In a Small Motel


John D. MacDonald - 2017
    She owns a small motor-inn motel on a major highway in South Georgia. The summer heat is still strong in the waning days of October, and she is tired from a long summer season. As the evening progresses, Ginny’s motel begins to fill-up. There is Johnny Benton, a strange motel guest who insists on parking his car behind the motel, a would-be suitor named Don Ferris, a guest that is the catalyst for a long and frightening night, and then there is the dead husband whose long shadow is cast across Ginny’s life like a long heavy rain...

The Return


Bentley Little - 2002
    Of course nobody really believes it. It’s just a good campfire story, something to attract gullible tourists ­ until an excavation team unearths the figurine of a screaming woman, the jawbone of a deformed animal, and a child’s toy. How odd that they were buried together. Odd, too, is the foul odor lingering in the air, the strange noises at night, and the man’s face found hanging from a tree. Now the locals are locking their doors. Because after sundown, campfire stories can seem very, very real.

Zero Lives Remaining


Adam Cesare - 2016
    And the afterlife is good. The best thing ever to have happened to him. But when the conscious electric current formerly known as Robby Asaro makes a decision to protect one of his favorite patrons, Tiffany Park, from a bully, he sets loose a series of violent supernatural events that can’t be stopped.Trapped inside the arcade as the kill count rises, Tiffany and a group of gamers must band together to escape from what used to be their favorite place on Earth…and the ghost of Robby Asaro.From the author of Tribesmen, Video Night, and The Summer Job, Zero Lives Remaining is a masterful mix of horror and suspense, dread and wonder, a timeless ghost story that solidifies Adam Cesare’s reputation as one of the best up-and-coming storytellers around. This is Adam Cesare firing on all cylinders—and he’s just getting started.

Saurian


William Schoell - 1988
    Something calls Tom back to the ruins of his boyhood home, to the scene of the devastation that almost destroyed him.

The Klarkash-Ton Cycle: Clark Ashton Smith's Cthulhu Mythos Fiction


Clark Ashton Smith - 2008
    Includes The Ghoul, Hunters from Beyond, Ubbo-Sathla, Vulthoom, The Infernal Star, and others. Selected and introduced by Robert M. Price. This book is part of an expanding collection of Cthulhu Mythos horror fiction and related topics. Call of Cthulhu fiction focuses on single entities, concepts, or authors significant to readers and fans of H.P. Lovecraft.

Charlotte


Norah Lofts - 1972
    Strangers pried, asked too many questions and pointed accusing fingers at Charlotte - herself eager to escape from the oppressive atmosphere of her father's home. She fled deep into the countryside and there taught at a school run by the untrusting and untrustworthy Mrs Armitage, who was prepared to keep quiet about Charlotte's past - but only up to a point. When the events come to be recreated, some questions naturally arise. Had Charlotte been responsible for the death of the little pupil she loved? And has that crime been repeated? In darker moments, even Charlotte herself cannot be sure.

Blood Games


Richard Laymon - 1992
    — They meet for one week every year, five young women, best friends since college, in search of fun and thrills. Each year they choose a different place for their reunion. This year it's Helen's choice, and she chose the Totem Pole Lodge. Bad choice. The Totem Pole Lodge is a deserted resort hotel deep in the woods with a gory, shocking past Helen has a macabre streak and she can't wait to tell her friends all about what happened at the lodge and why it's now abandoned. But Helen and the others are in for a nasty surprise. The resort isn't quite as deserted as they think. And not all the gruesome events at the Totem Pole Lodge are in its past. The worst are still to come....

Michael's Wife


Marlys Millhiser - 1972
    Only a slip of paper with the words "Captain Michael Devereaux, Luke Air Force Base" found in her clothing connects her with reality -- a reality that becomes terrifying when she meets the captain, who angrily tells her that she is his wife, Laurel, who deserted him and their newborn son two years before. Taken to the isolated Devereaux estate outside Phoenix, she gradually becomes convinced both that she may indeed be Michael's wife and that whatever horror she fled in the desert continues to threaten her life. The hostility of her newfound relatives, their refusal to believe her story of amnesia, and growing evidence of a very real and present jeopardy drive her in a desperate search for her past -- a past she fears will prove even more unbearable than the menace of the present.

Carfax House - A Christmas Ghost Story


Shani Struthers - 2020
    In the countryside. Just over an hour's train ride from London.An ideal family home. Sold unseen. At auction.Married couple, Al and Liz Greenaway, love London, but when they discover an impressive country property for sale, in need of some TLC, for the same price as their London flat, they decide to go for it. For them, life is all about reinventing themselves, keeping things fresh, and this house marks an exciting new chapter.In the week running up to Christmas, it is Liz who finds herself at Carfax House, alone. Al's held up with work. No matter, there's plenty to occupy her before he arrives, getting it ready for the festive season. A fine house. Once. Solitary, romantic, isolated, and quiet. So quiet that, for the first time in years, Liz can hear her own thoughts as long buried memories emerge. And there's an echo in them, a whisper...For someone else in the house, memories are emerging too. ~~~

You Come When I Call You


Douglas Clegg - 2000
    In Los Angeles, a woman is tormented by visions from a chilling past, and a man steps into a house of torture. On the steps of a church, a young woman has been sacrificed in a ritual of darkness. In New York, a cab driver dreams of demons while awake.And a man who calls himself the Desolation Angel has returned to draw his old friends back to their hometown -- a town where, two decades earlier, three boys committed the most brutal of rituals, an act of such intense savagery that it has ripped apart their minds. And where, in a cavern in a place called No Man's Land, something has been waiting a long time for those who stole something more precious than life itself.An epic tale of horror, spanning twenty years in the lives of four friends -- witnesses to unearthly terror.

The Home


Scott Nicholson - 2005
    But second chances aren’t easy for Freeman, the victim of painful childhood experiments that gave him the ability to read other people’s minds.At Wendover, Freeman and the other children are subjected to more secret experiments, organized by a shadowy organization called The Trust. But the experiments do more than open up clairvoyant powers--the electromagnetic fields used in the experiments are summoning the ghosts of the patients who died at Wendover back when it was a psychiatric ward.Now a new scientist has been brought into the project, an unstable and cruel pioneer in ESP studies who performed most of his work on a very special subject: his son, Freeman Mills.

The Thing From the Lake


Eleanor M. Ingram - 1921
    Immediately however, an unseen mysterious woman begins giving him warnings during nocturnal visits to leave the house at once. Soon he begins hearing strange ominous sounds emanating from the tiny lake at the back of the house coupled with a permeation of sickly odors. An evil presence then begins to visit him during the witching hours of the late night, challenging him to a battle of wits from which there can be only one victor. Is his mysterious female visitor there to help and encourage him to flee from the house, or is she working in tandem with The Thing From the Lake? A gripping, occasionally frightening tale, Ms. Ingram wastes no time in grabbing the reader into the story and manages to weave a tale that will leave the reader guessing at every turn of events. (Summary by Roger Melin)(from Librivox)

Cries of the Children


Clare McNally - 1992
    Three little children, found abandoned in different parts of the country. Three wonderfully sweet and startlingly gifted children who won the hearts of the grown-ups who adopted them.But now all three children were gone. Had they run away or been stolen? Their foster parents had to find them to find out. And on a rescue search that led them across America and into a world-within-a-world ruled by a psychically terrifying envoy of evil, little did they realize that the young ones they loved so briefly were now the unwitting possessors of a deadly power to harm.

Fiends


John Farris - 1990
    Ravishing beyond words, evil beyond our darkest dreams of Satan, Her eyelids flutter.Rising from Her pit, She wakes her vampire brood -- and frees them from their ancient graves.No, no one is safe, no one -- from the unwashed Children of Eve.

Drums of Darkness


Marion Zimmer Bradley - 1976
    About to face another winter in New York, without work and facing a divorce, welcomes an invitation from his great-aunt to visit Haiti. It is with real astonishment that perceives to be the descendant of a rich woman, whose property serves as a backdrop to the filming of an exciting epic. In the romantic setting of the island, a willful Mardee native lion, becomes involved with three very different men: Sebastian Wright, the filmmaker and passionate Scorpio, the handsome actor Kip Tybalt, a native of twins who seem to embody the whole mystery and Haiti's own ambivalence and Brian Dawes, a beautiful journalist and pragmatic, native rock, which seems to be the only anchor that secures it to reality. But the tropical splendor in suspense becomes deadly when a sinister voodoo ritual corners Mardee a frenzy of supernatural horror from which escape might not ever.