Book picks similar to
The Nightfarers by Mark Valentine


ex-occidente
short-stories
fiction
horror

The Ring of Thoth


Arthur Conan Doyle - 1890
    Originally published in The Cornhill Magazine in 1890, 'The Ring of Thoth' sees an Egyptologist visit the Louvre and witness a strange event. Many of the earliest occult stories, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Fludd


Hilary Mantel - 1989
    He is the curate sent by the bishop to assist Father Angwin-or is he? In the most unlikely of places, a superstitious town that understands little of romance or sentimentality, where bad blood between neighbors is ancient and impenetrable, miracles begin to bloom. No matter how copiously Father Angwin drinks while he confesses his broken faith, the level of the bottle does not drop. Although Fludd does not appear to be eating, the food on his plate disappears. Fludd becomes lover, gravedigger, and savior, transforming his dull office into a golden regency of decision, unashamed sensation, and unprecedented action. Knitting together the miraculous and the mundane, the dreadful and the ludicrous, Fludd is a tale of alchemy and transformation told with astonishing art, insight, humor, and wit.

Cock & Bull


Will Self - 1992
    "Bull: A Farce" is the story of a man who acquires a vagina and all its companion parts. There are, however, complications. Cock & Bull, the book that introduced an enfant terrible of English letters to an American audience, has quickly become a classic of blistering satire.

The Dark Side: Tales of Terror and the Supernatural


Guy de Maupassant - 1969
    These 31 stories of the supernatural explore the furthest reaches of the macabre and at the same time parallel de Maupassant's own descent into madness and death. Includes a Foreword by modern master horror writer Ramsey Campbell.The Horla --The Devil --Two friends --Fear --The hand --Coco --The mannerism --The madwoman --Mohammed-Fripouille --The blind man --At sea --Apparition --Saint-Antoine --The wolf --Terror --The diary of a madman --A vendetta --The smile of Schopenhauer --On the river --He? --Old Milon --The head of hair --The inn --Mother Savage --Was he mad? --The dead girl --Mademoiselle Cocotte --A night in Paris --The case of Louise Roque --The drowned man --Who knows?

Dial M for Monkey


Adam Maxwell - 2006
    The twenty stories included here range from a bizarre quest to find a dead rockstar's limb (Jim Morrison's Leg) to a memorable warning about the hidden dangers of building sites (the acclaimed Shooting Jelly With A Shotgun). Effortlessly fusing pop culture, gunplay, and simians, Dial M For Monkey contains a vibrant mixture of short stories - and short-short stories - most never published before. This unmissable collection represents another shot in the arm for the resurgent form of the short story. As featured in Tonto Short Stories and Dave Eggers' McSweeney's.

Winslow in Love


Kevin Canty - 2005
    His marriage is over and he is alone, teaching poetry as a visiting professor in Montana and continuing to avoid actually writing himself. He drinks to oblivion every night.At this freezing college, in the dead of winter, Winslow meets Erika, one of his poetry students. What begins with office hours and Jim Beam in paper cups becomes a road trip as they travel through Utah and Arizona. Long haunted by thoughts of death, both Erika and Winslow begin to glimpse the power life can hold if they will only open up to the shame, beauty, and heartbreak of it all.

The Tain


China Miéville - 2002
    A man named Sholl survives by knowing the safe parts of town, and those where people go in and never come out. He’s been living on his own for a while, and decides to befriend a makeshift unit of soldiers camped out in the south of Hampstead Heath. They seem to have their wits about them, unlike other units scattered throughout London who will shoot anything that moves. He wants them to join him. Sholl has a plan to deal with the enemy....

Shit Luck


Tiffany Scandal - 2016
    A deft, masterful mix of both bizarro and horror."--Brian Keene, author of The Rising and Ghoul"Dark and grim and surreal." --Electric LiteratureMondays suck. You get mugged, your car won't start, you miss the bus, and your stylist burns a bald spot into your head. Suddenly you're single and unemployed, and the only friend you have left is a cat. By Tuesday, you've been murdered. But death isn't the end. You find yourself on an odyssey between weird worlds, reborn each time you die, stalked obsessively by the man who killed you.Even in death, you just can't seem to catch a break. Call it Mercury in retrograde, call it Murphy's law, call it . . .SHIT LUCK

The Cabal and Other Stories


Ellen Gilchrist - 2000
    In five stories that are vintage Gilchrist, plus the hilarious title novella -- in which a psychiatrist in a Mississippi town goes mad and begins revealing his patients' deepest secrets and embarrassing misdeeds to anyone who will listen -- one of the contemporary South's finest storytellers gives us her richest, most inventive collection since Victory Over Japan.

Furious Seasons and Other Stories


Raymond Carver - 1976
    ContentsDummyDistanceThe LieSo Much Water So Close to HomeThe FlingPastoralMineFurious Seasons

The Abyssal Plain: The R'lyeh Cycle


William Holloway - 2019
    A cup full of tentacles mixed with existential nihilism and sprinkled with liberal quantities of gore, this is Lovecraftian horror with a bloody bent that few others have dared to explore. --Peter Rawlik, author of ReanimatorsThey called it the Event.The Event changed everything. The earthquakes came first, including the Big One, shattering the Pacific Rim and plunging the world into chaos. Then the seas came, the skies opened, and the never-ending rain began. But as bad as that was, there is something worse.The Rising has begun.A lone man who abandoned the world for his addictions searches a waterlogged Austin for something, anything to cling to. Little does he know that something else searches for him.In the Sonoran Desert, the downtrodden of the world search for a better life north of the border, only to see the desert become an ocean: an ocean that takes life and gives death.In the woods of Alabama, survivors escape to Fort Resistance, but soon discover that it isn't just the horrors of the deep places of the world that they need to fear; but rather a new and more deadly pestilence that has grown in their own ranks.In England, it's too late to fight, and all that's left is to survive. One man reaches for his own humanity, but what to do when humanity is an endangered species?And in the Pacific, He is rising.In The Abyssal Plain: The R'lyeh Cycle, authors William Holloway, Michelle Garza and Melissa Lason, Brett J. Talley, and Rich Hawkins have created a timely and uniquely modern reimagining of the Cthulhu Mythos.

The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard


Robert E. Howard - 2008
    Some of Howard’s best-known characters–Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, and sailor Steve Costigan among them–roam the forbidding locales of the author’s fevered imagination, from the swamps and bayous of the Deep South to the fiend-haunted woods outside Paris to remote jungles in Africa.The collection includes Howard’s masterpiece “Pigeons from Hell,” which Stephen King calls “one of the finest horror stories of [the twentieth] century,” a tale of two travelers who stumble upon the ruins of a Southern plantation–and into the maw of its fatal secret. In “Black Canaan” even the best warrior has little chance of taking down the evil voodoo man with unholy powers–and none at all against his wily mistress, the diabolical High Priestess of Damballah. In these and other lavishly illustrated classics, such as the revenge nightmare “Worms of the Earth” and “The Cairn on the Headland,” Howard spins tales of unrelenting terror, the legacy of one of the world’s great masters of the macabre.

The Were-Wolf


Clemence Housman - 1896
    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.A strange, fearless woman. Wolves prowling the night. Mysteries. The world outside the cozy house can be dangerous. Being prepared does not always mean you will survive.

The Vorrh


Brian Catling - 2012
    It is a place of demons and angels, of warriors and priests. Sentient and magical, the Vorrh bends time and wipes  memory. Legend has it that the Garden of Eden still exists at its heart. Now, a renegade English soldier aims to be the first human to traverse its expanse. Armed with only a strange bow, he begins his journey, but some fear the consequences of his mission, and a native marksman has been chosen to stop him. Around them swirl a remarkable cast of characters, including a Cyclops raised by robots and a young girl with tragic curiosity, as well as historical figures, such as writer Raymond Roussel, heiress Sarah Winchester, and photographer Edward Muybridge.  While fact and fiction blend, the hunter will become the hunted, and everyone’s fate hangs in the balance under the will of the Vorrh.

Best Ghost Stories of J.S. Le Fanu


J. Sheridan Le Fanu - 1964
    Half these stories never published before in U.S.