English Gothic

Four students travel to Ravencliffe, an eerie abandoned hotel perched on steep cliffs on the Welsh coast. After a series of unexplained accidents, only three of them leave. The fourth, Leo, disappears, and is never seen again. A decade on, the friends have lost contact. Oscar is fame-hungry, making public appearances and selling his story. Richard sank into alcoholism and is only just recovering. Bex just wants to forget – until one last opportunity to go back offers the chance to find out what really happened to Leo.

Critically acclaimed audiobook reader Barnaby Edwards (Doctor Who, The Voyage of the Beagle, Space Danger) performs 11 tales of ghostly gothic spookiness. From tales of vampyres and spirits to devil’s deals and ethereal coachmen. Short but oh so sweet, these 11 stories from some of the most lauded authors of the Gothic period prove that you need only a few pages to tell a truly terrifying tale.

All Things Seen and Unseen follows Alex Nguyen, an isolated, chronically ill university student in her early 20s. After a suicide attempt and subsequent lengthy hospitalization, she finds herself without a job, kicked out of campus housing, unable to afford school, and still struggling in the aftermath of a relationship’s dissolution. Hope comes in the form of a rich high school friend who offers Alex a job housesitting at her family’s empty summer mansion on a gulf island.

I'm an offering. A test. A pawn in an agreement I know little about. Fly to Andorra Sector. Allow them to experiment. Mate an X-Clan wolf alpha. Hope for the best. Those are my orders. My fate. My current existence. There's nowhere to run, and the moon is a clock I can't ignore. One of these alphas will claim me, assuming our genetics are a match. And if not, well, that's a fate worse than death.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” whispers secrets from its peeling edges, a silent witness to a woman’s descent into madness. In the dim light of her secluded room, she grapples with more than just faded wallpaper; it’s her sanity that unravels thread by thread. As the moon casts eerie shadows, the yellow hue takes on a life of its own, revealing cryptic patterns—a dance of confinement and rebellion.

This 19th century French thriller tells of the mysterious Erik, grotesque and elusive "phantom," who hides himself from the world in the labyrinthine bowels of the Paris Opera and entices with his angelic voice the beautiful opera singer Christine. Her abduction prompts a dramatic search not only for her, but also for the truth about her strange captor.

When Elisabeth Quemener dies she leaves a small parcel with the instructions that it must only be opened by Astrid Oake. The trouble is, no one knows who Astrid Oake is… Elisabeth’s family turn to Touissants detective agency for help but, when Mila Shepherd and Carter Jackson try to track Astrid down, their frustration soon mounts. Their only clue is a photo of two young women holding the hands of a tiny child. The women are smiling but Mila is haunted by the sadness in their eyes. Is this Astrid and Elisabeth and if so, who is the child?

After years of self-exile, Jacinda “Jac” Brodie is back in Brook Haven, South Carolina. But the small cliffside town no longer feels like home. Jac hasn’t been there since the beloved chief of police fell to his death—and all the whispers said she was to blame. That chief was Jac’s father. Racked with guilt, Jac left town with no plans to return. But when her granddad lands in the hospital, she rushes back to her family, bracing herself to confront the past.

People are dying...all in the name of love. Tell me, can the Devil and his Angel survive the flames? Deception and Blood were the counterparts, but now can Sophia and Creed navigate their way through the never-ending Chaos?

My name is Ace Bissett, and I’m a paranormal detective who doesn’t believe in magic. Or at least, I didn’t before I met them. The day I inherited my aunt’s old house, everything changed. One moment, I was convinced that magic was a hoax. The next, I’m surrounded by four winged, fanged, ridiculously hot guys who are definitely not human, and who insist that I'm the only one who can break the curse that binds them to the night.

Meet the women of American Housewife: They wear lipstick, pearls, and sunscreen, even when it's cloudy. They casserole. They pinwheel. They pump the salad spinner like it's a CPR dummy. And then they kill a party crasher, carefully stepping around the body to pull cookies out of the oven. These 12 irresistible stories take us from a haunted prewar Manhattan apartment building to the set of a rigged reality television show, from the unique initiation ritual of a book club to the getaway car of a pageant princess on the lam.

When the rescue team returns with Amanda and the chained Dalhu to the keep, Amanda is not as thrilled to be back as she thought she'd be. Between Kian's contempt for her and Dalhu's imprisonment, Amanda's budding relationship with Dalhu seems doomed. Things start to look up when Annani offers her help, and together with Syssi they resolve to find a way for Amanda to be with Dalhu.

After the end of her marriage, Kate Granger has retreated to her parents' home on Lake Superior to pull herself together - only to discover the body of a murdered woman washed into the shallows. Tucked in the folds of the woman's curiously vintage gown is an infant, as cold and at peace as its mother. No one can identify the woman. Except for Kate. She's seen her before. In her dreams...

This is a story from the Fall of the House of Usher collection. The horrors of the Spanish Inquisition, with its dungeon of death, and the overhanging gloom on the House of Usher demonstrate unforgettably the unique imagination of Edgar Allan Poe. Unerringly, he touches upon some of our greatest nightmares: Premature burial, ghostly transformation, words from beyond the grave. Written in the 1840s, they have retained their power to shock and frighten even now.

October 1840. A young woman staggers alone through a forest in the English countryside as a huge pair of impossible wings rip themselves from her shoulders. In London, rumors of a fallen angel cause a frenzy across the city, and a surgeon desperate for fame and fortune finds himself in the grips of a dangerous obsession, one that will place the women he seeks in the most terrible danger.

A man condemned...Falsely accused of murder and mute from a near-fatal beating, Apollo Greaves, Viscount Kilbourne has escaped from Bedlam. With the Crown's soldiers at his heels, he finds refuge in the ruins of a pleasure garden, toiling as a simple gardener. But when a vivacious young woman moves in, he's quickly driven to distraction...A desperate woman...London's premier actress, Lily Stump, is down on her luck when she's forced to move into a scorched theatre with her maid and small son.

Spencer, Lord Wolverston, and newly named Earl of Kinraven, intended to find peace in the wilds of Scotland, far from the torment of wanting the one woman he believed he could never have. But his inheritance has come with a price he had not foreseen...a curse that is slowly driving him mad. He sends a desperate plea for help to his friend, the Duke of Briarleigh, but that plea is intercepted by the last person he wishes to see... the Duke's sister-in-law, Miss Larissa Walters, the women he left England to escape.

Bram Stoker kept secret a tale even more terrifying than Dracula. It begins among the Carpathian peaks, when an intrepid explorer discovers a mysterious golden box. She brings it back with her to the foggy streets of Victorian London, unaware of its dangerous power…or that an evil beyond imagining has already taken root in the city. Stoker, a successful theater manager but frustrated writer, is drawn into a deadly web spun by the wealthy founders of a mission house for the poor. Far from a safe haven, the mission harbors a dark and terrifying secret.

Almost anyone who has read or written science fiction or fantasy has been inspired by the work of Michael Moorcock. His literary flair and grand sense of adventure have been evident since his controversial first novel Behold the Man, from the stories and novels featuring his most famous character, Elric of Melniboné, to his fantasy masterpiece, Gloriana, winner of both the Campbell Memorial and World Fantasy awards for best novel.

When Violeta Graceling and her younger brother, Arien, arrive at the haunted Lakesedge estate, they expect to find a monster. Leta knows the terrifying rumors about Rowan Sylvanan, who drowned his entire family when he was a boy. But neither the estate nor the monster are what they seem. As Leta falls for Rowan, she discovers he is bound to the Lord Under, the sinister death god lurking in the black waters of the lake.