Best of
Weird-Fiction

2004

The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories


H.P. Lovecraft - 2004
    "The Dreams in the Witch House," gathered together here with more than twenty tales of terror, exemplifies H.P. Lovecraft's primacy among twentieth-century American horror writers.A companion volume to The Call of Cthulhu and The Thing on the Doorstep, this original Penguin Classics collection presents the definitive texts of the work, including a newly restored text of "The Shadow out of Time", along with S.T. Joshi's invaluable Introduction and Notes."Lovecraft's fiction is one of the cornerstones of modern horror . . . A unique and visionary world of wonder, terror, and delirium."- Clive Barker

On Her Majesty's Occult Service


Charles Stross - 2004
    He soon found himself working at The Laundry - a bureau so secret even the government barely knows it exists - trying to fight eldritch horrors while fending off the dreaded paper clip audits

The Wavering Knife


Brian Evenson - 2004
    Replete with the brutality, primordial waste, and savage blankness familiar to readers of his earlier works, Evenson's Kafkaesque allegories entice the mind while stubbornly disordering it. In the title story an obsessive consciousness folds back on itself, creating a vertiginous mélange of Poe and Borges, both horrific and metaphysical. Here, as in "Moran's Mexico," and "Greenhouse," the solitary nature of reading and writing leads characters beyond human limits, making the act of putting words to paper a monstrous violation opening onto madness. In "White Square" the representation of humans by dimly colored shapes confirms our feeling that something lies behind these words, while seeming to mock us with the futility of seeking it. Evenson's enigmatic names-Thurm, Bein, Hatcher, Burlun-placeable landscapes, and barren rooms all combine to create a semblance of conceptual abstraction, as though the material universe had come to exist inside someone's head.Small wonder that Evenson's work has attracted so much attention among philosophers, literary critics, and other speculative intelligences, for it continuously projects a tantalizing absence, as though there were some key or code that, if only we knew it, would illuminate everything. However, the blade of discernment wavers, and we are left to our own groping interpretations.

Ancestral Shadows: An Anthology of Ghostly Tales


Russell Kirk - 2004
    In the tradition of Defoe, Stevenson, Hawthorne, Coleridge, Poe, and other master writers, these frightful stories conjure the creaks and shadows of the very places where they came to life: haunted St. Andrews, the Isle of Eigg, Kellie Castle, Balcarres House, Durie House ("which has the most persistent of all country-house spectres"), and Kirk's own ancestral spooky house in Mecosta, Michigan.

Morbid Tales


Quentin S. Crisp - 2004
    300 copies. (Out of print).Contents: 'Foreword''The Mermaid''Far-Off Things''Cousin X''A Lake''The Two-Timer''The Tattooist''Ageless''Autumn Colours'.In these eight immaculately realised strange stories, Quentin S. Crisp delves deep into the decadence of contemporary life. The fresh originality of the tales and their settings: an English country garden in ‘Cousin X’; contemporary Japan in ‘A Lake’: is matched by the elegance of the writing. They are unified, perhaps, by a yearning for the achingly perfect, ecstatic moment. As Mark Samuels points out in his Foreword, Crisp’s fiction is ‘. . . too multi-layered, too individual, to be labelled. One can spot influences here and there, a dash of this and a sprinkling of that, but the end result is much greater than the sum of its parts.’

Delphi Complete Works of Bram Stoker (Illustrated)


Bram Stoker - 2004
    This comprehensive eBook offers readers the unique opportunity of exploring the prolific writer’s work in a manner never before possible. This is the complete FICTIONAL works of Bram Stoker, with many bonus texts for Gothic lovers to explore. Features: * complete FICTIONAL works – first time in digital print * illustrated with many images relating to Stoker’s life and works * annotated with concise introductions to the novels and other works * ALL 12 novels – even Stoker’s rare novels like THE PRIMROSE PATH and THE MYSTERY OF THE SEA – first time in digital print * BOTH versions of the Mummy novel THE JEWEL OF SEVEN STARS – compare the original grisly ending to the revised happy ending! * each novel has its own contents table * images of how the novels first appeared, giving your Kindle a taste of the Victorian texts * ALL the short story collections, with rare uncollected tales * separate chronological and alphabetical contents tables for the short stories – find that special story easily! * EVEN includes Stoker’s rare biography of Sir Henry Irving – explore their interesting lives and unique relationship * boasts a special VAMPIRE SOURCES section, with five works examining Stoker’s influences in writing DRACULA * SPECIAL BONUS texts including the first ever vampire story in English -THE VAMPYRE by Henry Colburn * also includes the mammoth Penny Dreadful novel that caused a sensation in Victorian times - VARNEY THE VAMPIRE BY JAMES MALCOLM RYMER * EVEN includes CARMILLA BY JOSEPH SHERIDAN LE FANU – the haunting female vampire novel that influenced Stoker’s work * scholarly ordering of texts into chronological order and literary genres, allowing easy navigation around Stoker’s oeuvre * UPDATED with original 40 chapter version of 'The Lair of the White Worm' Please visit www.delphiclassics.com to browse our other titles and to download our FREE eBook MASTERS OF GOTHIC HORROR The Novels The Primrose Path The Snake’s Pass The Watter’s Mou’ The Shoulder of Shasta Dracula Miss Betty The Mystery of the Sea The Jewel of Seven Stars — 1903 Version The Jewel of Seven Stars — 1912 Version The Man Lady Athlyne The Lady of the Shroud The Lair of the White Worm — 40 Chapter Version, 1911 The Lair of the White Worm — 28 Chapter Version, 1925 The Short Story Collections Under the Sunset Snow Bound: The Record of a Theatrical Touring Party Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories Uncollected Short Stories The Short Stories List of Short Stories in Chronological Order List of Short Stories in Alphabetical Order The Vampire Sources Der Vampir by Heinrich Ossenfelder The Giaour by Lord Byron The Vampyre by Henry Colburn Varney the Vampire by James Malcolm Rymer Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu The Biography Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving Visit www.delphiclassics.com for more information and our other Great Writers collections!

Charnel Wine


Richard Gavin - 2004
    SouthFragments of a Primordial GnosisThe LodgeBerenice’s JournalView from a Ghost ShipThe Tides that BindParting the VeilsHeirloomsPorcelain & Pretty LaceThe Physics of Unseen PuppeteersThe FollyForewarning: The Good Doctor’s Eternal ReturnFlowers of DeliriumThe Master’s Posthumous SermonLeavings of Shroud House: An InventoryAcolytes of the ReapingThe Churchyard ChrysalidsSoiled Throats, or, The Litany of the MaggotThe Whimper of Those Long LostFruit from the Barbarous GardenTexts

Boneland


Jeffrey Thomas - 2004
    Families go mad. Parents commit suicide. A president is assassinated.By 1918, in the bleak boneland of the 20th Century, human assassins commit atrocities and global wars are waged to sate the appetites of the Guests. John Board is a crime scene photographer, whose nightmarish images of human destruction are used as titillating entertainment. Board's future is tied in with these unseen, unfathomable forces—and so is his past. America is drowning in a sea of blood as flashbulbs click and movie cameras roll. The Guests are here to stay.Boneland is a tale of a not-so-alternate history...a story of horror, science fiction, and the surreal by Jeffrey Thomas, acclaimed author of Letters From Hades, Punktown and Monstrocity.

The Worm in Every Heart


Gemma Files - 2004
    . . From the haunted hills of Roman Britain to the sewers of occupied Warsaw... in the bloodied streets of Revolutionary Paris, and the anarchy World War II Shanghai... out of the wilds of America, India, Africa and Europe... down the long savage darkness of the centuries, monsters have fed upon us. They are shapeshifters, vampires, sorcerers and spirits--things named only in myth, and things for which we have no name. They are our demons, our reflections, our desires and our nightmares. And all too often, they are...only human. In this second collection from Gemma Files--featuring the award-winning "The Emperor's Old Bones" (winner of the 1999 International Horror Guild Award for Best Short Fiction), and five never-before-published stories--we tour the overlooked intersections between wilderness and civilization where secret dances of fear and pain are performed and hunters and hunted change roles.

Collected Essays 2: Literary Criticism


H.P. Lovecraft - 2004
    Besides his authoritative early essay on "The Literature of Rome" (1918), other works condemn free verse and simple spelling, and devote attention to neglected poets. Discovering weird fiction as his chosen field, he produced such scintillating essays as "Lord Dunsany and His Work" (1922) and "Supernatural Horror in Literature" (1927), along with essays on Frank Belknap Long and Clark Ashton Smith. Late in life Lovecraft codified his grasp of weird literature by writing such trenchant pieces as "Notes on Writing Weird Fiction" (1933) and "Some Notes on Interplanetary Fiction" (1934). One of his last writings, "Suggestions for a Reading Guide" (1936), is a comprehensive discussion of world literature. H. P. Lovecraft has belatedly received world renown as the twentieth century's premier author of supernatural fiction; but during his lifetime he wrote far more essays than stories. This edition gathers Lovecraft's complete nonfictional output for the first time, arranged in broad thematic groupings. S. T. Joshi, the world's leading authority on Lovecraft, exhaustively annotates all texts, also providing critical and bibliographical notes.

The Evolution of the Weird Tale


S.T. Joshi - 2004
    T. Joshi is one of the premier critics of supernatural fiction. His pioneering research on H. P. Lovecraft, Lord Dunsany, Ambrose Bierce, and other writers has set a standard of scholarship that few have equaled. In The Evolution of the Weird Tale--an informal follow-up to his earlier studies, The Weird Tale (1990) and The Modern Weird Tale (2001)--Joshi assesses a wide array of American and British supernatural writers of the past century or more, meticulously scrutinizing their weird work and gauging their place in the canon of horror fiction.Such American writers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries as W. C. Morrow, F. Marion Crawford, Robert W. Chambers, and Edward Lucas White come under scrutiny, as well as their British counterparts E. F. Benson, Rudyard Kipling, and L. P. Hartley. Joshi includes substantial essays on Lovecraft and his disciples Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, and Frank Belknap Long.In a provocative section on contemporary writers, Joshi dissects the vampire novels of Les Daniels, the short stories of "Twilight Zone" creator Rod Serling, David J. Schow and the school of splatterpunk, and the novels and tales of Poppy Z. Brite. All in all, Joshi has provided some of the most in-depth analyses of both classic and modern weird writers ever written.