Book picks similar to
The Caller of the Black by Brian Lumley
horror
arkham-house
terror
fiction
In the Court of the Yellow King
Glynn Owen BarrassChristine Morgan - 2014
or to transport you into the bizarre world of Carcosa, and the King in Yellow. Banned, burned, yet never totally destroyed, the play lives on, eating away the fabric of society and rotting the veneer of civilization...Come and enjoy new visions of the King, expanding and deepening the fragments glimpsed in the award-winning True Detective television series, penned for your delight by a host of master scribes eager to guide you to a new world of delirium, despair, and madness.
The Nameless Dark: A Collection
T.E. Grau - 2015
Within these pages, you’ll find whispers of the familiar ghosts of the classic pulps - Lovecraft, Bradbury, Smith - blended with Grau’s uniquely macabre, witty storytelling, securing his place at the table amid this current Renaissance of literary horror.
Occultation and Other Stories
Laird Barron - 2010
P. Lovecraft, Peter Straub, and Thomas Ligotti. His stories have garnered critical acclaim and have been reprinted in numerous year’s best anthologies and nominated for multiple awards, including the Crawford, International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy awards. His debut collection, The Imago Sequence and Other Stories, was the inaugural winner of the Shirley Jackson Award.He returns with his second collection, Occultation. Pitting ordinary men and women against a carnivorous, chaotic cosmos, Occultation’s nine tales of terror (two published here for the first time) were nominated for just as many Shirley Jackson awards, winning for the novella “Mysterium Tremendum” and the collection as a whole. Occultation brings more of the spine-chillingly sublime cosmic horror Laird Barron’s fans have come to expect. Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.
Your Favorite Band Cannot Save You
Scotto Moore - 2016
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.
The Great God Pan
Arthur Machen - 1890
A version of the story was published in the magazine Whirlwind in 1890, and Machen revised and extended it for its book publication (together with another story, "The Inmost Light") in 1894. On publication it was widely denounced by the press as degenerate and horrific because of its decadent style and sexual content, although it has since garnered a reputation as a classic of horror. Machen’s story was only one of many at the time to focus on Pan as a useful symbol for the power of nature and paganism. The title was taken from the poem "A Musical Instrument" published in 1862 by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in which the first line of every stanza ends "... the great god Pan.
Black Spirits and White: A Book of Ghost Stories
Ralph Adams Cram - 1895
Gruesome apparitions, oppressive atmosphere, and throughout it all, a profound appreciation for the haunting beauty of Europe through the eyes of an American architect.This collection of six tales of the supernatural is an American fantasy cornerstone. "... foremost for horror fans is a small collection BLACK SPIRITS & WHITE ... hailed as one of the most extraordinary volumes of terror tales published. It includes his best-known story of a frightening journey through 'The Dead Valley,' which Lovecraft [in Supernatural Horror in Literature] singled out for praise." - Ashley, Who's Who in Horror and Fantasy Fiction, p. 58. "Excellent local color; transitional between the Victorian personal ghost story and the Edwardian interest in supernatural evil." - Bleiler, The Guide to Supernatural Fiction 442. "No. 252 Rue M. le Prince" is one of the very best haunted house stories. Barron (ed), Horror Literature 2-16.- No. 252 Rue M. Le Prince, - In Kropfsberg Keep, - The White Villa, - Sister Maddelena, - Notre Dame des Eaux, - The Dead Valley, - Postscript.
Greener Pastures
Michael Wehunt - 2016
Where nature rubs against small towns, in mountains and woods and bedrooms, here is strangeness seen through a poet’s eye.They say there are always greener pastures. These stories consider the cost of that promise.
The Wind in the Rosebush and Other Stories of the Supernatural
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman - 1903
When the supernatural caught her interest, the result was a group of short stories which combined domestic realism with supernaturalism and these have proved very influential. Her best known work was written in the 1880s and 1890s while she lived in Randolph. She produced more than two dozen volumes of published short stories and novels.Her stories deal mostly with New England life and are among the best of their kind.
The Cthulhu Child
David Brian - 2013
Nevertheless, it is often whispered by those who claim knowledge of such things, that a number of these Elder Gods - the lower rank and file, if you will - decided to hold this ground, so enamored were they by the cults who spilled blood in their names.Those times are all but forgotten, obscured by the shifting mists of history.Fast forward to today, and a wrong turn on a country lane is about to expose Jennifer Bueller, and her daughter Megan, to an unpleasant truth: Yes, times have changed, but ancient deities will adapt in order to thrive.Abandoned space gods, an unfaithful husband, a sociopath rapist, and a broken society with a social welfare system that presents horrors of its own; lastly, though by no means least in this eclectic collection of stories, a flash fiction homage to James Herbert, featuring his most infamous creation.
The Trail of Cthulhu
August Derleth - 1962
Lovecraft. In a comprehensive fusion of Lovecraft's fearful myth-pattern, Dr. Laban Shrewsbury pursues his arcane investigations into the unspeakable secrets of the Ancient Ones to the drowned city of R'lyeh, where the ancient god Cthulhu waits dreaming.
The Bazaar of Bad Dreams
Stephen King - 2015
Henry Prize winner Stephen King delivers a generous collection of stories, several of them brand-new, featuring revelatory autobiographical comments on when, why, and how he came to write (or rewrite) each story.Since his first collection, Nightshift, published thirty-five years ago, Stephen King has dazzled readers with his genius as a writer of short fiction. In this new collection he assembles, for the first time, recent stories that have never been published in a book. He introduces each with a passage about its origins or his motivations for writing it.There are thrilling connections between stories; themes of morality, the afterlife, guilt, what we would do differently if we could see into the future or correct the mistakes of the past. “Afterlife” is about a man who died of colon cancer and keeps reliving the same life, repeating his mistakes over and over again. Several stories feature characters at the end of life, revisiting their crimes and misdemeanors. Other stories address what happens when someone discovers that he has supernatural powers—the columnist who kills people by writing their obituaries in “Obits;” the old judge in “The Dune” who, as a boy, canoed to a deserted island and saw names written in the sand, the names of people who then died in freak accidents. In “Morality,” King looks at how a marriage and two lives fall apart after the wife and husband enter into what seems, at first, a devil’s pact they can win.Magnificent, eerie, utterly compelling, these stories comprise one of King’s finest gifts to his constant reader—“I made them especially for you,” says King. “Feel free to examine them, but please be careful. The best of them have teeth.”
New Tales of the Yellow Sign
Robin D. Laws - 2012
A slim, sinister text called The King in Yellow drove those who read it to madness. Despite suppression by anxious authorities, it spread through global culture, and history itself, like a virus. Now the contagion bears hideous fruit.New Tales of the Yellow Sign expands the classic horror mythos of weird tales pioneer and Lovecraft precursor Robert W. Chambers into new vistas of unease and imagination. Over the course of eight troubling stories, writer and visionary game designer Robin D. Laws lures you into diseased timelines, impossible pasts, and the all-too-terrifying present.Sterilize your suicide chamber, harken to the remorseless clicking of your black box, and whistle for the monstrous creature that lives in your basement. The pallid mask awaits.
The Ballad of Black Tom
Victor LaValle - 2016
He knows what magic a suit can cast, the invisibility a guitar case can provide, and the curse written on his skin that attracts the eye of wealthy white folks and their cops. But when he delivers an occult tome to a reclusive sorceress in the heart of Queens, Tom opens a door to a deeper realm of magic, and earns the attention of things best left sleeping.A storm that might swallow the world is building in Brooklyn. Will Black Tom live to see it break?
Poe's Children: The New Horror
Peter StraubM. Rickert - 2008
Showcasing this cutting-edge talent, Poe’s Children now brings the best of the genre’s stories to a wider audience. Featuring tales from such writers as Neil Gaiman and Jonathan Carroll, Poe’s Children is Peter Straub’s tribute to the imaginative power of storytelling. Each previously published story has been selected by Straub to represent what he thinks is the most interesting development in our literature during the last two decades.Selections range from the early Stephen King psychological thriller “The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet,” in which an editor confronts an author’s belief that his typewriter is inhabited by supernatural creatures, to “The Man on the Ceiling,” Melanie and Steve Rasnic Tem’s award-winning surreal tale of night terrors, woven with daylight fears that haunt a family. Other selections include National Book Award finalist Dan Chaon’s “The Bees”; Peter Straub’s “Little Red’s Tango,” the legend of a music aficionado whose past is as mysterious as the ghostly visitors to his Manhattan apartment; Elizabeth Hand’s visionary and shocking “Cleopatra Brimstone”; Thomas Ligotti’s brilliant, mind-stretching “Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story”; and “Body,” Brian Evenson’s disturbing twist on correctional facilities.Crossing boundaries and packed with imaginative chills, Poe’s Children bears all the telltale signs of fearless, addictive fiction.
20th Century Ghosts
Joe Hill - 2005
She kisses like a movie star and knows everything about every film ever made. She's also dead and waiting in the Rosebud Theater for Alec Sheldon one afternoon in 1945.... Arthur Roth is a lonely kid with big ideas and a gift for attracting abuse. It isn't easy to make friends when you're the only inflatable boy in town.... Francis is unhappy. Francis was human once, but that was then. Now he's an eight-foot-tall locust and everyone in Calliphora will tremble when they hear him sing....John Finney is locked in a basement that's stained with the blood of half a dozen other murdered children. In the cellar with him is an antique telephone, long since disconnected, but which rings at night with calls from the dead....The past isn't dead. It isn't even past...