Here, Edgar Award-winning editor Otto Penzler has followed his keen sense of the supernatural to collect the most chilling and uncanny tales in the canon. These spectral stories span more than a hundred years, from modern-day horrors by Joyce Carol Oates, Chet Williamson and Andrew Klavan, to pulp yarns from August Derleth, Greye La Spina, and M. L. Humphreys, to the atmospheric Victorian tales of Rudyard Kipling, Edith Wharton, and H. P. Lovecraft, not to mention modern works by the likes of Donald E. Westlake and Isaac Asimov that are already classics. Some of these stories have haunted the canon for a century, while others are making their first ghoulish appearance  in book form.  Whether you prefer possessive poltergeists, awful apparitions, or friendly phantoms, these stories are guaranteed to thrill you, tingle the spine, or tickle the funny bone, and keep you turning the pages with fearful delight.Including such classics as “The Monkey’s Paw” and “The Open Window” and eerie vintage illustrations, and also featuring haunted mansions, midnight frights, lovers from beyond the grave, rapping, tapping, wailing shades, and ghosts, ghouls, and specters galore! AlsoFeaturing haunted mansions, midnight frights, lovers from beyond the grave, rapping, tapping, wailing shades, and ghosts, ghouls, and specters galore!

    Loring, "For the Blood Is the Life" by F. Marion Crawford, "The Room in the Tower" and "Mrs. Amworth" by E.F. Benson, "The Transfer" by Algernon Blackwood, "The Vampire" by Jan Neruda, "Four Wooden Stakes" by Victor Roman, and "An Authenticated Vampire Story" by Dr. Franz Hartmann. **Lightning Print On Demand Title

    This collection of classic and newly reprinted stories provides readers with more of her unsettling, dark tales, including the "The Possibility of Evil" and "The Summer People." In these deliciously dark stories, the daily commute turns into a nightmarish game of hide and seek, the loving wife hides homicidal thoughts and the concerned citizen might just be an infamous serial killer. In the haunting world of Shirley Jackson, nothing is as it seems and nowhere is safe, from the city streets to the crumbling country pile, and from the small-town apartment to the dark, dark woods. There's something sinister in suburbia.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

    

    Written in the tradition of classic English ghost tales, "Winterbay Abbey" is an unsettling Gothic thriller.Will Larson has one last chance to save his stagnant career as an architect: design a grand restoration for a long-abandoned abbey. Looming above the breathtaking, windswept coast of Maine, Winterbay Abbey offers a picturesque spot for a charming hotel. But the locals harbor a peculiar distaste for the ruined Gothic convent. After witnessing a drowning within sight of the abbey, Will wonders why the police seem disinterested in the case. He begins looking deeper into the incident, gradually uncovering chilling secrets behind the old nunnery's walls. Will's wife, Emily, becomes convinced the drowning is a ghostly replay of a forgotten death. But their investigation into the abbey's frightening history results in a tragic end with no escape from Winterbay's dark curse.

    From the story about a beautiful young woman who shows up thirsty in the bathtub of the Frangipani Hotel in Saigon many years after her first sighting there, to a young woman in Houston who befriends an old Vietnamese man she discovers naked behind a dumpster, to a truck driver asked to drive a young man with an unnamed ailment home to die, to the story of two American sisters sent to Vietnam to visit their elderly grandmother who is not what she appears to be, these stories blend the old world with the new while providing a new angle of insight into the after-effects of the war on a generation of displaced Vietnamese immigrants as well as those who remained in Vietnam.

    A solitary fortress isolated in an endless sea. A city of secrets where the elite dominate with an iron fist and ambition ends at the city walls. Ordinarily the city is surrounded by water but one day a month when the moon is at its highest, the water recedes and uncovers the causeways linking the city to the outer towers. This is Moon-day, the time when the trades bring their specialities to market and the whole Citadel enjoy the celebrations the festival brings, so when the city’s stargazer predicts the water level will drop even further, nobody takes any notice.Soon enough and despite the people's indifference, the predictions are proved correct and as the sea falls it reveals secrets that have never been known before. Secrets that are at first exciting....then disturbing .....and ultimately.....terrifying

    Scattered throughout the settlement are centuries-old stones used during the Great Plague as boundary markers. No plague-sufferer was permitted to pass them and enter the village. The plague diminished, and the village survived unscathed, but since then each year the village trustees have insisted on an ancient ceremony to renew the village boundaries, until a misguided act by the Feenans' son then reminds the village that there is a reason traditions have been rigidly stuck to, and that all acts of betrayal, even those committed centuries ago, have consequences...

    A three-time winner of the World Fantasy Award and an eight-time winner of the British Fantasy Award, his writing has struck a chord with readers worldwide. But throughout his career he has also written insightful, terrifying, and disturbing short fiction. Ghosts & Grisly Things is a collection of the best of Campbell's short works from the past two decades. This book also features the story "Ra*e" which appears here for the first time anywhere.

    A panther runs through the forests of England and pixies prey upon violent men.From the islands of Scotland to the coast of Cornwall, the mountains of Galway to the depths of the Fens, these forgotten folktales howl, cackle and sing their way into the 21st century, wildly reimagined by some of the most exciting women writing in Britain and Ireland today.

    Two lonely schoolboys at the end of childhood are forced into an unwanted companionship. One of them is terrified of what the future holds.Does music have its ghosts? Its victims? Something is stirring in the cathedral that both echoes an ancient tragedy and seems to offer a chance of future happiness. One thing is certain. Broken voices make false promises. And their lies may prove fatal.

    To William Blake and his friends, the mystery of an underground chamber where no chamber should exist is an adventure to punctuate their round of champagne picnics and cocktail parties. But something dark and alien is seeping into this bright world, and shadows from the distant past are rising over Blake's glittering future. The church's congregation are being preyed on, body and soul. A deserted house reveals a disturbing secret. An unnatural and insatiable creature is lurking, madness is afoot...and a whirlwind of chaos and destruction is about to be unleashed from another dimensionBlake and his resourceful friends know archaeology, photography, esoteric lore and even non-Euclidean geometry. But can they even begin to understand the eldritch evil they are facing in time? Can they solve the riddle that lies behind the words Cthulu Fthagn before they are picked off one by one?An HP Lovecraft-inspired novella of madness and chaos to appeal to anyone familiar with the Cthulhu Mythos, and is sure to delight new readers and seasoned fans of the Call of Cthulhu alike.

    An old diary reveals glimpses of the mansion's past — and of a terrible tragedy. A mysterious woman talks to the dead. And evil lurks in the East Wing — a hideous labyrinth of passageways devised by a truly twisted mind.Can Elliott and his family escape the clutches of Glebe House? Or will they be trapped in the maze of corridors, forever hunted by the dead?Winner of the Calderdale AwardReviews'Beautifully written and truly chilling ghost story set in a creepy mansion and featuring lost children, fearsome hunters and echoing nursery rhymes ... I liked the creepiness and the tension, which ratchets up and up until its almost unbearable.' The Bookbag 'McNish is one of our most talented thriller writers, with an ability to make your spine crawl and your heart pound with his stylish pared down prose.' Amanda Craig, The Times 'The Hunting Ground follows all the directions laid down by writers like Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce, but McNish makes them all his own. This is a beautifully written and truly disturbing ghost story. Enjoy and shiver.' South China Morning Post'A masterly sense of revelation make this a seriously chilling read.' Jake Hope, The Bookseller'A gripping and inventive ghost story for older readers in which the tension builds through apprehension, to dread and finally outright terror. This book will have readers looking over their shoulders for a long time after the last page is finished.' Booktrust

    A treasured source used by almost all the significant writers in the American pulp tradition — H. P. Lovecraft, A. Merritt, Robert E. Howard, and many others — it endures as a work of remarkable power and one of the most chillingly original books in the genre.This collection reprints all the supernatural stories from The King in Yellow, including the grisly "Yellow Sign," the disquieting "Repairer of Reputations," the tender "Demoiselle d'Ys," and others. Robert W. Chambers' finest stories from other sources have also been added, such as the thrilling "Maker of Moons" and "The Messenger." In addition, an unusual pleasure awaits those who know Chambers only by his horror stories: three of his finest early biological science-fiction fantasies from In Search of the Unknown appear here as well.

    Justice Harbottle, The Room in the Dragon Volant, and Carmilla. The five stories are purported to be cases by Dr. Hesselius, a 'metaphysical' doctor, who is willing to consider the ghosts both as real and as hallucinatory obsessions. The reader's doubtful anxiety mimics that of the protagonist, and each story thus creates that atmosphere of mystery which is the supernatural experience. This new annotated edition includes an introduction, notes on the text, and explanatory notes.NB: The Familiar is a revision of The Watcher; Mr. Justice Harbottle is a revision of An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street.