Horror Urban Fiction

Seabury Quinn's short stories were featured in well more than half of the pulp magazine Weird Tales' original publication run. His most famous character, the supernatural French detective Dr. Jules de Grandin, investigated cases involving monsters, devil worshippers, serial killers, and spirits from beyond the grave, often set in the small town of Harrisonville, New Jersey.

Sweeney Cassidy is the typical college freshman at the University of the Archangels and St. John the Divine in Washington, DC. She drinks. She parties. And she certainly doesn't suspect that underneath its picturesque Gothic facade, the university is a haven for the Benandanti, a cult devoted to suppressing the powerful and destructive Moon Goddess. But everything is about to change as Sweeney learns that her two new best friends are the goddess' Chosen Ones.

Jessamyn Teoh is closeted, broke, and moving back to Malaysia, a country she left when she was a toddler. So when Jess starts hearing voices, she chalks it up to stress. But there's only one voice in her head, and it claims to be the ghost of her estranged grandmother, Ah Ma. In life Ah Ma was a spirit medium, the avatar of a mysterious deity called the Black Water Sister. Now she's determined to settle a score against a gang boss who has offended the god - and she's decided Jess is going to help her do it.

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.

It’s no surprise to Betsy that her trip to Hell with her sister, Laura, landed them in hot water. Betsy isn’t exactly sorry she killed the Devil but it’s put Laura in a damnable position: assuming the role of Satan (she may not have the training but she looks great in red) - and in charge of billions of souls as she moves up in the world. Or is that down? But Betsy herself is in an odd new position as well - that of being a responsible monarch suddenly in charge of all things more earth-bound: like her vampire husband, Sinclair, who has gone from relieved to ecstatic to downright reckless now that he can tolerate sunlight.

Since his wife died, Ralph Roberts has been having trouble sleeping. Each night he wakes up a bit earlier until he's barely sleeping at all. During his late-night walks, he observes some strange things going on in Derry, Maine. He sees colored ribbons streaming from people's heads, two strange little men wandering around town after dark, and more. He begins to suspect that these visions are something more than hallucinations brought on by lack of sleep.

Once an aristocrat in the heady days of pre-revolutionary France, now Lestat is a rockstar in the demonic, shimmering 1980s. He rushes through the centuries in search of others like him, seeking answers to the mystery of his terrifying exsitence. His story, the second volume in Anne Rice's best-selling Vampire Chronicles, is mesmerizing, passionate, and thrilling.

We are in a small room with the vampire, face to face, as he speaks--as he pours out the hypnotic, shocking, moving, and erotically charged confessions of his first two hundred years as one of the living dead. . . He speaks quietly, plainly, even gently . . . carrying us back to the night when he departed human existence as heir--young, romantic, cultivated--to a great Louisiana plantation, and was inducted by the radiant and sinister Lestat into the other, the "endless," life....

By day, Mark Wojcik can be found elbow-deep in engine grease, making cars and trucks safe for the highway. By night, he can be found traipsing through the wilds of Pennsylvania, making the world safe for humans. He's more than just a mechanic, he's a New Templar Knight. He travels the backroads and byways fighting weresquonks, ningen, selkies, ghosts, and . . . gnomes? Is that gnome . . . naked? (Sigh.) Season One collects the first four novellas in the Spells, Salt, & Steel series: Spells, Salt, & Steel; Open Season; Deep Trouble; and Close Encounters.

It starts with infected needles. It spreads like a plague. Soon the town of Chapel Grove, Pennsylvania, is overrun with cannibalistic corpses. Some are taken down with a bullet to the brain. Others, torched like kindling. But a few have survived - inside a maternity ward. Detective Bill Curtis manages to rescue his pregnant wife, Lauren, from the ward in the nick of time. But the other pregnant women are not so lucky. Some of them have been bitten - and infected. Now it's anyone's guess what's growing inside them.

Zo Grey is reeling from the sudden death of her mother when she receives a surprising call from an attorney in Divinity, Louisiana, with the news she has been left an inheritance by a distant relative, the terms of which he will only discuss in person. Destitute and alone, with nothing left to lose, Zo heads to Divinity and discovers she is the sole beneficiary of a huge fortune and a monstrosity of a house that sits ominously at the peak of Watch Hill—but she must live in it, alone, for three years before the house, or the money, is hers.

The Ultimate Horror Collection is a fully-indexed collection of over 60 classic horror stories, read by four Audie-winning narrators. Included here are stories by H.P. Lovecraft; Edgar Allan Poe; M.R. James; Oscar Wilde; Joseph Le Fanu; Bram Stoker; Mary Shelley; Robert Louis Stevenson; and Henry James.

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.

This second novel in the acclaimed Greywalker series finds PI Blaine Harper investigating a chilling case as Halloween approaches. After university researchers create an artificial poltergeist, the team leader suspects someone is faking the phenomena. When a student is murdered, Blaine is asked to investigate. Stepping into the spirit world, she realizes the haunting may be very real. But that doesn't necessarily mean a ghost did the killing.

Picking up from A Discovery of Witches' cliff-hanger ending, Shadow of Night takes reluctant witch Diana Bishop and vampire geneticist Matthew Clairmont on a trip through time to Elizabethan London, where they are plunged into a world of spies, magic, and a coterie of Matthew's old friends, the School of Night. As the search for Ashmole 782—the lost and enchanted manuscript whose mystery first pulled Diana and Matthew into one another's orbit—deepens and Diana seeks out a witch to tutor her in magic, the net of Matthew's past tightens around them.

Demonstrating once again her gift for spellbinding storytelling, Anne Rice makes real for us a great dynasty of four centuries of witches - a family given to poetry and incest, murder and philosophy, a family that over the ages is itself haunted by a powerful, dangerous, and seductive being called Lasher who haunts the Mayfair women. Moving in time from today's New Orleans and San Francisco to long-ago Amsterdam and the France of Louis XIV, from the coffee plantations of Port-au-Prince to Civil War New Orleans and back to today, Anne Rice has spun a mesmerizing tale.

On a brisk autumn day, a 13-year-old boy stands on the shores of the gray Atlantic, near a silent amusement park and a fading ocean resort called the Alhambra. The past has driven Jack Sawyer here: His father is gone, his mother is dying, and the world no longer makes sense. But for Jack everything is about to change. For he has been chosen to make a journey back across America - and into another realm. One of the most influential and heralded works of fantasy ever written, The Talisman is an extraordinary novel of loyalty, awakening, terror, and mystery.

In this fourth volume, Roland, Eddie, Susannah, and Jake survive Blaine the Mono's final crash, only to find themselves stranded in an alternate version of Topeka, Kansas, one that has been ravaged by the superflu virus. While following the deserted I-70 toward a distant glass palace, Roland recounts a story about a seaside town called Hambry, where he fell in love with a girl named Susan Delgado, and where he and his old tet-mates Alain and Cuthbert battled the forces of John Farson.

The next-to-last novel in Stephen King's seven-volume magnum opus, Song of Susannah is a fascinating key to the unfolding mystery of the Dark Tower.

Twenty years ago, a boy named Jack Sawyer traveled to a parallel universe called the Territories to save his mother and her “Twinner” from an agonizing death that would have brought cataclysm to the other world. Now Jack is a retired Los Angeles homicide detective living in the nearly nonexistent hamlet of Tamarack, Wisconsin. He has no recollection of his adventures in the Territories....