Psychological Horror

Chandler Hendricks hates his life. Socially awkward and a near shut-in, Chandler spends his time caring for his ailing mother and watching the neighbors from his window. His favorite person to watch is his next-door neighbor Samantha. Young and beautiful, she would be the woman of any man’s dreams. Chandler knows he will make Samantha happy, if she just gave him a chance. Chandler’s finally ready to make a change and live the life he always wanted…even if it already belongs to someone else.

February 14th and my wife is looking at me with hope in her eyes. She has just given me a card and a bottle of my favourite drink so I presume she is hoping for something similar in return. I have nothing but the shovel I'm hiding behind my back. Valentine's Day is a joke. A day made up, no doubt, by people who sell cards and flowers. A way of conning us out of our money as we feel duty bound to "prove our love" for one another. Well this collection is not about proving love. This collection of stories is all about sour, bloody violent love. They say love hurts. They're not wrong.

From the incomparable master of horror and suspense comes an electrifying collection of contemporary literary horror, with stories from 25 writers representing today’s most talented voices in the genre. Horror writing is usually associated with formulaic gore, but New Wave horror writers have more in common with the wildly inventive, evocative spookiness of Edgar Allan Poe than with the sometimes-predictable hallmarks of their peers. Showcasing this cutting-edge talent, Poe’s Children now brings the best of the genre’s stories to a wider audience.

An online identity, simply know as Frut-of-Her-Loins, makes a living by selling fruit (or other food) that has been inserted into her vagina for one full day. Needless to say, her website business is more profitable than one would imagine. A grieving housewife finds out that her husband has been a customer of Frut-of-Her-Loins. She gathers a group of angry wives and hunts down the woman behind the acts that they consider vile.

Stranded in the Amazon rainforest, a lost man fights for survival and discovers that the root of evil doesn’t just reside in the world’s darkest corners, but inside the hearts of all mankind. Dr. Gregory Zekser is on a mission to visit the furthest reaches of the Amazon, providing medical aid to recently contacted tribes. As a general practitioner and food pantry director, his life in Massachusetts can be chaotic, but serving people is what he does best, and he doesn’t mind sacrificing his personal life to help others, at home or halfway around the world.

Possession is an addiction. Sydney's spent years burying her past and building a better life for herself and her young son. A respectable marketing job, a house with reclaimed and sustainable furniture, and a boyfriend who loves her son and accepts her, flaws and all. But when she opens her front door, and a masked intruder knocks her briefly unconscious, everything begins to unravel. She wakes in the hospital and tells a harrowing story of escape. Of dashing out a broken window. Of running into her neighbors' yard and calling the police.

When Emily and Ben move in next door to Dr Burman and his wife, Anita, they are keen to get to know their new neighbours. Outgoing and sociable, Emily tries to befriend the doctor’s wife, but Anita is strangely subdued, barely leaving the house, and terrified of answering the phone. When Emily goes missing a few weeks later, Ben is plunged into a panic. His wife has left him a note, but can she really have abandoned him for another man? Or has Emily’s curiosity about the couple next door led her straight into danger?

A young man wakes in his basement. His face and arms are scratched and cut. His clothes are blood stained and trails of blood flow across the basement floor to his very large freezer. Though he can’t recall what happened to him, he knows something horrible lies waiting in the freezer. The idea of opening the freezer’s lid terrify him, but he also knows his mother will return home at any moment and she may be the scariest thing of all.

David Young, Deacon Price, and Beth Harris live with a dark secret. As children, they survived a religious group's horrific last days at the isolated mountain Red Peak. Years later, the trauma of what they experienced never feels far behind. When a fellow survivor commits suicide, they finally reunite and share their stories. Long-repressed memories surface, defying understanding and belief. Why did their families go down such a dark road? What really happened on that final night? The answers lie buried at Red Peak.

Med school dropout Lena is desperate for a job, any job, to help her parents, who are approaching bankruptcy after her father was injured and laid off nearly simultaneously. So when she is offered a position, against all odds, working for one of Boston’s most elite families, the illustrious and secretive Verdeaus, she knows she must accept—no matter how bizarre the interview or how vague the job description. By day, she is assistant to the family doctor and his charge—the sickly, poetic, drunken heir to the family empire, who is as difficult as his illness is mysterious.

Tamar Glass fled an abusive mother when she was eighteen, running away from home to find a better life elsewhere. She has lived in freedom from her mother, Ruth, for decades, until one night she wakes to find her now-elderly mother standing over her bed, disoriented and confused. When Tamar reluctantly takes in her mother, strange events start happening inside her home: the house is oppressively hot, lights flicker, and cupboards open and shut on their own.

Liz Kendall wouldn't hurt a fly. Even when times get tough, she's devoted to bringing up her two kids in a loving home. But there's another side to Liz - one that's dark and malicious. She will do anything to get her way, no matter how extreme. And when this other side of her takes control, the consequences are devastating.

It’s the last summer for Kit Lamb: The last summer before college. The last summer with her high school basketball team, and with Dana, her best friend. The last summer before her life begins. But the night before the big game, one of the players tells a ghost story about Daphne, a girl who went to their school many years ago and died under mysterious circumstances. Some say she was murdered, others that she died by her own hand. And some say that Daphne is a murderer herself.

The most terrifying thing that you can possibly imagine is your own body in the hands of a monster. Or worse, in the hands of another human being. In this definitive anthology of body horror selected by a World Horror Grandmaster, you'll find the unthinkable and the shocking: a couture designer preparing for an exquisitely grotesque runway show; a vengeful son seeking the parent who bred him as plasma donor; a celebrity-kink brothel that inflicts plastic surgery on sex workers; and organ-harvesting doctors who dissect a living man without anesthetic.

Hours after throwing a third birthday party for their twins Kathy and Kelly in their Connecticut home, Margaret and Steve Frawley return home from a dinner in New York to discover the police in the house, their daughters missing, and an eight million dollar ransom note. The Frawleys meet the kidnapper's demands, but the abandoned car they're led to contains only Kelly, the body of the driver, and a suicide note, saying he had inadvertently killed Kathy and dumped her body in the ocean.

Greetings. There is a body buried on your property, covered in your blood. The unfortunate young lady's name is Rita Jones. In her jeans pocket you'll find a slip of paper with a phone number on it. Call that number. If I have not heard from you by 8:00 P.M., the police will receive an anonymous call. I'll tell them where Rita Jones is buried on your property, how you killed her, and where the murder weapon can be found in your house. (I do believe a paring knife is missing from your kitchen.)

Parker, a young, overconfident psychiatrist new to his job at a mental asylum, miscalculates catastrophically when he undertakes curing a mysterious and profoundly dangerous patient.

Darkness has a way of creeping up when Ian is with Priss. Even when they were kids, playing in the woods of their small Upstate New York town, he could feel it. Still, Priss was his best friend, his salvation from the bullies who called him "loser" and "fatboy" - and from his family's deadly secrets.

NYPD criminalist Lincoln Rhyme joins his beautiful protégé, Amelia Sachs, in the hunt for the Coffin Dancer - an ingenious killer who changes appearance even faster than he adds to his trail of victims. They have only one clue: the madman has a tattoo of the Grim Reaper waltzing with a woman. Rhyme must rely on his wits and intuition to track the elusive murderer through New York City - knowing they have only 48 hours before the Coffin Dancer strikes again.

Brian Evenson’s hallucinatory and darkly comic stories of paranoia, pursuit, sensory deprivation, amnesia, and retribution rattle the cages of the psyche and peer into the gaping moral chasm that opens when we become estranged from ourselves. From sadistic bosses with secret fears to a woman trapped in a mime’s imaginary box, and from a post-apocalyptic misidentified Messiah to unwitting portraitists of the dead, the mind-bending world of this modern-day Edgar Allan Poe exposes the horror contained within our daily lives.