punk clubs and discotheques, feeding by night, and sleeping by day with others of his kind in the macabre labyrinth under the city's sidewalks.

Harry Keogh's Necroscope powers are gone, just as a new evil rears its head in the Balkan Mountains. Janos Ferenczy, master vampire and black magician, has risen from an ages-long sleep. He prepares an army of undead warriors to conquer the world. The dead try desperately to attract the Necroscope's attention, but Harry Keogh is deaf to their pleas and their screams. As Harry searches for a cure, he learns that to save mankind he must ally himself with the crafty father of vampires, the infamous Faethor Ferenczy. And Faethor's price will be very high indeed!

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 the dark underbelly of our world, there's a black market in arcane things - living and dead. Angela Gough has been pulled into this world, making her a criminal on the run. In London she encountered the Kin-satyrs and centaurs, Nephilim and wraiths, hunted and slaughtered for their body parts. Fleeing back to the United States, Angela discovers that the Kin are everywhere, and they are tired of being prey. When her niece Sammi is struck by lightning, she is drawn toward the mysterious Folded Land and its powerful and deadly ruler.

Par cette réécriture horrifique du conte célèbre Raiponce, engouffrez-vous au coeur d’un abîme où les masques de monstre et de victime couvrent le même visage ; où tous, y compris les sauveurs, n’échappent pas aux règles qui dictent l’abomination humaine. Un incendie mortel dans un hôpital psychiatrique pour enfants. Des jeunes femmes qui disparaissent de manière inexpliquée. Une adolescente capturée à son tour par un être défiguré qui se plaît à lui brosser sauvagement les cheveux au creux d’une mine désaffectée.

When horror writer Nick Steen gets sucked into a cursed typewriter by the terrifying Type-Face, Dark Lord of the Prolix, the hellish visions inside his head are unleashed for real. Forced to fight his escaping imagination - now leaking out of his own brain - Nick must defend the town of Stalkford from his own fictional horrors, including avascular-necrosis-obsessed serial killer Nelson Strain and Nick's dreaded throppleganger, the Dark Third.

It looked like another ordinary day in Los Angeles. Then night came...Evil as old as the centuries has descended upon the City of Angels - it comes as a kiss from the terrifying but seductive immortals. Slowly at first, then by the legions, the ravenous undead choke Los Angeles with bloodthirsty determination - and the hordes of monstrous victims steadily mount each night.

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.

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.

For 300 years, Sister Autumn has incited wars, burnt villages, killed kings, and released plagues at the bidding of the grimoire. When an order from the grimoire sends Agatha to the Kingdom of Merveille, she already anticipates the worst. Unless she wants to face the wrath of the Goddess, Agatha must keep her head down and do as she's commanded. But when the grimoire orders her to marry a pompous prince and play the role of a peasant "accepted" by vicious aristocrats, she finds herself at the center of a war between the classes and an age-old prophecy.

I’m one of four Willow daughters. He’s the first-born son of the Scafoni family. And we have history. For generations, the Scafoni family have demanded a sacrifice of us. A virgin daughter to atone for sins so old, we don’t even remember what they are anymore. But when you have as much money as they do, you don’t play by the rules. You make them. And Sebastian Scafoni makes all the rules. The moment I saw him, I knew he would choose me. Even though the mark on my sheath declared me unclean.

Since the beginning of time, the angelic forces of the High Heavens and the demonic hordes of the Burning Hells have been locked in eternal conflict for the fate of all Creation. That struggle has now spilled over into Sanctuary - the world of men. Determined to win mankind over to their respective causes, the forces of good and evil wage a secret war for mortal souls. This is the tale of the Sin War - the conflict that would forever change the destiny of man.

Andrew and Eddie did everything together, best friends bonded more deeply than brothers, until Eddie left Andrew behind to start his graduate program at Vanderbilt. Six months later, only days before Andrew was to join him in Nashville, Eddie dies of an apparent suicide. He leaves Andrew a horrible inheritance: a roommate he doesn’t know, friends he never asked for, and a gruesome phantom that hungers for him.

For more than 30 years, Ellen Datlow has been at the center of horror. Bringing you the most frightening and terrifying stories, Datlow always has her finger on the pulse of what horror fans crave. Now, with the 11th volume of the series, Daltow's back again to bring you the stories that will keep you up at night. With each passing year, science, technology, and the march of time shine light into the craggy corners of the universe, making the fears of an earlier generation seem quaint. This light creates its own shadows. The Best Horror of the Year chronicles these shifting shadows.

Darkness, both literal and psychological, holds its own unique fascination. Despite our fears, or perhaps because of them, listeners have always been drawn to tales of death, terror, madness, and the supernatural, and no more so than today when a wildly imaginative new generation of dark dreamers is carrying on in the tradition of Poe and Lovecraft and King, crafting exquisitely disturbing literary nightmares that gaze without flinching into the abyss - and linger in the mind long after.

Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk is a novel made up of stories: 23 of them, to be precise. Twenty-three of the most horrifying, hilarious, mind-blowing, stomach-churning tales you'll ever encounter, sometimes all at once. They are told by people who have answered an ad headlined "Writers' Retreat: Abandon Your Life for Three Months", and who are led to believe that here they will leave behind all the distractions of "real life" that are keeping them from creating the masterpiece that is in them.

Since the beginning of time, the angelic forces of the High Heavens and the demonic hordes of the Burning Hells have been locked in the Eternal Conflict for the fate of all Creation. That struggle has now spilled over into Sanctuary - the world of men. Determined to win mankind over to their respective causes, the forces of good and evil wage a secret war for mortal souls. This is the tale of the Sin War - the conflict that would forever change the destiny of man.