A medical procedure reveals an object of worship. A carnivorous reptile divides and cauterizes a town. Amelia Gray’s curio cabinet expands in Gutshot, where isolation and coupling are pushed to their dark and outrageous edges. These singular stories live and breathe on their own, pulsating with energy and humanness and a glorious sense of humor. Hers are stories that you will read and reread—raw gems that burrow into your brain, reminders of just how strange and beautiful our world is. These collected stories come to us like a vivisected body, the whole that is all the more elegant and breathtaking for exploring its most grotesque and intimate lightless viscera.

    Sheridan La Fanu --Hurst of Hurstcote / E. Nesbit --The mysterious stranger / Anonymous --The bottle imp / Robert Louis Stevenson --Dracula's guest / Bram Stoker --Wandering Willie's tale / Sir Walter Scott --Circumstance / Herriot Prescott Spofford --The lifted veil / George Eliot --One summer night / Ambrose Bierce --The dream woman / Wilkie Collins --The lost ghost / Mary E. Wilkins Freeman --Carmilla / J. Sheridan La Fanu --The banshee's warning / Mrs. J. H. Riddell --Clarimonde / Theophile Gautier --The upper berth / F. Marlon Crawford --Thrulow's Christmas story / John Kendrick Bangs

    Included are two original stories, several rarities and out of print tales, as well as a few "best of the year" inclusions. Stephen Graham Jones is a master storyteller. What does happen after the people lights have gone off? Crack the spine and find out. With an introduction by Joe R. Lansdale.Stephen Graham Jones is the author of fifteen novels and five collections, and has some two hundred stories published. Stephen's been an NEA Fellow and has won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Fiction and the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural fiction. He's forty-two, married with a couple of kids, and lives in Boulder, Colorado.WINNER, Short Story Collection, THIS IS HORRORNOMINATED, Short Story Collection, BRAM STOKER AWARDSNOMINATED, Short Story Collection, SHIRLEY JACKSON AWARDS

    

    Inhibitions melt away with these three deliciously erotic romance novellas that have something sweet in common: tempting chocolate.