King’s mysterious and thriller packed story vaults. Open up your imagination and let the vivid writing and frightening tales awaken your mind. Scream late into the night with more great horror for all your senses. Evil comes in many forms. Travel through the desert, speak with others from another world, and smell the roses in these incredible journeys and wild realities. WARNING: Not the famous Stephen King from Maine.

    'Red' seems to me to be a masterwork. 'Vampire' is a breathtaking work of virtuosity."—Dennis Etchison, from his Introduction"An impressive debut. These stories are all beautifully written and very, very disturbing."—Fangoria"Richard Christian Matheson's prose is elegant, yet spare. He is undoubtedly the master of the contemporary horror short story. His potent, subtle horror sneaks up on the reader and its echoes linger long after the story has ended."—Ellen Datlow, fiction editor, Omni

    From the painted faces of a child's nightmare to discovering what we really put in our bodies in the name of health. Here are 10 tales to read with the light on.TALE #1 - "Roll up, Roll up"TALE #2 - "Late Shift"TALE #3 - "You call that music?"TALE #4 - "Whose face is this anyway?"TALE #5 - "Pink Bow"TALE #6 - "Careful what you wish for"TALE #7 - "Recycling can be hazardous to your health"TALE #8 - "Mommy's little soldier"TALE #9 - "Trick or Treat"TALE #10 - "You are what you eat"

    Then the shadows, with their dark, inhuman eyes, are everywhere, surrounding her as she sobs silently, realizing with horror that they have taken her daughter once again. And now they have come bcak for- for her!

    What if some morning as the old woman stood at the head of the staircase she were suddenly to feel a weight thrusting against the back of her legs? What if she were to lunge forward, grasping at the air, striking her thin skull against the edge of a stair? What would become of me if she were found unmoving at the bottom of the stairway?’Such are the thoughts of Baxter, a sociopathic bull terrier on the hunt for the perfect master, as he contemplates the demise of his first victim. The basis for the acclaimed 1989 film Baxter, Ken Greenhall’s utterly chilling and long-unobtainable Hell Hound (1977) has earned a reputation as a lost classic of horror fiction. This first-ever reissue includes a new introduction by Grady Hendrix.

    Alex had taught them well. They helped with the house, set the table for meals, and went straight upstairs after dinner to do their homework. They did as they were told -- that is, as Alex told.Sharon didn't miss the glances that passed between her husband and the foster children. From the day they arrived, they had looked up to Alex., worshipped him. Why, it even seemed they were beginning to act like Alex -- right down to the icy sarcasm, the terrifying smile, the evil gleam in their eyes when they looked at her.Oh yes, they'd do anything to please Alex. Anything at all...

    After long and tedious days on the assembly line, she returns home to care for her corpse-like husband while enduring her loathsome and hateful mother-in-law, Jo. Jo blames the entire town for her son’s mishap, and when she gives a strange piece of jewelry to the man she believes most responsible, a series of gruesome deaths is set in motion. Sarah believes the amulet has something to do with the rising body count, but no one will believe her. As the inexplicable murders continue, Sarah and her friend Becca Blair have no choice but to track down the amulet themselves, before it’s too late.

    For Ellen Wilder, editor of the local newspaper, the gruesome killing is as disturbing as the irrational fears that have suddenly woven themselves into her mind and left her doubting her own sanity. For state police detective Michael Chandler, whose haunting near-death experience has left him with an uncanny way of sensing things, the murder is only a hint of what is to come.But nothing could have prepared either of them for the return of Franny Corbett. A hulking child of a man and the blackest sheep in a family of black sheep, his eerie presence may have ushered in all of these bizarre and frightening events. Soon the town of Wiltshire will be shaken again. For in a car sunk beneath the surface of a glimmering blue lake, floats another body. And the killing has just begun....

    . . and more.

    The Headhunter is loose on the streets of Vancouver. The psycho’s victims are everywhere - floating in the Fraser River, buried in a shallow grave, nailed to a totem pole on the university campus. All are women. All are headless.Then the taunting photographs arrive. Carefully posed shots of the women’s heads stuck on poles. The Mounties of Special X are up against a unique brand of killer. A killer whose sexual psychosis stretches back through Ecuador’s steaming jungle and a scream-filled New Orleans dungeon to a dead-of-winter manhunt in the Rocky Mountains a century ago.

    A young genius desperately isolated in a world of theories and formulae few can understand. Until he meets shy and loving Samantha. The friend he never had. The love he only dreamed of. He loves her so much, he cannot let her go.And when suddenly, tragically, Samantha is lost, he makes a solemn vow -- to use his gifts of genius to keep his beloved Samantha. For just a little while longer....A modern day Frankenstein story that was the basis for a Sci-Fi horror movie of the same name by Wes Craven.

    When a careless exploration leaves her trapped underground, she learns to live again in the absence of everything she once knew. Even driven by love and light, Sally Ann finds the deepest darkness within herself in When Darkness Loves Us.Beauty Is... - Old Martha Mannes has been a part of Morgan, Illinois since her birth. The whole town knows her as the dim-witted woman who was born without a nose, but Martha's mind wasn't always a blank slate. Unlocking the monster buried deep in her memories may bring back the sparkling child she once was... or it may send those around her crashing down into the nightmares of a little girl gone wrong.

    But the house sits on a nexus point; a gateway to demonic realms.Amid a turbulence of twisting realities, and facing legions of fallen angels and nightmarish servitors, Frank and Roz become separated. Frank turns to a local pensioner for assistance. But the enigmatic George Smoke is a man who offers more questions than answers.Confronted by dark gods and cosmic abominations, Frank faces a battle for his wife's soul. It seems a fight he is destined to lose... but he must succeed. Saving Roz is the key to everything.

    In the orderly, pleasant world Barbara inhabited, nice children -- and they were nice children — didn't hold an adult captive.But what Barbara didn't count on was the heady effect their new-found freedom would have on the children. Their wealthy parents were away in Europe, and in this rural area of Maryland, the next house was easily a quarter of a mile away. The power of adults was in their hands, and they were tempted by it. They tasted it and toyed with it -- their only aim was to test its limits. Each child was consumed by his own individual lust and caught up with the others in sadistic manipulation and passion, until finally, step by step, their grim game strips away the layers of childishness to reveal the vicious psyche, conceived in evil and educated in society's sophisticated violence, that lies always within civilized men.More than a terrifying horror story, Let's Go Play at the Adams' is a compelling psychological exercise of brooding insights and deadly implications.