The Tell-Tale Heart: The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe


Julian Symons - 1978
    Symons reveals Poe as his contemporaries saw him a man struggling to make a living out of hack journalism and striving to find a backer for his new magazine, and a man whose life was beset by so many tragedies that he was often driven to excessive drinking and a string of unhealthy relationships. Fittingly written by another master in the art of crime writing, this volume brilliantly portrays the original creator of the detective story and reveals him as the genius and unashamed plagiarist that he was."

Black Butterflies


John Shirley - 1998
    Winner of the Bram Stoker Award, the International Horror Guild Award, and a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year.

Covenant


John Everson - 2004
    Hiding from his past big city exposés in the quiet coastal town of Terrel, he stumbles upon a web of mysterious teen suicides that somehow connect a ring of five women. Is there really a malevolent presence inside Terrel Cliff that holds all of the town in thrall as Angelica, a fortune teller, suggests? Or is there a murderous covenant between five women to sacrifice their first-born? When Angelica is kidnapped right under his nose, Joe suspects that there is more at work in Terrel than a dark, tragic streak.Deep beneath the remains of a long-demolished lighthouse on its tragic cliff, Joe discovers Terrel's secret history and salvation. And in his desperate bid to save two women, he forges a new covenant, one that puts his own soul in deadly danger.

Bad Blood


Jonathan Maberry - 2014
    Now Trick knows that his blood is poison to the bloodsuckers, and he will stop at nothing to eradicate them. Collects issues #1-#5 of the Dark Horse original series.

Friggin Zombies


N.C. Reed - 2015
    This installment is written in first person, sort of a diary format, as one man recounts his frantic, often hilarious and occasionally dangerous odyssey of preparing for the oncoming Zombie Apocalypse.

The Haunting of Harriet


Jennifer Button - 2011
    Liz had lingered behind, savouring the last of the night air. She pushed at the stray blond lock with her fingers, willing it to stay in place. On letting go the hair slid back. She secured it with her ivory comb. She began to run, overcome by a desperate need to see her children. A sense of dread swept over her. An unaccountable ache lay in her belly. The twins were so vulnerable, what if she failed in her duty to protect them? Then she stopped. She stood very still. The ache and the cold were replaced by the warmth of a hug and a kiss on her cheek. She turned to say thank you, but she was alone. The others were already at the house.'Beckman's appeared to be Liz's dream house, the perfect home in which to raise her young family. She had an immediate inexplicable affinity with the property, and it welcomed her with open arms. Why then should just one of its many rooms, the fourth room, make her feel as if she was an intruder? What secret was it hiding? She knew it was connected to the burnt out boat house and that sunken old rowing boat. Something about it was linked to her: its presence haunted her. She knew she needed to unravel the mystery before some dreadful disaster overcame her family. Her daughter's elusive friend Harriet had the answers but would she reveal them? And then there was that horrid Tarot reading. The potent image of the Five of Cups would not leave her. What were the cards trying to tell her and more to the point, would she listen? After all they were just bits of paper.Cover: The Five of Cups from a set of Tarot cards designed by the author.

The Turning


A.L. Masters - 2021
    They realize too late that this is no ordinary plague...and that the enemy they have to fight may not be the only thing they need to worry about.Book One of The Salvation Plague series.The Turning includes foul language, graphic violence, and some mature themes.

The Rise of Malbeck


Jason L. McWhirter - 2012
    An army of darkness marches from the north, crushing all who oppose it under its muddy black boot. The drums of war echo throughout Kraawn as the struggle between light and dark teeters in the balance, fueled on the one hand by the greed of the Forsworn, and on the other by the ultimate desire for all that is good to survive.Tarsis, the last city in the north, is laid waste, decimated by Malbeck’s army. Kromm, the King of Tarsis, battles for his life as the dark hunters of Malbeck relentlessly pursue him through the Tundren Mountains. His mighty army has been destroyed and its remnants are now scattered throughout the lands. But he is not alone. He is surrounded by his elite guard, along with Addalis, his court wizard, and Allindrian, the half-elf Blade Singer. But will that be enough to thwart that which hunts him?The road to Finarth is now open and few are left to stop the Dark One. The hope of the land rests in the combined power of its last remaining heroes. Jonas Kanrene, cavalier to Shyann, has been given his next mission. He must find King Kromm and bring him to Finarth. The bow of Taleen, cavalier to Bandris, and the sword of Fil Tanrey, warrior of Finarth, accompanies Jonas on this perilous task. Their quest is fraught with death, sacrifice, and courage. But will their courage see them through their mission? Can Jonas and his companions prevail against the Forsworn and protect the king? These are questions that can only be answered by the strength of their blades, and more importantly, the courage in their hearts.

The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Eighteenth Annual Collection


Ellen DatlowAndy Duncan - 2005
    The critically acclaimed and award-winning tradition continues with another stunning collection, including stories by M. T. Anderson, Laird Barron, Simon Bestwick, Simon Brown, Stepan Chapman, Douglas Clegg, D. Ellis Dickerson, Terry Dowling, Andy Duncan, Jean Esteve, John Farris, Mélanie Fazi, Jeffrey Ford, Christopher Fowler, Stephen Gallagher, Theodora Goss, Elizabeth Hand, Alice Hoffman, Shelley Jackson, John Kessel, Margo Lanagan, Tanith Lee, Bentley Little, Elizabeth A. Lynn, Gregory Maguire, China Miéville, Richard Mueller, Joyce Carol Oates, Frances Oliver, Chuck Palahniuk, Tina Rath, Philip Raines and Harvey Welles, M. Rickert, Anna Ross, Alison Smith, R.T. Smith, Peter Straub, Lucy Sussex, Catherynne M. Valente, Greg Van Eekhout, and Conrad Williams. Rounding out the volume are the editors’ invaluable overviews of the year in fantasy and horror, and sections on comics, by Charles Vess, on anime and manga, by Joan D. Vinge, on media, by Ed Bryant, and on music, by Charles de Lint. With a long list of Honorable Mentions, this is an indispensable reference as well as the best reading available in fantasy and horror.

Origin


Greg McLean - 2014
    Or to hide a body.When wiry youngster Mick Taylor starts as a jackaroo at a remote Western Australian sheep station, he tries to keep his head down among the rough company of the farmhands. But he can't keep the devils inside him hidden for long.It turns out he's not the only one with the killer impulse – and the other psychopaths don't appreciate competition. Is Cutter, the station's surly shooter, on to him? And what are the cops freally up to as they follow the trail of the dead?In the first of a blood-soaked series of Wolf Creek prequel novels, the cult film's writer/director Greg Mclean and horror writer Aaron Sterns take us back to the beginning, when Mick was a scrawny boy, the only witness to the grisly death of his little sister. Origin provides an unforgettably bloody answer to the question of nature vs nurture. What made Mick Taylor Australian horror's most terrifying psycho killer?'One of the great horror film heavies of the last 25 years' Quentin Tarantino

The Hut Builder


Laurence Fearnley - 2010
    I felt it though. I let out an incredible whoop of joy and skipped into the air, laughing and laughing; there was so much joy inside me. For the first time in all my memory, I could not contain myself.As a boy in the early 1940s, young Boden Black finds his life changed for ever the day his neighbour Dudley drives him over the hills into the vast snow-covered plains of the Mackenzie country. Unexpectedly his world opens up and he discovers a love of landscape and a fascination with words that will guide him throughout his life, as he forges a career as a butcher and poet, spends a joyous summer building a hut on the slopes of Mount Cook and climbs to the summit in the company of Sir Edmund Hillary.A moving exploration of onw man's journey and the events which shape him, The Hut Builder is also an evocative celebration of the mountain world and the wonder of life.

I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan


Eliza Griswold - 2014
    But the poem above is a folk couplet—a landay, an ancient oral and anonymous form created by and for mostly illiterate people: the more than 20 million Pashtun women who span the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. War, separation, homeland, love—these are the subjects of landays, which are brutal and spare, can be remixed like rap, and are powerful in that they make no attempts to be literary. From Facebook to drone strikes to the songs of the ancient caravans that first brought these poems to Afghanistan thousands of years ago, landays reflect contemporary Pashtun life and the impact of three decades of war. With the U.S. withdrawal in 2014 looming, these are the voices of protest most at risk of being lost when the Americans leave.     After learning the story of a teenage girl who was forbidden to write poems and set herself on fire in protest, the poet Eliza Griswold and the photographer Seamus Murphy journeyed to Afghanistan to learn about these women and to collect their landays. The poems gathered in I Am the Beggar of the World express a collective rage, a lament, a filthy joke, a love of homeland, an aching longing, a call to arms, all of which belie any facile image of a Pashtun woman as nothing but a mute ghost beneath a blue burqa.

The Fable of the Bees


Bernard Mandeville - 1989
    Each was a defence and elaboration of his short satirical poem The Angry Hive, 1705. The version of the Fable of 1723 and 1732 are the fullest defences of his early paradox that social benefit is the unintended consequence of personal vice. It is an argument that is generally held to lie behind Adam Smith's doctrine of the 'hidden hand' of economic development.

Fractured Mosaic


Sabarna Roy - 2021
    

Drysalter


Michael Symmons Roberts - 2013
    These poems offer a similarly potent and sensory multiplicity, unified through the formal constraint of 150 poems of 15 lines.Like the medieval psalters echoed in its title, this collection contains both the sacred and profane. Here are hymns of praise and lamentation, songs of wonder and despair, journeying effortlessly through physical and metaphysical landscapes, from financial markets and urban sprawl to deserts and dark nights of the soul.From an encomium to a karaoke booth to a conjuration of an inverse Antarctica, this collection is a compelling, powerful search for meaning, truth and falsehood. But, as ever in Roberts’ work – notably the Whitbread Award-winning Corpus – this search is rooted in the tangible world, leavened by wit, contradiction, tenderness and sensuality.This is Roberts’ most expansive writing yet: mystical, philosophical, earthy and elegiac. Drysalter sings of the world’s unceasing ability to surprise, and the shock and dislocation of catching your own life unawares.