Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror


Lynne JamneckEllie Knightsbridge - 2016
    Kiernan, Molly Tanzer, Lois H. Gresh, Nancy Kilpatrick, Elizabeth Bear, Gemma Files and many more fully color illustrated by Daniele Serra, Dreams from the Witch House highlights some of the very best women writers of weird fiction and Lovecraftian horror. The history of the Old World is shrouded in secrecy. Creatures and forces unimaginable inhabited this realm for eons, long before any human navigated the surface of the earth. As the Old Ones have slumbered or observed from afar, humans have assembled civilization upon this fragile planet. Yet the whispers from the elders have been growing stronger, their energy once again seeping into the world. These whispers are being felt throughout the earth; from the roots of our flora to the dreams of our children. They are preparing us for what is to come. In Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror the most intuitive dreamers have been assembled to give us glimpses into these ancient terrors and their whispered warnings. Featuring authors Joyce Carol Oates, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Lois Gresh, Gemma Files, Nancy Kilpatrick, Elizabeth Bear, Storm Constantine and others accompanied by the lavish artwork of Daniele Serra, Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror is a representation of some of the finest cosmic horror and weird fiction from female authors in the field today.

Darkness on the Edge of Town


Brian Keene - 2008
    Just . . . gone. Surrounding their town was a wall of inky darkness, plummeting Walden into permanent night. Nothing can get in - not light, not people, not even electricity, radio, TV, internet, food, or water. And nothing can get out. No one who dared to penetrate the mysterious barrier has ever been seen again. Only their screams were heard. But for some, the darkness is not the worst of their fears. Driven mad by thirst, hunger, and perpetual night, the residents of Walden are ready to explode. The last few sane prisoners of this small town must prepare a final stand against their neighbors, themselves, and something even worse . . . something out there . . . in the darkness . . .

Flight or Fright: 17 Turbulent Tales


Stephen KingDan Simmons - 2018
    This exciting new anthology, perfect for airport or airplane reading, includes an original introduction and story notes for each story by Stephen King, along with brand new stories from Stephen King and Joe Hill.Stephen King hates to fly. Now he and co-editor Bev Vincent would like to share this fear of flying with you.Welcome to Flight or Fright, an anthology about all the things that can go horribly wrong when you're suspended six miles in the air, hurtling through space at more than 500 mph and sealed up in a metal tube (like—gulp!—a coffin) with hundreds of strangers. All the ways your trip into the friendly skies can turn into a nightmare, including some we'll bet you've never thought of before... but now you will the next time you walk down the jetway and place your fate in the hands of a total stranger.Featuring brand new stories by Joe Hill and Stephen King, as well as fourteen classic tales and one poem from the likes of Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, Roald Dahl, Dan Simmons, and many others, Flight or Fright is, as King says, "ideal airplane reading, especially on stormy descents... Even if you are safe on the ground, you might want to buckle up nice and tight."

The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard


Robert E. Howard - 2008
    Some of Howard’s best-known characters–Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, and sailor Steve Costigan among them–roam the forbidding locales of the author’s fevered imagination, from the swamps and bayous of the Deep South to the fiend-haunted woods outside Paris to remote jungles in Africa.The collection includes Howard’s masterpiece “Pigeons from Hell,” which Stephen King calls “one of the finest horror stories of [the twentieth] century,” a tale of two travelers who stumble upon the ruins of a Southern plantation–and into the maw of its fatal secret. In “Black Canaan” even the best warrior has little chance of taking down the evil voodoo man with unholy powers–and none at all against his wily mistress, the diabolical High Priestess of Damballah. In these and other lavishly illustrated classics, such as the revenge nightmare “Worms of the Earth” and “The Cairn on the Headland,” Howard spins tales of unrelenting terror, the legacy of one of the world’s great masters of the macabre.

Cthulhu Mythos Writers Sampler 2013


David ConyersDavid Dunwoody - 2013
     “The Great White Bed” – A senile old man makes a deal with a strange being for a new lease on life. What happens when a book reads you? “The Cellar Gods” – In the 1940s, a young medical student protects a beautiful Asian woman from prejudiced townsfolk, only to discover she is connected to mysterious entities from an unholy dimension. “The Locked Door” – The visions of a psychic threatens the existence of a secret order. “In the Gyre” – A research vessel investigating a growing pollution problem in the ocean finds that something else has discovered a use for our waste material—something designed for building, and growing, and multiplying. “The Gate and the Way” – Poking around the local spook house for redeemable cans and bottles, two brothers stumble upon cosmic horrors from beyond space and time. “I Cannot Begin To Tell You” – A desperate father kidnaps his infant son and flees to a remote cabin to wait out an apocalypse only he can perceive. Is the man psychotic? Or is the boy a conduit for an ancient malevolence from the depths of Time? “Cutter” – A man and boy are trapped in an abandoned house by plague of bizarre monsters. “Graveyard Orbit” – In the future, the deep space exploration vessel Wellington encounters the unthinkable orbiting the uncharted planet Osiris II. Amid the debris of a trillion alien corpses, the Wellington’s Captain Walker will stumble upon an unlikely ally—and potentially, the secrets of the universe. “The Weaponized Puzzle” – A Russian spy steals an alien artifact from the Australian Government which soon transforms into a prison, and Australian spy Harrison Peel must solve its various puzzles and confront its captive horrors to escape again. Fiction by Don Webb, Jeffrey Thomas, Brian M, Sammons, Peter Rawlik, William Meikle, Kevin Lucia, David Kernot, Scott R. Jones, C.J. Henderson, Cody Goodfellow, David Dunwoody, Shane Jiraiya Cummings and David Conyers. Cover illustration by Paul Mudie. This sampler collection provides links to the various author’s works, personal interviews, and further information on their e-books. Step inside, and discover the newest horror releases lurking in the nightmare lands of Lovecraft…

Stranger Things Happen


Kelly Link - 2001
    The girl detective must go to the underworld to solve the case of the tap-dancing bank robbers. A librarian falls in love with a girl whose father collects artificial noses. A dead man posts letters home to his estranged wife. Two women named Louise begin a series of consecutive love affairs with a string of cellists. A newly married couple become participants in an apocalyptic beauty pageant. Sexy blond aliens invade New York City. A young girl learns how to make herself disappear.These eleven extraordinary stories are quirky, spooky, and smart. They all have happy endings. Every story contains a secret prize. Each story was written especially for you.Stories from Stranger Things Happen have won the Nebula, Tiptree, and World Fantasy Award. Stranger Things Happen was a Salon Book of the Year, one of the Village Voice's 25 Favorite Books of 2001, and was nominated for the Firecracker Alternative Book Award.Contents:- Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (1998)- Water Off a Black Dog's Back (1995)- The Specialist's Hat (1998)- Flying Lessons (1995)- Travels with the Snow Queen (1996/1997)- Vanishing Act (1996)- Survivor's Ball, or, The Donner Party (1998)- Shoe and Marriage (2000)- Most of My Friends Are Two-Thirds Water (2001)- Louise's Ghost (2001)- The Girl Detective (1999)Cover painting by Shelley Jackson

To Rouse Leviathan


Matt Cardin - 2019
    Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti, Cardin explores the convergence of religion, horror, and art in a cosmos that may be actively hostile to our species. In this substantial volume, Cardin gathers the totality of his short fiction. In tales long and short, some substantially revised from their original appearances and including a new novella co-written with Mark McLaughlin, Cardin rings a succession of changes on those fateful words from the Book of Job: “Let those sorcerers who place a curse on days curse that day, those who are skilled to rouse Leviathan.” Aside from his fiction, Matt Cardin is the editor of Born to Fear: Interviews with Thomas Ligotti (2014) and Horror Literature through History (2015), and co-editor of the journal Vastarien.

That Which Should Not Be


Brett J. Talley - 2011
    From the faculty to the students, the fascination with other-worldly legends and objects runs rampant. So, when Carter Weston’s professor Dr. Thayerson asks him to search a nearby village for a book that is believed to control the inhuman forces that rule the Earth, Incendium Maleficarum, The Inferno of the Witch, the student doesn’t hesitate to begin the quest.Weston’s journey takes an unexpected turn, however, when he ventures into a tavern in the small town of Anchorhead. Rather than passing the evening as a solitary patron, Weston joins four men who regale him with stories of their personal experiences with forces both preternatural and damned. Two stories hit close to home as they tie the tellers directly to Weston’s current mission.His unanticipated role as passive listener proves fortuitous, and Weston fulfills his goal. Bringing the book back to Miskatonic, though, proves to be a grave mistake. Quickly, Weston realizes he has played a role in potentially opening the gate between the netherworld and the world of Man. Reversing the course of events means forgetting all he thought he knew about Miskatonic and his professor and embracing an unknown beyond his wildest imagination.

Shotguns v. Cthulhu


Robin D. LawsRob Heinsoo - 2012
    Steel your nerves, reach into your weapons locker, and tie tight your running shoes as humanity takes up arms against the monsters and gods of H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. Grab your pistols, your knives, your gearpunk grenades. Confront deep ones, mi-go, and flying polyps. Fight in the past, present and future, from the birth of the shotgun to the end of the world. Escape by car, carriage, and hot air balloon. Above all, remember to count your bullets...you may need the last one for yourself.

The Willows


Algernon Blackwood - 1907
    Throughout the story Blackwood personifies the surrounding environment—river, sun, wind—and imbues them with a powerful and ultimately threatening character. Most ominous are the masses of dense, desultory, menacing willows, which "moved of their own will as though alive, and they touched, by some incalculable method, my own keen sense of the horrible.""The Willows" is one of Algernon Blackwood's best known short stories. American horror author H.P. Lovecraft considered it to be the finest supernatural tale in English literature. "The Willows" is an example of early modern horror and is connected within the literary tradition of weird fiction.

Poe's Children: The New Horror


Peter StraubM. Rickert - 2008
    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.

The Ballad of Black Tom


Victor LaValle - 2016
    He knows what magic a suit can cast, the invisibility a guitar case can provide, and the curse written on his skin that attracts the eye of wealthy white folks and their cops. But when he delivers an occult tome to a reclusive sorceress in the heart of Queens, Tom opens a door to a deeper realm of magic, and earns the attention of things best left sleeping.A storm that might swallow the world is building in Brooklyn. Will Black Tom live to see it break?

Sour Candy


Kealan Patrick Burke - 2015
    They take walks in the park together, visit county fairs, museums, and zoos, and eat together overlooking the lake. Some might say the father is a little too accommodating given the lack of discipline when the child loses his temper in public. Some might say he spoils his son by allowing him to set his own bedtimes and eat candy whenever he wants. Some might say that such leniency is starting to take its toll on the father, given how his health has declined.What no one knows is that Phil is a prisoner, and that up until a few weeks ago and a chance encounter at a grocery store, he had never seen the child before in his life.

Unseaming


Mike Allen - 2014
    A childhood doll arrives to tear its owner’s reality limb from limb. A portal to the spirit realm stretches wide on the Appalachian Trail, and something more than human crawls through on eight legs. Words of comfort change to terrifying sounds as a force from outside time speaks through them. The buttons in the bin will unseam your flesh to bare your nastiest secrets.

Year's Best Weird Fiction; Volume 2


Kathe KojaCat Hellisen - 2015
    Contributing authors include Julio Cortazar, Jean Muno, Karen Joy Fowler, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Nick Mamatas, Carmen Maria Machado, Nathan Ballingrud, and more. No longer the purview of esoteric readers, weird fiction is enjoying wide popularity. Chiefly derived from early 20th-century pulp fiction, its remit includes ghost stories, the strange and macabre, the supernatural, fantasy, myth, philosophical ontology, ambiguity, and a healthy helping of the outre. At its best, weird fiction is an intersecting of themes and ideas that explore and subvert the Laws of Nature. It is not confined to one genre, but is the most diverse and welcoming of all genres.