The People in the Castle: Selected Strange Stories


Joan Aiken - 2016
    Here are tales of suspense and the supernatural that will chill, amuse, and exhilarate.

The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall


Katie Alender - 2015
    Long ago, it was the Piven Institute for the Care and Correction of Troubled Females—an insane asylum nicknamed “Hysteria Hall.” However, many of the inmates were not insane, just defiant and strong willed. Kind of like Delia herself.But the house still wants to keep “troubled” girls locked away. So, in the most horrifying way, Delia gets trapped.And that’s when she learns that the house is also haunted.Ghost girls wander the halls in their old-fashioned nightgowns. A handsome ghost boy named Theo roams the grounds. Delia finds that all the spirits are unsettled and full of dark secrets. The house, as well, harbors shocking truths within its walls—truths that only Delia can uncover, and that may set her free.But she’ll need to act quickly, before the house’s power overtakes everything she loves.From master of suspense Katie Alender comes a riveting tale of twisted memories and betrayals, and the meaning of madness.

Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone


Stefan Kiesbye - 2012
    This is where four young friends come of age—in an atmosphere thick with fear and suspicion. Their innocent games soon bring them face-to-face with the village's darkest secrets in this eerily dispassionate, astonishingly assured novel, evocative of Stephen King's classic short story "Children of the Corn" and infused with the spirit of the Brothers Grimm.

The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All


Laird Barron - 2013
    Melding supernatural horror with hardboiled noir, espionage, and a scientific backbone, Barron’s stories have garnered critical acclaim and have been reprinted in numerous year’s best anthologies and nominated for multiple awards, including the Crawford, International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy awards.Barron returns with his third collection, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. Collecting interlinking tales of sublime cosmic horror, including “Blackwood’s Baby”, “The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven”, and “The Men from Porlock”, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All delivers enough spine-chilling horror to satisfy even the most jaded reader.

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories


Angela Carter - 1979
    K. Rowling, Kelly Link, and other contemporary masters of supernatural fiction. In her masterpiece, The Bloody Chamber—which includes the story that is the basis of Neil Jordan’s 1984 movie The Company of Wolves—she spins subversively dark and sensual versions of familiar fairy tales and legends like “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Bluebeard,” “Puss in Boots,” and “Beauty and the Beast,” giving them exhilarating new life in a style steeped in the romantic trappings of the gothic tradition.

The Virago Book of Ghost Stories


Richard Dalby - 1987
    Byatt, Angela Carter, Charlotte Brontë, Antonia Fraser, Penelope Lively, Ruth Rendell, Edith Wharton, and many more. Here lost loves, past enmities, and unwanted memories mingle with the inexplicable as unquiet souls return to repay kindnesses, settle scores, and haunt the imagination. All of the writers demonstrate a subtle power to delight and chill at the same time as they explore the ghostly margins of the supernatural.

The Collection


Bentley Little - 2002
    And that's a scary place to be.

Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories


Michael Sims - 2010
    Beginning with the supposedly true accounts that captivated Byron and Shelley, the stories range from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Oval Portrait" and Sheridan Le Fanu's "Carmilla" to Guy de Maupassant's "The Horla" and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's "Good Lady Ducayne." Sims also includes a nineteenth-century travel tour of Transylvanian superstitions, and rounds out the collection with Stoker's own "Dracula's Guest"-a chapter omitted from his landmark novel.Vampires captivated the Victorians, as Sims reveals in his insightful introduction: In 1867, Karl Marx described capitalism as "dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor"; while in 1888 a London newspaper invoked vampires in trying to explain Jack the Ripper's predations. At a time when vampires have been re-created in a modern context, Dracula's Guest will remind readers young, old, and in between of why the undead won't let go of our imagination.

Not All Monsters


Sara TantlingerBriana McGuckin - 2020
    With this anthology, we wanted to give women the chance to take something back to show their skills and storytelling abilities, but to also create striking stories that resonate profoundly with readers: Protagonists who take no shit; women who save themselves; women who slay the beast; women who become the monster.

Halloween: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre


Paula GuranLawrence C. Connolly - 2011
    and sometimes what they don't. Introducing nineteen original stories from mistresses and masters of the dark celebrate the most fantastic, enchanting, spooky, and supernatural of holidays.Stories:“Black Dog” by Laird Barron“From Dust” by Laura Bickle“Angelic” by Jay Caselberg“Pumpkin Head Escapes” by Lawrence Connolly“All Hallows in the High Hills” by Brenda Cooper“We, the Fortunate Bereaved” by Brian Hodge“Thirteen” by Stephen Graham Jones“Whilst the Night Rejoices Profound and Still” by Caitlín R. Kiernan“Trick or Treat” by Nancy Kilpatrick“Long Way Home: A Pine Deep Story” by Jonathan Maberry“The Mummy’s Kiss” by Norman Partridge“All Souls Day” by Barbara Roden“And When You Called Us We Came To You” by John Shirley“The Halloween Men” by Maria V. Snyder“Lesser Fires” by Steve Rasnic Tem & Melanie Tem“Unternehmen Werwolf” by Carrie Vaughn“For the Removal of Unwanted Guests” by A.C. Wise“Quadruple Whammy” by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

His Hideous Heart


Dahlia AdlerMarieke Nijkamp - 2019
    Whether the stories are familiar to readers or discovered for the first time, readers will revel in Edgar Allan Poe’s classic tales, and how they’ve been brought to life in 13 unique and unforgettable ways.Contributors include Kendare Blake (reimagining “Metzengerstein”), Rin Chupeco (“The Murders in the Rue Morge”), Lamar Giles (“The Oval Portrait”), Tessa Gratton (“Annabel Lee”), Tiffany D. Jackson (“The Cask of Amontillado”), Stephanie Kuehn (“The Tell-Tale Heart”), Emily Lloyd-Jones (“The Purloined Letter”), Hillary Monahan (“The Masque of the Red Death”), Marieke Nijkamp (“Hop-Frog”), Caleb Roehrig (“The Pit and the Pendulum”), and Fran Wilde (“The Fall of the House of Usher”).

Vampires Never Get Old: Tales with Fresh Bite


Zoraida CórdovaRebecca Roanhorse - 2020
    Parker, Tessa Gratton, Heidi Heilig, Julie Murphy, Mark Oshiro, Rebecca Roanhorse, Laura Ruby, Victoria “V. E.” Schwab, and Kayla Whaley.

Naomi's Room


Jonathan Aycliffe - 1991
    Brimming with excitement, Charles sets off with his daughter Naomi on a Christmas Eve shopping trip to London. But, by the end of the day, all Charles and his wife have left are cups of tea and police sympathy. For Naomi, their beautiful, angelic only child, has disappeared. Days later her murdered body is discovered.But is she dead?In a howling, bumping story of past and present day hell, Jonathan Aycliffe's haunting psychological masterpiece is guaranteed to make you sink to untold depths of teeth-shaking terror.

Help the Witch


Tom Cox - 2018
    Inspired by our native landscapes and traversing boundaries of the past and future, this collection is Tom Cox's first foray into fiction. Funny, strange and poignant, it elicits the unexpected and unseen to raise our hackles and set imaginations whirring.Inspired by our native landscapes, saturated by the shadows beneath trees and behind doors, listening to the run of water and half-heard voices, Tom Cox's first collection of short stories is a series of evocative and unsettling trips into worlds previously visited by the likes of M.R. James and E.F. Benson.Railway tunnels, the lanes and hills of the Peak District, family homes, old stones, shreds fluttering on barbed wire, night drawing in, something that might be an animal shifting on the other side of a hedge: Tom has drawn on his life-long love of weird fiction, folklore and nature's unregarded corners to write a collection of stories that will delight fans old and new, and leave them very uneasy about turning the reading lamp off.

The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares: The Haunted City


Jason BlumNissar Modi - 2015
    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.