Book picks similar to
Shock Totem 1: Curious Tales of the Macabre and Twisted by K. Allen WoodPam L. Wallace
horror
short-stories
anthologies
fantasy
The Mammoth Book of Monsters
Stephen JonesRobert Silverberg - 2007
Bounds, and a reclusive islander shares his world with shape-changing selkies in Robert Holdstock's haunting tale The Silvering.Late-night office workers are menaced by hungry horrors in Ramsey Cambell's claustrophobic Down There, while the monsters of both Brian Lumley's The Thin People and Basil Copper's The Flabby Men share only a semblance of humanity. The King of the Monsters himself turns up in Godzilla's Twelve Step Program by Joe R. Lansdale, R. Chetwynd-Hayes' The Shadmock and Clive Barker's Rawhead Rex are genuinely new monsters, and the last monster-fighter and the last classic monster confront each other in Kim Newman's The Chill Clutch of the Unseen.If you like monsters, then there are plenty to choose from in this creature-filled collection boasting some of the biggest names in horror, fantasy and science fiction.Contents:Introduction: How to Make a Monster by Stephen JonesVisitation by David J. SchowDown There by Ramsey CampbellThe Man He Had Been Before by Scott EdelmanCalling All Monsters by Dennis EtchisonThe Shadmock by R. Chetwynd-HayesThe Spider Kiss by Christopher FowlerCafé Endless: Spring Rain by Nancy HolderThe Medusa by Thomas LigottiIn the Poor Girl Taken by Surprise by Gemma Files Downmarket by Sydney J. BoundsFat Man by Jay LakeThe Thin People by Brian LumleyThe Hill by Tanith LeeGodzilla's Twelve Step Program by Joe R. Lansdale.220 Swift by Karl Edward WagnerOur Lady of the Sauropods by Robert SilverbergThe Flabby Man by Basil CopperThe Silvering by Robert HoldstockSomeone Else's Problem by Michael Marshall SmithRawhead Rex by Clive BarkerThe Chill Clutch of the Unseen by Kim Newman
The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All
Laird Barron - 2013
Melding supernatural horror with hardboiled noir, espionage, and a scientific backbone, Barron’s stories have garnered critical acclaim and have been reprinted in numerous year’s best anthologies and nominated for multiple awards, including the Crawford, International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy awards.Barron returns with his third collection, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. Collecting interlinking tales of sublime cosmic horror, including “Blackwood’s Baby”, “The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven”, and “The Men from Porlock”, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All delivers enough spine-chilling horror to satisfy even the most jaded reader.
Black Hills
Dan Simmons - 2010
Haunted by Custer's ghost, and also by his ability to see into the memories and futures of legendary men like Sioux war-chief Crazy Horse, Paha Sapa's long life is driven by a dramatic vision he experienced as a boy in his people's sacred Black Hills. In August of 1936, a dynamite worker on the massive Mount Rushmore project, Paha Sapa plans to silence his ghost forever and reclaim his people's legacy-on the very day FDR comes to Mount Rushmore to dedicate the Jefferson face.
Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination
Edogawa Rampo - 1956
Collected in this chilling volume are some of the famous Japanese mystery writer Edogawa Rampo's best stories—bizarre and blood-curdling expeditions into the fantastic, the perverse, and the strange, in a marvelous homage to Rampo's literary 'mentor', Edgar Allan Poe.
His Hideous Heart
Dahlia AdlerMarieke Nijkamp - 2019
Whether the stories are familiar to readers or discovered for the first time, readers will revel in Edgar Allan Poe’s classic tales, and how they’ve been brought to life in 13 unique and unforgettable ways.Contributors include Kendare Blake (reimagining “Metzengerstein”), Rin Chupeco (“The Murders in the Rue Morge”), Lamar Giles (“The Oval Portrait”), Tessa Gratton (“Annabel Lee”), Tiffany D. Jackson (“The Cask of Amontillado”), Stephanie Kuehn (“The Tell-Tale Heart”), Emily Lloyd-Jones (“The Purloined Letter”), Hillary Monahan (“The Masque of the Red Death”), Marieke Nijkamp (“Hop-Frog”), Caleb Roehrig (“The Pit and the Pendulum”), and Fran Wilde (“The Fall of the House of Usher”).
What the #@&% Is That?: The Saga Anthology of the Monstrous and the Macabre
John Joseph AdamsMaria Dahvana Headley - 2016
Nobody knew what the F it was, but they loved it.Renowned editors John Joseph Adams and Doug Cohen then asked some of the best writers in the fantasy, horror, and thriller genres including Jonathan Maberry, Seanan McGuire, Christopher Golden, and Scott Sigler to create a monster story that included the line “WTF is that?”This anthology is a feast for the imagination for anyone who loves monsters.
Hannah-Beast
Jennifer McMahon - 2018
The mean girls made sure of it. To this day, for a haunted local mother, the most unsettling Halloween costume of all is an urban legend they call Hannah-Beast. It’s a reminder of the past she can’t forget. Especially tonight when it’s come back, so close to home.Jennifer McMahon’s Hannah-Beast is part of Dark Corners, a collection of seven heart-stopping short stories by bestselling authors who give you so many new reasons to be afraid. Each story can be read in a single sitting. Or, if you have the nerve, you can listen all by yourself in the dark.
Still Bleeding
Stephen Leather - 2012
A young girl is bleeding from her hands and feet and claims to be talking to the Virgin Mary. But Nightingale soon realises that all is not as it seems - and the girl is in mortal danger. Still Bleeding is about 14,000 words, about forty pages, perfect if you have half an hour to spare. Stephen Leather is one of the UK's most successful thriller writers, an ebook and Sunday Times bestseller and author of the critically acclaimed Dan “Spider’ Shepherd series and the Jack Nightingale supernatural detective novels. Before becoming a novelist he was a journalist for more than ten years on newspapers such as The Times, the Daily Mirror, the Glasgow Herald, the Daily Mail and the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. He is one of the country’s most successful ebook authors and his ebooks have topped the Amazon Kindle charts in the UK and the US. In 2011 alone he sold more than 500,000 eBooks and was voted by The Bookseller magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the UK publishing world. Born in Manchester, he began writing full time in 1992. His bestsellers have been translated into fifteen languages. He has also written for television shows such as London's Burning, The Knock and the BBC's Murder in Mind series and two of his books, The Stretch and The Bombmaker, were filmed for TV. You can find out more from his website www.stephenleather.com and you can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/stephenleather
In a Glass Darkly
J. Sheridan Le Fanu - 1872
Justice Harbottle, The Room in the Dragon Volant, and Carmilla. The five stories are purported to be cases by Dr. Hesselius, a 'metaphysical' doctor, who is willing to consider the ghosts both as real and as hallucinatory obsessions. The reader's doubtful anxiety mimics that of the protagonist, and each story thus creates that atmosphere of mystery which is the supernatural experience. This new annotated edition includes an introduction, notes on the text, and explanatory notes.NB: The Familiar is a revision of The Watcher; Mr. Justice Harbottle is a revision of An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street.
Ghost: Thirteen Haunting Tales to Tell
Illustratus - 2016
a wood where the trees look back... a basement door blocked by a brick wall so thick, it stifles the screams from below ... This original collection of chilling poems and tales contains the only true ghost stories in existence (as the book itself will tell you)—13 eerie encounters perfect for sharing...if you dare. Accompanied by striking illustrations and building to a truly spine-tingling conclusion, this haunting book will consume the imagination and keep readers of every age up long past their bedtimes.
The Cipher
Kathe Koja - 1991
She had to see the dark hole in the storage room down the hall. She had to make love to Nicholas beside it, and stare into its secretive, promising depths. Then Nakota began her experiments: First, she put an insect into the hole. Then a mouse...Now from down the hall, the black hole calls out to Nicholas every day and every night. And he will go to it. Because it has already seared his flesh, infected his soul, and started him on a journey of obsession - through its soothing, blank darkness into the blinding core of terror...
Double Dead
Chuck Wendig - 2011
Or at least it didn't, not until he awoke from a forced five-year slumber to discover that most of human civilization was now dead-but not dead like him, oh no.See, Coburn likes blood. The rest of the walking dead, they like brains. He’s smart. Them, not so much. But they outnumber him by about a million to one. And the clotted blood of the walking dead cannot sustain him. Now he’s starving. And nocturnal. And more pissed-off than a bee-stung rattlesnake. The vampire not only has to find human survivors (with their sweet, sweet blood), but now he has to transition from predator to protector-after all, a man has to look after his food supply.
The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard
Robert E. Howard - 2008
Some of Howard’s best-known characters–Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, and sailor Steve Costigan among them–roam the forbidding locales of the author’s fevered imagination, from the swamps and bayous of the Deep South to the fiend-haunted woods outside Paris to remote jungles in Africa.The collection includes Howard’s masterpiece “Pigeons from Hell,” which Stephen King calls “one of the finest horror stories of [the twentieth] century,” a tale of two travelers who stumble upon the ruins of a Southern plantation–and into the maw of its fatal secret. In “Black Canaan” even the best warrior has little chance of taking down the evil voodoo man with unholy powers–and none at all against his wily mistress, the diabolical High Priestess of Damballah. In these and other lavishly illustrated classics, such as the revenge nightmare “Worms of the Earth” and “The Cairn on the Headland,” Howard spins tales of unrelenting terror, the legacy of one of the world’s great masters of the macabre.
EverFall
Joe Hart - 2013
His wife, daughter, and son are stripped from him in a flash of lightning revealing something in the darkness with glowing eyes and a mouth of fire. On the brink of madness and past the point of breaking, he enters into a world of evil, wholly unlike our own. There he finds a hellish version of Earth, populated with unspeakable horrors and beset by a malevolence older than time itself. Joining forces with an unlikely trio, he must face his fears, both within and without, to find those that matter most to him and prevent the spreading of a shadow intent on the destruction of both realms.
Scary Stories Treasury
Alvin Schwartz - 1981
Reviews
"A wonderful collection of tales that range from creepy to silly to haunting. ...Gammell's drawings add just the right touch..." -- John Scieszka, Entertinment Weekly"Guaranteed to make your teeth chatter and your spine tingle." -- School Library Journal"Read these if you dare." -- The New York Times