McCammon, Whitley Strieber, Michael McDowell, Robert Bloch, Ramsey Campbell, Charles L. Grant and others. Edited by Alan Ryan, author of The Kill and Dead White.

    Schow received the World Fantasy Award for "Red Light" and the Twilight Zone Magazine Dimension award for "Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You", both of which are included in this volume.

    Ferguson did to him when he was a boy. The pain, the blood and the snip-snip of those glinting scissors will live in his nightmares for the rest of his life. But now Dr. Ferguson is back and not just in Stuart's dreams. He's very real. He's determined to perform that same horrible procedure on Stuart's young son. And his scissors are nice and sharp.

    In this creepy tale, the twist comes with the very last word…

     DEADLY MESSENGERS Nobody's listening, so he'll just keep killing.Three massacres in the same city, the same month. Two detectives discover a link that can't possibly exist. One journalist unwittingly holds the answers. Zero clues to a killer who sends a deadly message.Kendall's usual freelance work consists of fluff magazine pieces until she scores an interview with the survivor of a horrific mass killing. Seven people brutally murdered with an axe at a cafe, with the killer left dead at the scene. She’ll soon discover these killings are part of a plan far greater than just these crimes. Someone is sending a message and soon many more will die. BEHIND THE FIRE What if all that stood between us and hell was a match?An ordinary couple stand accused of a heinous crime. They're the last people you'd expect to save the world. Are they criminals, heroes or completely insane? Or maybe all three?Something terrifying has led Bobby and Emily to leave their two young children with a sitter while they embarked on a crazy fire-bug spree. That something was an incredible secret they'd promised to protect. Inspired by true-life headlines, this is the tale of the random appearances of frightening black things, and one couple's battle to protect their town from these dangerous and hellish creatures. BACK AGAIN Between life and death lies fate and one hell of a fightA single mom struggles with unexplained lost time. An angry young woman makes a fatal mistake, taking them on a collision course that will shatter their lives to pieces.Since childhood, Dawn has "lost time." She awakens in strange places, far away from her last memory. Now she's just trying to be a good mom to her son while fearing another blackout episode. Kylie is over her dead-end job and has just been fired. As she drives from the supermarket lot, she picks up her cell to send a text. In the next terrifying moment, she’ll realize the gravity of her mistake when Dawn’s and her destinies collide.

    The boy seems to have a psychic connection to something in the dark forest, something unseen... and evil. The old-timers in the region know the truth of the legendary creature that stalks the Pine Barrens. And they know the savagery it's capable of

    And an old flame to complicate the trip.Check out this beach-y Violet Darger short featuring Darger, Loshak, Owen, and Spinks.When 17-year-old Micaela Tolliver goes missing during her beach vacation, FBI profiler Violet Darger heads to Curacao to investigate. The case vexes local law enforcement, with plenty of suspicious characters around and comparisons to Natalee Holloway aplenty.Red herrings. False starts. People who will go great lengths to protect the island's long held secrets.Further complications emerge due to someone else entangled in the case -- Darger's old friend and former lover, private investigator Owen Baxter. They're working together for the first time after a bad breakup. The tension is palpable, and Darger begins to question the knot of conflicts in her own heart.Corruption. Death. Sand. Romance.Once again, Violet Darger shines her light into the shadows. And what she finds there in the darkness will change her.

    ‘Come on! Move it!’ Pilcher, though considerably older than the others, ran with surprising speed from the base of the Needle to the helicopter. Reynolds…brought up the rear, his M16 swinging left and right in case any targets popped up. ‘Evans,’ Reynolds said, “ETA on Pam.’ ‘She’s about a minute away.’ ‘And the abbies?’ ‘They’re right behind her.’” The genius architect of Wayward Pines, David Pilcher, decides to lead a scouting party out of his secluded mountain fortress to make sure the dying world he once knew has disappeared. It has…mostly. But the abbies are out there, too—millions of monstrous reminders of what humanity has involved into. And every one of them wants to tear Pilcher and his crew apart.Brett Battles’s Alone is another wildly inventive, hair-raising chapter in the Wayward Pines series.

     The mansion in Pellam Woods had been shipped in, piece by piece, and reconstructed in the forest at the edge of town. The citizens of Edgar Falls wondered who would build such a grand house in their sleepy little backwater. But the house sat vacant…. THEN THE DYING BEGAN…. A mother lights her home ablaze, burning her six children alive… A young boy drowns himself in a lake.... Twelve year old Bobby Topin sensed something evil inside the house. Something that tried to crawl inside his mind. One by one, the townsfolk are falling victim to their darkest impulses. And only Bobby knows that the house where no one lives is home to a malevolent force... SOUL-EATER

    As John unravels the mystery and trails the killer across Missouri, he finds himself caught in the web of David's twisted psychological schemes. The terror increases when Emily Dolon, the woman both John and David have loved since childhood, becomes the target of David's macabre mind games.Trapped between his duty of solving the case and his devotion to his best friend, John struggles to find the truth, knowing he must execute justice, even if it costs him lifelong loyalties or his own life. Blind Evil is a taut psychological thriller that explores the dark place where sanity and madness collide.

    One is a magnificent dog of astonishing intelligence. The other, a hybrid monster of a brutally violent nature. And both are on the loose.… Bestselling author Dean Koontz presents his most terrifying, dramatic and moving novel: The explosive story of a man and a woman, caught in a relentless storm of mankind’s darkest creation.… Midnight In picturesque Moonlight Cove, California, inexplicable deaths occur and spine-tingling terror descends to this "edge of paradise." Growing numbers of residents harbor a secret so dark it is sure to cost even more lives. Tessa Lockland comes to town to probe her sister's seemingly unprompted suicide. Independent and clever, she meets up with Sam Booker, an undercover FBI agent sent to Moonlight Cove to discover the truth behind the mysterious deaths. They meet Harry Talbot, a wheelchair-bound veteran, who has seen things from his window that he was not meant to see. Together they begin to understand the depth of evil in Moonlight Cove. Chrissie Foster, a resourceful eleven-year-old, running from her parents who have suddenly changed and in whom darkness dwells, joins them. Together they make a stand against darkness and terror.

    But her fantasies about heroic outdoor survival flop as hard as her marriage. Dejected beyond measure, she takes a bus to Montana to visit an old high school suitor–someone she once suspected too sinister to pursue. Turns out her initial suspicions about him were spot-on. She soon finds herself in the exact predicament she'd so long imagined. Only now she must outwit a vast wilderness ... and sheer evil.Marty Clawson's got a big problem: 264 pounds’ worth. Doc warns of dire consequences if something doesn't change, but Marty's already tried every diet on the market plus an endless list of her own concoctions. Still, she devises a NEW PLAN–and unlike the others–this one is terrifying: a rendezvous with the state park, a place she considers the very heart of darkness (and snack-free) where she won't emerge again until she is thin. Hubby Raymond believes the method too dangerous–abandoning his super-sized wife like a broken dresser–and refuses to help with her scheme; his crap attitude, along with everything else, changes when she catches him in bed with an aging porn star. Surviving the backwoods alone is challenging for a seasoned outdoorsman but unthinkable for a woman nearing red-alert obesity; yet, she believes it's her last chance to avoid eating herself to death. Despite Ray's newfound assistance, Marty fails at her plan. Desperate and depressed, she contacts Logan Myers, a peculiar boy from her past. Her hopelessness prompts her to accept his offer of bus fare north into the unforgiving Montana bush where he hunts and traps wild animals.Logan soon reveals himself to be far worse than she remembered. So bad that he tosses her to the elements as punishment for rejecting him. In a wicked and ironic twist, her once farfetched idea morphs into an epic web of repetitious terrain and pure malevolence. Now she needs to make it back to the Greyhound station before nightfall, without getting mauled by a random grizzly or discovered by a roaming psychopath determined to hunt her down.THE CHASE IS ON.

    Thought to be buried somewhere within the Mato Grosso region of the Amazon rainforest, the lure of the vanished riches has long proven deadly to treasure-seekers who brave the forbidding wilderness and mysterious creatures in search of it. Disgraced historian Dr. Hunter Winslow, fired from a lucrative professorship for stealing rare documents in order to gain a competitive edge over his colleagues, thinks the key to Manuscript 512 lies not in its words, but in its paper itself. The only problem is that to confirm his hypothesis means to destroy the document, something the Brazil National Library in Rio de Janeiro will never allow. But old habits die hard, and Hunter knows his way around a Special Collections room. After a brazen theft that triggers an international manhunt, the rogue historian is able to reveal the document’s secrets in a way no one else can, or ever will be able to again—by using its physical properties to reveal missing sections that had supposedly been irreversibly damaged. Armed with this new information, Hunter embarks on an expedition to the deepest Amazon to put to rest the mystery of the lost city once and for all. But while Hunter is looking for the fabled treasure, the long arm of the law is looking for him. Will they catch up to him before he can locate the treasure of a thousand lifetimes, or will he become as lost as the city he seeks?

    Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King - A 30-minute Summary of the Novel Inside this Instaread Summary: Overview of the entire bookIntroduction to the Important people in the bookSummary and analysis of all the chapters in the bookKey Takeaways of the bookA Reader's Perspective Preview of this summary: Part1Chapter 1Down-on-his-luck, Augie Odenkirk helps homeless Janice Cray care for her baby as they wait in the early morning fog for a job fair. A gray Mercedes plows into the crowd. Augie, Janice and the baby are among the victims.Part 2Chapters 1-3About a year after the Mercedes crash, Retired Detective K. William Hodges watches more grubby reality shows, fails to enjoy his beer, and thinks, again, of shooting himself. The arrival of the mail distracts him. A letter, allegedly from the driver of the killer Mercedes, stuns him. The writer brags about killing eight and wounding many. He says that he got off sexually at he drove into the crowd. He wore a condom and used bleach to get rid of any DNA. He wore a hair net under a clown mask for the same reason. He knows Hodges is miserable and hopes the letter cheers him up. He gives Hodges a website where they can talk, including a username: kermitfrog19.Chapters 4-6Hodges wonders if he should turn the letter over to his former partner, Pete Huntley. He believes the writer is the killer because he knows inside information about the condom and the bleach. The idea of using this letter, and chats on line, to catch the killer gives Hodges a reason to live.Chapter 7-9Hodges analyzes the letter and sees that the writer has several identifying traits, including misusing perk for perp and peppering his words with an image of a smiley face. The same smiley face was glued onto the steering wheel of the Mercedes. Hodges calls Pete and makes a lunch date....

     FBI profiler Victor Loshak works a brutal murder case in Watertown, New York -- a woman found strangled in her basement, her face gone purple and baggy. But as he sifts through the crime scene details, his mind keeps drifting back to Kansas City, his last job. The human trafficking case there ended in something of a cliffhanger, and it's a loose end that everyone else in law enforcement seems in no hurry to tie up. The truth is out there. Always just out of reach. Loshak finds himself changed by the events that transpired in Missouri. His worldview shifted. His priorities shuffled. He reaches out to the people close to him, hoping to make major changes in his personal life. But they are watching. When Loshak pursues leads relating to Kansas City, however, the warnings start. They are watching him. Seem to know everything about him. If he keeps working the human trafficking case, everything -- and everyone -- he cares about will be in jeopardy. Justice bears a heavy cost. How high of a price will you pay? The shape of a man's life is largely defined by what passions he pursues, Loshak decides. Now he will choose what that means for him. While the Victor Loshak novels can be read in any order, we recommend reading this short after having read the earlier books in the series. Here is the full list of Loshak books in chronological order: Beyond Good & Evil (Victor Loshak Book 1) The Good Life Crisis (Victor Loshak Book 1.5) What Lies Beneath (Victor Loshak Book 2) Take Warning (Victor Loshak Book 2.5)