P. Lovecraft, published his first story, the monstrosities that crawled out of his brain have become legend: the massive, tentacled Cthulhu, who lurks beneath the sea waiting for his moment to rise; the demon Sultan Azathoth, who lies babbling at the center of the universe, mad beyond imagining; the Deep Ones, who come to shore to breed with mortal men; and the unspeakably-evil Hastur, whose very name brings death. These creatures have been the nightmarish fuel for generations of horror writers, and the inspiration for some of their greatest works.This impressive anthology celebrates Lovecraft's most famous beasts in all their grotesque glory, with each story a gripping new take on a classic mythos creature and affectionately accompanied by an illuminating illustration. Within these accursed pages something unnatural slouches from the sea into an all-night diner to meet the foolish young woman waiting for him, while the Hounds of Tindalos struggle to survive trapped in human bodies, haunting pool halls for men they can lure into the dark. Strange, haunting, and undeniably monstrous, this is Lovecraft as you have never seen him before.Contents"Only the End of the World Again" by Neil Gaiman"The Bleeding Shadow" by Joe R. Lansdale"Love is Forbidden, We Croak & Howl" by Caitlín R. Kiernan"Bulldozer" by Laird Barron"A Quarter to Three" by Kim Newman"Inelastic Collisions" by Elizabeth Bear"That of Which We Speak When We Speak of the Unspeakable" by Nick Mamatas"Red Goat Black Goat" by Nadia Bulkin"Jar of Salts" and "Haruspicy" by Gemma Files"Black is the Pit From Pole to Pole" by Howard Waldrop and Steven Utley"I've Come to Speak with You Again" by Karl Edward Wagner"The Sect of the Idiot" by Thomas Ligotti"The Dappled Things" by William Browning Spencer"The Same Deep Waters as You" by Brian Hodge"Remnants" by Fred Chappell"Waiting at the Cross Roads" by Steve Rasnic Tem"Children of the Fang" by John Langan

    Too hot to be making love unless your romance is young, like Sherry and Duane's. It's their first time but there's just one problem - they have no condoms. Of course they could wait until tomorrow... Duane remembers the all-night Speed-D-Mart. In the usual circumstances, it's not a place anyone would want to visit at night. But these aren't usual circumstances. Duane throws on his clothes - the store is just ten minutes down the block. Now Sherry is waiting. Ten minutes has gone, so has twenty. She's not worried - what's another few minutes? Then she hears the noise from down the street. It might be a door slamming. It might be the backfire of a car. But Sherry thinks it sounds mostly like a gunshot...

    Out of the murky sewers they suddenly attacked —snapping, biting, ripping at his flesh. After the first sensationalism had died down, the newspapers lost interest ... the experts dismissed them as no more dangerous than ferrets ... people started to forget.But Matt knew different. All the time they were growing in size and numbers — and they preyed on living flesh!For when they returned — slithering out of village ponds, swimming pools, even bath pipes — the fate of the British population was sealed.And there was no more horrifying way to die ....

    Steven Wrigley is trying to survive his senior year of high school, still reeling from the death of his mother and adjusting to life with his father. Along the way, he meets a girl who becomes another kind of obsession: Elise Devon.Elise’s secrets keep her distanced from everyone. She has a special place she calls the Obscura. She goes there when she is depressed or angry. The Obscura makes her feel like nothing she’s ever felt before. When she loses herself to the Obscura, she fears she also gives herself to something much darker, something much more powerful. Something calling itself the Sorrow King.Who is the Sorrow King?He is carved from wood and bone.He smells like wax, dead leaves, and memories.He travels by moonlight and drinks the sorrow of others.Can love exact vengeance on a monster made from madness, depression, and misery? Or will the Sorrow King bleed the town dry before satiating himself and moving on?

    Jack Quinlan, an American writer, is researching a book on the horrors of the Irish Famine. As the days pass, and the longer nights, the darkness of history parts ... only to reveal an even greater darkness in the present.

    So you go on a road trip together, have a few drinks, a final fling before the long academic haul ahead. Young and bright, you feel the future surge beneath you like a sleek stallion, under your full control.But a series of small lapses ends in tragedy and now you're faced with a terrible decision: Do you take responsibility for what you've done and risk losing everything? Or flee into the night unseen, with only God and conscience as your jury?Sixteen years ago, Scott Bowman faced this decision...Now a successful psychiatrist with a loving family, Scott endures a judgement far more harrowing than any god or man could conceive. An ancient derelict appears in his practice, an apparently senile old man with a remarkable artistic talent. Otherwise disconnected from the world around him, this strange little man quickly demonstrates an ability to foretell events through his drawings.But before long Scott is left to wonder: is this eldritch prophet predicting events? Or shaping them?PRAISE FOR THE CARTOONIST"In THE CARTOONIST, Sean Costello creates a fast-moving read that mounts in tension while mixing horror with psychological anguish." —J. B. Macabre"Sean Costello's The Cartoonist is a wonderful blend of horror, psychology, and the power of suggestion that leaves you guessing right up to the very end!" —The New Jersey Grapevine

    The story of John Moore, his wife Mim, and his mother, it is a gripping tale of greed in a small town being quietly overrun by auctioneer Perly Dunsmore. Acclaimed by writers including Stephen King, and an influence on King’s Needful Things, The Auctioneer is here reprinted for the first time in thirty years.

    And like Jane Eyre, they call her wicked - but in her case, she fears the accusation is true. When she flees, she leaves behind the corpses of her tormentors.A fugitive navigating London's underbelly, Jane rights wrongs on behalf of the have-nots whilst avoiding the noose. Until an advertisement catches her eye. Her aunt has died and the new master at Highgate House, Mr Thornfield, seeks a governess. Anxious to know if she is Highgate's true heir, Jane takes the position and is soon caught up in the household's strange spell. When she falls in love with the mysterious Charles Thornfield, she faces a terrible dilemma: can she possess him - body, soul and secrets - and what if he discovers her murderous past?

    A timid spinster in her fifties who still sleeps with teddy bears, Marion does her best to shut out the shocking secret that John keeps in the cellar.Until, suddenly, John has a heart attack and Marion is forced to go down to the cellar herself and face the gruesome truth that her brother has kept hidden.As questions are asked and secrets unravel, maybe John isn't the only one with a dark side.

    But when reaching out to the murderer for salvation in those last dying moments, a sudden switch takes place.Now Kepler is looking out through the eyes of the killer himself, staring down at a broken and ruined body lying in the dirt of the alley.Instead of dying, Kepler has gained the ability to roam from one body to another, to jump into another person’s skin and see through their eyes, live their life — be it for a few minutes, a few months or a lifetime.Kepler means these host bodies no harm — and even comes to cherish them intimately like lovers. But when one host, Josephine Cebula, is brutally assassinated, Kepler embarks on a mission to seek the truth — and avenge Josephine’s death.

    The house belongs to her. She should be happy. But Valerie isn’t quite normal… She’s taking in roommates to make ends meet, but, one by one, they keep ending up dead. Her young niece is crying out for a special kind of discipline that only she can provide. And there’s the voices she hears...voices that want her to do terrible things. Valerie is only trying to survive. If she stops doing what the voices tell her, something grotesquely evil will devour her soul... WHAT’S WRONG WITH VALERIE?

    They find a beautiful old country mansion on Long Island -- restful, secluded, with pool and private beach -- perfect, for the right people. But their "perfect" summer home hides terrors beyond their wildest imaginings. During that long summer the house becomes a nightmare from which there seems to be no escape.

    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.

    No one ever imagined that conditions were perfect for multiple breeding, that it was a warm womb, fetid, moist and with food so plentiful that everything crawling, creeping and slithering could gorge to satiation. Then the change in poison control was made and the huge mutants began to leave their nest - in search of human flesh...

    He woke up the next morning with a thunderous hangover, a raging headache . . . and a pair of horns growing from his temples.At first Ig thought the horns were a hallucination, the product of a mind damaged by rage and grief. He had spent the last year in a lonely, private purgatory, following the death of his beloved, Merrin Williams, who was raped and murdered under inexplicable circumstances. A mental breakdown would have been the most natural thing in the world. But there was nothing natural about the horns, which were all too real.Once the righteous Ig had enjoyed the life of the blessed: born into privilege, the second son of a renowned musician and younger brother of a rising late-night TV star, he had security, wealth, and a place in his community. Ig had it all, and more—he had Merrin and a love founded on shared daydreams, mutual daring, and unlikely midsummer magic.But Merrin's death damned all that. The only suspect in the crime, Ig was never charged or tried. And he was never cleared. In the court of public opinion in Gideon, New Hampshire, Ig is and always will be guilty because his rich and connected parents pulled strings to make the investigation go away. Nothing Ig can do, nothing he can say, matters. Everyone, it seems, including God, has abandoned him. Everyone, that is, but the devil inside. . . .