Literary Horror

Ava, 14 years old and totally on her own, has still not fully processed her mother’s death when she finds herself on a train heading to New Orleans, to stay with Lane, the grandmother she barely remembers. Lane is a well-known artist in the New Orleans art scene. She spends most of her days in a pot-smoke haze, sipping iced coffee, and painting. Her grip on reality is shaky at best, but her work provides a comfort. Ava’s arrival unsettles Lane. The girl bears an uncanny resemblance to her daughter, whom she was estranged from before her death.

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.

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.

Das kleine Häuschen auf dem Land war ein echter Glücksfall, Friedel ist schwanger und Jakob hat endlich die nötige Ruhe, um an seinem zweiten Roman zu schreiben. Alles scheint perfekt. Nachdem Jakob jedoch eines Nachts von einem Tier angefallen und gebissen wird, gerät die Harmonie ins Wanken. Die Arbeit an seinem Buch verwirft er, sie passt ohnehin nicht zu seinen neu auftretenden, irritierenden Tagträumen. Viel interessanter scheinen ihm plötzlich die Sagen aus der Umgebung.

Poco prima che la morte lo raggiunga, Razziddu Buscemi, un vecchio siciliano da tempo emigrato a Milton, West Virginia, rievoca la sua vita passata. Nel disfacimento dei ricordi, mischiati a suggestioni metafisiche, il vecchio narrerà di un'infanzia suo malgrado visionaria, scaturita dagli esorcismi subiti, e di un'evoluzione violenta e dolorosa verso la maturità.

Boston, 1870. Photographer Edward Moody runs a booming business capturing the images of the spirits of the departed in his portraits. He lures grieving widows and mourning mothers into his studio with promises of catching the ghosts of their deceased loved ones with his camera. Despite the whispers around town that Moody is a fraud of the basest kind, no one has been able to expose him, and word of his gift has spread, earning him money, fame, and a growing list of illustrious clients.

In a small logging town in northern California, young Emma Rose Finnis was born and died. Now, no one remembers her hardworking life and her grand dreams - but she remembers. She remembers everything. Emma Rose is still here, one hundred years after her death...and she doesn't plan on leaving. But when a determined hunter arrives with instructions to "clean" Emma Rose out of her haunt, the stately Lambry mansion, death suddenly isn't the worst fate imaginable.

After she nearly ruins her family with a terrible misstep, Elena Spira is sent to Venice to escape disgrace and to atone by caring for the ailing Samuel Farber. But the crumbling and decaying Ca' Basilio palazzo, where Samuel is ensconced, holds tragic secrets, and little does Elena know how profoundly they will impact her.

In the Old City of Québec, Kay Harper falls in love with a puppet in the window of the Quatre Mains, a toy shop that is never open. She is spending her summer working as an acrobat with the cirque while her husband, Theo, is translating a biography of the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge. Late one night, Kay fears someone is following her home. Surprised to see that the lights of the toy shop are on and the door is open, she takes shelter inside.

This the the first three complete books of M in one volume.

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.

Seven years after the death of Edward Hyde, a stylish gentleman shows up in foggy London claiming to be Dr. Henry Jekyll. Only Mr. Utterson, Jekyll’s faithful lawyer and confidant, knows that he must be an impostor - because Jekyll was Hyde. But as the man goes about charming Jekyll’s friends and reclaiming the estate, and as the bodies of potential challengers start piling up, Utterson is left fearing for his life, and questioning his own sanity.

Still the Night Call is about Calem Dewayne Honeycutt, a 32-year-old Missouri dairy farmer of few words. But just because he's quiet doesn't mean he's simple. In fact, Calem's internal voice eloquently leads us through his wondrous yet tortured past, his fears for the future of his beleaguered rural world, and his carefully laid plans to remedy the vicious Night Call that haunts his present. All he has to do is get through one last day on the farm, then he can free himself of being a straight, white, middle-aged man with nothing in his possession but a gun and a prayer.

In a sleepy, little New England village stands a dark, weather-beaten, many-gabled house. This brooding mansion is haunted by a centuries-old curse that casts the shadow of ancestral sin upon the last four members of the distinctive Pyncheon family. Mysterious deaths threaten the living. Musty documents nestle behind hidden panels carrying the secret of the family’s salvation - or its downfall.

According to legend, the Pyncheon family has been cursed by their 17th century ancestor, Colonel Pyncheon, who stole the land from Matthew Maule. Maule was later put to death after being accused of witchcraft and the deed for the land could not be found. Now living in the New England mansion fraught with haunted miseries of the past, Hepzibah Pyncheon opens a small shop to pull herself from the poverty-striken curse she has lived under while her brother, Clifford, was serving a decades-long prison sentence for murder.

Myles Carver is dead. But his estate, Watermere, lives on, waiting for a new Carver to move in. Myles’s wife, Annabel, is dead too, but she is also waiting, lying in her grave in the woods. For nearly half a century she was responsible for a nightmarish reign of terror, and she’s not prepared to stop now. She is hungry to live again...and her unsuspecting nephew, Paul, will be the key. Julia Merrow has a secret almost as dark as Watermere’s. But when she and Paul fall in love they think their problems might be over.

The Deadfall Hotel is where our nightmares go, it’s where the dead pause to rest between worlds, and it’s where Richard Carter and his daughter Serena go to rediscover life - if the things at the hotel don’t kill them first. Think of it as the vacation resort of the collective unconscious. With the powerful prose that has earned him awards and accolades, Steve Rasnic Tem explores the roots of fear and society’s fascination with things horrific, using the many-layered metaphor of the Deadfall Hotel.

Five years ago Susannah Harper's son, Joel, went missing without trace. Bereft of her son and then of her husband, Susannah has rebuilt her life around helping others. But then, on the last night of Hull Fair, a fortune-teller makes an eerie prediction. She tells her that this Christmas Eve, Joel will finally come back to her. As her carefully constructed life begins to unravel, Susannah is forced to confront the buried truths of her family's past.

A portrait of Colonel Pyncheon looms over his family in the house of the seven gables - an ominous reminder of the curse he left behind over a century ago. The shadow still falls over the New England mansion's current residents, siblings Clifford and Hepzibah - unless they can expose the one secret that offers an escape from the hex. Set in seventeenth- and nineteenth-century Massachusetts, Nathaniel Hawthorne's gothic tale was inspired by the Salem Witch Trials and by a family home that still stands today.

Naomi Alderman's The Lessons reflects the truth that the lessons life teaches often come too late. Hidden away in an Oxford backstreet is a crumbling Georgian mansion, unknown to any but the few who possess keys to its unassuming front gate. Its owner is the mercurial, charismatic Mark Winters, whose rackety trust-fund upbringing has left him as troubled and unpredictable as he is wildly promiscuous.