Ghostly narratives of the Edwardian era, lurid classics from the pulp heyday, and modern-day masterpieces are included in these collections.

    A recovering alcoholic on the run from his past, all Billy Smith wants is to be left alone. But commanded by the voices in his head to commit acts of violence he does not understand, he kidnaps a prostitute known only as Angel and heads north to a bucolic little New England town called White Falls. Something monstrous has taken root in White Falls, and has waited centuries for the right time to awaken. Psyches begin to unravel and violence erupts. The fate of the living ultimately rests on the back of one man. For the dead are watching . . . and they are hungry. Nate Kenyon and his family reside in Boston, Massachusetts.

    The twins try to discover the source of the voice only they can hear--a voice that needs their help. Using telepathy and their individual talents, the twins uncover a long-lost manuscript of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s, along with the ghost of Sherlock Holmes’s forgotten twin brother.

    Nesbit, Diana Wynne Jones, Gahan Wilson, and other literary luminaries. Sales of Unnatural Creatures benefit 826DC, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting students in their creative and expository writing, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write.

    Tired of his decrepit house, he leaves his wife and mother behind and sets out for a night at The Boneyard. Joe has a knack for dice throwing and figures he can take on any opponent. But can he win when the stakes are raised, and it's his life he's gambling for?

    Forbidden by international accords to engage in combat, the "dog soldiers" lend their skills to the regular Army units, sniffing out IEDs and guarding the troops against things that go bump in the night. Sergeant Decker and his 300th comrade, Sergeant Sobieski, are assigned to a Forward Operating Base deep in the mountains of Afghanistan when they have to face a local threat far more dangerous than roadside bombs or insurgent ambushes.

    Winner of the 2009 World Fantasy AwardWinner of the 2008 Asimov’s magazine Readers Award for best short storyFinalist, 2008 Nebula AwardFinalist, 2008 Hugo AwardScience Fiction World has accepted Guo Jianzhong’s translationRead by Diane Severson as a charming audio reading at StarShipSofa.com

    Showcasing this cutting-edge talent, Poe’s Children now brings the best of the genre’s stories to a wider audience. Featuring tales from such writers as Neil Gaiman and Jonathan Carroll, Poe’s Children is Peter Straub’s tribute to the imaginative power of storytelling. Each previously published story has been selected by Straub to represent what he thinks is the most interesting development in our literature during the last two decades.Selections range from the early Stephen King psychological thriller “The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet,” in which an editor confronts an author’s belief that his typewriter is inhabited by supernatural creatures, to “The Man on the Ceiling,” Melanie and Steve Rasnic Tem’s award-winning surreal tale of night terrors, woven with daylight fears that haunt a family. Other selections include National Book Award finalist Dan Chaon’s “The Bees”; Peter Straub’s “Little Red’s Tango,” the legend of a music aficionado whose past is as mysterious as the ghostly visitors to his Manhattan apartment; Elizabeth Hand’s visionary and shocking “Cleopatra Brimstone”; Thomas Ligotti’s brilliant, mind-stretching “Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story”; and “Body,” Brian Evenson’s disturbing twist on correctional facilities.Crossing boundaries and packed with imaginative chills, Poe’s Children bears all the telltale signs of fearless, addictive fiction.

    His raw and experimental work lays bare the unimportance of our world and the sickening madness of the human condition. Like the greatest writers of cosmic horror, Ligotti bends reality until it cracks, opening fissures through which he invites us to gaze on the unsettling darkness of the abyss below.For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

    Her mother had hoped that Dusie's being half-mortal would protect her from inheriting the family curse.    Still reeling from this revelation, Dusie tries to keep her snakes under wraps. But after a boy she likes in school almost exposes her, she discovers another family secret--just one look from Dusie's snakes has the power to send someone right into his own personal Stone Age. Talk about "if looks could kill"!     Dusie better figure out how to control her snakes and her rage, and find a way to get her life back--before anything else disastrous happens.

    Holt.Reprinted in Gardner Dozois's The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection, and later in Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue #129~~~The derelict ship ward was in an isolated section of Outsider space, one of the numerous spots left blank on interstellar maps, no more or no less tantalising than its neighbouring quadrants. To most people, it would be just that: a boring part of a long journey to be avoided–skipped over by Mind-ships as they cut through deep space, passed around at low speeds by Outsider ships while their passengers slept in their hibernation cradles.

    Besides the acclaimed, Hugo-winning title piece and its influential prequels, the 36 stories include the British SF Association Award winner "Cube Root", and eight "Year's Best" and "Best Of" anthology choices. SF, fantasy, horror, and unclassifiable Langford weirdness ranging from 1975 to 2003.Contents: *Introduction (Different Kinds of Darkness) (2004) • essay by David Langford *Heatwave (1975) / short story by David Langford *Accretion (1977) / short story by David Langford *Connections (1978) / short story by David Langford *Training (1979) / short story by David Langford *The Final Days (1981) / short story by David Langford *Answering Machine (1982) / short story by David Langford * Hearing Aid (1982) / short story by David Langford * Wetware (1984) / short story by David Langford * Cube Root (1985) / short story by David Langford * Notes for a Newer Testament (1985) / short story by David Langford *In a Land of Sand and Ruin and Gold (1987) / short story by David Langford *Ellipses (1990) / short story by David Langford *A Surprisingly Common Omission (1990) / short fiction by David Langford *A Snapshot Album (1991) / short story by David Langford *Leaks (1991) / short story by David Langford *Waiting for the Iron Age (1991) / short story by David Langford *Blossoms That Coil and Decay (1992) / short story by David Langford *A Game of Consequences (1998) / short story by David Langford *Logrolling Ephesus (2003) / short fiction by David Langford *Too Good to Be (1983) / short story by David Langford *In the Place of Power (1984) / short story by David Langford *The Arts of the Enemy (1992) / short story by David Langford *As Strange a Maze as E'er Men Trod (1998) / short story by David Langford *Cold Spell (1980) / short story by David Langford *3.47 AM (1983) / short story by David Langford *The Facts in the Case of Micky Valdon (1989) / short story by David Langford *The Motivation (1989) / short story by David Langford *Encounter of Another Kind (1991) / short story by David Langford *The Lions in the Desert (1993) / short story by David Langford *Deepnet (1994) / short story by David Langford *Serpent Eggs (1994) / short story by David Langford *Blood and Silence (1995) / short story by David Langford *Blit [Blit] (1988) / short story by David Langford * What Happened at Cambridge IV [Blit] (1990) / short story by David Langford * comp.basilisk FAQ [Blit] (1999) / short fiction by David Langford (variant of Comp.Basilisk FAQ) *Different Kinds of Darkness [Blit] (2000) / short story by David Langford *Original Appearances (Different Kinds of Darkness) (2004) • essay by uncredited.

    Not many survived, but some of those who did emerged twenty years later, to a world where mutant whales heaved themselves across the blackened, dry seabed of the Pacific, and the roses… oh God, the roses.“Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back” is a chilling post-nuclear short story by Joe R. Lansdale.

    When her husband sets out to discover what has happened, he is tortured, tempted, and analyzed and eventually sheds his identity and gains a new one-as a tightrope walker whose strength is his vulnerability. Photographs.

    In film, television, novels, and short stories, he keeps coming back to life, fed by the vital imaginative energies of a world-wide audience that cannot seem to resist his abominable charms. Aristocratic and urbane, deeply erotic and profoundly evil, Dracula's bloodsucking savagery has cast a mesmerizing fascination not only over his victims but over his readers as well. And, as Leonard Wolf suggests, "Vampire fiction...exerts an amazing pull on readers for a reason that we may find disturbing. The blood exchange—the taking of blood by the vampire from his or her victim is, all by itself, felt to be a singularly symbolic event. Symbolic and attractive!" Now, in Blood Thirst; One Hundred Years of Vampire Fiction, Leonard Wolf brings together thirty tales in which vampires of all varieties make their ghastly presence felt;male and female, human and non-human, humorous and heroic;all of them kin to the dreadful bat. From Lafcadio Hearn, Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman, Edith Wharton, August Derleth, and Ray Bradbury to such contemporary masters as Anne Rice, Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, John Cheever, and Woody Allen, and in settings as diverse as rural New England and outer space, this collection offers readers a dazzling compendium of vampire stories. Wolf organizes the collection into six categories;The Classic Adventure Tale, The Psychic Vampire, The Science Fiction Vampire, The Non-Human Vampire, The Comic Vampire, and The Heroic Vampire;which allows readers to see the many guises Dracula's descendants have assumed and the many ways they can be interpreted. In his penetrating introduction, Wolf argues that such an arrangement enables us to see the evolution of the vampire from an unmitigated evil to a creature we are more likely to identify with. "In a century in which God and Satan have become increasingly irrelevant in the popular arts, there has been an accompanying secularization of the vampire idea. And, as the stories in Blood Thirst will show, sympathy for the vampire has grown as we have become increasingly interested in the workings of the mind." Indeed, the vampire's ability to change over time, to draw into itself such a richness of symbolic meanings, to conjure itself into so many diabolical shapes, may account for the enduring appeal of the literature written about it. Here, then, is a definitive collection for aficionados and novices alike, and whether readers find the vampires who inhabit these pages sympathetic or horrific, psychologically intriguing or spiritually repellent, morbidly seductive or comically absurd,Blood Thirst gives us all something to sink our teeth into.