P. Lovecraft, Peter Straub, and Thomas Ligotti. His stories have garnered critical acclaim and have been reprinted in numerous year’s best anthologies and nominated for multiple awards, including the Crawford, International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy awards. His debut collection, The Imago Sequence and Other Stories, was the inaugural winner of the Shirley Jackson Award.He returns with his second collection, Occultation. Pitting ordinary men and women against a carnivorous, chaotic cosmos, Occultation’s nine tales of terror (two published here for the first time) were nominated for just as many Shirley Jackson awards, winning for the novella “Mysterium Tremendum” and the collection as a whole. Occultation brings more of the spine-chillingly sublime cosmic horror Laird Barron’s fans have come to expect. Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.

    Pugmire, a highly regarded author of Lovecraftian fiction. Loaded with color and black and white illustrations, including many in color by famed symbolist Jean Delville, it also includes a new introduction by weird fiction scholar S. T. Joshi. Presented in a narrow format and beautifully designed, the book measures 6.5 x 11 inches. Each book is signed by Pugmire and Joshi.

    It was later voted best story in that issue by Weird Tales readers.'Passing the Narrows' is the tale of a haunted American South, an ancient evil, and a defeated yet defiant riverboat crew. The stern-wheeler Yocona has been ordered by a Federal sorceress to make a frantic run to Vicksburg via the Yazoo River, and that means passing the Narrows on a moonless night, a passage every riverboat master knows is suicide...

    Librarian Charles Milburn takes up a position as cataloguer in the Library of Miskatonic University. He becomes the keeper of the Necronomicon, an ancient book of secret lore kept in the Library’s vault.Herbert West, a medical student with a dubious reputation, requests access to the fabled book, and Charles grants it despite his misgivings. So begins a friendship that takes Charles far from the rules of cataloguing and the conventions familiar to an honest young man from a good Boston family.Herbert West can restore the dead to life, he says, and he persuades Charles to be his assistant. Their experiments, carried out in secret by night, in improvised laboratories and by stealth in the hospital attached to the university, achieve success – of a sort. Charles finds himself caught between the demands of his fascinating friend and his growing attraction to Alma Halsey, daughter of the Dean of Medicine.In 1914, as war begins in Europe, Charles is both relieved and distressed to say goodbye to West as he sails away to France to serve as a medical officer. Over the next four years, West’s letters reveal a mixture of cynicism and black humour that hint at – what? Charles doesn’t know and would rather not guess. Engrossed in cataloguing the books of an eccentric professor, he develops an interest in alchemy as a way to transform the base into the excellent.West returns from the War to a career as a surgeon utilizing techniques perfected on the maimed, dying …and dead? Lonely and self-doubting despite his professional success, Charles can’t bring himself to abandon West as his reputation grows and darkens. Rumours of illicit experiments overshadow West’s spectacular public successes, and he begins to crack under attacks from colleagues and threats from his gangster brothers. Beleaguered on all sides and under threat of investigation, West appeals to Charles for help. Charles is sympathetic until West reveals the perilous nature of his plan.Vacillating between horror and hope and haunted by West’s misdeeds, Charles must draw on his knowledge of alchemy and his tottering faith in powers beyond himself if he is to save his friend’s life. Only his conscience stands in the way.

    A being known as Diablero has miraculously reanimated the bones of Edward Teach and is moving relentlessly, day and night, through the dark forests and waterways of north-eastern North Carolina. The demon leaves a trail of headless corpses as it slowly makes its way through the swamp to a relic dealer in Williamsburg, Virginia, where it can reacquire what was lost so long ago--the skull that will make it human once again.But it doesn't stop there. Underneath an ancient church on an island in the Bahamas lies a cave with a secret as fascinating as it is terrifying, and it's Blackbeard's ultimate destination. Hunter and Lisa are joined in their fight by others who say they also seek to destroy the demon. But their true intentions may be less than honorable, and Teach is about to open the gates of Hell on an unsuspecting world.Then, there are the dreams, strange visions of things that have yet to come to pass, and other visions of unspeakable horror. Teach has to be destroyed at all costs, but how can mere humans stop the unstoppable?One man knows the answer, a shaman who has plenty of secrets of his own. And he must be found before it's too late. Not only for Hunter and Lisa, but for the entire human race."Blackbeard is fertile ground for pure evil, and Toby Tate's Diablero does the subject justice. A well-crafted read."- Steve Alten, New York Times bestselling author of The MEG series.“...an enjoyable modern day take on Blackbeard’s tale.”- HorrorNews.com

    Horrible things, usually with tentacles. Al-Hazred glimpsed them, John Dee summoned them, HP Lovecraft wrote about them, and Alan Turing mapped the paths from our universe to theirs. The right calculation can call up entities from other, older universes, or invoke their powers. Invisibility? Easy! Animating the dead? Trivial! Binding lesser demons to your will? Easily doable! Opening up the way for the Great Old Ones to come through and eat our brains? Unfortunately, much too easy. That's where the Laundry comes in - it's a branch of the British secret service, tasked to prevent hideous alien gods from wiping out all life on Earth (and more particularly, the UK). You work for the Laundry. The hours are long, the pay is sub-par, the co-workers are... interesting (in the Chinese curse sense of the word), and the bureaucracy is stifling - but you do get to wave basilisk guns and bullet wards around, and to go on challenging and exciting missions to exotic locations like quaint, legend-haunted Wigan, cursed Slough and Wolverhampton where the walls are thin. You may even get to save the world. Just make sure you get a receipt.

    For me, Joe Pulver is of the latter type. His imagination is so vile so much of the time that it makes me giggle with amazement. And the prose so deadly visionary. I'm grateful that the pieces in this collection are those of a fellow horror writer who has raised the ante on what it means to be such a creature." -- Thomas Ligotti on _Blood Will Have Its Season_ by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. The world of Joe Pulver's dreams and nightmares is a world of grim violence and death but also of strange beauty and wonder. In stories that read like poems and poems that read like incantations, Pulver weaves a sorcerer's spell of language-tough, gritty, cheerless, but always evocative, hypnotizing, intoxicating-that lays bare the fragility of human beings on the edge of the abyss, looking down at the depths and looking up at the boundless cosmos. H. P. Lovecraft, Robert W. Chambers, and other writers of terror and the supernatural are Pulver's touchstones, but his riffs on their tales are the work of a master craftsman who recognizes the emotive value of every sentence, phrase, and word. A poet in every sense of the word, Pulver sees the world and the cosmos as a cauldron of death and carnage but also a platform for triumph and redemption. In these stories, sketches, prose-poems, and vignettes, Pulver evokes the wild beauty of terror in a manner that few can match. Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. is the acclaimed author of the Lovecraftian novel _Nightmare's Disciple_, and he has written many short stories that have appeared in magazines and anthologies. His first short story collection, _Blood Will Have Its Season_ (2009), was published to wide acclaim.

    Ten years later, over seventy percent of the human population is dead and only a handful of cities survive intact. Above this, the orbital colonies spin within artificial gravity wells, impartial observers, unaffected by the horrors below. Greed and corruption are left hovering over this bleak and brutalised domain and a cosmic horror is now free to infiltrate the remote abandoned corners of the Earth. Within this mix the lives of two survivors collide: a renegade intelligence agent and a cold-blooded master of violence, shaping events with their virulent hunger for money and a desire to carve their name into this new world. David J Rodger’s trademark unforgiving rendering of harsh reality, and relentless narrative pace, are here in palm-sweating abundance, delivered in a novel that opens up a new universe of conflict, shocking truths and monstrous threats to sanity and life

    That's French for "My God! It's full of stars!" Or maybe that was 2001: A Space Odyssey. Anyway, it applies here. Each poem is a brilliant point of light on its own merit. Deborah Kolodji, who wrote the introduction, had this to say, among other things: "Wild Hunt of the Stars is a book filled with “familiar terrors tearing at our sleep” as well as “quantum tantrums” you could have never imagined. Through it all, each poem is a testament to craft, each verse a testament to the incredible depth of Ann’s imagination." This dark science fiction poetry collection includes fifty poems by Rhysling Award-winning poet Ann Schwader, with color cover and black and white interior illustrations by noted speculative artist Marge Simon.

    It was, perhaps, a more haunted time... Here you will find the corpse of a child which can foretell the future, and a stately Massachusetts house where the painting of a mourning gown haunts a bedchamber wall. Something terrible inhabits a wintry woodlot and something worse menaces a war-bound frigate. The seventeen stories within are steeped in autumn leaves, chilled in wintry wind and haunted by New England ghosts. "That's no ordinary chill in the night air. It's the result of spooky tales told by the master. Scott Thomas continues to entertain with timeless stories of the macabre." -- Jordan Rich, WBZ Radio "Thomas' stories creep under your skin, linger with you for days and follow into many deep, dark nights." -- www.fatally-yours.com Scott Thomas is an atmosphere wizard summoning up a semblance of time past in his evocation of the weird. He rises from the eerie evolution of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Lafacadio Hearn, and H.P. Lovecraft, yet his poignant stories are astonishingly original.

    Players seize on clues presented in the ten mysterious documents.They choose which leads to track down. The Keeper, using clearly broken down step-by-step techniques introduced in this volume, improvises suitably mind-blasting mysteries in response to their choices. Weave these together into an epic campaign of madness, dread and danger.Terror Between the Lines!Mystery takes on written form when pages from a disturbing manuscript fall into the investigators' hands. Can your mind correlate the awful beauty of 10 stunningly distressed handouts realized by acclaimed illustrator Sarah Wroot? A series of scrawled messages, comprising a free-floating cacophony of facts, speculations, and fevered imaginings, portends cryptic doom. Preliminary inquiries reveal that they are written in the hand of Dr. Henry Armitage, director emeritus of the Mistakonic University Library.Components of Calamity!Combine the documents with pre-prepared elements such as supporting characters (in sinister, heroic or in between versions), organizations, locations and artifacts to create your unique version of the Armitage Files. An article on improvising GUMSHOE, by Steve Dempsey, shows you how.With clear advice to players and Keepers on improvisation, extensive examples and advice, following the Trail of Cthulhu Will Never Be the Same Again!