Literary Horror

Paris, 1810. Haunted by the French Revolution, Marie Tussaud has locked herself away in her shop with the death masks she was forced to make to avoid the guillotine. Philidor, a famous magician, offers her the chance to accompany him to London to assist in creating a wax automaton that will bring them both money and success. Following a disastrous performance on their opening night in which the wax on their prized spectacle melts, the eccentric duke, William Cavendish, invites them to his rambling estate, Welbeck.

Don’t think about it...don’t talk about it...and if you feel a prickling on the back of your neck...don’t turn around! Matt Hardison doesn’t believe in the Shadowstealer, an evil spirit that could steal a person’s shadow and demand they sacrifice pieces of themselves. It was just a local boogeyman, a gruesome campfire yarn to frighten youngsters; not something that adults took seriously. The Shadowstealer is Matt’s new novel, a bestseller featuring the creepy legend that frightened him as a child.

Sally, a cynical 15-year-old schoolgirl, is much too clever for her own good. When partnered with her best friend, Pamela—a mouthy girl who no one else much likes—Sally finds herself unable to resist the temptation of rebellion. The pair play truant, explore forbidden areas of the old school and—their favourite—torment posh Sylvia Rose, with her pristine uniform and her beautiful voice that wins every singing prize. One day, Sally ventures up to the greenhouse on the roof alone. Or at least she thinks she's alone, until she sees Sylvia on the roof, too.

Where do writers go when they die? The forgotten ones, at least, go to the Café of Minor Authors where they drink endless cups of cappuccino, self-obsess, and nurse their shattered dreams. Some authors, it’s rumored, can escape Oblivion if they try hard enough to write something the universe can’t ignore, even after death. This is the story of one ambitious writer stuck in Oblivion who not only risks upturning his own fate but also the fate of his literary hero and that of his great grandmother, Hanna, an aspiring actor in the Yiddish theater in the Prague of 1911.

Bram Stoker's masterpiece is at the same time intensely romantic and very modern. It unfolds the story of a Transylvanian Don Juan, the aristocratic Count Dracula who preys on desirous damsels.

Dracula begins with the journal of Jonathan Harker, a young solicitor on the way to Transylvania to give information to the mysterious Count Dracula about his new estate in London. Dracula takes the young man prisoner, and Jonathan sees many strange and evil things in the castle before escaping and fleeing into the night. He later decides that he must have been mad.

England 1321: Deep in the countryside lies an isolate village governed by a sinister regime of Owl Masters. But their dark status quo is disturbed by the arrival of a house of religious women. Why do their crops succeed when village crops fail, their cattle survive despite the plague? Accusations of witchcraft and heresy run rife, while the Owl Masters rain down hellfire and torment on the women, who must look to their faith to save them from the lengthening shadow of evil... a shadow with predatory, terrifying talons.

El verano de 1816 en Villa Diodati parece promisorio. Los personajes no pueden ser más ilustres: Lord Byron, Percy y Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont y el Dr. Polidori, secretario privado de Byron. Polidori es quien resulta clave para Las Piadosas. ¿Por qué? Alguien se ha fijado en él para confiarle un terrible secreto. Andahazi descubre regiones insospechadas, turbadoras de la sexualidad y construye la intriga de una verdadera novela gótica moderna en torno a personajes y situaciones que difícilmente se olvidarán.

Because one of her fathers died when she was very young, much of Celia's family knowledge comes from stories her surviving father narrates—road-trip adventures from the mid-'80s that explore homophobia in a supernatural context. As she considers these adventures (a rescue mission aided by ghostly hallucinations, a secluded town of strangely shaped inhabitants, a movie star with a monstrous secret), Celia uncovers startling new truths about her family's past.

Winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Priyanka Champaneri’s transcendent debut novel brings us inside India’s holy city of Banaras, where the manager of a death hostel shepherds the dying who seek the release of a good death, while his own past refuses to let him go.

Pamela Wales, the young governess at Ravenswood, can hardly believe her luck. The man she adores - the brooding master of the palatial estate - wants her for his wife. For a little while, she is so happy that she ignores the servants' gossip of old scandals and her fiance's involvement in a recent murder. Suddenly, she is almost killed. Then a ghost pursues her through the mansion's sinister corridors.

When three friends receive a startlingly incoherent invitation to a “Reeyoonyun”, they seize upon it to break up the monotony of their middle-aged lives. The host, one of their old friends, seems battered and out of it. The maid acts like a weird robot. The host confesses the house might not actually be his. Over the course of a tense, bizarre evening, the friends soon realize the invitation was to something much more sinister than a reunion: the past. Twenty-five years ago, in 1993, the group experienced something on a summer night in the woods.

An Antarctic expedition runs up against a mountain range the rivals the Himalayas, and a cave concealing an ancient evil. Inside this nightmarish cavern the intrepid band of explorers make a horrifying and tragic discovery - a discovery that is best buried deep in the barren, frozen wastes of ancient Antarctica.

When Mary Shelley wrote her 1818 classic Frankenstein, she failed to disclose the fate of Victor's middle brother, Ernest. Face to face with the creature who murdered his entire family, will Ernest succeed where his brother failed?

When Mary Shelley wrote her 1818 classic Frankenstein, she failed to disclose the fate of Victor's middle brother, Ernest. Now, for the first time, listeners learn what really happened in the Frankenstein household and the cursed fate of their clan.

These 18 stories range from magical realism to the Gothic and macabre. Whether describing a burg of one-legged miners, a bizarre brother/sister relationship, or salty seamen telling their favorite real-life horror tales, Eric McCormack disturbs and enchants.

The Castle of Otranto is regarded as the first Gothic novel. The son of Manfred, Prince of Otranto, is mysteriously killed on his wedding day by a huge helmet. The event leads to a fast-paced story of jealous passion, intrigue, murder, and supernatural phenomena unfolding in an atmosphere of thunderclaps, moonlight, and dark castle walls, mirroring the inner turmoils of the characters themselves. Horace Walpole's tale, an immediate success when it first appeared in 1764, is a classic of its genre.

After years of traditional treatments and therapies, Derrick still suffers from pain ineluctable enough that it has become his identity. Then he hears of an exclusive, very private New York clinic that promises relief. It comes highly recommended by a friend. The multisession remedy unfolds as a sensorial wonder that’s so illuminating it’s enough to bring tears to Derrick’s eyes. It’s all working so well. So unexpectedly well.

The Oversight of London has been sworn for millennia to prevent the natural and the supernatural worlds from preying on each other. Now, at its lowest ebb, with its headquarters destroyed and its last members scattered far and wide, this secret society will battle for survival and face the harshest foe it has ever met: itself.

Set in the bathroom of an old house just before dawn on a night in June, Centuries of June is a black comedy about a man who is attempting to tell the story of how he ended up on the floor with a hole in his head. But he keeps getting interrupted by a series of suspects - eight women lying in the bedroom just down the hall. Each woman tells a story drawn from five centuries of American myth and legend in a wild medley of styles and voices.