Literary Horror

Dracula is a Gothic horror novel by Bram Stoker, considered to be one of the most enduring and skillful examples of the modern vampire genre. It tells the story of Count Dracula, and of Professor Abraham Van Helsing, who attempts to thwart the vampire in his attempt to move from Transylvania to London, in order to find new blood and spread the undead curse. This Essential Classics edition includes a new introduction by Professor Vivian Heller, PhD in literature and modern studies from Yale University.

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.

Caty non è come tutti gli altri fantasmi: non sa fluttuare e quando dorme sogna. Spesso i suoi sogni si trasformano in incubi terrificanti. Da quando è uno spettro, poi, lei e i suoi amici, il gatto Pinky e lo scienziato Doc, hanno lottato uniti contro il Male, affrontando mostri terribili. Un giorno però tra loro arriva un nuovo spettro, che cerca di metterli uno contro l'altro. Cosa vuole veramente questo intruso? Per non perdere i suoi compagni, Caty è pronta ad affrontare anche le paure più insormontabili: così ha inizio la sua più spaventosa avventura.

L'agente Sara Milani e il suo giovane braccio destro, Lauro, tornano a lavorare insieme per un'indagine all'ultimo sospiro... In un piccolo paese nella ridente e florida Val Vignè si aggira un pericoloso assassino, che nessuno riesce a fermare. Ma chi o cosa sarà questa creatura che uccide, per poi svanire nel nulla? Solo due veri esperti del brivido come Lauro e Sara potranno risolvere il caso, a patto di riuscire a sopravvivere alla misteriosa mano che colpisce ogni dodici del mese, senza lasciare scampo.

Caty sa che un'orribile sciagura sta per abbattersi su Mirandola, il suo paese, già devastato dal terremoto: lo ha capito grazie agli incubi che la tormentano nel sonno. Ma i fantasmi come lei non dovrebbero fare né sogni né incubi, e questo è solo il primo di molti, inquietanti episodi che si ripetono un giorno dopo l'altro. Per fortuna, Caty non è sola: c'è Pinky, il suo gatto e animale-guida, e Doc, il fantasma-scienziato, e molti altri spettri, uno più strano dell'altro. Riusciranno Caty e i suoi amici a sventare la terribile minaccia?

Al risveglio da una caduta, Caterina, detta Caty, si ritrova davanti un gatto nero che parla. E non è l'unica stranezza: lei è diventata invisibile, impalpabile... Incredibile, è diventata un fantasma! Nella nuova dimensione, Caty entra in contatto con spettri buffi, antichi e moderni, con cui riesce a comunicare. Ma come mai è diventata uno di loro? Come è morta? Mentre i ricordi affiorano, Caty scopre di essere stata assassinata. Adesso, però, non c'è un minuto da perdere: l'assassino sta per colpire ancora e l'omicidio di Caty è solo l'inizio.

Unique to this title is: A historical introduction and a study of the themes present in A Tale of Two Cities, A Christmas Carol and The Chimes. Charles Dickens was an English writer and social critic. He was born in 1812 in Portsmouth. When his father was sent to jail because of unsettled debt, Dickens had to leave school and get a job in a factory. Dickens is believed to be the best novelist of the Victorian era and he became very popular during his lifetime. His novels are still widely read and translated.

The patriarch of the Licht family, Abraham has raised a brood of talented con artists, children molded in his image, and experts in The Game, his calling and philosophy of life. Traveling from one small town to the next across the continent, from the Northeast to the frontier West, they skillfully swindle unsuspecting victims, playing on their greed, lust, pride, and small-mindedness. Despite their success, Abraham cannot banish a past that haunts him: the ghost of his ancestor Sarah Licht, a former con woman who met with a gruesome fate.

Thirteen-year-old Emma grows up under an Eastern European dictatorship where oppression seems eternal. When her dissident parents die in a car accident, she’s taken to an orphanage, only to be adopted soon after by a grandmother she has never met. While her homeland is shattered by a violent revolution, Emma—like a witch's apprentice—comes to learn the ways of her new grandmother, who can tell fortunes from coffee dregs, cause and heal pain at will, and shares her home with the ghost of her husband.

The (black) magical season is here - and whether it's a solstice seance gone demonically wrong with the incomparable Kim Harrison, a grossly misshapen Christmas with the remarkable Lynsay Sands, a blood-chilling-and-spilling New Year's with the wonderful Marjorie M. Liu, or a super-powered Thanksgiving with the phenomenal Vicki Pettersson, one thing is for certain: in the able hands of these exceptional dark side explorers, the holidays are going to be deliciously hellish!

Brightness Falls isn't just the name of the TV show that womanizing man-child Andrew Ware has been painstakingly creating for the last couple years, it's also his hometown. A town that he loves as much as he hates. By request of no one, Andrew returns home to help his sister separate from her husband, only to become sidetracked by a beautiful woman. A few drinks and few compliments later the woman is dead, killed in a tragic oral sex accident. In which Andrew would have lost his own life if it weren’t for the dapperly dressed, antler-headed, human skeleton named Doug.

Allison and James Price move to the navy-blue forests of Concordia, Idaho, hoping to leave behind the chaos of Los Angeles and the painful memories of his indiscretions. Once settled in the picturesque town, where time seems to have stalled and life moves at a slower pace, their six-year-old daughter, Reagan, befriends a mysterious young girl who seems too idyllic to be true with her pressed pinafores and perfectly curled pigtails. One late autumn evening, as their playdate winds down, both girls vanish into thin air.

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.

Though published second after Altmann's Tongue, The Din of Celestial Birds (1997) consists of the best of Evenson's early stories. They take place in a country (perhaps several countries) that seems at once everywhere and nowhere, haunted by birds, ghosts, poverty, tyranny, and the permeability of the line between the living and the dead. These stories offer a heady mix of absurdity and bleakness on the one hand and exuberant magic realism on the other.

Stanley Maddox lives a mundane life in a nondescript town. His wife is cheating on him, his colleagues at work don’t recognize him, and he has recently noticed a mysterious creature darting its way through his house. When he notices a flap of skin on his face, he begins pulling. Beneath his skin lies another person, an evil person, with the power to change his life forever.

Frankenstein (1818) is the definitive fable about genetic modification gone haywire which is only too relevant to modern times. Victor Frankenstein decides to build a 'man' from assembled body parts stolen from corpses. What results, of course, is a 'monster', but the mastery of Shelley's storytelling leaves a listener asking themselves what a 'monster' really is - and feeling thoroughly frightened.

On a quiet Christmas Eve, a governess’ manuscript detailing her encounters with the supernatural is read. She tells the story of moving into an estate to take care of two children and becoming slowly aware that the area is overrun with ghosts of the previous inhabitants - and that the children are aware that these ghosts exist.

James' chilling Gothic horror novella read by Nicki White, reprising her role as the governess.

A new arrival at an isolated school for orphaned boys quickly comes to realize there is something wrong with his new home. He hears chilling whispers in the night, his troubled classmates are violent and hostile, and the Headmaster sends cryptic messages, begging his new charge to confess. As the new boy learns to survive on the edges of this impolite society, he starts to unravel a mystery at the school's dark heart. And that's when the corpses start turning up.

A young governess arrives at Bly, a country home in Essex, England, to care for Miles and Flora, two precocious and pure children. But as ghostly visions take shape, the obsessively protective governess soon fears for the safety of her wards - only to wonder if these hauntings are a conjuring of her own imagination.