This collection of classic and newly reprinted stories provides readers with more of her unsettling, dark tales, including the "The Possibility of Evil" and "The Summer People." In these deliciously dark stories, the daily commute turns into a nightmarish game of hide and seek, the loving wife hides homicidal thoughts and the concerned citizen might just be an infamous serial killer. In the haunting world of Shirley Jackson, nothing is as it seems and nowhere is safe, from the city streets to the crumbling country pile, and from the small-town apartment to the dark, dark woods. There's something sinister in suburbia.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

    We move from the mysteries of Egypt and the strange powers granted by The Ring of Thoth to the isolated ghost-lands of the Arctic in The Captain of the Polestar, we encounter a monstrous creature in The Terror of Blue John Cap and the beings that live above our heads in The Brazilian Cat and The Leather Funnel; and we shudder at the thing in the next room in Lot 249.Sit down in your uneasy chair and enjoy this collection of chillers.

    He had always loved a good ghost story himself, particularly at Christmas time, and was open-minded, willing to accept, and indeed put to the test, the existence of spirits.His natural inclinations toward drama and the macabre made him a brilliant teller of ghost tales, and in the twenty stories presented here, which include his celebrated A Christmas Carol, the full range of his gothic talents can be seen.Chilling as some of these stories are, Dickens has managed to inject characteristically grotesque comedy as he writes of revenge, insanity, pre-cognition and dream visions, he indulges also in some debunking of contemporary credulity.

    LovecraftActor, journalist, devotee of Celtic Christianity and the Holy Grail legend, Welshman Arthur Machen is considered one of the fathers of weird fiction, a master of mayhem whose work has drawn comparisons to H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe. Readers will find the perfect introduction to his style in this new collection. With the title story, an exercise in the bizarre that leaves the reader disoriented virtually from the first page, Machen turns even fundamental truths upside down. "There have been those who have sounded the very depths of sin," explains the character Ambrose, "who all their lives have never done an 'ill deed.'"

    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)

    In his first collection, North American Lake Monsters, Nathan Ballingrud carved out a distinctly singular place in American fiction with his “piercing and merciless” (Toronto Globe and Mail) portrayals of the monsters that haunt our lives—both real and imagined: “What Nathan Ballingrud does in North American Lake Monsters is to reinvigorate the horror tradition” (Los Angeles Review of Books). Now, in Wounds, Ballingrud follows up with an even more confounding, strange, and utterly entrancing collection of six stories, including one new novella. From the eerie dread descending upon a New Orleans dive bartender after a cell phone is left behind in a rollicking bar fight in “The Visible Filth” to the search for the map of hell in “The Butcher’s Table,” Ballingrud’s beautifully crafted stories are riveting in their quietly terrifying depictions of the murky line between the known and the unknown.

    American Supernatural Tales celebrates the richness of this tradition with chilling contributions from some of the nation’s brightest literary lights, including Poe himself, H. P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and—of course— Stephen King. By turns phantasmagoric, spectral, and demonic, this is a frighteningly good addition to Penguin Classics.

    In "The New Daughter," a father comes to suspect that a burial mound on his land hides something very ancient, and very much alive; in "The Underbury Witches," two London detectives find themselves battling a particularly female evil in a town culled of its menfolk. And finally, private detective Charlie Parker returns in the long novella "The Reflecting Eye," in which the photograph of an unknown girl turns up in the mailbox of an abandoned house once occupied by an infamous killer. This discovery forces Parker to confront the possibility that the house is not as empty as it appears, and that something has been waiting in the darkness for its chance to kill again.

    Comprised of spine-chilling tales published by Stoker’s widow after his death, as well as The Lair of the White Worm, an intensely intriguing novel of myths, legends, and unspeakable evils, this collection demonstrates the full range of Stoker’s horror writing.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

    Kevin Brockmeier's fiction has always explored the space between the fantastical and the everyday with profundity and poignancy. As in his previous books, The Ghost Variations discovers new ways of looking at who we are and what matters to us, exploring how mysterious, sad, strange, and comical it is to be alive--or, as it happens, not to be.

    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.

    Morbid, cynical, eerie, they take you to a twilight region of flesh and spirit — and into the darkest recesses of the human mind. These are unusual constructions of terror and grim irony, reminiscent of Poe, the Gothic novel, and the Romantic short story, but having the unmistakable individual stamp of a man who knew first-hand something of the fears and specters which haunt men.In this volume you will come across a number of old favorites: "An Inhabitant of Carcosa," "The Eyes of the Panther," "The Death of Halpin Frayser," "An Adventure at Brownville," and such classics as "The Middle Toe of the Right Foot," "The Damned Thing," and "Moonlit Road," a minor masterpiece in which events of the story are told from three different points of view, including that of the victim as spoken through a medium. You will also find some less familiar, but equally fascinating stories and pieces not available elsewhere, including "Visions of the Night," in which Bierce gives us a rationale for his "reverse holiness" and the surrealistic morality that permeates these writings. Bierce's characters — possessed poets, shabby aristocrats, grimy professional men, revived corpses, haunted malefactors — live in a spare, perverse world. Patricide, the revenge of the dead, inexplicable disappearances, dreadful ironies, hypnotism and second sight, and the like, form much of the substance of these unsettling tales.

    A gripping, chilling collection of 47 stories and six poems, dating back to Shelley and Stevenson, but also including modern masters.

    Lovecraft from 1917-1935. Excludes collaborations.The eBook’s table of contents is listed below. It includes the year each story was written.The Tomb (1917)Dagon (1917)Polaris (1918)Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1919)Memory (1919)Old Bugs (1919)The Transition of Juan Romero (1919)The White Ship (1919)The Doom That Came to Sarnath (1919)The Statement of Randolph Carter (1919)The Terrible Old Man (1920)The Tree (1920)The Cats of Ulthar (1920)The Temple (1920)Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family (1920)The Street (1920)Celephaïs (1920)From Beyond (1920)Nyarlathotep (1920)The Picture in the House (1920)Ex Oblivione (1921)The Nameless City (1921)The Quest of Iranon (1921)The Moon-Bog (1921)The Outsider (1921)The Other Gods (1921)The Music of Erich Zann (1921)Herbert West — Reanimator (1922)Hypnos (1922)What the Moon Brings (1922)Azathoth (1922)The Hound (1922)The Lurking Fear (1922)The Rats in the Walls (1923)The Unnamable (1923)The Festival (1923)The Shunned House (1924)The Horror at Red Hook (1925)He (1925)In the Vault (1925)The Descendant (1926)Cool Air (1926)The Call of Cthulhu (1926)Pickman’s Model (1926)The Silver Key (1926)The Strange High House in the Mist (1926)The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1927)The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927)The Colour Out of Space (1927)The Very Old Folk (1927)The Thing in the Moonlight (1927)The History of the Necronomicon (1927)Ibid (1928)The Dunwich Horror (1928)The Whisperer in Darkness (1930)At the Mountains of Madness (1931)The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1931)The Dreams in the Witch House (1932)The Thing on the Doorstep (1933)The Evil Clergyman (1933)The Book (1933)The Shadow out of Time (1934)The Haunter of the Dark (1935)

    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.