Book picks similar to
Binscombe Tales: Sinister Saxon Stories by John Whitbourn
short-stories
horror
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short-stories-novellas
Beast
Anna Willett - 2020
They supplement their income by selling pics of themselves as stock photos online.The abandoned Red Water Hotel is the perfect location for a shoot. But when they enter the decrepit building, Dursha begins to feel a strange presence. Jackie dismisses her concerns and they head further in.Strange moths have clustered, and the light filtering through has an eerie shimmer. The young women see a telephone number scrawled on the wall.By now Dursha is totally creeped out. But Jackie is already calling it...THE WIDOWDan decides to go to a party held by an old friend. It’s a no-good group, but it might help him put his worries aside. His life is spiralling and he has a serious toothache to add to his woes.At the party he strikes up a conversation with an enigmatic man who has excellent whiskey, and promises him a quick way to make money.In all honesty, Dan just wants enough cash to pay for a dentist, but he journeys with his new friend to a house deep in the country. The hazy plan is to rob it of a known stash of money.It sounded good in theory, but now his friend is nowhere to be seen and Dan is stuck inside the house, face to face with the widow who lives there...
Meridian Six
Jaye Wells - 2013
She also remembers her mother, a freedom fighter murdered in the final battle between humans and vampires. But it is her mother's final words that have haunted her: Red means life.In the years since her mother's death, she has been used as both a propaganda tool and a blood slave by the Troika. She's withstood their indignities because the alternative meant bleeding out in a blood camp. But their abuses finally go too far, and she decides to run towards freedom and her mother's red light.On the other side, she finds the Sisters of Crimson. They help her just as her mother promised, but they also hand her to the human rebels. The vampires used her famous name to keep human slaves biddable, but now the humans want to use it inspire a revolution.When the world is at war, freedom is a luxury paid for with blood.
Pliosaur
Russ Elliott - 2014
But his luck is about to change on a mysterious island near South Africa, where he seeks a rare prehistoric fish. Deep inside the caves, John finds more than he bargained for. He encounters the tribal elder, Kota―practically the devil himself with a plan straight from hell. Within the caverns beneath the island, the tribe worships and nurtures a prehistoric marine reptile that could engulf T-Rex. The size of a sperm whale, and equipped with ten-foot jaws bristling with eighteen-inch teeth, this pliosaur is the last remaining member of the greatest predator species that ever lived. Only then does John realize Kota’s true agenda―to unleash the leviathan on the modern world to fulfill the tribe’s bloodlust for revenge. Now it’s all up to John to warn humanity of the fifty-ton killing machine headed its way―before the Ivory Coast washes blood red. But first, he has to get off the island . . . alive.
Novels & Stories: The Lottery / The Haunting of Hill House / We Have Always Lived in the Castle / Other Stories and Sketches
Shirley Jackson - 2010
M. Homes. “It is a place where things are not what they seem; even on a morning that is sunny and clear there is always the threat of darkness looming, of things taking a turn for the worse.” Jackson’s characters–mostly unloved daughters in search of a home, a career, a family of their own–chase what appears to be a harmless dream until, without warning, it turns on its heel to seize them by the throat. We are moved by these characters’ dreams, for they are the dreams of love and acceptance shared by us all. We are shocked when their dreams become nightmares, and terrified by Jackson’s suggestion that there are unseen powers–“demons” both subconscious and supernatural–malevolently conspiring against human happiness.In this volume Joyce Carol Oates, our leading practitioner of the contemporary Gothic, presents the essential works of Shirley Jackson, the novels and stories that, from the early 1940s through the mid-1960s, wittily remade the genre of psychological horror for an alienated, postwar America. She opens with The Lottery (1949), Jackson’s only collection of short fiction, whose disquieting title story–one of the most widely anthologized tales of the twentieth century–has entered American folklore. Also among these early works are “The Daemon Lover,” a story Oates praises as “deeper, more mysterious, and more disturbing than ‘The Lottery,’” and “Charles,” the hilarious sketch that launched Jackson’s secondary career as a domestic humorist.Here too are Jackson’s masterly short novels The Haunting of Hill House (1959), the tale of an achingly empathetic young woman chosen by a haunted house to be its new tenant, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), the unrepentant confessions of Miss Merricat Blackwood, a cunning adolescent who has gone to quite unusual lengths to preserve her ideal of family happiness. Rounding out the volume are 21 other stories and sketches that showcase Jackson in all her many modes, and the essay “Biography of a Story,” Jackson’s acidly funny account of the public reception of “The Lottery,” which provoked more mail from readers of The New Yorker than any contribution before or since.
Healed
Dean Skinner - 2021
As one reader put it, Healed reads "as if it were written by both Steven King and M. Night Shyamalan." It is the third short story written by Dean Skinner whose first short story, Broken, climbed as high as #134 in Amazon's "90-Minute Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Short Reads." Dean Skinner is an artist who has his work displayed throughout the US, UK and Australia. Dean is also an author of supernatural thrillers who combines his faith with his love of horror.
Kolchak: The Night Stalker Chronicles
Joe GentileMark Dawidziak - 2005
For the first time ever, a monster collection of 26 new original Kolchak short fiction stories by noted authors from comics, horror fiction, and film! With the advent of the new Kolchak ABC TV show, Moonstone proudly announces new contemporary prose adventures of the original Kolchak, TV's first and foremost paranormal investigator! Plus all kinds of other cool stuff, like tales from Kolchak's untold past, monster huntings, noir thrillers, and even horror stories of more cerebral type!
The Haunted Cabin
Michelle Dorey - 2017
Her best friend, who happens to be psychic, told her not to go to that cabin with Jordan. “Not only is it isolated, in the middle of nowhere, but it has a dark history. Two people died there tragically!” But she’s determined to support her boyfriend Jordan, in his grief. The cabin is now his, bequeathed to him by his favourite uncle. Besides which, Meryl and Jordan are old hands at roughing it in the forest. Right from the start, the paranormal makes its presence known. A door creaks open on its own, even though the bedroom was locked when she first tired it. That room is a shrine, perfectly intact and there’s a diary—a twisted tale of treachery and deceit. Unexplained noises, cryptic messages left for her, fleeting glimpses of ghostly entities and the eerie sense that she’s being watched. She is. The ghosts have been waiting for revenge. Don’t read this book at night, especially if you’re alone. A chilling, frightening story of ghosts and thrilling supernatural suspense. Special Bonus- LEGACY: The Mystical Veil, a full length novel is included with this book
The Deaths of Henry King
Jesse Ball - 2015
Not just once or twice, but seven dozen times. Each death a new demise, from the comic to the grim to the absurd to the transcendent and back again. With text by Jesse Ball and Brian Evenson complimented by Lilli Carré's macabre, gravestone-rubbing-style art, Henry King's ends are brought to a vivid life.