While mediums dupe the grief-stricken, a group of local fringe scientists seeks to bridge the gap to the spirit world by investigating the dark corners of the human mind.Each running from a shadowed past, Kate, Asher, and Elsie take refuge within the walls of Summerfield College. But their peace is soon shattered by the discovery of a dead body nearby. Is this the work of a flesh-and-blood villain, or is something otherworldly at play? This unlikely trio must illuminate what the scientists have not, and open a window to secrets taken to the grave—or risk joining the spirit world themselves.

    Are their malefactions at the root of the haunting -- or is there something darker, something much more unknowable at work? (Jacketless library hardcover.)

    Editor Alan Ryan includes a wide range of talents here, from Bram Stoker to Robert Bloch to Tanith Lee.Contents:"Fragment of a Novel" by George Gordon, Lord Byron "The Vampyre" by John Polidori "Varney the Vampyre, or, the Feast of Blood" [excerpt] by James Malcolm Rymer "The Mysterious Stranger" by Anonymous"Carmilla" by Sheridan Le Fanu"Good Lady Ducayne" by Mary Elizabeth Braddon "Dracula's Guest" by Bram Stoker "Luella Miller" by Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman "For the Blood is The Life" by F. Marion Crawford "The Transfer" by Algernon Blackwood "The Room in the Tower" by E.F. Benson "An Episode of Cathedral History" by M.R. James "A Rendevous in Averoigne" by Clark Ashton Smith "Shambleau" by C.L. Moore "Revelations in Black" by Carl Jacobi "School for the Unspeakable" by Manly Wade Wellman "Drifting Snow" by August Derleth "Over the River" by P. Schuyler Miller "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes" by Fritz Leiber "The Mindworm" by C.M. Kornbluth "Drink My Blood" by Richard Matheson "Place of Meeting" by Charles Beaumont "The Living Dead" by Robert Bloch "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal" by Robert Aikman "The Werewolf and the Vampire" by R. Chetwynd-Hayes "Love-Starved" by Charles L. Grant "Cabin 33" by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro "Unicorn Tapestry" by Suzy McKee Charnas "Following the Way" by Alan Ryan "The Sunshine Club" by Ramsey Campbell "The Men & Women of Rivendale" by Steve Rasnic Tem "Bite-Me-Not, or, Fleur de Feu" by Tanith Lee Also includes short appendices of vampire novels and movies.

    In the thirteen decades since A Study in Scarlet first appeared, countless variations on that theme have been played, from Mary Russell to Greg House, from 'Basil of Baker Street' to the new BBC Holmes-in-the-internet-age.We suspect that you have in the back of your mind a story that plays a variation on the Holmes theme...And what if these great writers read that proposal and decided that yes, they did have that kind of tale in the back of their minds? The result is A Study in Sherlock, Stories Inspired by the Sherlock Holmes Canon, with stories by Alan Bradley, Tony Broadbent, Jan Burke, Lionel Chetwynd, Lee Child, Colin Cotterill, Neil Gaiman, Laura Lippman, Gayle Lynds and John Sheldon, Phillip and Jerry Margolin, Margaret Maron, Thomas Perry, S.J. Rozan, Dana Stabenow, Charles Todd, and Jacqueline Winspear.

    This is where four young friends come of age—in an atmosphere thick with fear and suspicion. Their innocent games soon bring them face-to-face with the village's darkest secrets in this eerily dispassionate, astonishingly assured novel, evocative of Stephen King's classic short story "Children of the Corn" and infused with the spirit of the Brothers Grimm.

    Novelty teeth turn predatory. Flies settle and die on an old pair of sneakers in New York, and the Nevada desert swallows a Cadillac. Meanwhile the legend of Castle Rock returns... and grows on you. What does it all mean? What else could it mean? First there was Night Shift (1978), then Skeleton Crew (1985), and now Stephen King is back with a third collection of stories - a vast, many-chambered cave of a volume, with passages leading every which way to hell... and a few to glory.The long reach of Stephen King's imagination and the no-holds-barred force of his storytelling have never been so richly demonstrated. There's something here for readers of every stripe and predilection - classic tales of the macabre and the monstrous, cutting-edge explorations of the borderlands between good and evil, brilliant pastiches of Chandler and Conan Doyle, even a teleplay and a non-fiction bonus, a heartfelt piece of Little League baseball that first appeared in The New Yorker.In story after story, several published here for the first time, he will take you to places you've never been before, places that are both dark and vividly illuminated. Fair warning: You will lose a good deal of sleep. But Stephen King, writing to beat the devil, will do your dreaming for you.Can you believe? Then come...

    She dares to fall in love.And only then do they discover the true horror of the Vallarca curse.

    Revenge comes from beyond the grave in Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Body-Snatcher,” while visions of the dead come between the living in Henry James’s “The Friends of the Friends.” P. G. Wodehouse gives us a farcical take on the haunted house in “Honeysuckle Cottage,” and in L. P. Hartley’s “W.S.,” a writer is fatally stalked by his own aggrieved creation.Here are ghosts of every stripe and intent in stories from writers as varied as Elizabeth Bowen and Jorge Luis Borges, Eudora Welty and Vladimir Nabokov, Ray Bradbury and Edith Wharton, among others. In the hands of these masters, the ghost story ranges far beyond mere horror to encompass comedy and tragedy, pathos and drama, and even a touch of poetry.

    Perchance to Dream contains a selection of Beaumont’s finest stories, including five that he later adapted for Twilight Zone episodes.Beaumont dreamed up fantasies so vast and varied they burst through the walls of whatever box might contain them. Supernatural, horror, noir, science fiction, fantasy, pulp, and more: all were equally at home in his wondrous mind. These are stories where lions stalk the plains, classic cars rove the streets, and spacecraft hover just overhead. Here roam musicians, magicians, vampires, monsters, toreros, extraterrestrials, androids, and perhaps even the Devil himself. With dizzying feats of master storytelling and joyously eccentric humor, Beaumont transformed his nightmares and reveries into impeccably crafted stories that leave themselves indelibly stamped upon the walls of the mind. In Beaumont’s hands, nothing is impossible: it all seems plausible, even likely.

    Ghost stories as we know them did not develop until the late nineteenth century, but the restless dead haunted the premodern imagination in many forms, as recorded in historical narratives, theological texts, and personal letters. The Penguin Book of the Undead teems with roving hordes of dead warriors, corpses trailed by packs of barking dogs, moaning phantoms haunting deserted ruins, evil spirits emerging from burning carcasses in the form of crows, and zombies with pestilential breath.Spanning from the Hebrew scriptures to the Roman Empire, the Scandinavian sagas to medieval Europe, the Protestant Reformation to the Renaissance, this beguiling array of accounts charts our relationship with spirits and apparitions, wraiths and demons over fifteen hundred years, showing the evolution in our thinking about the ability of dead souls to return to the realm of the living--and to warn us about what awaits us in the afterlife.

    They are drawn to the suspiciously inexpensive Cliff End, feared amongst locals as a place of disturbance and ill omen. Gradually, the Fitzgeralds learn of the mysterious deaths of Mary Meredith and another strange young woman. Together, they must unravel the mystery of Cliff End's uncanny past - and keep the troubled young Stella, who was raised in the house as a baby, from returning to the nursery where something waits to tuck her in at night... The second in Tramp's Recovered Voices series, this strange, bone-chilling story was first published in 1942, and was adapted for the screen as one of Hollywood's most successful ghost stories, The Uninvited, in 1944.

    . .In the countryside of Victorian England, Edward Atherton, rector of Thornham St. Stephen, has taken on the arduous task of restoring the ancient church. But he should never have meddled with the tomb that lay beneath the church’s crumbling walls. The moment the workman raised the tomb lid, an unspeakable horror escaped. At a loss to explain the unsettling noises and frightening visions that begin to plague the church, Atherton calls upon fellow antiquarian and Cambridge professor Richard Asquith to help investigate the strange events that began in the wake of the tomb’s disturbance.The two discover tantalizing hints of whom and what may have been laid to rest in the tomb, but the unforeseen circumstances force Asquith to give up his inquiries and leave the small village of Thornham behind. Asquith tries to put the frightening experiences behind him and focus on his new wife and family. But death and disappearances abound, and Robert Asquith soon has no choice but to confront the darkness that has followed him from that ancient church into his own home.English novelist Jonathan Aycliffe has mastered the classic English ghost story, and A Shadow on the Wall, nominated in 2000 for the International Horror Guild Award, is sure to both mesmerize and haunt you.

    Generally, very little changes in the Briardale Valley, but this year things are different. His grandfather - known to everyone as the Gaffer - has died and John's new wife, Katherine, is accompanying him for the first time.Every year, the Gaffer would redraw the boundary lines of the village, with pen and paper but also through the remembrance of folk tales, family stories and timeless communal rituals which keep the sheep safe from the Devil. This year, though, the determination of some members of the community to defend those boundary lines has strengthened, and John and Katherine must decide where their loyalties lie, and whether they are prepared to make the sacrifices necessary to join the tribe...Gripping, unsettling and beautifully written, Andrew Michael Hurley's new novel asks how much we owe to tradition, and how far we will go to belong.

    Blending the miraculous with the macabre, and leavened by a mischievous gallows humor, these bewitching tales are like nothing being written in Russia-or anywhere else in the world-today.

    . . .When Cora and her younger sister, Mimi, are sent to stay with their elderly aunt in the isolated village of Byers Guerdon, they receive a less than warm welcome. Auntie Ida is eccentric and rigid, and the girls are desperate to go back to London. But what they don't know is that their aunt's life was devastated the last time two young sisters were at Guerdon Hall, and she is determined to protect her nieces from an evil that has lain hidden for years. Along with Roger and Peter, two village boys, Cora must uncover the horrifying truth that has held Bryers Guerdon in its dark grip for centuries -- before it's too late for little Mimi. Riveting and intensely atmospheric, this stunning debut will hold readers in its spell long after the last page is turned.