Book picks similar to
Shiloh by Philip Fracassi
horror
war
historical-fiction
fiction
Silver in the Wood
Emily Tesh - 2019
Tobias, tethered to the forest, does not dwell on his past life, but he lives a perfectly unremarkable existence with his cottage, his cat, and his dryads.When Greenhollow Hall acquires a handsome, intensely curious new owner in Henry Silver, everything changes. Old secrets better left buried are dug up, and Tobias is forced to reckon with his troubled past—both the green magic of the woods, and the dark things that rest in its heart.
Voice of the Fire
Alan Moore - 1996
First, a cave-boy loses his mother, falls in love, and learns a deadly lesson. He is followed by an extraordinary cast of characters: a murderess who impersonates her victim; a fisherman who believes he has become a different species; a Roman emissary who realizes the bitter truth about the Empire; a crippled nun who is healed miraculously by a disturbing apparition; an old crusader whose faith is destroyed by witnessing the ultimate relic; two witches, lovers, who burn at the stake. Each related tale traces a path in a journey of discovery of the secrets of the land.In the tradition of Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill, Schwob's Imaginary Lives, and Borges' A Universal History of Infamy, Moore travels through history, blending truth and conjecture, in a novel that is dazzling, moving, sometimes tragic, but always mesmerizing.This edition presents Voice of the Fire for the first time in hardcover format, with full color illustrations by Jose Villarrubia.
World War Cthulhu: A Collection of Lovecraftian War Stories
Brian M. Sammons - 2014
War has existed in one form or another since the dawn of human civilization, and before then, Elder terrors battled it out across this planet and this known universe in ways unimaginable.It has always been a losing battle for our side since time began. Incidents like the Innsmouth raid, chronicled by H.P. Lovecraft, mere blips of victory against an insurmountable foe. Still we fight, against these incredible odds, in an unending nightmare, we fight, and why? For victory, for land, for a political ideal? No, mankind fights for survival.Our authors, John Shirley, Mark Rainey, Wilum Pugmire, William Meikle, Tim Curran, Jeffrey Thomas and many others have gathered here to share war stories from the eternal struggle against the darkness. This book chronicles these desperate battles from across the ages, including Roman Britain, The American Civil War, World War Two, The Vietnam Conflict, and even into the far future.Table of ContentsLoyalty by John ShirleyThe Game Changers by Stephen Mark RaineyWhite Feather by T.E. GrauTo Hold Ye White Husk by W.H. PugmireSea Nymph’s Son by Robert M. PriceThe Boonieman by Edward M. ErdelacThe Turtle by Neil BakerThe Bullet and the Flesh by David Conyers & David KernotBroadsword by William MeikleThe Ithiliad by Christine MorganThe Sinking City by Konstantine ParadiasShape of a Snake by Cody GoodfellowMysterious Ways by C.J. HendersonMagna Mater by Edward MorrisDark Cell by Brian M. Sammons and Glynn Owen BarrassCold War, Yellow Fever by Pete RawlikStragglers from Carrhae by Darrell SchweitzerThe Procyon Project by Tim CurranWunderwaffe by Jeffrey ThomasA Feast of Death by Lee Clark ZumpeLong Island Weird by Charles ChristianThe Yoth Protocols by Josh Reynolds
Fire Watch
Connie Willis - 1982
Her startling and powerful works have redefined the boundaries of contemporary science fiction. Here in one volume are twelve of her greatest stories, including double award-winner "Fire Watch," set in the universe of Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog, in which a time-traveling student learns one of history's hardest lessons. In "A Letter from the Clearys," a routine message from distant friends shatters the fragile world of a beleaguered family. In "The Sidon in the Mirror," a mutant with the unconscious urge to become other people finds himself becoming both killer and victim. Disturbing, revealing, and provocative, this remarkable collection of short fiction brings together some of the best work of an incomparable writer whose ability to amaze, confound, and enlighten never fails.Contents:Fire Watch (1982)Service for the Burial of the Dead (1982)Lost and Found (1982)All My Darling Daughters (1985)The Father of the Bride (1982)A Letter from the Clearys (1982)And Come from Miles Around (1979)The Sidon in the Mirror (1983)Daisy, in the Sun (1979)Mail-Order Clone (1982)Samaritan (1978)Blued Moon (1984)
Teratologist
Edward Lee - 1994
Farrington has abducted priests and nuns to commit sexual atrocities with the most grievously genetically deformed people he can find. People that he's also abducted and kept in such a high state of sexual intensity, with a drug his company produces, that they are just ravenous for physical contact. The abductees, with basically no self control, commit some of the most depraved sex acts, over, and over again. Westmore and Bryant, a photographer and journalist, are given the rare opportunity to interview the reclusive Farrington and see inside his mansion and operation. Only to find the horrors within, and who have become pawns in the mysteries they find behind every door. Farmington's plan may work, and to make sure he's successful, he will do whatever it takes to have the deity of man face him.
The Grimscribe's Puppets
Joseph S. Pulver Sr.Nicole Cushing - 2013
In The Grimscribe’s Puppets, Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., has commissioned both new and established talents in the world of weird fiction and horror to contribute all new tales that pay hoame to Ligotti and celebrate his eerie and essential nightmares. Poppy Z. Brite once asked, “Are you out here, Thomas Ligotti?” This anthology proves not only is he alive and well, but his extraordinary illuminations have proven to be visionary and fertile source of inspiration for some of today’s most accomplished authors.List of tales: Livia Llewellyn “Furnace” [5,800]Daniel Mills “The Lord Came at Twilight” [3,950]Michael Cisco “The Secrets of the Universe” [3,360]Kaaron Warren “The Human Moth” [2,700]Joel Lane “Basement Angels” [2,697]Darrell Schweitzer “No Signal” [1,735]Robin Spriggs “THE XENAMBULIST: A Fable in Four Acts” [3,369]Nicole Cushing “The Company Town” [1,700]Cody Goodfellow “The Man Who Escaped This Story” [8,490]Michael Kelly “Pieces of Blackness” [3,750]Eddie M. Angerhuber “The Blue Star” [2,970]Jon Padgett “20 SIMPLE STEPS TO VENTRILOQUISM” [4,490]Mike Griffin “Diamond Dust” [4,900]Richard Gavin “After the Final” [3,100]Scott Nicolay “Eyes Exchange Bank” [9,050]Simon Strantzas “BY INVISIBLE HANDS” [6,200]Paul Tremblay “Where We Will All Be” [4,900]Ally Bird “Gailestis” [4,019]Jeff Thomas “The Prosthesis” [4,835]John Langan “Into the Darkness, Fearlessly” [10,499]Gemma Files “OUBLIETTE” [8,424]
Cthulhu's Reign
Darrell SchweitzerMatt Cardin - 2010
Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos relate to what will happen after the Old Ones return and take over the earth. In "The Dunwich Horror," the semi-human half-breed Wilbur Whateley speaks in his diary of travelling to nonhuman cities at the Earth's magnetic poles "when the Earth is cleared off," and hints at his own promised "transfiguration." Very few Mythos stories have ever touched on this. What happens when the Stars Are Right, the sunken city of R'lyeh rises from beneath the waves, and Cthulhu is unleashed upon the world for the last time? What happens when the other Old Ones, long since banished from our universe, break through and descent from the stars? What would the reign of Cthulhu be like, on a totally transformed planet where mankind is no longer the master?It won't be simply the end of everything. It will be a time of new horrors and of utter strangeness. It will be a time when humans with a "taint" of unearthly blood in their ancestry may come into their own. It will be a time foreseen only by authors with the kind of finely honed imaginative visions as those included in Cthulhu's Reign
The Night Ocean
Paul La Farge - 2017
Lovecraft and his circle. Marina Willett, M.D., has a problem. Her husband, Charlie, has become obsessed with H.P. Lovecraft, in particular with one episode in the legendary horror writer's life: In the summer of 1934, the "old gent" lived for two months with a gay teenage fan named Robert Barlow, at Barlow's family home in central Florida. What were the two of them up to? Were they friends--or something more? Just when Charlie thinks he's solved the puzzle, a new scandal erupts, and he disappears. The police say it's suicide. Marina is a psychiatrist, and she doesn't believe them.A tour-de-force of storytelling, The Night Ocean follows the lives of some extraordinary people: Lovecraft, the most influential American horror writer of the 20th century, whose stories continue to win new acolytes, even as his racist views provoke new critics; Barlow, a seminal scholar of Mexican culture who killed himself after being blackmailed for his homosexuality (and who collaborated with Lovecraft on the beautiful story The Night Ocean); his student, future Beat writer William S. Burroughs; and L.C. Spinks, a kindly Canadian appliance salesman and science-fiction fan -- the only person who knows the origins of The Erotonomicon, purported to be the intimate diary of Lovecraft himself.As a heartbroken Marina follows her missing husband's trail in an attempt to learn the truth, the novel moves across the decades and along the length of the continent, from a remote Ontario town, through New York and Florida to Mexico City.The Night Ocean is about love and deception -- about the way that stories earn our trust, and betray it.
Dear Laura
Gemma Amor - 2019
That stranger claims to know the whereabouts of her missing friend Bobby, but there’s a catch: he’ll only tell her what he knows in exchange for something... personal.So begins Laura’s sordid relationship with her new penpal, built on a foundation of quid pro quo. Her quest for closure will push her to bizarre acts of humiliation and harm, yet no matter how hard she tries, she cannot escape her correspondent’s demands. The letters keep coming, and as time passes, they have a profound effect on Laura.From the author of Cruel Works of Nature comes a dark and twisted tale about obsession, guilt, and how far a person will go to put her ghosts to bed.
The Wine-Dark Sea
Robert Aickman - 1988
Unlike much of the current form, full of blood, monsters and melodrama, Aickman's stories achieve a quieter, more subtle and, in several ways, more lasting sense of disquiet. His lucid, finely tuned prose moves imperceptibly from the small crises and celebrations of ordinary life into another sphere. In these 11 stories, the occasion may be a walking tour of Northern England, a birthday present of a Victorian dollhouse or a stay at a Swedish sanatorium for insomniacs, but it simultaneously traps the characters with dread and opens them up to a new awareness of a greater, deeper and more dangerous world. A remarkable collection by an author who deserves to be better known.Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
A Short, Sharp Shock
Kim Stanley Robinson - 1990
Now he confirms his reputation for brilliance and for the unexpected in this luminous short work.A Short, Sharp ShockA man tumbles through wild surf, half drowned, to collapse on a moonlit beach. When he regains consciousness, he has no memory of who he is or where he came from. he know only that the woman who washed ashore with him has disappeared sometime in the night, and that he has awakened in a surreal landscape of savage beauty -- a mysterious watery world encircled by a thin spine of land. Aided by strange tribesmen, he will journey to the cove of the spine kings, a brutal race that has enslaved the woman and several of the tribesmen. That is only the beginning of his quest, as he struggles to find her identity in this wondrous and cruel land -- and seeks out the woman whose hold on his imagination is both unfathomable and unshakable.Haunting and lyrical, filled with uncommon beauty and terrible peril, A Short, Sharp Shock is an ambitious and enthralling story by one of science fiction's most respected talents.
Equoid
Charles Stross - 2013
Now Bob Howard, Laundry agent, must travel to the quiet English countryside to deal with an outbreak of one of the worst horrors imaginable. For, as it turns out, unicorns are real. They're also ravenous killers from beyond spacetime...At the publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied.
The Secret of Ventriloquism
Jon Padgett - 2016
With themes reminiscent of Shirley Jackson, Thomas Ligotti, and Bruno Schulz, but with a strikingly unique vision, Padgett's work explores the mystery of human suffering, the agony of personal existence, and the ghastly means by which someone might achieve salvation from both. A bullied child seeks vengeance within a bed's hollow box spring. A lucid dreamer is haunted by an impossible house. A dummy reveals its own anatomy in 20 simple steps. A stuttering librarian holds the key to a mill town's unspeakable secrets. A commuter's worldview is shattered by two words printed on a cardboard sign. An aspiring ventriloquist spends a little too much time looking at himself in a mirror. And a presence speaks through them all. Contents: Introduction by Matt Cardin The Mindfulness of Horror Practice Murmurs of a Voice Foreknown The Indoor Swamp Origami Dreams 20 Simple Steps to Ventriloquism Infusorium Organ Void The Secret of VentriloquismEscape to Thin Mountain
The Night Children
Alexander Gordon Smith - 2011
In the densely forested mountains of Belgium one of the conflict’s most brutal battles is raging. Cut off from the front, a ragtag group of young British and American soldiers finds itself being hunted by a patrol of elite German Special Forces, including a newly commissioned officer called Kreuz—a teenage boy who will grow up to become Warden Cross (the fearsome prison director who will one day rule Furnace Penitentiary, the terrifying underground prison specially built for teen offenders).As both sides fight for their lives in the unforgiving terrain, however, they start to realize that there are worse things hiding in the snow than soldiers. There are creatures out there with gas masks and piggy eyes (ancestors of Furnace prison’s “wheezers”)—demonic entities that cannot be killed by guns and grenades, monsters who do not care what uniforms their victims are wearing so long as they bleed, and so long as they scream…
Aria
Allison M. Dickson - 2011
Unfortunately, the way home isn't as clear-cut as he'd hoped and he's forced to turn to Aria, his GPS, for an alternate route. However, Aria has something far more sinister in mind...