Occult Horror Fiction

Thomas Ligotti’s debut collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, and his second, Grimscribe, permanently inscribed a new name in the pantheon of horror fiction. Influenced by the strange terrors of Lovecraft and Poe and by the brutal absurdity of Kafka, Ligotti eschews cheap, gory thrills for his own brand of horror, which shocks at the deepest, existential, levels.

For 30 years, they have avoided the outbreak of walking death that has consumed America's heartland. They have secured a small compound near the ruins of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Isolated from the world, they have remained blissfully unaware of what lies outside in the region known as the Dead Lands. Until now. Led by a military vet who's seen better days, the inexperienced offspring of the original survivors form a small expedition to explore the wastelands around them. Small pockets of humanity hide in the shadows: some scared, some mad, all dangerous. This is the New World.

Seabury Quinn's short stories were featured in well more than half of the pulp magazine Weird Tales' original publication run. His most famous character, the supernatural French detective Dr. Jules de Grandin, investigated cases involving monsters, devil worshippers, serial killers, and spirits from beyond the grave, often set in the small town of Harrisonville, New Jersey.

A lone narrator meets a railway worker who is confined to a cold, gloomy station in a deep cutting near a tunnel entrance. This worker is a signalman, and it is his responsibility to give the green light for trains to pass through the area. These are slow, monotonous days. The signalman’s life is not marked by much, until the nightmares begin. Three times in a row, a ghost mysteriously appears before the signalman – and with each apparition, a tragic accident unfolds on the rail tracks. Although our narrator doubts the man at first, events soon make him a believer too.

K-9 search and rescue handler Jamie Flint and her team - both human and canine - are called in when a group vanishes during a dogsledding expedition for battered women in the Mahoosuc Mountains of Maine. When it's learned a rogue gunman was involved in the disappearance, authorities look to the abusive partners of the women now lost for answers. Meanwhile, a voice from Jamie's past begins to haunt her, echoing the words of the shooter now in pursuit of a target Jamie alone can save.

Everyone knows leprechauns are just make believe. But wait, isn't that what they say about ghosts?

Carlos Castaneda takes the listener into the very heart of sorcery, challenging both imagination and reason, shaking the very foundations of our belief in what is “natural” and “logical”. His landscape is full of terrors and mysterious forces, as sharply etched as a flash of lightning on the deserts and mountains where don Juan takes him to pursue the sorcerer’s knowledge - the knowledge that it is the Eagle that gives us, at our births, a spark of awareness, that it expects to reclaim at the end of our lives and which the sorcerer, through his discipline, fights to retain.

From the author of the best-selling Contagion comes a new novel in the Living Dead series. When deadly earthquakes devastate the Caribbean, an ancient disease of almost unimaginable destructive force engulfs the globe. As the earth continues to convulse and the seas encroach, the dead rise with an appetite for human flesh. Survivors must learn to navigate a world in which they are now the hunted.

Kat Richardson excels at creating vivid, fast-moving novels that blend urban fantasy with paranormal mystery. In Greywalker, Seattle P.I. Harper Blaine is viciously attacked and murdered - but after exactly two minutes, somehow she returns to life. Now she's seeing strange things all around her - dark visions from the shadow world - and living a normal life may no longer be possible no matter how hard she tries.

Grave Sight draws listeners into the intriguing world of Harper Connelly, a woman with a unique gift: she can "see" the deceased and how they died. A teenage girl from a small Ozarks town is missing and feared dead. Hired by local police, Harper locates the girl's body in a nearby forest. But there's more than one corpse in those woods, and the second one raises questions no one wants to ask.

The ghosts haunting Alison Kerby's Jersey Shore guesthouse are sad. Maxie wants to know who murdered her ex-husband, and Paul pines for his still-living almost-fiancee. The only one who isn't missing her ex is Alison-because The Swine just arrived on her doorstep...

A dark and sweeping adventure, Dreamcatcher is set in the haunted city of Derry - the site of Stephen King's It and Insomnia. In it, four young boys stand together and do a brave, good thing, an act that changes them in ways that they hardly understand. A quarter-century later, as grown men who have gone their separate ways, these friends come together once a year to hunt in the woods of Maine.

The New York Times best-selling author of the Nightside series, Simon R. Green has won widespread acclaim and an immense following for his Secret Histories novels featuring Eddie “Shaman Bond” Drood. In Green’s action-packed riff on everyone’s favorite superspy, Eddie once again finds himself at the center of supernatural intrigue. And even though protecting humanity from the forces of darkness is nothing new to Eddie, he now faces a threat that’s leaving him both shaken and stirred.

In 1893, there's no such thing as witches. There used to be, in the wild, dark days before the burnings began, but now witching is nothing but tidy charms and nursery rhymes. If the modern woman wants any measure of power, she must find it at the ballot box. But when the Eastwood sisters - James Juniper, Agnes Amaranth, and Beatrice Belladonna - join the suffragists of New Salem, they begin to pursue the forgotten words and ways that might turn the women's movement into the witch's movement.

Jess Carter wasn't looking for a place to belong when she arrived in Banks, Idaho. It was supposed to be a temporary spot to finish out her last year of high school and bond with her dad. Meeting Dom changed everything. Now, the Pack needs her. Dom needs her. And she's figuring out she needs them if they plan to survive what's coming. A challenge has been issued, and if the Pack doesn't respond, they'll be seen as weak.

Find a gateway to the underworld. Steal a soul out of hell. A simple plan, except people who make this particular journey rarely come back. But Galaxy “Alex” Stern is determined to break Darlington out of purgatory—even if it costs her a future at Lethe and at Yale.

There are three ways up to Castle View from the town of Castle Rock: Route 117, Pleasant Road, and the Suicide Stairs. Every day in the summer of 1974, 12-year-old Gwendy Peterson has taken the stairs, which are held by strong (if time-rusted) iron bolts and zigzag up the cliffside. At the top of the stairs, Gwendy catches her breath and listens to the shouts of the kids on the playground. One day a stranger calls to Gwendy: "Hey, girl. Come on over here for a bit. We ought to palaver, you and me."

With nothing but the clothes on his back - and something horrific snapping at his heels - Jack Winter fled his rural Georgia home when he was just a boy. Watching the world he knew vanish in a trucker’s rearview mirror, he thought he was leaving an unspeakable nightmare behind forever. Now, years later, the bright new future he’s built suddenly turns pitch black, as something fiendishly familiar looms dead ahead. Surviving a violent car crash seems like a miracle for Jack’s family, but Jack knows there’s nothing divine about it.

Recently widowed and rendered penniless by her Ponzi-scheming husband, Julia Bishop is eager to start anew. So when a stranger appears on her doorstep with a job offer, she finds herself accepting the mysterious yet unique position: caretaker to his mother, Amaris Sinclair, the famous and rather eccentric horror novelist whom Julia has always admired...and who the world believes is dead.

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.