These stories are explorations of the extreme in human behaviour, where the bizarre chills the spine, and few authors can match Grabinski's depiction of seething sexual frenzy. The Dark Domain will introduce to English readers one of Europe's most important authors of literary fantasy.

    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.

    In the spirit of that iconic, timeless show, these mysterious and gripping narratives explore parallel worlds, faraway planets, dystopian societies, and unsettling reality.•A toddler shifts through parallel worlds, changing into different versions of herself. What would a mother do for her daughter?•A chef finds an alternate food source on a remote world. When the new chef arrives, will he be forced to reveal a horrific secret?•A twelve-year-old Earth girl is randomly chosen to rule the galaxy. Why are galactic administrators so desperate to stop her?•Humanity is on trial, annihilation at stake. Can an underdog alien lawyer save us?•Time seems to stand still as a young boy bikes with his troubled friend. Is the friend causing this phenomenon—and what if he doesn’t stop it?Explore space and time—and confront humanity’s deepest fears—with Ten Tales of a Dark Tomorrow.

    Rolt in Sleep No More, his highly effective collection of stories which was first published in 1948.Tom Rolt was an engineering historian, whose many book credits include biographies of Thomas Telford and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, as well as the highly-acclaimed Red for Danger, a history of railway accidents and railway safety.Rolt's first book, Narrow Boat, a classic in its own right, tells of his love for Britain's canals, a love which led to his involvement with the Inland Waterways Association.His knowledge of Britain's industrial past and his love for the countryside around him are very evident in this collection, which includes two stories not included in the original edition and also Rolt's essay 'The Passing of the Ghost Story'. Rolt takes us on a haunted tour of the world he knew well—from Cornwall to Wales, and from the hill country of Shropshire to the west coast of Ireland—in tales which are guaranteed to make you Sleep No More.Jacket and interior illustrations by Paul Lowe.Contents:The MineThe Cat ReturnsBosworth Summit PoundNew CornerCwm GaronA Visitor at AshcombeThe Garside Fell DisasterWorld's EndHear Not My StepsAgony of FlameHawley Bank FoundryMusic Hath CharmsThe ShoutingThe House of VengeanceThe Passing of the Ghost Story

    Countless authors — and mystery fans — owe Poe a great debt for his contributions to American literature. Canterbury Classics is proud to present the stories and collected works of Edgar Allan Poe in this handsome, leather-bound volume. Fans will discover some of his most famous works, including "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Purloined Letter," "The Tell-Tale Heart," and "The Pit and the Pendulum," as well as some of his notable poems, including "The Raven" and "Lenore." These masterpieces get the royal treatment, and are printed on high quality ivory paper with gilded edges.

    He is the curate sent by the bishop to assist Father Angwin-or is he? In the most unlikely of places, a superstitious town that understands little of romance or sentimentality, where bad blood between neighbors is ancient and impenetrable, miracles begin to bloom. No matter how copiously Father Angwin drinks while he confesses his broken faith, the level of the bottle does not drop. Although Fludd does not appear to be eating, the food on his plate disappears. Fludd becomes lover, gravedigger, and savior, transforming his dull office into a golden regency of decision, unashamed sensation, and unprecedented action. Knitting together the miraculous and the mundane, the dreadful and the ludicrous, Fludd is a tale of alchemy and transformation told with astonishing art, insight, humor, and wit.

    Cross-genre blowtorches with bad guys and worse guys. Love stories both dark and bittersweet. A brand new novella and extensive story notes. You’ll find this and more in the fifth collection from three-time Bram Stoker award-winner Norman Partridge, an author Locus calls “one of the most dependable, exciting, and entertaining practitioners of dark suspense and dark fantasy… emphasis on the dark.”In Lesser Demons, Partridge explores the kind of fiction that made him both a horror fan and a writer. Using the shotgun prose of a crime novel, the title story draws a deadly bead on H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. “The Iron Dead” introduces Chaney, a monster-hunting pulp hero with a mechanical hand built in hell. “Carrion” cuts a mean swath through Robert E. Howard territory, while “The Big Man” explores dark shadows of American life never imagined in the atom-age horror movies of the fifties.Part celebration, part reinvention, Lesser Demons only serves to underscore RevolutionSF’s verdict: “Norman Partridge is the finest writer of short horror fiction going.” Table of Contents Second Chance The Big Man Lesser Demons Carrion The Fourth Stair up from the Second Landing And What Did You See in the World? Road Dogs The House Inside Durston The Iron Dead A Few Words AfterDust jacket by Vincent Chong

    Essential reading for young and old alike.Among the stories collected here are:• Kate Crackernuts• Gold-Tree and Silver-Tree• Yallery Brown

    Drawing on Matthew Lewis's The Monk, Sade's Justine, K.H. Macha's May, and Murnau's Nosferatu as well as the form and language of the pulp serial novel, Nezval has constructed a lyrical, menacing dream of sexual awakening involving a vampire with a taste for chicken blood, changelings, a lecherous priest, a malicious grandmother desiring her lost youth, and an androgynous merging of brother with sister.In his Foreword Nezval states: "I wrote this novel out of a love of the mystique in those ancient tales, superstitions and romances, printed in Gothic script, which used to flit before my eyes and declined to convey to me their content." Part fairy tale, part Gothic horror, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is a meditation on youth and age, sexuality and death — an exploration of the grotesque that juxtaposes high and low genres, with shifting registers of language and moods that was a trademark of the Czech avant-garde. The 1970 film version is considered one of the outstanding achievements of Czech new-wave cinema.

    Soon this haggard SS officer will be dispatched to perform the menial but necessary task of locating and assassinating a degenerate Belgian painter.Join "The Dinner Party," where a man stands adrift in a distinctly Borgesian universe, somewhere at the end of time. It could be the Apocalypse or some ghoulish carnival. He's attending a feast at an anonymous mansion while the fall of Babylon is acted out around him, and he struggles to hold on to the faint remnants of his conscience while the world goes up in flames.Turn to a search for "The Primordial Face," in which two expatriates, one of them mute, go diving for a mythological treasure at the bottom of the sea and wind up competing for the love of the obsessive expedition leader's young daughter.And spend "Sunday Evenings at Contessa Pasquali's," where a man and a woman torture each other with indifference and affection and find that love can be born of terrible schemes. With this volume, Robert Girardi illustrates a world that is both beautifully alluring and brilliantly sinister, where souls are lost and won on the simple weight of everyday decisions. Rich with history and irony, vastly entertaining and told in the timeless style of tales, fables, and myths, these meditations on morality remind us of the eternal human condition.From the Hardcover edition.

    Brite, author of Exquisite Corpse and Love in Vein, among others, features anew story, Monday's Special. Poppy contributed story notes as well as the Preface.

    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

    Included in this selection are the "heroic poems" such as Widsith, Deor, Brunanburh and Maldon, and passages from Beowulf; some of the famous 'riddles' from The Exeter Book; all the "elegies," including The Ruin, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Wife's Complaint and The Husband's Message, in which the virtu of Old English is found in its purest and most concentrated form; together with the great Christian poem The Dream of the Rood.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

    A highpoint of the collection is Thomas's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, a vivid collage of memories from his Swansea childhood that combines the lyricism of his poetry with the sparkle and sly humor of Under Milk Wood. Also here is the fiction from Quite Early One Morning, a collection planned by Thomas shortly before his death.Altogether there are more than forty stories, providing a rich and varied literary feast and showing Dylan Thomas in all his intriguing variety-somber fantasist, joyous word-spinner, comedian of smalltown Wales. The book includes an entertaining, informative reflection on Thomas by another Welsh poet and storyteller, Leslie Norris, as well as a brief listing of publication details by Professor Walford Davies, editor of Dylan Thomas: Early Prose Works.After the fair --Tree --True story --Enemies --Dress --Visitors --Vest --Burning baby --Orchards --End of the river --Lemon --Horse's ha --School for witches --Mouse and the woman --Prospect of the sea --Holy six --Prologue to an adventure --Map of love --In the direction of the beginning --Adventure from a work in progress --Portrait of the artist as a young dog: Peaches --Visit to Grandpa's --Patricia, Edith and Arnold --Fight --Extraordinary little cough --Just like little dogs --Where Tawe flows --Who do you wish was with us? --Old Garbo --One warm Saturday --Adventures in the skin trade: Fine beginning --Plenty of furniture --Four lost souls --Quite early one morning --Child's Christmas in Wales --Holiday memory --Crumbs of one man's year --Return journey --Followers --Story --Appendix: early stories: Brember --Jarley's --In the garden --Gaspar, Melchior, Balthsar --List of sources

    Where men stood tall and lived rough. But that West is no more. In its place Shann Ray finds washedup basketball players, businessmen hiding addictions, and women fighting the inexplicable violence that wells up in these men. A son struggles to accept his father’s apologies after surviving a childhood of beatings. Two men seek empty basketball hoops on a snowy night, hoping to relive past glory. A bull rider skips town and rides herd on an unruly mob of passengers as he searches for a thief on a train threading through Montana’s Rocky Mountains. In these stories, Ray grapples with the terrible hurt we inflict on those we love, and finds that reconciliation, if far off, is at least possible. The debut of a writer who is out to redefine the contours of the American West, American Masculine is a deeply felt and fiercely written ode to the country we left behind.