Book picks similar to
The Dwarf of Westerbourg by Christian Heinrich Spieß


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Mapping the Interior


Stephen Graham Jones - 2017
    Instead of the people who could be there, his mother or his brother, the figure reminds him of his long-gone father, who died mysteriously before his family left the reservation. When he follows it he discovers his house is bigger and deeper than he knew. The house is the kind of wrong place where you can lose yourself and find things you'd rather not have. Over the course of a few nights, the boy tries to map out his house in an effort that puts his little brother in the worst danger, and puts him in the position to save them . . . at terrible cost.

The Magicians and Mrs. Quent


Galen Beckett - 2008
    Quent. A first novel. 30,000 first printing.

Strange Practice


Vivian Shaw - 2017
    In her consulting rooms, Dr. Helsing treats the undead for a host of ills - vocal strain in banshees, arthritis in barrow-wights, and entropy in mummies. Although barely making ends meet, this is just the quiet, supernatural-adjacent life Greta's been groomed for since childhood. Until a sect of murderous monks emerges, killing human and undead Londoners alike. As terror takes hold of the city, Greta must use her unusual skills to stop the cult if she hopes to save her practice, and her life.

Melmoth the Wanderer


Charles Maturin - 1820
    In a satanic bargain, Melmoth exchanges his soul for immortality. The story of his tortured wanderings through the centuries is pieced together through those who have been implored by Melmoth to take over his pact with the devil. Influenced by the Gothic romances of the late 18th century, Maturin's diabolic tale raised the genre to a new and macabre pitch. Its many admirers include Poe, Balzac, Oscar Wilde and Baudelaire.

Der Ackermann: Frühneuhochdeutsch/Neuhochdeutsch


Johannes von Saaz
    It's considered one of the most important works of late medieval German literature. The poem's 34 short chapters are a dialog between a plowman, whose beloved wife has recently died, & Death. In odd-numbered chapters the grieving plowman accuses Death for his loss. In even-numbered chapters Death responds to the plowman's emotions with cold cynical logic. In the penultimate chapter God appears & adjudicates the dispute, reminding the plowman that he owes his life to God & reminding Death that he owes his powers to God. The final chapter is a prayer by the plowman for the soul of his wife. Sixteen manuscripts & 17 early printed editions of the work are preserved. The present manuscript was created around 1470 in the workshop of Ludwig Hennflin in Stuttgart. It is presently held by Heidelberg University Library.

Houses Without Doors


Peter Straub - 1990
    "Straub at his spellbinding best".--Publishers Weekly.

The Unwanted


John Saul - 1987
    She has just lost her mother in a terrible accident. Now, lonely and frightened, she has come to live with the father she barely knows and his new family in tiny False Harbor on Cape Cod. For Cassie, the strange, unsettling dreams that come to her suddenly in the dead of night are merely the beginning. Very soon, Cassie Winslow will come to know the terrifying powers that are her gift. And in the village of False Harbor, nothing will ever be the same.

Blood & Sugar


Laura Shepherd-Robinson - 2019
    An unidentified body hangs upon a hook at Deptford Dock – horribly tortured and branded with a slaver’s mark.Some days later, Captain Harry Corsham – a war hero embarking upon a promising parliamentary career – is visited by the sister of an old friend. Her brother, passionate abolitionist Tad Archer, had been about to expose a secret that he believed could cause irreparable damage to the British slaving industry. He’d said people were trying to kill him, and now he is missing . . .To discover what happened to Tad, Harry is forced to pick up the threads of his friend's investigation, delving into the heart of the conspiracy Tad had unearthed. His investigation will threaten his political prospects, his family’s happiness, and force a reckoning with his past, risking the revelation of secrets that have the power to destroy him.And that is only if he can survive the mortal dangers awaiting him in Deptford...

Never Tell a Lie


Hallie Ephron - 2009
    Ivy was eight months and one week pregnant when she insisted that she and her husband, David, clean out the junk they’d inherited with with the old Victorian house they’d bought three years before. Call it nesting, call it nerves—she just wanted it all gone: the old electrical fixtures, the boxes of National Geographic from the 1960s, the four black wool greatcoats.Neither she nor David recognized the woman at first. But it turned out that the customer asking about the lime-green glass swan dish—the woman who looked just about as pregnant as Ivy—was none other than Melinda White, a former high school classmate of David and Ivy’s. When Melinda was a child she used to play in their new house, she explained. Would it be all right if she took a look around? David took Melinda inside. And she never came out.Now David’s under police suspicion, and Ivy finds herself digging deep into the past to clear his name. But David’s history, she begins to discover, is not necessarily the history she remembers, and before long Ivy has uncovered a twisted web of deceit, betrayal, and lies, both the ones we tell those we love and the ones we tell ourselves....Relentlessly fast-paced and disturbingly creepy, Never Tell a Lie is a page-turning thrill ride about how well we know the people we love, and how far we are willing to go to protect the secrets of our past.

Elijah's Mermaid


Essie Fox - 2012
    But despite being cosseted and spoiled by the Madame, come her 14th year, Pearl is to be sold to the highest bidder.Orphaned twins Lily and Elijah are on a rare trip to London when they meet the ethereal Pearl. And the repercussions of this chance encounter will bind all their fates together, in a dark and dangerous way. Bewitching, gothic and sensual, this is a tale of love and betrayal in a world where nothing is quite as it seems.

Penny Dreadful Multipack Vol. 1: Wagner The Wehr-Wolf; Varney the Vampire; The Mysteries of London


George W.M. Reynolds - 2013
    M. Reynolds?" *Links to free, full-length audio recordings of Varney the Vampire and The Mysteries of London All three pulp classics for one unbeatable low price! *An individual, active Table of Contents for each book accessible from the Kindle "go to" feature. *Perfect formatting in rich text compatible with Kindle's Text-to-Speech features.

Cornelius Chronicles V02


Michael Moorcock - 1986
    Jerry Cornelius, a time traveler who is able to assume many identities, must prey on others to maintain his image stability.

Gemsigns


Stephanie Saulter - 2013
    Again.Surviving the Syndrome meant genetically modifying almost every person on the planet. But norms and gems are different. Gems may have the superpowers that once made them valuable commodities, but they also have more than their share of the damaged, the violent and the psychotic.After a century of servitude, freedom has come at last for the gems, and not everyone’s happy about it. The gemtechs want to turn them back into property. The godgangs want them dead. The norm majority is scared and suspicious, and doesn’t know what it wants.Eli Walker is the scientist charged with deciding whether gems are truly human, and as extremists on both sides raise the stakes, the conflict descends into violence. He’s running out of time, and with advanced prototypes on the loose, not everyone is who or what they seem. Torn between the intrigues of ruthless executive Zavcka Klist and brilliant, dysmorphic gem leader Aryel Morningstar, Eli finds himself searching for a truth that might stop a war.

Songs of a Dead Dreamer


Thomas Ligotti - 1986
    When originally published in 1985 by Harry Morris’s Silver Scarab Press, the book was hardly noticed. In 1989, an expanded version appeared that garnered accolades from several quarters. Writing in the Washington Post, the celebrated science fiction and fantasy author Michael Swanwick extolled: “Put this volume on the shelf right between H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe. Where it belongs.”The revisions in the present volume of Songs of a Dead Dreamer have been calculated to make its stories into enhanced incarnations of the originals. This edition is and will remain definitive.For those already familiar with the stories in Songs of a Dead Dreamer, an invitation is extended to return to them in their ultimate state. For those new to the collection, it is submitted to engage them with some of the most extraordinary tales of their kind. In either case, this publication of Songs of a Dead Dreamer offers evidence for why Ligotti has been judged to be among the most important authors in the history of supernatural horror.

Dracula's Child


J.S. Barnes - 2020
    It has been some years since Jonathan and Mina Harker survived their ordeal in Transylvania and, vanquishing Count Dracula, returned to England to try and live ordinary lives. But shadows linger long in this world of blood feud and superstition - and, the older their son Quincy gets, the deeper the shadows that lengthen at the heart of the Harkers' marriage. Jonathan has turned back to drink; Mina finds herself isolated inside the confines of her own family; Quincy himself struggles to live up to a family of such high renown. And when a gathering of old friends leads to unexpected tragedy, the very particular wounds in the heart of the Harkers' marriage are about to be exposed...There is darkness both within the marriage and without - for, while Jonathan and Mina wrestle with the right way to raise a child while still recovering from the trauma of their past lives, new evil is arising on the Continent. A naturalist is bringing a new species of bat back to London; two English gentlemen, on their separate tours of the continent, find a strange quixotic love for each other, and stumble into a calamity far worse than either has imagined; and the vestiges of something thought long-ago forgotten is, finally, beginning to stir...