Dark Horror

Elizabeth Lavenza hasn't had a proper meal in weeks. Her thin arms are covered with bruises from her "caregiver", and she is on the verge of being thrown into the streets...until she is brought to the home of Victor Frankenstein, an unsmiling, solitary boy who has everything - except a friend. Victor is her escape from misery. Elizabeth does everything she can to make herself indispensable - and it works. She is taken in by the Frankenstein family and rewarded with a warm bed, delicious food, and dresses of the finest silk.

In his Locus review of Two Worlds and in Between - the first volume of The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan - Gary K. Wolfe wrote, “...it makes you wish the second volume were here now.” Well, the long wait is over. This second volume completes this ambitious undertaking, collecting the finest of Kiernan’s stories from 2004 to 2012, selected by the author herself. The book includes 25 short stories and one poem, plus the short novel Black Helicopters - more than 200,000 words of fiction, including the World Fantasy Award-winning “The Prayer of 90 Cats”.

Fifteen-year-old Leo is watching the world crumble. His father is missing, and his mother is slipping into madness as she cares for Leo, his sick sister Goldfish, and two useless brothers. Relatives are no help, and the church folk have turned their backs in the midst of the Great Depression.

Clara Woods is a killer—and perfectly fine with it, too. So what if she takes a couple of lives to make her own a little bit better? At the bottom of her garden is a flower bed, long overgrown, where her late husband rests in peace—or so she’s always thought. Then the girls arrive. Lily and Violet are her nieces, recently orphaned after their affluent parents died on an ill-fated anniversary trip. In accordance with their parents’ will, the sisters are to go to their closest relative—who happens to be Clara.

The bold investigators of Arkham Horror are humanity's best hope against monstrous terrors from beyond the void in this second collection of extraordinary eldritch novellas.

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.

Daniel Carter used to be a homicide detective, but his last case - the hunt for a serial killer - went wrong in strange ways and soured the job for him. Now he's a private investigator trying to live a quiet life. Strangeness, however, has not finished with him. First, he inherits a bookstore in Providence from someone he's never heard of, along with an indignant bookseller who doesn't want a new boss.

After Cora Glass’s life was stolen by Harrow Faire, things just keep going from bad to worse. Unable to run, unable to escape, there seems to be no way to avoid what she’s become - the Contortionist. But a girl can only take so much. Haunted by an abandoned and seemingly sentient circus? Fine. The life of her best friend threatened unless she sacrificed herself? Fine. Tormented and stalked by a grinning madman who wanted to kill her, and now wants to do worse? That’s where Cora has to draw the line.

Vampires: murderous creatures in the shape of humans, they stalk the night feeding on the blood of innocents. Seemingly immortal, they can be destroyed only by the use of a stake through the heart, severing of their heads, or exposure to sunlight. By the year AD 12,090, vampires have ruled the Earth for almost 300 years, and it is only these weaknesses that have kept these foul monsters from totally overrunning the world. But what happens when those rules no longer apply?

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.

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.

Horst, the most affable vampire one is ever likely to meet, is resurrected by an occult conspiracy that wants him as a general in a monstrous army. Their plan is to create a country of horrors, a supernatural homeland. As Horst sees the lengths to which they are prepared to go and the evil they cultivate, he realizes that he cannot fight them alone. What he really needs on his side is a sarcastic, amoral, heavily armed necromancer.

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.

The Haunter of the Dark" is a horror short story by American author H. P. Lovecraft, written between 5–9 November 1935 and published in the December 1936 edition of Weird Tales. It was the last written of the author's known works, and is part of the Cthulhu Mythos. The epigraph to the story is the second stanza of Lovecraft's 1917 poem "Nemesis".

Lance was living a rather boring life as an office worker. That is, until he suffered a fiery death. Now he's been reborn as a combat mage, a versatile spellcaster from a dying sect of mighty warriors. With his new dragonblood abilities and the help of a brash augmenter, a beautiful arcane weaver and a deadly swordswoman, Lance will have to survive the land of Oracle, a world where power is manifested from the blood of gods...that, or die trying.

Ghost underestimated me. Judas likely didn’t think of me at all. Wolf pitied me. To them, I was a peculiar jokester, a shameless flirt, and a restless musician. Brothers and lovers often trivialized the gifts of their counterparts.

Pandemonium: a twilight dimension of nightmare creatures, mythical beings, the undead, and everything in between. To Dead Jack, it’s hell sweet hell. In the first book of the series, the tortured, drug-addicted detective and his associate, the homunculus Oswald, face rogue leprechauns, ghost pirates, a sex-obsessed shark woman, sycophantic ghouls, an insecure fire demon, and a goateed maniac who calls himself the Duke of Pandemonium.

In the aftermath of the mysterious death of their lead singer, the young members of a now-legendary British acid folk band hole up at Wylding Hall, an ancient English country house with its own dark secrets. There they record Wylding Hall, the album that makes their reputation but at a terrifying cost when Julian Blake, their new lead singer, disappears within the mansion and is never seen again.

Reais, a fractured abyss ruled by thousands of contesting Demon Lords no stranger to chaos, happens to be the birth place of a new chaos, a new threat. Punished for disbelief in a mortal life, a soul curses Deities for its unfair imprisonment and psychological torture. Set free by witless demons, this soul sees an opportunity for vengeance.

Celia wakes up in a house that’s supposed to be hers. There’s a little girl who claims to be her daughter and a man who claims to be her husband, but Celia knows this family—and this life—is not hers… Allie is supposed to be on a fun weekend trip—but then her friend’s boyfriend unexpectedly invites the group to a remote cabin in the woods. No one else believes Allie, but she is sure that something about this trip is very, very wrong.