Science Fiction Horror Anthology

Reclusive chef Heinrich Schauer has invited six guests to a blind 12-course tasting menu. As they eat, each guest is overtaken by carnal appetites, unaware of their host's savage plan - or of the creature lurking below.

Darkness falls. The undead rise to feast on the succulent blood of the living. For years vampires have fascinated great writers of the occult such as De Maupassant, Count Stenbock, E. Nesbit, and E.F. Benson. This is The Story Circle's collection of some of their spine-chilling tales told by award-winning actors.

Within these diverse stories, you will encounter a magician whose finale is murder, shared nightmares, a magic carpet that lives up to its name, a recipe for a Martian non-vegetarian main course, a cook who purloins the body of a stranger, and other interesting topics and characters. A few can be classified as horror stories, one as science fiction, and the majority just plain quirky. There's a story here to amuse almost anyone.

The problem with the dark is you don’t really know what’s lurking in there. Something hiding? Something menacing? Or just an inky dome for the stars to twinkle on? Writers rarely let us dwell on the latter. No, they would much rather they put our nerves on edge, that our skin would begin to crawl and that the cold sweat of fear propels our pulse and heartbeat to nightmare-inducing trauma. I think they’re ready.

This thirty-first issue of Tales from the Canyons of the Damned consists of five sharp, suspenseful, thought provoking short stories - each from a different featured master of speculative fiction. Tales from the Canyons of the Damned: No. 31 features "Fortune Cookies" by Hunter C. Eden; "That Time of Year" by D.K. Cassidy, "The Pairing Witch" by David Alan Jones, "Similar" by Holly Heisey, and "#Eddie_and_June" by Daniel Arthur Smith.

Steve isn't much for antiques. In fact, he hates them. So when he finds himself in an old antique shop taking shelter from the rain, he isn't pleased. But he finds something in there. He finds a beautiful old bed that he falls in love with and must have. But the bed is not normal, and Steve learns the hard way that sometimes you fall into things that you simply can't get up from.

When a young man goes from the demands and rigors of the army to a luxurious and serene country living, his mind is bound to wander where it should not. Such is the fate of Alexei Alexeyevich Fedyashev, who becomes so absorbed in his newfound idleness that he falls in love with an old portrait. When the famous conjurer and medium Count Cagliostro accidentally ends up at Fedyashev's escape, the young man begs him to bring his dream to reality. "Be careful what you wish for" is the lesson young Alexei has yet to learn - and how!

Blue e la bambina senza cuore è una favola dark con sfumature bianco candido. E' una favola per adulti e bambini con contenuti di geniale delicatezza. Per il tipo di ambientazione, è la favola perfetta di Natale. Questa è la storia di Blue, il grosso cinghiale dagli occhi azzurri, e di Batuffolo, un'adorabile bambina trasparente e senza cuore. Questa è la storia di un'amicizia indissolubile e di un legame che va oltre le apparenti diversità.

The town of Pine Ridge has an eerie past, with tales of witchcraft and ritual murders, but when a local man is savagely killed, all hell threatens to break loose. Supernatural detective Jack Nightingale is called in to investigate the brutal slaying - a murder that seems to have been carried out by children - children with dead black eyes....

Business has been slow for Jack Nightingale, but an appointment with a Catholic priest leads to an interesting new case. Eleven-year-old Christine Warren has been showing worrying signs of developing an alternate personality, who goes by the name of Lydia. It's up to Nightingale to find out whether she's been possessed, or if there's something more to Lydia....

The Light Brothers present The Corpus Corruptum: These stories are our mutant children, fever-dream hallucinations that don't necessarily fit into any particular genre. No matter how weird they are, we love them anyway. The Corpus Corruptum is a collection that peeks into what happens when the body goes bad, the most universal of all human fears.

Follow the horror of the career of Herbert West, as in medical school he seeks and fails with terrifying consequences to animate the "Graveyard's Cold Clay", to return the dead to life, continuing through his private practice as a physician where he finally learns to reanimate not only entire dead bodies, but parts, with horrendous consequences.

Daring to leave everything behind and move to New York City, David Merchant finds himself teetering on the edge of oblivion. Utterly alone, he soon sinks into a depression that threatens to swallow his soul. When blind chance puts David on a subway car bound for a place unlike any he has ever seen, in a time that has never been, he is thrust into a landscape filled with horrors from the very darkest corners of his grimmest nightmares.

"The Steal" - A thief is hired by a collector to acquire an occult artifact. "Crash" - A hard landing on an alien planet. "Collision" - A world-changing incident at the Large Hadron Collider. "The Fall" - A London gangster finds himself in a bad situation.

"The Colour out of Space." Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) is a novelist famous for his horror stories, fantasy and science fiction. Although he was not famous during his lifetime, his work is now considered a classic of literature. Lovecraft's work has influenced many authors, including Stephen King, who considers him "the greatest craftsman of the classic horror story of the 20th century."

Tonia Brown brings you three werewolf stories. Enjoy! In "Moonshine", Carson discovers the cure to his unfortunate curse in an old woman's still. In "Beauty of a Beast", an inventor learns the truth about his beautiful assistant's secret life. Will he abandon her to her hairy fate, or rescue her with his own well-guarded secret? And in "House Rules", a werewolf and a vampire walk into a bar...

This compelling collection will engage the lovers of horror, fantasy, and science fiction and marry their eccentric desires in the church of Blithecraft. Twelve stories suitable for the discerning fantasist. A blithely return to the eccentric craft of weird short stories. Tales of other dimensions, eldritch beasts, and seditious sirens. Ancient witchcraft, necromancers, and giant arthropods. Worlds of past, present, and future are presented in a classical style with contemporary beguile.

Light the candles and shut the door. The Wrong Train is a deliciously creepy and terrifyingly good collection of scary stories for fans of Patrick Ness, R.L. Stine, and Emily Carroll.

Eidolon Avenue: Where the secretly guilty go to die. One building. Five floors. Five doors per floor. Twenty-five nightmares feeding the hunger lurking between the bricks and waiting beneath the boards. All thrown into their own private hell as every cruel choice, every drop of spilled blood, every silent, complicit moment of cowardice is remembered, resurrected, and relived to feed the ancient evil that lives on Eidolon Avenue.

A cyborg on the edge of eternity, a lonely 10-year old girl, a curmudgeon seeking his one great novel; there are many lost souls desperate for a way out. These 20 tales show us the side of humanity we'd often like to ignore.