Dark Horror

What William Gibson did for science fiction, China Miéville has done for fantasy, shattering old paradigms with fiercely imaginative works of startling, often shocking, intensity. Now from this brilliant writer comes a groundbreaking collection of stories, many of them previously unavailable in the United States, and including four never-before-published tales - one set in Miéville’s signature fantasy world of New Crobuzon.

Screenwriter and noted film critic C. Robert Cargill continues the story begun in his acclaimed debut Dreams and Shadows in this bold and brilliantly crafted tale involving fairies and humans, magic and monsters - a vivid phantasmagoria that combines the imaginative wonders of Neil Gaiman, the visual inventiveness of Guillermo Del Toro, and the shocking miasma of William S. Burroughs.

Harry Adams has always loved horror movies, so it’s not a total coincidence that she took the job cleaning house for movie director Javier Castillo. His forbidding graystone Chicago mansion, Bright Horses, is filled from top to bottom with terrifying props and costumes, as well as glittering awards from his career making films that thrilled audiences—until family tragedy and scandal forced him to vanish from the industry.

The empire rests on the edge of a knife, and sisters Ashyn and Moria are the handle and the blade. Desperate to outmaneuver the evil Alvar Kitsune, whose hold on the people grows stronger every day, Emperor Tatsu begs Moria to put aside past grievances and ally with Gavril - at least long enough to make an attempt on Alvar's life.

With her husband off fighting at World War I’s eastern front, Petra Kurková embraces her fleeting freedom, roaming the city at night with her camera. A born witch, she’s discovered that she can capture the souls of the dead on film. Her supernatural skills don’t go unnoticed by the enigmatic Josef Svoboda. He’s recruiting a team of sorcerers to infiltrate the front lines, where the bloodshed of combat has resurrected foul creatures. Petra’s unique abilities will be needed against the most dangerous enemies of all—those ever present, undead, and unseen.

Ever since her sister became a man-eating spider and slaughtered her way through town, nineteen-year-old Ness has been terrified—terrified of some other Nightmare murdering her, and terrified of ending up like her sister. Because in Newham, the city that never sleeps, dreaming means waking up as your worst fear.

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.

31 Brand-New Dark Fantasy Horror Stories. Bloody corridors of ancient rock. A castle surrounded by poisonous thorns. A lost temple of traps and corpses. A subaqueous cave at the bottom of a cursed lake. These are the places where secrets are buried, where ancient evils are summoned, where beasts are imprisoned, where the insane lie in wait. These are tombs of darkness and nightmare, where if you stare into the abyss, the abyss will stare back. Heed the warnings of your elders and return from whence you came. Ahead lie monster lairs.

Nadya doesn’t trust her magic anymore. Serefin is fighting off a voice in his head that doesn’t belong to him. Malachiasz is at war with who - and what - he’s become. As their group is continually torn apart, the girl, the prince, and the monster find their fates irrevocably intertwined. They’re pieces on a board, being orchestrated by someone...or something. The voices that Serefin hears in the darkness, the ones that Nadya believes are her gods, the ones that Malachiasz is desperate to meet - those voices want a stake in the world, and they refuse to stay quiet any longer.

For years, Cinna has been forced to serve her wealthy cousins rather than attend society events alongside them. She has waited for the chance to exact revenge. When a ball at the castle is announced, promising to bring many powerful people to town, she seizes the opportunity to strike. She bets her best friend, Johann, a small-time thief and con man, that she can land a greater score the night of the ball than he can. But as their plots unfold, things begin to unravel. By the end of the night, the castle’s on lockdown, a duchess is dead, a mansion has burned to the ground.

In the dark and dangerous Warhammer world, the desperate and the depraved live hand in glove. In this anthology of stories, reacquaint yourself with some of its more morally ambiguous denizens, including ‘Filthy’ Harald Kleindeinst and the scryer Rosanna Ophuls, Baron Johann von Mecklenberg, playwright and self-confessed genius Detlef Sierck and, of course, the vampire Genevieve.

Night Visions: At The Crossroad presents eight tales of horror and dark fantasy by Richard Laymon, Chet Williamson, and Gary Brandner. Prepare to enter a world where your darkest nightmare can become a chilling reality...A world of Night Visions.

A series of bizarre assaults is mystifying Boston police: an unknown attacker is viciously beating random strangers and leaving a note quoting an old warning about witchcraft. History professor Alex Maple was one of the victims, and now he's gone missing. Vickie Preston is certain that someone has taken her friend for malicious purposes. She's having blood-drenched visions that seem to be staining her waking life, and the escalating attacks suggest that a dangerous cult is at work behind the scenes.

When dissolute fisherman Abel Davenport discovers an ancient temple in the deep ocean, he under the influence of a long dead god. In his attempts to restore the god's cult, Abel unleashes a plague of twisted doppelgangers on Arkham. Horrified by the consequences, Davenport realizes that he alone cannot stop the monsters from resurrecting the Ancient One. Sometimes the only way to end one cult is to start another.

Bubba’s back from Fairyland, and sometimes it feels like they shoulda just stayed there! Man, coming back to the real world sucks. Bubba and his whole team have been fired on account of going MIA for a year and a half (yeah, time moves differently in Fairyland - yay), and now they’ve got to…get jobs? Oh, this is going to go well.

Having no fortune, a negligible reputation, and an appearance that could only be described as plain, Miss Olympia Daventry has few prospects. Unless, of course, she elects to remain in her aunt's home dodging her uncle's amourous advances and his sermons, both of which are dished out in equal measure. Out of desperation, she accepts an offer of marriage from a man she has never met. Married by proxy, she travels to his home and at her first sight of it, begins to wonder if perhaps she has not made a terrible mistake.

When rock guitarist Ash Hudson suffers a career-ending hand injury, she seeks out the only thing that can heal it - her hometown's darkest secret. For decades the residents of Hollow Hills, Pennsylvania, have offered their diseased and injured body parts to a creek demon named Snare. In return, Snare rewards its Traders with healthy replacement parts. There's only one catch: if Traders leave town, their new parts vanish forever. Ash wants a new hand, but living in Hollow Hills isn't an option. Not when her band is one gig away from hitting the big time.

How far would you go to save a child in need? Jadyn is a promising inner-city student. But his community is terrorized by gangs and a series of grisly unsolved murders. When the boy stops coming to school. his teacher, Annelise, determines to find out why. Now she is trapped on the wrong side of town, and something evil is stalking her.

A cemetery full of the restless dead. A town so wicked it has already burned twice, with the breath of the third fire looming. A rural, isolated bridge with a terrifying monster waiting for the completion of its summoning ritual. A lake that allows the drowned to return, though they have been changed by the claws of death. These are the shadowed, liminal spaces where the curses and monsters lurk, refusing to be forgotten.

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.