Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper


J.L. Bryan - 2014
    Part detective, part paranormal exterminator, Ellie operates out of Savannah, Georgia, the most haunted city in the United States.When a family contacts her to deal with a disturbing presence in the old mansion they’ve recently purchased, Ellie first believes it to be a typical, by-the-book specter, a residual haunting by a restless spirit. Instead, she finds herself confronting an evil older and more powerful than she’d ever expected, rooted in the house’s long and sordid history of luxury, sin, and murder. The dangerous entity seems particularly interested in her clients’ ten-year-old daughter.Soon her own life is in danger, and Ellie must find a way to exorcise the darkness of the house before it can kill her, her clients, or their frightened young child.

Outpost


Joe Hart - 2012
    A remote fishing trip in the Canadian wilderness promises relaxation and fun for four friends.But after catching a fish that should have been released on a secluded lake, the horror truly begins.And something has followed them back to the Outpost.

Hark! the Herald Angels Scream


Christopher GoldenJames A. Moore - 2018
    Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol is filled with scenes that are unsettling. Marley untying the bandage that holds his jaws together. The hideous children--Want and Ignorance--beneath the robe of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. The heavy ledgers Marley drags by his chains. In the finest versions of this story, the best parts are the terrifying parts. Bestselling author and editor Christopher Golden shares his love for Christmas horror stories with this anthology of all-new short fiction from some of the most talented and original writers of horror today.Absinthe & angels by Kelley Armstrong --Christmas in Barcelona by Scott Smith --Fresh as the new-fallen snow by Seanan McGuire --Love me by Thomas E. Sniegoski --Not just for Christmas by Sarah Lotz --Tenets by Josh Malerman --Good deeds by Jeff Strand --It's a wonderful knife by Christopher Golden --Mistletoe and holly by James A. Moore --Snake's tail by Sarah Langan --The second floor of the Christmas hotel by Joe R. Lansdale --Farrow Street by Elizabeth Hand --Doctor Velocity: a story of the fire zone by Jonathan Maberry --Yankee swap by John M. McIlveen --Honor thy mother by Angela Slatter --Home by Tim Lebbon --Hiking through by Michael Koryta --The hangman's bride by Sarah Pinborough

The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies


John Langan - 2013
    Gifted with a supple and mellifluous prose style, an imagination that can conjure up clutching terrors with seeming effortlessness, and a thorough knowledge of the rich heritage of weird fiction, Langan has already garnered his share of accolades. This new collection of nine substantial stories includes such masterworks as “Technicolor,” an ingenious riff on Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death”; “How the Day Runs Down,” a gripping tale of the undead; and “The Shallows,” a powerful tale of the Cthulhu Mythos. The capstone to the collection is a previously unpublished novella of supernatural terror, “Mother of Stone.” With an introduction by Jeffrey Ford and an afterword by Laird Barron.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Reading Langan, by Jeffrey FordKidsHow the Day Runs DownTechnicolor The Wide, Carnivorous SkyCity of the DogThe ShallowsThe Revel June, 1987. Hitchhiking. Mr. Norris. Mother of Stone Story Notes Afterword: Note Found in a Glenfiddich Bottle, by Laird BarronAcknowledgments

Scraping the Bone: Ten Dark Tales


William Malmborg - 2011
    Now, in SCRAPING THE BONE: TEN DARK TALES, William Malmborg wants to show you worlds where everyday decisions can lead to unimaginable nightmares, good intentions can have torturous consequences, and digging into the locked-away parts of the mind can uncover horrors that are best left buried. So, don’t resist, take his hand, hold it tight, and embrace the journey into the darkest, most disturbing areas of humanity.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories


Washington Irving - 1810
    In two sketches, he experiments with tales transplanted from Europe, thereby creating the first classic American short stories, Rip Van Winkle, and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Based on Irving's final revision of his most popular work, this new edition includes comprehensive explanatory notes of The Sketch-Book's sources for the modern reader.

Shadows on the Highway


C.S. Valentine - 2016
    This collection of delightfully twisted, supernatural short stories will captivate your imagination and entertain your darker side. A monster with a love of bakery, an old woman living in fear with her ex-con nephew, a widow with only one chance left, and a demon with a dark and powerful heart, are some of the characters wrestling with their darker selves in this enjoyable collection.

Sliced and Diced


Joan De La Haye - 2017
    All are sure to provide thrills and chills but are best read with the lights on.

Thirteen Chairs


Dave Shelton - 2013
    They argue, they laugh, and they tell their stories. Some tell their own stories, some tell stories they have heard elsewhere. Some of them are true, some are not. But each tale draws you closer.One by one, the storytellers depart, until suddenly it's just you and the narrator, alone in the dark...

The Haunting Season: Ghostly Tales for Long Winter Nights


Bridget Collins - 2021
    . .Featuring new and original tales from:Bridget CollinsSunday Times bestselling author of The BindingImogen Hermes GowarSunday Times bestselling author of The Mermaid and Mrs HancockKiran Millwood HargraveSunday Times bestselling author of The MerciesAndrew Michael HurleySunday Times bestselling author of The LoneyJess KiddInternational award-winning author of Things in JarsElizabeth MacnealSunday Times bestselling author of The Doll FactoryNatasha PulleySunday Times bestselling author of The Watchmaker of Filigree StreetLaura PurcellAward-winning author of The Silent Companions

American Supernatural Tales


S.T. JoshiHenry James - 2007
    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.

Asylum - 13 Tales of Terror


Matt Drabble - 2013
    None more so than that of its founding father Horace Whisker.Martin Parcell is an ex-journalist with shattered dreams of an author’s career. Sidelined through a car crash’s injuries, he finds himself forced through governmental austerity measures having to take a custodians position at a private mental health hospital. A writer with undoubted talent, but an author without a story.He begins his new job deep in depression and drowning under waves of his lost dreams. On his first night he meets Jimmy, his elderly supervisor who has spent most of his life within the hospital walls. Jimmy is nearing retirement age and desperate to rest his weary bones. Jimmy offers Martin a way out for both of them, access to the background histories and stories of the hospital’s patients. A collection of 13 tales from the darkly disturbed minds of the residents of Blackwater Heights.As the long night unwinds, Martin finds himself deeply troubled as the tales unfold before him and threaten to drag him down into their insanity.

Don’t Turn Out the Lights: A Tribute to Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark


Jonathan Maberry - 2020
    Stine and Madeleine Roux, this middle grade horror anthology, curated by New York Times bestselling author and master of macabre Jonathan Maberry, is a chilling tribute to Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.Flesh-hungry ogres? Brains full of spiders? Haunted houses you can’t escape? This collection of 35 terrifying stories from the Horror Writers Association has it all, including ghastly illustrations from Iris Compiet that will absolutely chill readers to the bone.So turn off your lamps, click on your flashlights, and prepare—if you dare—to be utterly spooked!The complete list of writers: Linda D. Addison, Courtney Alameda, Jonathan Auxier, Gary A. Braunbeck, Z Brewer, Aric Cushing, John Dixon, Tananarive Due, Jamie Ford, Kami Garcia, Christopher Golden, Tonya Hurley, Catherine Jordan, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Alethea Kontis, N.R. Lambert, Laurent Linn, Amy Lukavics, Barry Lyga, D.J. MacHale, Josh Malerman, James A. Moore, Michael Northrop, Micol Ostow, Joanna Parypinksi, Brendan Reichs, Madeleine Roux, R.L. Stine, Margaret Stohl, Gaby Triana, Luis Alberto Urrea, Rosario Urrea, Kim Ventrella, Sheri White, T.J. Wooldridge, Brenna Yovanoff

Stay Awake


Dan Chaon - 2012
    Now, in Stay Awake, Chaon returns to that form for the first time since his masterly Among the Missing, a finalist for the National Book Award.In these haunting, suspenseful stories, lost, fragile, searching characters wander between ordinary life and a psychological shadowland. They have experienced intense love or loss, grief or loneliness, displacement or disconnection—and find themselves in unexpected, dire, and sometimes unfathomable situations.A father’s life is upended by his son’s night terrors—and disturbing memories of the first wife and child he abandoned; a foster child receives a call from the past and begins to remember his birth mother, whose actions were unthinkable; a divorced woman experiences her own dark version of “empty-nest syndrome”; a young widower is unnerved by the sudden, inexplicable appearances of messages and notes—on dollar bills, inside a magazine, stapled to the side of a tree; and a college dropout begins to suspect that there’s something off, something sinister, in his late parents’ house.Dan Chaon’s stories feature scattered families, unfulfilled dreamers, anxious souls. They exist in a twilight realm—in a place by the window late at night when the streets are empty and the world appears to be quiet. But you are up, unable to sleep. So you stay awake.

The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories


Kevin Brockmeier - 2021
    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.