Book picks similar to
Forgotten Lore: Volume I by Alexei Maxim Russell
fantasy
m-next-pile
not-free
historical-fiction
Cold Bath Street
A.J. Hartley - 2018
In order to save his soul he must brave his greatest fear - Cold Bath Street. A gothic thriller - think Hunger Games crossed with Artemis Fowl - that will keep you gripped to the end. Stunning black and white illustrations throughout.
Stitch
Sue Brown - 2014
It is the first in a series of gothic m/m romance anthologies called gothika. The stories in this volume are:Made For Aaron by Sue BrownAs a teenager, Aaron Fox was sent to an asylum by his parents because he was gay, leaving him emotionally fragile after the treatment. However it gave him Damon Fox, the nurse he later married. For over twenty years, Damon’s devotion and strength has never faltered. When Damon is killed in a car accident, Aaron’s devastation soon gives way to confusion when he is shown Damon walking away from the hospital. Despite a desperate search, Damon isn’t seen again, and if Aaron can’t live with Damon, he may not want to live at all. But forces beyond Aaron’s understanding work behind the scenes, and if he can find the courage to unveil the secrets, he might get a second chance at happiness.Watchworks by Jamie FessendenHarland Wallace made his name as one of the premiere watchmakers in Victorian London, so he isn’t surprised when a handsome young gentleman named Luke Prescott comes to his townhouse to hire him for a repair job. He is apprehensive when he discovers it is not a watch Mr. Prescott wants repaired, but a complex prosthesis he has in place of a hand.As further repairs are needed, Harland begins to wonder how much of Mr. Prescott is real and how much is mechanical, but he cannot deny the growing attraction he feels toward him. When he learns Prescott’s household servants pose a threat to the man they see as a monster, Harland must choose between what his culture tells him is wrong and what his heart tells him is right.The Golem of Mala Lubovnya by Kim FieldingIn a small, 17th-century Eastern European town, a rabbi creates a man of clay—a golem—to protect the Jewish people from the threat of pogrom. Awaiting a call to duty, the golem spends a long time confined to an attic, lonely and sad. His only joys are watching the stonemason at work across the street and listening to a lovely voice singing prayers. When the golem meets the mason, Jakob, the two become friends, and Jakob names the golem Emet. But devout Jakob struggles with his attraction to Emet, and Emet dreads being used as an instrument for violence. Though Emet’s name means truth, honest love between a faithful man and a golem will only survive if they risk everything for a miracle.Reparation by Eli EastonOn the harsh planet of Kalan, weakness is not tolerated. When young spore farmer Edward suffers an carriage accident that kills his mail-order bride and his factory manager, Edward has little chance of survival, until Knox—an enormous “reconstitute” labor slave—plucks him from disaster. Recons are part machine, part human remains from executed Federation prisoners. But Knox is different from other recons. He can read and has flashes of brilliance. With no one else to rely on over the bleak winter, Edward forms an alliance with Knox, and against social taboos, they become friends. Edward struggles against his growing lust for the large humanoid, and while Knox thrives in his new life, memories of his past torment him.A twist of fate brought Knox and Edward together, but there will be a price to pay in blood when they learn how deeply their lives truly intersect.
Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories
Michael Sims - 2010
Beginning with the supposedly true accounts that captivated Byron and Shelley, the stories range from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Oval Portrait" and Sheridan Le Fanu's "Carmilla" to Guy de Maupassant's "The Horla" and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's "Good Lady Ducayne." Sims also includes a nineteenth-century travel tour of Transylvanian superstitions, and rounds out the collection with Stoker's own "Dracula's Guest"-a chapter omitted from his landmark novel.Vampires captivated the Victorians, as Sims reveals in his insightful introduction: In 1867, Karl Marx described capitalism as "dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor"; while in 1888 a London newspaper invoked vampires in trying to explain Jack the Ripper's predations. At a time when vampires have been re-created in a modern context, Dracula's Guest will remind readers young, old, and in between of why the undead won't let go of our imagination.
The Invited
Jennifer McMahon - 2019
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In a quest for a simpler life, Helen and Nate have abandoned the comforts of suburbia to take up residence on forty-four acres of rural land where they will begin the ultimate, aspirational do-it-yourself project: building the house of their dreams. When they discover that this beautiful property has a dark and violent past, Helen, a former history teacher, becomes consumed by the local legend of Hattie Breckenridge, a woman who lived and died there a century ago. With her passion for artifacts, Helen finds special materials to incorporate into the house--a beam from an old schoolroom, bricks from a mill, a mantel from a farmhouse--objects that draw her deeper into the story of Hattie and her descendants, three generations of Breckenridge women, each of whom died suspiciously. As the building project progresses, the house will become a place of menace and unfinished business: a new home, now haunted, that beckons its owners and their neighbors toward unimaginable danger.
Haunted Legends
Ellen DatlowM.K. Hobson - 2010
Lansdale, Caitlin Kiernan, Catherynne M. Valente, Kit Reed, Ekaterina Sedia, and thirteen other fine writers to create stories unlike any they've written before. Tales to make readers shiver with fear, jump at noises in the night, keep the lights on. These twenty nightmares, brought together by two renowned editors of the dark fantastic, are delightful visions sure to send shivers down the spines of horror readers.
The Ghost Garden
Emma Carroll - 2020
When Fran unearths a bone in the garden of Longbarrow House on the same afternoon that Leo breaks his leg, it must surely be just a coincidence. But Fran can't shake the uneasy feeling that the events are somehow connected, and there is a shift in the atmosphere that leaves her troubled and anxious. Roped into keeping wheelchair-bound Leo company, Fran is forced to listen to his foolish theories about the looming threat of war in Europe. But as the pair start to uncover more secrets buried beneath the garden, they dredge up threatening shadows of the future, and Fran begins to fear that Leo's dire predictions might be coming true ... Queen of Historical Fiction, Emma Carroll, makes her Barrington Stoke debut with a powerful, evocative, and spine-tingling story of childhood on the brink of war.
October Dreams: A Celebration of Halloween
Richard ChizmarJack Ketchum - 2000
Brite * Rick Hautala * Steve Rasnic Tem * Elizabeth Engstrom * Thomas Ligotti * Gary A. Braunbeck * Jack Ketchum * Thomas F. Monteleone * Hugh B. Cave * Simon Clark * Christopher Golden * Ray Bradbury * Jack Ketchum * Alan M. Clark * Gahan Wilson * Paula Guran * John Shirley * Tom Piccirilli * Jack Cady * David B. Silva * Robert Morrish * William F. Nolan * Michael Cadnum * Richard Laymon * Douglas Clegg * Douglas E. Winter * Stanley Wiater * Caitlín R. Kiernan * Lewis Shiner * Yvonne Navarro * Tim Lebbon * Kim Newman * F. Paul Wilson * Owl Goingback * Dennis Etchison * Stephen Mark Rainey * Charles L. Grant * Kelly Laymon * Dominick Cancilla * Kristine Kathryn Rusch * Michael Marshall Smith * Wayne Allen Sallee * Ramsey Campbell * Ed Gorman * Stefan Dziemianowicz * Peter Crowther
Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales
Vernon Lee - 1890
of whom I can affirm only one thing, that they haunted certain brains, and have haunted, among others, my own.” First published in 1890, Lee’s most famous volume of supernatural tales occupies a special place in the literature of the fantastic for its treatment of the femme fatale and the allure of the past, along with the themes of thwarted artistic creativity and psychological obsession. This collection, which includes the four stories originally published in Hauntings and three others, enables readers to consider Lee’s work anew for its subtle redefinitions of gender and sexuality during the Victorian fin-de-siècle.The appendices, which include extensive excerpts from writings by Lee’s predecessors and peers, including Algernon Charles Swinburne, Walter Pater, and Lee’s brother Eugene Lee-Hamilton, allow the reader to see how Lee takes on the themes and preoccupations of the late-Victorian period but adapts them to her own purposes.Preface to Hauntings (1890) -- Amour dure (1887, 1890) -- Dionea (1890) -- Oke of Okehurst (1886, 1890) -- A wicked voice (1887, 1890) -- Prince Alberic and the snake lady (1896) -- A wedding chest (1904) -- Preface to The virgin of the seven daggers (1927) -- The virgin of the seven daggers (1896, 1909,1927) -- Appendix A: From Algernon Charles Swinburne, "Notes on designs of the old masters at Florence" (1868, 1875) -- Appendix B: From Walter Pater, "Pico della Mirandula" (1871, 1873) -- Appendix C: From Walter Pater, "Lionardo da Vinci" (1869, 1873) -- Appendix D: Vernon Lee, "Faustus and Helena: notes on the supernatural in art" (1880, 1881) -- Appendix E: A. Mary F. Robinson, "Before a bust of Venus" (1881) -- Appendix F: Eugene Lee-Hamilton, "The mandolin" (1882) -- Appendix G: A. Mary F. Robinson, "The ladies of Milan" (1889) -- Appendix H: Eugene Lee-Hamilton, "On a surf-rolled torso of Venus" (1884, 1894) -- Appendix I: Vernon Lee, "Out of Venice at last" (1925).
Headhunter
Warren Barns - 2017
Unbearable pain. A night of passion becomes a nightmare for corporate headhunter Adam Walters. In Prague for a few days to do business, he makes the most of his time away from home and commitments, indulging his lustful desires. But when he wakes up hog tied naked on an operating table in a filthy tiled room, he can’t begin to imagine the pain that is about to come his way… WARNING * This is an extreme horror book. It may contain scenes of gratuitous sex, and violence against humans, animals, and inanimate objects that didn’t deserve their fate.
The Midnight Circus
Jane Yolen - 2020
The dark imaginings of fantasy icon Jane Yolen are not for the faint of heart. In these sixteen brilliantly unnerving tales and poems, Central Park becomes a carnival where you can - but probably shouldn’t - transform into a wild beast. The Red Sea will be deadly to cross due to a plague of voracious angels. Meanwhile, the South Pole is no place for even a good man, regardless of whether he is living or dead.Wicked, solemn, and chilling, the circus is ready for your visit - just don’t arrive late. Other short story collections by Jane Yolen in this series The Emerald Circus (9781616962739): 2018 World Fantasy Award winnerHow to Fracture a Fairy Tale (978-1-61696-306-4): 2019 Anne Izard Storytellers’ Choice Award
Nocturnes
John Connolly - 2004
In "The New Daughter," a father comes to suspect that a burial mound on his land hides something very ancient, and very much alive; in "The Underbury Witches," two London detectives find themselves battling a particularly female evil in a town culled of its menfolk. And finally, private detective Charlie Parker returns in the long novella "The Reflecting Eye," in which the photograph of an unknown girl turns up in the mailbox of an abandoned house once occupied by an infamous killer. This discovery forces Parker to confront the possibility that the house is not as empty as it appears, and that something has been waiting in the darkness for its chance to kill again.
Florence & Giles
John Harding - 2010
Banned from reading, Florence devours books in secret and talks to herself—and narrates her story—in a unique language of her own invention. By night, she sleepwalks the corridors and is troubled by a recurrent dream in which a mysterious woman appears to threaten her younger brother Giles.After the sudden violent death of the children's first governess, a second teacher, Miss Taylor, arrives, and immediately strange phenomena begin to occur. Florence becomes convinced that the new governess is a malevolent spirit who means to do Giles harm. Against this powerful enemy, Florence must use all her intelligence and ingenuity to protect her little brother and preserve her private world. This Gothic page-turner in the tradition of The Woman in Black and The Fall of the House of Usher is told in a startlingly different and wonderfully captivating narrative voice.
Melmoth
Sarah Perry - 2018
In Prague, working as a translator, she has found a home of sorts—or, at least, refuge. That changes when her friend Karel discovers a mysterious letter in the library, a strange confession and a curious warning that speaks of Melmoth the Witness, a dark legend found in obscure fairy tales and antique village lore. As such superstition has it, Melmoth travels through the ages, dooming those she persuades to join her to a damnation of timeless, itinerant solitude. To Helen it all seems the stuff of unenlightened fantasy.But, unaware, as she wanders the cobblestone streets Helen is being watched. And then Karel disappears. . . .
The Haunting of Clandestine House
Celina Myers - 2019
It is known as the haunted house that swallows people whole. It isn’t until an out of town buyer Hannah Watts purchases Clandestine house that the the dark past of the time capsule home will come to light. What happened to the Clandestine family? What is going to happen to Hannah?