The passengers are told the repairs will take till tomorrow, so... What will they do tonight? Good fortune strikes! Just down the road, there's a carnival! The passengers exit the bus: a pregnant British tart, three low-life fishermen on their way back to Florida, and various other disheartened souls hoping to find greener pastures elsewhere. But the last man off is a writer and sightseer from Rhode Island, a man named Howard Phillips Lovecraft... O'SLAUGHNASSEY'S TRAVELLING SHOW! RIDES! CONCESSIONS! ODDITIES OF NATURE! COME ONE, COME ALL! A carnival sounds like the perfect cure to a boring night, and Howard embarks with vigor. A genuine mermaid! A living cadaver! A man with three eyes! Why, there's even a girl with hands for feet! Howard knows that such "spectacles" are all too often frauds, but...what's he got better to do? What Howard doesn't realize is this: the carnival's frolicky fun will quickly degrade into a waking nightmare of unspeakable carnal depravity and sick-in-the-head violence beyond anything he could ever conceive. And when he finally flees the wretched scene... Something awaits him a thousand times worse.

    With a noir sensibility and complexity of character, the novella is a hybrid psychological thriller that's part suspense tale, part family saga, and part literate mystery.Praise for The Walls of the Castle & Tom Piccirilli"As the first entry of a planned ten in Dark Region’s Black Labyrinth imprint, it is worth noting the difference you get in these books. Namely, the cover and interior artwork by Santiago Caruso, which is to be the calling card of all of the Black Labyrinth books. I’m a nut for interior artwork anyways (just look at my ravings in the Hiram Grange reviews). It adds so much to the impact of the story when done right. But Santiago does something special here. His work is as concrete and as ethereal and the words on the page. Images that initially seem only slightly off but become more bizarre the more you consider them. Images that add to the story instead of simply replicating it. Hopefully the other books in the series are done this well." - Horror News"Kasteel is a classic Piccirilli character, a broken, grief-stricken man on a classic Piccirilli quest for redemption. In its own way, The Castle is a classic Piccirilli character as well, a mercurial entity with layers upon layers of secrets." - FEAR NET"[The Walls of the Castle] is a novella with the paramount importance of three Ls: love, life, and loss. The setting is unbelievably believable and the atmosphere is nearly tangible. The author manages to modernize the Gothic concept of a castle turning it into an outpost of death, life, desperation, help and hope." - Zulfiya Trotter"Piccirilli straddles genres with the boldness of the best writers today, blending suspense and crime fiction into tight, brutal masterpieces." - James Rollins, New York Times bestselling author of The Devil Colony"[A Choir of Ill Children is] A wonderfully wacked, disorienting, fully creepy book…The poetic nature of the prose and seriousness of intent carried the day in every scene." - Dean Koontz, New York Times bestselling author of the Odd Thomas series"Tom Piccirilli is a powerful, hard-hitting, fiercely original writer of suspense. I highly recommend him." - David Morrell, New York Times bestselling author of Creepers

    To survive it, you will have to make alliances with the sleeping demons in your blood; learn to wear new names and faces, and shed your soul; feed your inner child to the machine, before it eats you alive; build and defend your own heaven; and become one of the sacred, secret tools with which nature reinvents itself. To win this game, you will have to change into everything that you are not. To play you need only open this book and arm yourself with... Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars

    A city of gas lamps, cobblestone streets, and horse-drawn carriages—and home to the controversial surgeon Dr. Spencer Black. The son of a grave robber, young Dr. Black studies at Philadelphia’s esteemed Academy of Medicine, where he develops an unconventional hypothesis: What if the world’s most celebrated mythological beasts—mermaids, minotaurs, and satyrs—were in fact the evolutionary ancestors of humankind?  The Resurrectionist offers two extraordinary books in one. The first is a fictional biography of Dr. Spencer Black, from a childhood spent exhuming corpses through his medical training, his travels with carnivals, and the mysterious disappearance at the end of his life. The second book is Black’s magnum opus: The Codex Extinct Animalia, a Gray’s Anatomy for mythological beasts—dragons, centaurs, Pegasus, Cerberus—all rendered in meticulously detailed anatomical illustrations. You need only look at these images to realize they are the work of a madman. The Resurrectionist tells his story.

    I wanted not a tract, but a tapestry in which making is seen in the context of the other processes—sexuality, mortality—inseparable from it.""Bidart has patiently amassed as profound and original a body of work as any now being written in this country. He has given form for our age to what is most urgent and most private in the human soul: the ordeals of solitude and mortality and hunger and, recently, that action through which being speaks: the drive to make or create. Bidart’s poems sound like no one else’s; they look like no one else’s. . . . He is, in the feeling of our jury, one of the great poets of our time."—Louise Glück, jury chair, 2001 Wallace Stevens Award The Academy of American PoetsThe inaugural edition in Sarabande's Quarternote Chapbook Series which will feature a select group of poets by invitation onlyFrank Bidart's collections of poetry include Desire (1997), which received the 1998 Bobbitt Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress and the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, and was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize; In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90 (1990); The Sacrifice (1983); The Book of the Body (1977); and Golden State (1973). Among his many honors are the Lila Acheson Wallace/Reader’s Digest Fund Writer’s Award, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Shelley Award of the Poetry Society of America, and the Lannan Literary Award. He teaches at Wellesley College and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

    Originally published by Palliard Press.

    Inside this book you will find weird things indeed, not least the likes of:The fungus-riddled mannequin in the lunatic asylumThe reconstruction company that works with life and deathThe legal nightmare where the sane are guiltyA horror writing convention taken over by black magic cannibalsThe Punch and Judy show broadcast live after deathThe strange fate of the reincarnation of H.P. Lovecraft

    300 copies. (Out of print).Reality is a thin translucent membrane that separates this world from the one beyond, and that membrane bends and buckles as we thrust ourselves against it. Through the barrier we see distorted visions, the merest glimpse of which is enough to infect our minds. . . . Thirteen tales of strangeness and surrealism await the reader of this book; stories of loss, despair, and what happens when those without hope meet that which they cannot understand. Two women vacationing far away encounter the mysteries of island life. . . . A trip north of the city to woods and a lake and a sky hungry for more. . . . Snow is falling, reminding the dying of all they've lost, or the young of all they have yet to lose. . . . The other world, it awaits you in the dark, cold to the touch. Contents: 'Under the Overpass', 'The Other Village', 'The Uninvited Guest', 'A Seed on Barren Ground', 'Writing on the Wall', 'A Chorus of Yesterdays', 'The Sweetest Song', 'Pinholes in Black Muslin', 'Fading Light', 'Poor Stephanie', 'Like Falling Snow', 'Here’s to the Good Life', 'Cold to the Touch, and 'Afterword'.

    His ambitions go only as far as his next gig, until the day the earth changes. Millions vanish and a plague sweeps viciously across the globe, killing everyone infected. Three days later … they rise from the dead.Now Del and six others are all that remain. They travel city to city, looking for a safe haven while trying to rid the land of the undead. They believe they are spared for a reason, when actually they are simply forgotten. However, within their group is one individual who was not meant to be forgotten. He must be delivered to sanctuary before the undead completely consume the earth. The Special One is the key to humanity.It will take dedication and sacrifice to complete the mission. Del and the others may be forgotten, but if they succeed, the human race will never forget them.Mankind is promised life after death, it is just never explained what the ‘Resurrection’ really entails.

    There they will confront madness, murder, and the ultimate evil so that their billionaire host might find the key to life beyond the grave. But as they learn, dead souls dwell in The Pines. And death is just the beginning...

    Between the covers of this book lie worlds you’ll never want to leave, stories familiar and yet strange, and characters old, made new… Dip inside to discover today’s Princess and the Pea, the modern Hansel and Gretel, twenty-first century ghouls, monsters and more. Darkly humorous and bone-shatteringly terrifying – this collection of tales will reel you in and won't let you escape its spell…

    Two complete unabridged novels in one volume: HIDEAWAY, tells of an accident victim being miraculously resuscitated, and THE VISION is the story of a clairvoyant who can foresee murders but cannot prevent them taking place.

    For the first time in one edition, Richard Laymon's acclaimed Beast House Series: The Cellar, The Beast House, The Midnight Tour and Friday Night in Beast House.The deeper you go into the Beast House, the darker the nightmares become. If you have nerves of steel and are looking for excitement and adventure, why not take the tour? But don't even think about going into the cellar...

    It is an epic journey not only affirming that “there is a difference between sadness and suffering;” but that Schomburg is one of the most unusual poets writing today, pushing his work beyond our familiarity. These poems have a thirst for blood, but they don't yet know exactly what to do with their hands. The Book of Joshua calls out in hunger and loneliness, “I didn’t feel like living in anything not shaped like me anymore.”

    I envy those of you making your first acquaintance with this author.” – From the introduction by Matthew Carpenter Respected as one of today’s leading figures of weird fiction for his striking imagination, versatility, and deeply emotional stories, Jeffrey Thomas here offers up fourteen searing tales. Included are the haunting and surreal "Ghosts in Amber," in which a man is compelled to visit a mysterious derelict factory that harbors chilling secrets; "Jar of Mist," which focuses on a father who, in seeking to understand his daughter’s suicide, encounters a dream-like other realm; "Those Above," which imagines an alternate Victorian society controlled by vast monstrous entities from beyond; and the title novelette "The Endless Fall," which concerns an astronaut who crash-lands on an unknown forested world where time seems to work in an alien way, and where he finds he is unfortunately not alone. “With brutal elegance and chilling subtlety, Thomas pulls his readers into his dark visions immediately from every opening line.” – Paul Di Filippo, in ASIMOV’S “Jeffrey Thomas’ imagination is as twisted as it is relentless.” – F. Paul Wilson “In time he will, in this reviewer’s opinion, be listed alongside King, Barker, Koontz, and McCammon.” – Brian Keene