Horror Fiction

Daniel Martin has never forgotten his childhood encounters with Frank Watkins, the man who built his family a summer home out of cardboard and plywood. Frank's gaze was oddly confusing, as if he was attempting to discern the proper way to behave because he didn't know how to respond in a human manner. Since Frank obviously wasn't an alien, young Daniel thought maybe the man was crazy. In the end, Daniel would learn the terrifying truth about Frank Watkins. And as an adult, Daniel is about to discover there are more of them out there.

Aaron Decker's life changes one December morning when his wife, Allison, is killed. Haunted by her absence - and her ghost - Aaron goes through her belongings, where he finds a receipt for a motel room in another part of the country. Piloted by grief and an increasing sense of curiosity, Aaron embarks on a journey to discover what Allison had been doing in the weeks prior to her death.

A lone narrator meets a railway worker who is confined to a cold, gloomy station in a deep cutting near a tunnel entrance. This worker is a signalman, and it is his responsibility to give the green light for trains to pass through the area. These are slow, monotonous days. The signalman’s life is not marked by much, until the nightmares begin. Three times in a row, a ghost mysteriously appears before the signalman – and with each apparition, a tragic accident unfolds on the rail tracks. Although our narrator doubts the man at first, events soon make him a believer too.

The cozy little town of Pine Deep buried the horrors of its past a long time ago. Thirty years have gone by since the darkness descended and the Black Harvest began, a time when a serial killer sheared a bloody swath through the quiet Pennsylvania village. The evil that once coursed through Pine Deep has been replaced by cheerful tourists getting ready to enjoy the country’s largest Halloween celebration in what is now called “The Spookiest Town in America.”

In the darkness of a vast cave system, cut off from the world for millennia, blind creatures hunt by sound. Then there is light, there are voices, and they feed. Swarming from their prison, they multiply and thrive. To scream, even to whisper, is to summon death. Deaf for many years, Ally knows how to live in silence. Now, it is her family's only chance of survival. They must leave their home, shun others, and find a remote haven where they can sit out the plague. But will it ever end? And what kind of world will be left?

A once-respected college professor and novelist, Dale Stewart has sabotaged his career and his marriage - and now darkness is closing in on him. In the last hours of Halloween, he has returned to the dying town of Elm Haven, his boyhood home, where he hopes to find peace in isolation.

Carlos Castaneda takes the listener into the very heart of sorcery, challenging both imagination and reason, shaking the very foundations of our belief in what is “natural” and “logical”. His landscape is full of terrors and mysterious forces, as sharply etched as a flash of lightning on the deserts and mountains where don Juan takes him to pursue the sorcerer’s knowledge - the knowledge that it is the Eagle that gives us, at our births, a spark of awareness, that it expects to reclaim at the end of our lives and which the sorcerer, through his discipline, fights to retain.

Named Author of the Year at the 2003 British BookAwards, Sarah Waters is the author of Tipping the Velvet, a New York Times Notable Book. Once inside the concrete walls of Millbank Prison, Margaret Prior, hired to speak with the female inmates, becomes all too aware that what she perceives to be reality may not be so. Bringing new ideas to her mind is the beautiful, but dangerous criminal Selina Dawes.

Waking up in a tacky coffin and wearing off-brand shoes, Betsy Taylor can't believe the horrible turn her life has taken; then she discovers she's a vampire. Soon, Betsy becomes a participant in a power struggle between the forces of darkness. With only her friend Jessica and the hunky vampire Sinclair to help her, this new "Queen of Vampires" will have a tough time getting her afterlife straight.

Heather Keynes’ teenage son died in a tragic car accident. Or so she thinks. However, deep in the countryside, an ancient evil has awoken...intent on hunting local residents. No-one is safe. When Heather takes a closer look at a series of coincidental deaths, she is drawn reluctantly into the company of an odd group of elderly Guardians.

Dark of Night is a story of worlds in collision. Three heroes who have survived the apocalypse are in a deadly race to save a busload of children from ravenous zombies and ruthless human scavengers.

After a tragedy too painful to bear, former novelist Lily Albrecht has resigned herself to a dull, sexless life as a rare-book dealer—until she gets a lead on a book that just might turn everything around. The Book of the Most Precious Substance is a 17th-century manual on sex magic, rumored to be the most powerful occult book ever written—if it really exists at all. And some of the wealthiest people in the world are willing to pay Lily a fortune to find it, if she can.

Recently widowed and rendered penniless by her Ponzi-scheming husband, Julia Bishop is eager to start anew. So when a stranger appears on her doorstep with a job offer, she finds herself accepting the mysterious yet unique position: caretaker to his mother, Amaris Sinclair, the famous and rather eccentric horror novelist whom Julia has always admired...and who the world believes is dead.

The winner of multiple Hugo Awards, Charles Stross is one of the most highly regarded science fiction writers of his time. In The Apocalypse Codex, occasionally hapless British agent Bob Howard tackles a case involving an American televangelist and a supernatural threat of global proportions.

Izzie Lefevre was the newest investigator for the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit when she first came to Recondito, a coastal city that's been shrouded in mystery and legend for centuries. Local law enforcement had requested the Bureau's assistance in hunting a sword-wielding serial killer who'd left a dozen mutilated bodies in his wake. Patrick Tevake was a local homicide detective assigned to the taskforce, and together he and Izzie managed to track down and stop the killer before he claimed another victim.

Iphigenia Holt is a good little witch who grew up under the thumb of a wicked mother and two powerful sisters. Pegged as a caretaker, Iphi hides a secret that would change the way everyone around her views her: she's an empath. And yet she doesn't let that stand in her way. A soaring circus performer with a fierce love for animals and the downtrodden, Iphi tumbles her way through life, hiding the hurt just being around others can inflict, until she meets an enigmatic vampire and his three hot shapeshifting cousins.

East Antarctica: the coldest, most desolate location on earth. Two-and-a-half miles below the ice cap is Vostok, a 6,000 square mile liquid lake, over 1,000 feet deep, left untouched for more than 15 million years. Now, marine biologist Zachary Wallace and two other scientists aboard a submersible tethered to a laser will journey 13,000 feet beneath the ice into this unexplored realm to discover Mesozoic life-forms long believed extinct - and an object of immense power responsible for the evolution of modern man.

In the secluded Dutch territory of Sleepy Hollow, nebbish schoolmaster Ichabod Crane competes with the town hero for the hand of Katrina Van Tassel, the 18-year-old daughter and sole child of a wealthy farmer. As Crane leaves a party at the Van Tassel's farm one autumn evening, he is pursued by the Headless Horseman, an apparition said to be the ghost of a Hessian trooper snuffed out by a stray cannonball.

Welcome back, horror-lovers, your long wait for new scary vibes is now over. The Midnight Society is back with even more thrills and chills to haunt your airwaves, and now is your chance to become an honorary member. From twisted hauntings from the afterlife lurking in innocent kids’ backyards, to a séance gone terribly wrong, and many other chilling tales, listen if you dare. Only truly brave souls should proceed. You’ve been warned.

Last year, Night Shade Books unleashed The Book of Cthulhu onto an unsuspecting world. Critically acclaimed as the ultimate Cthulhu anthology” and a must read’ for fans of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos,” The Book of Cthulhu went where no collection of mythos tales had gone before: to the very edge of madness and beyond. For nearly a century, H. P. Lovecraft’s tales of malevolent Great Old Ones existing beyond the dimensions of this world, beyond the borders of sanity, have captured and held the imaginations of writers and aficionados of the dark, the macabre, the fantastic, and the horrible. Now, because you demanded more, anthologist Ross E. Lockhart has risked all to dive back into the Cthulhu canon, combing through mind-shattering manuscripts and moldering tomes to bring you The Book of Cthulhu 2, with even more tales of tentacles, terror, and madness.