Short Ghost

In his first collection of short stories, Ron Ripley delivers eight spine-tingling tales of the strange and the macabre. Weaving an intricate web of storytelling, listeners are asked to join him on a journey through some of the darkest of his works. Book a room at the old Crowe’s Bed and Breakfast, but be certain you can leave. Join the treasure hunter as he digs up graves and awakens more than just the dead. Lay beside a homeless man in a shelter, but make sure you’re not trespassing.

Reader Stephen Critchelow has spent a lifetime collecting and reading works like these and, with carefully chosen music, brings a strong sense of atmosphere to this recording. "The Signalman" provides a great listening experience for dark autumn evenings.

When her husband dies unexpectedly, Maggie Royal is struck with sinister visions that foretell danger for her and for her five-year-old daughter. Her mother and grandmother were said to have “the sight,” but it was never like this. With no one alive to turn to, Maggie must move quickly to uncover the meaning of her visions before her candle is snuffed out.

In Ghost in the Sky, the first installment in the Bob the Interdimensional Trucker series, Sam Gage has picked up an enigmatic motorist whose mere presence, it seems, is making Gage hear the sound of a small propeller-driven passenger airplane...or maybe even a crop duster. But whatever is really making the sound, which his rider can't hear, is not only keeping pace with Gage's truck at an impossibly slow speed for airplane flight - it's also invisible.

Based on traditional Vietnamese folk tales told to Violet Kupersmith by her grandmother, these fantastical, chilling, and thoroughly contemporary stories are a boldly original exploration of Vietnamese culture, addressing both the immigrant experience and the lives of those who remained behind. Lurking in the background of them all is a larger ghost—that of the Vietnam War, whose legacy continues to haunt us.

Meng Jin’s critically acclaimed debut novel, Little Gods, was praised as “spectacular and emotionally polyphonic (Omar El-Akkad, BookPage), “powerful” (Washington Post), and “meticulously observed, daringly imagined” (Claire Messud). Now Jin turns her considerable talents to short fiction, in ten thematically linked stories.

Algernon Blackwood, a journalist and broadcast narrator, was one of the most prolific writers of ghost stories in the history of the genre. The title story, "The Touch of Pan", explores the lingering presence of myth in everyday life. In "The Glamour of the Snow", Blackwood winds a tale about a man's infatuation with a supernatural winter beauty. In "The Attic", the ghost of an usurer haunts the old Chateaux and, on the anniversary of a young boy's death, the boy's cat brings the family together. "The Willows" follows two campers who are on a canoe trip down the Danube.

The Fogg River Seminary, a girls’ school in a small Illinois town, is supposed to be just another stop on Maryse and Vasyl’s endless travels. They’ve made lucrative use of Maryse’s “foreign” looks in their melodramatic séance act—and an act is all it is. Then, during their performance, a blizzard sweeps in and cuts them off from town completely. In the freezing halls, there’s a voice speaking the secrets of the dead, and Maryse has no choice but to listen…because this time, the voice is real.

When a photographic retoucher is commissioned to fix the abnormalities on a Great War portrait, he finds his own past and that of the subject beginning to connect. Are his personal nightmares returning, or is it something more? A short ghost story in the M.R. James tradition, "The Last Photograph of John Buckley" is a dark tale of past crimes and unfinished business.

Thirteen classic stories of horror and the supernatural by some of the greatest writers in the genre. This compilation includes a mix of well-known classics by authors such as Edith Nesbit, J. Sheridan Le Fanu and M. R. James, alongside several tales by less familiar names who were hugely popular and prolific in their day.

The sequel to the best-selling Zombie, Ohio, this explosive supernatural thriller from Scott Kenemore tells the story of three Chicagoans who have been thrown together by a bizarre, interconnected series of events during the first 24 hours of a zombie outbreak in the Midwest's largest city. A partnership is crafted between a pastor from Chicago's rough South Side, an intrepid newspaper reporter, and a young female musician, all of whom are fighting for survival as they struggle to protect themselves and their communities in a city overrun with the walking dead.

M. R. James is one of the finest English language ghostwriters ever published. These short stories are not only classics of their genre, but are outstanding examples of beautifully paced, understated terror and sociological horror, reaching to the dark expanse of the unconscious mind.

A decade after Nocturnes first terrified and delighted listeners, John Connolly, best-selling author of 13 acclaimed thrillers featuring private investigator Charlie Parker, gives us a second volume of tales of the supernatural.

Stranded on a desert island, a young man yearns for objects from his past. A local from a small coastal town in England is found dead as the tide goes out. A Norwegian whaling ship is stranded in the Arctic, its crew threatened by mysterious forces. In the nineteenth century, a ship drifts in becalmed waters in the Indian Ocean, those on it haunted by their evil deeds. A surfer turned diver discovers there are things worse than drowning under the sea. Something from the sea is creating monsters on land.

The events of the story occupy a single June day in post-World War I Central London, as wealthy and fashionable society hostess Clarissa Dalloway is preparing for a party she is to give that evening. Through her thoughts and memories, the voices of others who have touched on her life and will attend her party, Virginia Woolf shows her genius as a writer who is both accessible and popular.

It's not really about the boots … or is it? Boot Points is a set of short tales about Violet Parker's purple boots. It is set in the story time between the third and fourth books in the Deadwood Mystery series. Each tale not only explains more of Violet's history, but also shows the role each character plays in Violet's life. In addition to this short story, there is a deleted scene from Nearly Departed in Deadwood, the first book in the Deadwood Mystery Series.

Welcome to another kind of terror as Peter Straub leads us into the outer reaches of the psyche. Here the master of the macabre is at his absolute best in seven exquisite tales of living, dying, and the terror that lies in between.

Fearful Rock and Other Precarious Locales is the third volume of Night Shade Books' five volume "Selected Stories of Manly Wade Wellman." This volume is made up of eight novella length stories. It includes Wellman's "Judge Pursivant" and "Sergeant Jaeger" stories, as well as a lost classic from Strange Stories (1939).

At first blush, Widdershins is a conventional haunted house story involving an unsuccessful writer who moves into an empty house in hope that isolation will help his failing creativity. His sensitivity and imagination are enhanced by his seclusion, but his art, his only friend, and his sanity are all destroyed in the process. It can be interpreted as narrating the gradual possession of the protagonist by a mysterious, possessive feminine spirit, or as a realistic description of a psychotic outbreak culminating in catatonia and murder, told from the psychotic subject’s view.

Our protagonist, Victoria, is a successful businesswoman. She has a history of mental illness, but that's behind her now, despite what her distant husband might say. What starts out as a normal day at the office is turned upside down by the appearance of a mysterious figure that only Victoria can see. It soon becomes clear that this being, whatever it is, is following her. As Victoria tries to make the creature go away, her demons begin to creep up on her again.