Morlan, Robert Silverberg, Michael Swanwick, Jane Yolen, and many others. Supplementing the stories are the editors' invaluable overviews of the year in fantastic fiction, Edward Bryant's witty roundup of the year's fantasy films, and a long list of Honorable Mentions-all of which adds up to an invaluable reference source, and a font of fabulous reading.

    A gasp of pleasure. The exquisite danger of nakedness...In Little Deaths some of the most gifted writers inside and outside the horror genre have come together to peer into this realm of desire and dread, love and violence, tenderness and shame in a stunning collection that takes its title from the French phrase for orgasm: le petit mort.The lady of situations / Stephen Dedman --Hungry skin / Lucy Taylor --Becky lives / Harry Crews --The swing / Nicholas Royle --Lover doll / Wayne Allen Sallee --The careful geometry of love / Kathe Koja and Barry N. Malzberg --The pain barrier / Joel Lane --Ménage à trois / Richard Christian Matheson. On Amen's shore / Clive Barker --Fever blisters / Joyce Carol Oates --An outside interest / Ruth Rendell --And Salome danced / Kelley Eskridge --That old school tie / Jack Womack --Ice palace / Douglas Clegg --Serial monogamist / Pat Cadigan --Dying in Bangkok / Dan Simmons

    Four monsters collected in paperback for the first time. 'Did You Forget About Me?'"He had written to me a month or so before he died. I'd ignored the letter the same way I'd ignored all the others." When Cam Miller returns to the town he grew up in he's heading to clear his estranged father's farmhouse. He's also returning to the house he fled 23 years before. There, among the nicotine stained keepsakes and remnants of a broken life, he'll come face to face with a horror that has waited all those years for his return."It's you he wants."'Hope and Walker'"We were both 10. But he was dead. And I sat drawing him."Em Walker is just like any other 10-year-old girl growing up in the small, outback town of Hope. That is, except for the fact that her Dad runs one of the town's two funeral parlours, and the dead have just started speaking to her...When Hope is rocked by a terrible crime, Em, stubborn, scared of spiders, and with a temper that's likely to get her into trouble, will find herself thrust into the middle of a dangerous hunt for the truth."Being scared's good," Grandpa Walker had told me once. "Stops us from doing stupid things." It hadn't stopped me.'The Trade'That summer should have been filled with laughter, with slip n' slides in the yard, lazy afternoons lying watching ice cream clouds swirling through the blue sky, melting in slow motion. I watched a plane rising high above our house. From the ground it looked completely still, as if it hung suspended in the air, a model on a string. I wished I was on it, I wished I could escape. I was seven and that was the summer death stalked our home.It began with the offerings...'Knock and You Will See Me'"We buried Dad in the winter. It wasn't until the spring that we heard from him again." When grieving Ellie Ray finds a crumpled, handwritten note from her recently deceased father, hidden behind the couch, she assumes that her middle boy, Max, left it there. It has a single word written on it: WHY. But, as more and more letters begin to appear throughout the house, Ellie and her three boys will find themselves dragged into a deeply sinister mystery surrounding her father's death."Dad? I looked down at the scribbled note in my hand, at the words torn into the paper. What had started as a whisper had grown louder, more desperate. The words had been screamed onto the page. Dad? Please. What's going on?"'Bones' Four Stories. Four Monsters.

    In her debut collection of short fiction, Due takes us to Gracetown, a small Florida town that has both literal and figurative ghost; into future scenarios that seem all too real; and provides empathetic portraits of those whose lives are touched by Otherness. Featuring an award-winning novella and fifteen stories—one of which has never been published before—Ghost Summer: Stories is sure to both haunt and delight.With an Introduction by Nalo Hopkinson and an Afterword by Steven Barnes.

    a midnight caller keeping his promise ... forests where Nature is deliberate and malefic ... enchanted houses ... these are the beings and ideas that flood through this collection of ghost stories by Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951). Altogether 13 stories, gathered from the entire corpus of Blackwood's work, are included; stories of such sheer power and imagination that it is easy to see why he has been considered the foremost British supernaturalist of the twentieth century.Blackwood's ability to create an atmosphere of unrelieved horror and sustain it to the end of the story is almost unsurpassed. “The Willows” — which has been called by H.P. Lovecraft the finest supernatural story — is a typical example of Blackwood's art: slowly and surely Blackwood draws the reader into a world of shadows, nuances and unearthly terror.Blackwood was also a master at evoking feelings of mysticism and cosmic experience; dealing with such ideas as interpenetrating levels of existence and pantheistic elemental powers, he expanded the content of supernatural literature enormously. But even the more traditional elements of horror stories such as ghosts and haunted houses are handled with such energy and feeling that they rise far above their predecessors.Drawing on serious Oriental thought, modern psychology and philosophy, Algernon Blackwood introduced a sophistication to the horror story that — with a few exceptions — it was devoid of before. The results are stories that are not only guaranteed to chill, but stories that have something to say to the intelligent reader.Contents:- The Willows (1907)- Secret Worship (1908)- Ancient Sorceries (1908)- The Glamour of the Snow (1911)- The Wendigo (1910)- The Other Wing (1915)- The Transfer (1911)- Ancient Lights (1914)- The Listener (1907)- The Empty House (1906)- Accessory before the Fact (1914)- Keeping His Promise (1906)- Max Hensig (1945)

    Each track has a mysterious name and a strangely powerful effect on the band's fans.A curious music blogger decides to investigate the phenomenon up close by following Beautiful Remorse on tour across Texas and Kansas, realizing along the way that the band's lead singer, is hiding an incredible, impossible secret.

    Immersed in the history, atmosphere and rumours of hauntings, they channelled their darker imaginings into a series of extraordinary new ghost stories.Sarah Perry's intense tale of possession at the Jacobean country house Audley End is a work of psychological terror, while Andrew Michael Hurley's story brings an unforgettably shocking slant to the history of Carlisle Castle. Within the walls of these historic buildings each author has found inspiration to deliver a new interpretation of the classic ghost story.Also includes two afterwords: Andrew Martin's Within These Walls: How the Abbeys and Houses of England Inspired the Ghost Story, and Katherine Davey's A Gazetteer of English Heritage Hauntings, properties which are said to be haunted, including the eight locations which inspired the stories in this book.

    The landscape of death becomes the new frontier for scientific exploration. With remarkable deftness, Rogers draws together the disturbing and the diverting in twenty-two showcase stories that will guide you through terrain at once familiar and startlingly fresh.

    Ghostly narratives of the Edwardian era, lurid classics from the pulp heyday, and modern-day masterpieces are included in these collections.

    In “The Cemetery for Lost Faces,” two orphans translate their grief into taxidermy, artfully arresting the passage of time. The anchoring novella, “The Unfinished World,” unfurls a surprising love story between a free and adventurous young woman and a dashing filmmaker burdened by a mysterious family. Sparks’s stories—populated with sculptors, librarians, astronauts, and warriors—form a veritable cabinet of curiosities. Mythical, bizarre, and deeply moving, The Unfinished World and Other Stories heralds the arrival of a major writer and illuminates the search for a brief encounter with the extraordinary.

    Each tale offers glimpses into familiar, shadowy worlds that push the boundaries of the spirit and leave the mind haunted with the knowledge that black juice runs through us all.Contents:Earthly Uses (2004)House of the Many (2004)My Lord's Man (2004)Perpetual Light (2004)Red Nose Day (2004)Rite of Spring (2004)Singing My Sister Down (2004)Sweet Pippit (2004)Wooden Bride (2004)Yowlinin (2004)

    When originally published in 1985 by Harry Morris’s Silver Scarab Press, the book was hardly noticed. In 1989, an expanded version appeared that garnered accolades from several quarters. Writing in the Washington Post, the celebrated science fiction and fantasy author Michael Swanwick extolled: “Put this volume on the shelf right between H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe. Where it belongs.”The revisions in the present volume of Songs of a Dead Dreamer have been calculated to make its stories into enhanced incarnations of the originals. This edition is and will remain definitive.For those already familiar with the stories in Songs of a Dead Dreamer, an invitation is extended to return to them in their ultimate state. For those new to the collection, it is submitted to engage them with some of the most extraordinary tales of their kind. In either case, this publication of Songs of a Dead Dreamer offers evidence for why Ligotti has been judged to be among the most important authors in the history of supernatural horror.