Book picks similar to
Dark Theatres by Benjamin AdamsGreg Stolze


horror
short-stories
lovecraftian
cthulhu-mythos

Don't Read This Book


Chuck WendigRyan Macklin - 2012
    Here, then, is a book from that place.Within these recovered pages are the tales of the Awake, insomniacs who've walked those perilous streets, bringing a bit of the power of dream with them to fight back the night - always at a terrible cost. For many, it will not end well. For a few, they might just become heroes - or at least find their way back home. For you, a choice. Turn away. Don't read this book. And maybe you'll continue to rest easy. Or open the cover and enter a world unlike any you've ever dared to imagine! Don't Read This Book introduces 13 forbidden tales from the Mad City and the world of the Don't Rest Your Head RPG.

Grotesquerie


Richard Gavin - 2020
    The highly anticipated new collection of macabre delights, that explores dark realms of the fevered, fecund mind, and visits strange landscapes and vistas. These are grim and grotesque tales of terror -- modern Mysterium Tremendums -- that open new doors of perception and reality.“Gavin’s writing serves as a testament that great masters once crafted great stories .. .and as evidence that they shall do so again.”— Thomas Ligotti

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.

The Worm and His Kings


Hailey Piper - 2020
    Monique learns that the hard way after her girlfriend Donna vanishes without a trace. Only after the disappearances of several other impoverished women does Monique hear the rumors. A taloned monster stalks the city’s underground and snatches victims into the dark.Donna isn’t missing. She was taken.To save the woman she loves, Monique must descend deeper than the known underground, into a subterranean world of enigmatic cultists and shadowy creatures. But what she finds looms beyond her wildest fears—a darkness that stretches from the dawn of time and across the stars.

The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories


Jeff VanderMeerWilliam Gibson - 2010
    Together these stories form The Weird, and its practitioners include some of the greatest names in twentieth and twenty-first century literature.Exotic and esoteric, The Weird plunges you into dark domains and brings you face to face with surreal monstrosities. You won't find any elves or wizards here... but you will find the biggest, boldest, and downright most peculiar stories from the last hundred years bound together in the biggest Weird collection ever assembled. The Weird features 110 stories by an all-star cast, from literary legends to international bestsellers to Booker Prize winners: including William Gibson, George R. R. Martin, Stephen King, Angela Carter, Kelly Link, Franz Kafka, China Miéville, Clive Barker, Haruki Murakami, M. R. James, Neil Gaiman, Mervyn Peake, and Michael Chabon.

The Shadow Out of Time


I.N.J. Culbard - 2013
    Professor Nathaniel Peaslee collapses in front of a class of students, only coming to his senses five years later. Horrified to discover that his body has been far from inactive during the intervening period - and plagued by unsettling and outlandish nightmares - Peaslee attempts to piece together the truth behind the missing years of his life. A chilling journey through time, space and the recesses of the mind, this adaptation gives terrifying from to one of H.P. Lovecraft's final tales.

The Cthulhu Cycle: Thirteen Tentacles of Terror


Robert M. PriceLeonard Carpenter - 1996
    

Only the End of the World Again


Neil Gaiman - 1994
    In it, we meet Lawrence Talbot, an adjuster who has set up shop in Innsmouth, a dark, mysterious town with a rich history of magic and evil. When the local overweight gentleman exclaims that the world is ending and that the instrument of destruction is a werewolf, Talbot is thrown into a turbulent and spooky adventure. What's made even more exciting (for readers, not for Talbot), is that our protagonist may turn out to be the werewolf himself. Filled with Gaiman's trademark genius, the story, as short as it may be, is a monster tale for the ages.

Sefira and Other Betrayals


John Langan - 2019
    Placed together within the same cover for the first time, a theme emerges from the tales that binds and unites them–and it is signaled in the title of the book.“These are stories of betrayal,” author John Langan confirms.Apart from this thread, the stories are otherwise quite distinct from each other in terms of their characters, plots, settings, themes and even varieties of horror.There’s “In Paris in the Mount of Kronos,” a snappy, neo-noirish, action packed Laird Barron-esque encounter with ancient malevolent forces; the dark, character-driven relationship dramas of “The Third Always Beside You” and “Renfrew’s Course”; the vaguely Lovecraftian horrors of “Bloom”; the atmospheric steampunk weirdness in the form of “The Unbearable Proximity of Mr. Dunn’s Balloons”; and apocalyptic surrealism in “Bos Uros”.Finally, the title novella, Sefira, is about a woman who is chasing a succubus across the United States, while the novelette At Home in the Devil’s House offers a new, nightmarish concept of Hell.Sefira and Other Betrayals contains stories previously published in such prestigious anthologies as Supernatural Noir, Blood and Other Cravings, Ghosts by Gaslight, Black Wings 2, Shadows Edge and others, and includes one original novella, Sefira, and an original novelette, At Home in the Devil’s House.(from Rue Morgue Magazine review)

Space Eldritch


D.J. ButlerLarry Correia - 2012
    Featuring work by Brad R. Torgersen (Hugo/Nebula/Campbell nominee), Howard Tayler (multiple Hugo nominee), and Michael R. Collings ( author of over 100 books), plus a foreword by New York Times bestselling author Larry Correia, SPACE ELDRITCH inhabits the intersection between the eternal adventure of the final frontier and the inhuman darkness between the stars.

Lovecraft's Legacy: A Centennial Celebration of H.P. Lovecraft


Robert E. WeinbergGahan Wilson - 1990
    Lovecraft is one of the most influential modern horror writers. Lovecraft's fiction is a category unto itself. Eschewing the traditional werewolves, vampires, and ghosts of most horror fiction, he wrote of dread Elder Gods and cosmic, earth-shattering horrors. Lovecraft mined rich veins of terror uniquely his own, and wherever in the known and unknown universe his imagination sped, readers followed—fascinated, enrapt, and terrified by the scope of his dark vision.More than fifty years after his death, Lovecraft's fiction continues to influence each new generation of horror readers…and writers. Lovecraft's Legacy collects 13 stories by critically-acclaimed, award-winning horror and dark fantasy writers, including F. Paul Wilson, Brian Lumley, Gene Wolfe, and Gahan Wilson. With an introduction by Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, this splendid anthology pays well-deserved homage to the late, great master of the weird tale.