But innocence can't last forever... The only family Ruby Landry has ever known are her loving guardian, Grandmère Catherine, a Cajun spiritual healer, and her drunken, outcast Grandpère Jack. Although thinking about her dead mother and mysterious father sometimes makes her feel as mournful as the wind sighing through the Spanish moss, Ruby is grateful for all she has. Her life is filled with hope and promise...especially when her attraction for handsome Paul Tate blossoms into a mysterious, wonderful love. But Paul's wealthy parents forbid him to associate with a poor Landry, and Grandmère urges her to follow her dream of becoming a great painter, foreseeing a time when Ruby will be surrounded with riches in the dazzling city of New Orleans! Yet she cannot know how close that uncertain future looms.... In a faded photograph, Ruby glimpses for the first time the image of her father -- and learns of a shameful deception and a shocking scheme of blackmail that now must come to light. Stunned by these revelations, she is devastated when Grandmère dies, leaving her to seek out her father in his vast New Orleans mansion. There, in a house of lies, madness, and cruel torment, Ruby clings to her memories of Paul to keep her heart alive. For only their love can save her now....

    The timeless magic of Dark Shadows continues years after the first episode was presented on ABC - TV, June 27, 1966.The Dark Shadows Companion is a special 25th anniversary celebration of the show everyone "ran home from school to watch."

    Behind a dusty Georgia carny show... In a mausoleum in Baton Rouge, or in an alley in Calcutta... Here wanderers come to rest, the lost and lonely press their bodies up against each other, the heat rises, flesh yields, bones are bared, blood spills. This is the landscape of today's most brilliant young horror writer, Poppy Z. Brite.Now, in a collection that sings like cutting edge rock 'n' roll and shows the deft touch of a master storyteller, Poppy Z. Brite weaves her unique spell of the sensual, the frightening, and the forbidden....

    These stories are explorations of the extreme in human behaviour, where the bizarre chills the spine, and few authors can match Grabinski's depiction of seething sexual frenzy. The Dark Domain will introduce to English readers one of Europe's most important authors of literary fantasy.

    Gradually he learns the violent history of the house's owner, the fierce, saturnine Heathcliff and the thwarted love that has led him to exact terrible revenge on the two families that have sought to oppose him.Since its original publication in 1847, Emily Bronte's only novel, whether repelling, captivating or intriguing different generations of readers, has never relaxed its powerful grip on the public, and the figure of the haunted, brutal Heathcliff has become part of Britain's cultural mythology.This edition also includes over sixty of Emily Bronte's poems, an introduction, notes, text summary, selected criticism and a chronology of Emily Bronte's life and times.(back cover)

    

    A powerful historical love story! Perfect for fans of Georgette Heyer, Mary Balogh, Jane Aiken Hodge and Jane Austen.Could a chance meeting lead to happily ever after…?1795, EnglandA cold and stormy March night forces two strangers to take shelter in the same inn.Benedict Beckenham is immediately captivated by Theda – a beguiling young woman who appears to be in distressed circumstances.When Theda’s new position as a companion to the wealthy but ailing Lady Merchiston throws her and Benedict together again, the attraction between them in undeniable.But Theda has been burned in love before and is wary of opening her heart.And Benedict is hiding secrets of his own. Will Theda reveal the truth about her past? Is Benedict really who he seems?And can the hidden flame of love triumph?HIDDEN FLAME is an authentic Georgian historical romance with a lively heroine at its heart.

    Part 8 of the graphic adaptation of Anne Rice's Interview With The Vampire.

    

    This is the first book in English on the seventeenth-century Chinese masterpiece Liaozhai's Records of the Strange (Liaozhai zhiyi) by Pu Songling, a collection of nearly five hundred fantastic tales and anecdotes written in Classical Chinese.

    Eckbert the Fair is a compelling study in paranoia and retribution; The Runenberg a story of the mind-destroying power of Nature. In Kleist’s The Betrothal on Santo Domingo, conflict and persecution during the slave revolt of 1803 on Haiti symbolise a world-view in which evil seems destined to prevail over good. The Earthquake in Chile, despite its brevity perhaps the most epic of all Kleist’s stories, presents an extraordinary pile-up of cataclysmic events, at the high-point of which the horror is turned on its head.E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Jesuit Chapel in G. and Don Giovanni, the latter containing a celebrated and influential interpretation of Mozart’s opera, show the conflict between art and life and the Romantic vision of the artistic vocation.This volume of new translations contains several works which, though highly characteristic of their authors, are not readily available elsewhere in English.

    BE WARY OF THEM ALL!"Shy Megan Cooper was bold enough to answer the advertisement for a secretary in a London newspaper, but no sooner had she arrived on remote Harrow Island than her courage began to falter. Lord Ambrose Hawkins ruled his fogbound domain with a stern and unsmiling demeanor; the dark secrets of his mystery-enshrouded mansion were whispered in the village and in the echoing corridors of his vast estate.Not once but many times, Megan was warned that she should leave. Then the strange occurrences began: her bedside clock, always moved to the sitting room mantel; the sound of organ music when no one was at the keyboard; then a pair of hands around her throat...and a hideous shock in the high and shadowy bell tower. Terrified now, Megan had been drawn so deeply into the web of evil intrigue that there was no one she could trust...no place she dared to hide...no way to escape the stormswept island that had become her prison!

    She must travel to the mother-kingdom Onafross and beg help from the King, her father-in-law. But to reach him she must cross The Stolen Land where The Unseen worship the demon-goddess Sudema, the Evening Star…and kill any one of Ama’s children who trespass on their domain…

    

    His close reading of the individual texts leads to illuminating intertextual parallels, drawn through an archetypal perspective, which creates coherence among the many recurring image-patterns and motifs.The haunting is an incursion into the male ego's dominion: the female demon is seen as a usurper or intruder; she inhabits and insidiously attempts to exert her influence, to feminize the male. These demands include the impelling need to acknowledge male femininity, or androgyny. Ignoring this drive, which Andriano views as instinctual and archetypal, often results in what the Romantics called nympholepsy, and what Carl Jung called anima-possession.Although the notion that men need to acknowledge their own femininity is not new, the realization that doing so involves coming to terms not only with Eros (in its widest sense) but also with Thanatos has never been sufficiently emphasized, except perhaps by the post-Jungian James Hillman, by whose work Andriano is especially influenced. This book clearly and succinctly demonstrates that fear of the inner feminine prevents a man from ever fully maturing; his anima remains that of a child (he can only view women as girls or mothers), and he never comes to know, much less to love, the dark side of his soul, his own lady of darkness.

    ....as those who will not see. And Lindsey Witherspoon, used to capturing the world with her camera, to controlling the images that met her eyes, refused to see that the swamp was beyond her control.The swamp that spread so tantalizingly beyond her door, beckoning with promises of beauty never yet captured on film, was in truth a place of darkness, a place where a woman had no business to walk alone, unprotected. Where the paths themselves seemed to shift and shiver. Where a woman who wasn't careful might find herself alone with... a man like Royce Blanchard. A man who once had warned her that his last woman had come into the swamp... and died.

    Now grown, Meredith makes the estate a home for her family. But a hidden watcher knows all the secrets--of Meredith's past, of the carousel, of the Gypsy tales that encircle Meredith's life.

    But it was on the ship bound for America to claim her legacy that she lost her heart to attorney Forrest Singleton and agreed to become his bride...Yet from the moment she first glimpsed the castle's start, forbidding facade - gazing up into windows that seemed to stare back like dark, malevolent eyes - Charlotte was gripped by feelings of unease. In the jagged lightning, the turreted towers seemed to pierce the stormy sky like an ominous omen. And her grandmother's strange assortment of friends and relations made it clear she was not welcome at Villa Montelano. Then Charlotte saw the phantom figure suspended from a tree, head the strains of a haunting aria that followed her through the cavernous halls like a ghostly refrain.

    Then she found the one man who could help her: Christian Reyeult, a rugged frontiersman whose seductive charms concealed his own dark secrets.

    The reader is invited to decide which testimony, if either, is to be relied upon. The short stories show superably the familiar Herdman preoccupations: reckless and unreliable narrators, states of mind bordering on the insane, and partially submerged complexes which erupt into the normal circumstances of life with surreal and unforgettable results.

    But the paradise of Andrew McLaren's plantation harbored dark secrets - not the least of which was whether Andrew's wife had died of natural causes.Trapped in a maze of murder and mystery, Varina turned to McLaren for protection only to discover that the handsome botanist's passionate nature offered a different kind of comfort. Although Varina wanted nothing more than Andrew's love, a near fatal accident led her to suspect that in his powerful embrace she might meet her own untimely demise.

    Each book in the series has been designed with today's young reader in mind. As the words come to life, students will develop a lasting appreciation for great literature.The humor of Mark Twain...the suspense of Edgar Allan Poe...the danger of Jack London...the sensitivity of Katherine Mansfield. Creative Short Stories has it all and will prove to be a welcome addition to any library.

    But after toiling as a governess in faraway New York for five long years, Deanna dared to return to Hunters Hall and the twin brother she missed so much. Surely the haunting ghosts of the past had been laid to rest by now. But the moment Deanna stepped off the train, she knew that coming home had been a mistake...and that her life was in deadly danger. Her brother and his wife kept their distance. A former suitor shocked her with his vicious words. Even the handsome new minister seemed to mistrust her. Then a visitor met a gruesome death in the garden...and Deanna was accused. Someone wanted her to leave Hunters Hall - and would stop at nothing to silence her - permanently!