They've lived there so long, there are only legends about people living anywhere else. Such a life requires rules. Strict rules. There are things that must not be discussed. Like going outside. Never mention you might like going outside.Or you'll get what you wish for.

    For those who already know these tales, the poignant introduction is a window on the creator's mind. Reflecting back after 14 years, Barker writes: I look at these pieces and I don't think the man who wrote them is alive in me anymore.... We are all our own graveyards I believe; we squat amongst the tombs of the people we were. If we're healthy, every day is a celebration, a Day of the Dead, in which we give thanks for the lives that we lived; and if we are neurotic we brood and mourn and wish that the past was still present. Reading these stories over, I feel a little of both. Some of the simple energies that made these words flow through my pen--that made the phrases felicitous and the ideas sing--have gone. I lost their maker a long time ago. These enthusiastic tales are not ashamed of visceral horror, of blood splashing freely across the page: "The Midnight Meat Train," a grisly subway tale that surprises you with one twist after another; "The Yattering and Jack," about a hilarious demon who possesses a Christmas turkey; "In the Hills, the Cities," an unusual example of an original horror premise; "Dread," a harrowing non-supernatural tale about being forced to realize your worst nightmare; "Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament," about a woman who kills men with her mind. Some of the tales are more successful than others, but all are distinguished by strikingly beautiful images of evil and destruction. No horror library is complete without them. --Fiona Webster

    Kiernan is one of dark fantasy and horror’s most acclaimed and influential short fiction writers. Her powerful, unexpected stories shatter morality, gender, and sexuality: a reporter is goaded by her toxic girlfriend into visiting sadistic art exhibits; a countess in a decaying movie theater is sated by her servants; a collector offers his greatest achievement to ensnare a musician who grieves for her missing sister.In this retrospective collection of her finest work—previously only available in limited editions—Kiernan cuts straight to the heart of the emotional truths we cannot ignore.

    The Old Rich, who have made their millions from the royalties on their world-famous nursery rhymes, are being murdered one by one. A psychopath is on the loose, and he must be stopped at any cost. It’s a job for Toy Town’s only detective—but he’s missing, leaving only Eddie Bear, and his bestest friend Jack, to track down the mad killer.

    Placed together within the same cover for the first time, a theme emerges from the tales that binds and unites them–and it is signaled in the title of the book.“These are stories of betrayal,” author John Langan confirms.Apart from this thread, the stories are otherwise quite distinct from each other in terms of their characters, plots, settings, themes and even varieties of horror.There’s “In Paris in the Mount of Kronos,” a snappy, neo-noirish, action packed Laird Barron-esque encounter with ancient malevolent forces; the dark, character-driven relationship dramas of “The Third Always Beside You” and “Renfrew’s Course”; the vaguely Lovecraftian horrors of “Bloom”; the atmospheric steampunk weirdness in the form of “The Unbearable Proximity of Mr. Dunn’s Balloons”; and apocalyptic surrealism in “Bos Uros”.Finally, the title novella, Sefira, is about a woman who is chasing a succubus across the United States, while the novelette At Home in the Devil’s House offers a new, nightmarish concept of Hell.Sefira and Other Betrayals contains stories previously published in such prestigious anthologies as Supernatural Noir, Blood and Other Cravings, Ghosts by Gaslight, Black Wings 2, Shadows Edge and others, and includes one original novella, Sefira, and an original novelette, At Home in the Devil’s House.(from Rue Morgue Magazine review)

    Slag Attack features four visceral, noir stories about the living, crawling apocalypse. The Devastated Insides of Hollow City - Hack detective Shell joins in the insane search for a girl named Pearl, who just might hold the key to restoring order. Vincent Severity - A woman is taken hostage by a very severe man in a sleazy El Camino. Corpse Mountain - Two guys named Cobra and Commando chug gasoline and help build grotesque robots to save the world. All Alone at the End of the World - Re-introduces Shell in a radically different light, building to a ferocious conclusion.

    Available in deluxe hardcover edition, paperback, and eBook.  Jason Blum invited an impressive group of authors, filmmakers, and screenwriters to envision a city of their choosing . . . and to let their demons run wild.     Taken together, the provocative stories in The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares: The Haunted City create the unforgettable cityscape of a new world of horror. Disturbing, suspenseful, devious, and entertaining, each tale showcases an innovative voice featured in a definitive collection that could only come from Jason Blum.

    Blissed out club kids dying at the speed of sound. The un-dead and the very soon-to-be-dead. They're all here, trying to claw their way free. From the radioactive streets of a war-scarred future, where the nuclear bombs have become self-aware, to the fallow fields of Nebraska where the kids are mainlining lightning bugs, this is a world both alien and intensely human. This is a place where self-discovery involves scalpels and horse tranquilizers; where the doctors are more doped-up than the patients; where obsessive-compulsive acid-freaks have unlocked the gateway to God and can't close the door. This is not a safe place. You can turn back now, or you can head straight into the heart of. the Angel Dust Apocalypse

    His stories are powerfully charged explorations of psychical violence, their effects heightened by detailed character studies graced with a powerful poetic elegance. In simple terms Oliver Onions goes for the cerebral rather than the jugular. However, make no mistake, his ghost stories achieve the desired effect. They draw you in, enmeshing you in their unnerving and disturbing narratives.This collection contains such masterpieces as The Rosewood Door, The Ascending Dream, The Painted Face and The Beckoning Fair One, a story which both Algernon Blackwood and H. P. Lovecraft regarded as one of the most effective and subtle ghost stories in all literature. Long out of print, these classic tales are a treasure trove of nightmarish gems.

    The story Pages from a Young Girl's Journal won Aickman the World Fantasy Award in 1975. It was originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1973 before appearing in this collection.Cold Hand in Mine stands as one of Aickman's best collections and contains eight stories that show off his powers as a 'strange story' writer to the full, being more ambiguous than standard ghost stories. Throughout the stories the reader is introduced to a variety of characters, from a man who spends the night in a Hospice to a German aristocrat and a woman who sees an image of her own soul. There is also a nod to the conventional vampire story (Pages from a Young Girl's Journal) but all the stories remain unconventional and inconclusive, which perhaps makes them all the more startling and intriguing.• The Swords • The Real Road to the Church • Niemandswasser • Pages from a Young Girl's Journal• The Hospice • The Same Dog • Meeting Mr. Millar • The Clock Watcher

    "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" is just one of many classic horror stories by Richard Matheson that have insinuated themselves into our collective imagination.Here are more than twenty of Matheson's most memorable tales of fear and paranoia, including:"Duel," the nail-biting tale of man versus machines that inspired Steven Spielberg's first film;"Prey," in which a terrified woman is stalked by a malevolent Tiki doll, as chillingly captured in yet another legendary TV moment;"Blood Son," a disturbing portrait of a strange little boy who dreams of being a vampire;"Dress of White Silk," a seductively sinister tale of evil and innocence.Personally selected by Richard Matheson, the bestselling author of I Am Legend and What Dreams May Come, these and many other stories, more than demonstrate why he is rightfully regarded as one of the finest and most influential horror writers of our generation.

    In “Who Will Greet You at Home,” a National Magazine Award finalist for The New Yorker, A woman desperate for a child weaves one out of hair, with unsettling results. In “Wild,” a disastrous night out shifts a teenager and her Nigerian cousin onto uneasy common ground. In "The Future Looks Good," three generations of women are haunted by the ghosts of war, while in "Light," a father struggles to protect and empower the daughter he loves. And in the title story, in a world ravaged by flood and riven by class, experts have discovered how to "fix the equation of a person" - with rippling, unforeseen repercussions. Evocative, playful, subversive, and incredibly human, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky heralds the arrival of a prodigious talent with a remarkable career ahead of her.

    Enter the mind of one of the seven dwarfs wrestling with his fevered sexual desire for Snow White. In another story, a cash-strapped elderly man in the future is quietly pressured to “retire” by having his brain put in a vat and live out the rest of his day in a virtual reality paradise. “Sex Fantasies at Work” follows an office drone who suspects he’s always at work and his entire home life is merely implanted memories. Read what Charles Yu calls “one of the funniest books I’ve read in years,” what Jack Pendarvis likened to Donald Barthelme by way of E.C. comics, and Joe Randazzo, the editor of The Onion, calls simply “f***ing awesome.”

    Some are familiar mer-people; some as strange as as a golden eye in a pool at the edge of the Great Desert Kalarsham, where the mad god Geljdreth rules; or the unknowable, immense Kraken, dark beyond the darkness of the deepest ocean, who will one day rise and rule the world. 1 Prologue: The water sprite / Robin mcKinley and Peter Dickinson 2 Mermaid song / Peter Dickinson --3 The sea-king's son / Robin McKinley --4 Sea serpent / Peter Dickinson --5 Water horse / Robin McKinley --6 Kraken / Peter Dickinson --7 A pool in the desert / Robin McKinley.

    Including stories from the 1970s to the present day, the collection seeks to expand the conversation about feminism while engaging the reader in a wealth of imaginative ideas. Sisters of the Revolution seeks to expand the ideas of both contemporary fiction and feminism to new fronts.Contents:The forbidden words of Margaret A. / L. Timmel Duchamp --My flannel knickers / Leonora Carrington --The mothers of Shark Island / Kit Reed --The palm tree bandit / Nnedi Okorafor --The grammarian's five daughters / Eleanor Arnason --And Salome danced / Kelley Eskridge --The perfect married woman / Angélica Gorodischer --The glass bottle trick / Nalo Hopkinson --Their mother's tears : the fourth letter / Leena Krohn --The screwfly solution / James Tiptree, Jr. --Seven losses of na Re / Rose Lemberg --The evening and the morning and the night / Octavia E. Butler --The sleep of plants / Anne Richter --The men who live in trees / Kelly Barnhill --Tales from the breast / Hiromi Goto --The Fall River axe murders / Angela Carter --Love and sex among the invertebrates / Pat Murphy --When it changed / Joanna Russ --The woman who thought she was a planet / Vandana Singh --Gestella / Susan Palwick --Boys / Carol Emshwiller --Stable strategies for middle management / Eileen Gunn --Northern chess / Tanith Lee --Aunts / Karin Tidbeck --Sur / Ursula K. Le Guin --Fears / Pamela Sargent --Detours on the way to nothing / Rachel Swirsky --Thirteen ways of looking at space/time / Catherynne M. Valente --Home by the sea / Elisabeth Vonaburg.