Lovecraft -- The Shuttered Room / August w. Derleth -- The Round Tower / Robert M. Price -- The Devil's Hop Yard / Richard A. Lupoff -- The Road to Dunwich / Ben Indick -- The Tree-House / W.H. Pugmire and Robert M. Price -- You Can't Take It With You / C.J. Henderson -- Wilbur Whateley Waiting / Robert M. Price.

    Originally published with Current 93's 1997 album of the same name.

    

    I had a three-day notice to pay rent or quit. The ad was the answer to my problem. Someone needed a party hostess for 24 hours on a private island. With my catering experience and model looks, I could get the gig. But when I set eyes on the man about to fly me to the island, I realized I might have made a mistake. The tall, older, arrogant stranger didn’t just undress me with his eyes, he used me right there on the pavement. Deviant desires seemed to radiate from him. He pulled a black leather dog collar out of his pocket. “Wait. You have to sign this before we do anything. Read it.” He handed me a contract. The wind swept a bottle down the runway and blew my skirt up. It was hard to read with his dark eyes looking right through my underwear and into my secret places. “This is a mistake. I didn’t know the ad meant —.” “You thought you were going to serve canapes on a tray?” He chuckled. “No, Brittani. You’re the main course.” His eyes worked me over again. “And you’re perfect.” He handed me a pen that probably cost more than my laptop. “Just sign at the bottom of the page. Full disclosure, full consent. That’s the way I do business.” “Can I leave?” “Of course you can leave. If you leave now. But you don’t get paid if you leave. Once we get to the island, you’re ours for 24-hours.” He tapped the contract with his long finger. “When your service is over, I transfer $10,000 to your account and send you home.” “$10,000?” I choked on it. That was more than generous. I scanned the contract again. It had long, dense paragraphs of disclaimers and waivers but not much in the way of details. “I’ll be — okay — when it’s over?” “You’ll be okay.” He smiled. I liked his smile. I needed the money. I signed. He put the collar around my neck and buckled it. If you like dark short erotica, kinky alpha billionaires — and no-entrances-barred hard-and-unprotected group interracial action with a white woman at the center, you'll love Q. Zayne's creamy story about Brittani’s scary-hot visit to The Billionaire’s Club. Click Buy and get the adventure! All characters are 18+ and readers should be, too, due to language and sexual content. If you're over 21, enjoy the dash of interracial BMWW romance sparked amid all the juicy action. :)

    That's what Harriet and Arthur Bloomsbury think, but that comforting feeling is a fiction. Hiding among the stone walls, picturesque barns, and hay bales is a horror they can't imagine. It's deadly, impossible -- maybe even paranormal. This short story isn’t your average murder mystery, because this time, the threat isn’t quite so clear. Is it the serial killers hunting you? Your own paranoia? Or the very laws of nature? The suspense is free.

    They have created the Domains and there they plan to reside forever. Except, the nightmares of reality have followed them into their new quantum dimension and those nightmares threaten to destroy it all! Now it is up to one of them to help navigate the quantum platform known as EverRealm, a fantasy MMORPG of epic proportions, in order to complete a quest he neither wants to complete nor knows how. With the help of his friends, and a lot of luck, he will have to face trials and tribulations like he's never faced as a player! Because now it is no longer a matter of Game Over, but of life or death! Can he survive it all and come out a winner? The only way he'll know is if he plays the game to the bitter end!

    P. Lovecraft, Tsathoggua was exactly that. They found the Saturnian-Hyperborean-N'klaian toad-bat-sloth-deity as cute and adorable as horrific, and this strange ambivalence echoes throughout their various tales over which Great Tsathoggua casts his batrachian shadow Some are droll fables of human foibles; others are terrifying adventures of human delvers who perish in the fire of a religious fanaticism fully as awful as its super-sub-human object of worship. Tsathoggua has inspired many types of stories in many moods. And not just by Smith and Lovecraft In this arcane volume you will read Tsathogguan tales old and new by various writers, chronicling the horrors of the amorphous amphibian's descent into new decades and deeper waters. The mere fact that such a thing is possible attests mightily the power of the modern myth of Tsathoggua, and the men who created him This book is part of an expanding collection of Cthulhu Mythos horror fiction and related topics. Call of Cthulhu fiction focuses on single entities, concepts, or authors significant to readers and fans of H.P. Lovecraft.Contents and authors in order --From the Parchment of Pnom (Clark Ashton Smith)The Seven Geases (Clark Ashton Smith)The Testament of Athammaus (Clark Ashton Smith)The Tale of Satampra Zeiros (Clark Ashton Smith)The Theft of the Thirty-Nine Girdles (Clark Ashton Smith)Shadow of the Sleeping God (James Ambuehl)The Curse of the Toad (Loay Hall and Terry Dale)Dark Swamp (James Anderson)The Old One (John Glasby)The Oracle of Sadoqua (Ron Hilger)The Horror Show (Gary Myers)The Tale of Toad Loop (Stanley C. Sargent)The Crawling Kingdom (Rod Heather)The Resurrection of Kzadool-Ra (Henry J. Vester III)

    P. Lovecraft, The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky examines life in a South American dictatorship. Centered on the journal of a poet-in-exile and his failed attempts at translating a maddening text, it is told by a young woman trying to come to grips with a country that nearly devoured itself.In My Heart Struck Sorrow, a librarian discovers a recording from the Deep South—which may be the musical stylings of the Devil himself.Breathtaking and haunting, A Lush and Seething Hell is a terrifying and exhilarating journey into the darkness, an odyssey into the deepest reaches of ourselves that compels us to confront secrets best left hidden.

    1."Introduction"2."The Return of Hastur"3."The Whipporwills in the Hills"4."Something in Wood"5."The Sandwin Compact"6."The House in the Valley"7."The Seal of R'lyeh"Cover Illustration: Bruce Pennington

    Following on from the success of his thriller, Ex Machina, Alex Garland returns to cerebral sci-fi with his adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer's cult novel -a tale of a biologist attempting to uncover the mystery of her husband's disappearance into a restricted zone.What she and her fellow scientists discover is a world populated by mysterious life forms that might offer answers, but which exposes them to madness and death.Beside the screenplay, the book also includes 20 pages of behind-the-scenes photos.

    Bram Stoker Award-winner Sara Tantlinger delivers her CRADLELAND OF PARASITES, a harrowing and darkly gorgeous collection of poetry chronicling the death and devastation of one of history's greatest horrors: The Black Plague.

    When one of her most gifted students elopes with a dreamer from the waking world, Vellitt must retrieve her.But the journey sends her on a quest across the Dreamlands and into her own mysterious past, where some secrets were never meant to surface.

     Knots is a collection of poetry and prose about love and heartbreak, tragedy and grief, survival and loss. It's a journey through the numerous knots that we tie in life, and the ones we tangle and untangle with. It explores the realities of mental illness & suicide, social taboos & violence against women, pain & darkness, self love & healing in all its naked glory. The rhythm of Knots resonates directly with the poet's heart, conveying to the readers that there is a way to untangle every knot in life, but sometimes, some of these knots are what we are made of. Foreword by Dr. Santosh Bakaya

    P. Lovecraft wrote “The Call of Cthulhu” in 1926, initiating the Cthulhu Mythos, one of the most widely imitated shared-world universes in weird fiction. Even in his lifetime, many other writers added to the Mythos, and after his death hundreds if not thousands of authors of weird, fantasy, and science fiction have added their distinctive elaborations on Lovecraft’s basic themes and ideas. This volume features some of the best Cthulhu Mythos writing over the past century. Beginning with such rare but classic stories as Mearle Prout’s “The House of the Worm” and Robert Barbour Johnson’s “Far Below,” from the pages of Weird Tales, the anthology moves on to James Wade’s novella “The Deep Ones” and Ramsey Campbell’s refreshing riff on the “forbidden book” motif, “The Franklyn Paragraphs.” Acclaimed stories by T. E. D. Klein, Thomas Ligotti, Neil Gaiman, and W. H. Pugmire are also included. The book includes an array of original stories by such leading authors of Lovecraftian fiction as Caitlín R. Kiernan, Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., Donald Tyson, Cody Goodfellow, and Michael Shea. Gemma Files contributes a richly textured novella, while Jonathan Thomas offers a story full of his distinctive melding of horror and satire. A Mountain Walked is chock-full of stories old and new that highlight the endless variations that can be played on H. P. Lovecraft’s signature creation. S. T. Joshi is the leading authority on H. P. Lovecraft. He is the author of I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft and the editor of the Black Wings series of Lovecraftian fiction. He edits the Lovecraft Annual and the Weird Fiction Review.

    P. Lovecraft—the master of modern horror fiction. Part of the Oxford People series, this book dares you to explore the hidden secrets of your own imagination through the life of a man whose writing was inspired by nightmares. H. P. Lovecraft was virtually unknown during his lifetime and only published his stories in pulp magazines such as Weird Tales and Astounding Stories. He died a recluse in poverty and obscurity, aged just 46. Consumed with self-doubt, despair, and monstrous inner demons, his nightmares inhabit every page of his writing. H. P. Lovecraft and the universe he created are part of an astonishing cultural phenomenon. Lovecraft's reputation has been revived to the point of reverence, and he now occupies a position of great respect within American literature—as one of the most significant horror fiction writers of the twentieth century. His dark grotesque creations have inspired authors such as Stephen King and Clive Barker, as well as film directors John Carpenter, Sturart Gordon, and Roger Corman. Dark forbidden knowledge is always a central theme in Lovecraft's stories, with protagonists who dare to discover hidden secrets which, in the end, completely destroy them.Explore the depths of H. P. Lovecraft's own dark secrets, and discover some things about your own.