Occult Horror

1983: Three students from a small college embark on a week-long road trip to film a documentary on roadside memorials for their American Studies class. The project starts out as a fun adventure with long stretches of empty road and nightly campfires where they begin to open up with one another. But as they venture deeper into the Appalachian backwoods, the atmosphere begins to darken. They notice more and more of the memorials feature a strange, unsettling symbol hinting at a sinister secret.

At the novel's center: the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt, hero, leader, inspirer, irresistible force, irrepressible spirit, battling (and ultimately reconciling with) a strange otherworldly form that has somehow taken possession of Lestat's undead body and soul. This ancient and mysterious power and unearthly spirit of vampire lore has all the force, history, and insidious reach of the unknowable universe.

Helen Lambert has lived several lives-a young piano virtuoso in 1890s Paris, an actress in 1930s Hollywood, a rock star in 1970s Los Angeles - only she doesn't know it. Until she meets a strange man who claims he's watched over her for centuries, bound to her from the beginning. At first, Helen doesn't believe him. Her life is as normal as any other modern career woman's. Then she begins having vivid dreams about ill-fated love and lives cut short. Caught in a curse, Helen will be forced to relive the same tragic events that ruined her previous lives.

My name is Peter Grant, and I am a keeper of the secret flame - whatever that is. Truth be told, there's a lot I still don't know. My superior Nightingale, previously the last of England's wizardly governmental force, is trying to teach me proper schooling for a magician's apprentice. But even he doesn't have all the answers. Mostly I'm just a constable sworn to enforce the Queen’s Peace, with the occasional help from some unusual friends and a well-placed fire blast.

Tallyn O’Malley’s dreams are coming true. Her husband is back from the war, their son is opening up to him, and they’ve just been invited to be participants on the hottest game show in the nation. But things are not what they seem. An attempted kidnapping goes wrong and Tallyn is hurled into a world she didn’t know existed. Pursued by a relentless and smart supernatural force that wants revenge, fight or flight is the only answer. And she is a fighter.

When Sir Peter Pendragon, a retired pilot of the Great War, meets the free-spirited Louise, a devotee of the mysterious occultist Basil King Lamus, the two immediately get married and set off across Europe, on a drug-fueled honeymoon of heroin and cocaine. Eventually, in an attempt to break free of their recently acquired habit, the newlyweds find their way to the Abbey of Thelema in Italy, where the adults perform invocations to the sun and the children freely recite passages from the Book of the Law.

Ella Louise has lived in the woods surrounding Pilot's Creek, Virginia, for nearly a decade. Publicly, she and her daughter Jessica are shunned by their upper-crust family and the Pilot's Creek residents. Privately, desperate townspeople visit her apothecary for a cure to what ails them - until Ella Louise is blamed for the death of a prominent customer. Accused of witchcraft, both mother and daughter are burned at the stake in the middle of the night.

Heartbeats had a pesky way of complicating things. They almost always came with the nasty side effect of humanity and finally...death. Since Thorne came into my life, I'd been plagued with both. Heartbeats and humanity. Both of these things were going to be the death of me. One way or another. And the death of everyone I knew and loved, a list growing longer with every beat of my newly repaired - and irritating - heart. That pesky humanity was almost as toxic as the most debilitating illness on this hunk of rock, killing more humans than any vampire could. Love.

One of the world's most famous intellectual ghost stories, The Turn of the Screw is a haunting tale of suspected supernatural possession. A governess at a country house claims that Miles and Flora, two orphaned children in her care, are being controlled by spirits for some evil purpose. No one else can see the ghosts, and the children themselves are silent. Are they being dominated by spectral forces, or are they hiding something? Is the governess simply paranoid, or is something else going on?

Laura and Owen buy a secluded cottage on the edge of the Peak District. Old mines riddle the hills surrounding their new home and soon after moving in, Laura starts to hear faint snatches of birdsong. Her husband, wrapped up in his new job, is rarely around. Nervous and alone, Laura fears she's developing tinnitus. Her doctor can find nothing wrong. Then an archaeological dig on a neighbouring hill unearths some disturbing finds...and Laura's life starts to become terrifying.

It begins with a ghost story around a campfire. Teenagers out on a walking trip, trying to act brave in front of each other. But as the walk gets underway and the boys begin to fall out, odd things start to happen. Noises in the night. A severed rabbit’s foot outside someone’s tent. Soon, the boys begin to disappear. As panic sets in and a storm approaches, the remaining boys must band together to face a darkness not even the local ghost stories could help them predict.

Blythe has accepted her fate and is tired of running. Who would miss her anyway? She attends her new and eccentric town’s month long Halloween masquerade for one last party before meeting her end. But what will she find...and what will find her?

Halloween, 1963. They call him the October Boy, or Ol' Hacksaw Face, or Sawtooth Jack. Whatever the name, everybody in this small Midwestern town knows who he is. How he rises from the cornfields every Halloween, a butcher knife in his hand, and makes his way toward town, where gangs of teenage boys eagerly await their chance to confront the legendary nightmare. Both the hunter and the hunted, the October Boy is the prize in an annual rite of life and death. Pete McCormick knows that killing the October Boy is his one chance to escape a dead-end future in this one-horse town.

No matter how hard she tries, Rebekah just doesn’t fit in at her prestigious Ivy League prep school. The cruel, privileged students ridicule and bully her on a daily basis. And instead of standing up for herself, Rebekah retreats into a dark, unsettling world of nightmarish visions … In her dreams, a cloaked figure named The Raven gives her a chance to turn the tables on her tormentors, and exact bloody revenge. At first, she secretly relishes the power, but then Rebekah discovers her dreams have terrifying consequences: The Raven’s brutal revenge is real.

Harry August is on his deathbed. Again. No matter what he does or the decisions he makes, when death comes, Harry always returns to where he began, a child with all the knowledge of a life he has already lived a dozen times before. Nothing ever changes. Until now. As Harry nears the end of his 11th life, a little girl appears at his bedside. "I nearly missed you, Doctor August", she says. "I need to send a message". This is the story of what Harry does next, and what he did before, and how he tries to save a past he cannot change and a future he cannot allow.

In the summer of 1994, psychologist Daniel Hill buys a rustic farmhouse nestled in the rolling hills of West Virginia. Along with his wife and teenage daughter, the family uproots their lives in Ohio and moves south. They are initially seduced by the natural beauty of the country setting. That soon changes when they discover a hidden room in the basement with a well, boarded shut and adorned with crucifixes. Local legends about the previous owner being an exorcist come to light, but by then, all Hell has broken loose.

She’d always been my destiny. The woman whose life was tied to mine. I just hadn’t planned on falling in love and being forced to choose between my vows and my soul. No matter how deep my connection to her ran, I had a greater purpose I was meant to serve. And now that she was carrying the Harbinger of the Apocalypse–the result of our passion–I had to get her away from the rest of them.

The novel opens with the vampire world in crisis… vampires have been proliferating out of control; burnings have commenced all over the world, huge massacres similar to those carried out by Akasha in The Queen of the Damned… Old vampires, roused from slumber in the earth are doing the bidding of a Voice commanding that they indiscriminately burn vampire-mavericks in cities from Paris and Mumbai to Hong Kong, Kyoto, and San Francisco.

A story of youth and promise, of loss and the search for love, of secrets and destiny, Blackwood Farm brings together the Vampire Chronicles and the story of the Mayfair Witches, and is Anne Rice at her mesmerizing best.

Consummate master of his craft, Stephen King has kept millions awake past midnight shivering at tales that probe the shadows and reveal the dark side. Now listeners can chill to this second dramatic unabridged production of short stories from his best selling book, Night Shift. It brings Stephen King's demonic stories fully to life - and the terror even closer to home.