Book picks similar to
Mr Stoker & I by Becky Wright
horror
paranormal
gothic
love-the-cover
Johannes Cabal the Necromancer
Jonathan L. Howard - 2009
Johannes Cabal, a brilliant scientist and notorious snob, is single-mindedly obsessed in heart and soul with raising the dead. Well, perhaps not "soul" . . . He hastily sold his years ago in order to learn the laws of necromancy. But now, tormented by a dark secret, he travels to the fiery pits of Hell to retrieve it. Satan, who is incredibly bored these days, proposes a little wager: Johannes has one year to persuade one hundred people to sign over their souls or he will be damned forever. To make the bet even more interesting, Satan throws in that diabolical engine of deceit, seduction, and corruption known as a "traveling circus" to aid in the evil bidding. What better place exists to rob poor sad saps of their souls than the traveling carnivals historically run by hucksters and legendary con men? With little time to lose, Johannes raises a motley crew from the dead and enlists his brother, Horst, a charismatic vampire (an unfortunate side effect of Johannes's early experiments with necromancy), to be the carnival's barker. On the road through the pastoral English countryside, this team of reprobates wields their black magic with masterful ease, resulting in mayhem at every turn. Johannes may have the moral conscience of anthrax, but are his tricks sinful enough to beat the Devil at his own game? You'll never guess, and that's a promise! Brilliantly written and wickedly funny, "Johannes Cabal the Necromancer" combines the chills and thrills of old-fashioned gothic tales like "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," the mischievous humor of "Wicked," and the sophisticated charms of" Jonathan Strange &Mr. Norrell "and spins the Faustian legend into a fresh, irreverent, and irresistible new adventure.
Descent into Dust
Jacqueline Lepore - 2010
Widow Emma Andrews 25 sees black cloud in shape of man around angelic little Henrietta. Valerian Fox recognizes master vampire he hunts, Marius. Hen's nursemaid Miss Harris sets Emma's family against the widow.
Vlad: The Last Confession
C.C. Humphreys - 2008
A name of horror, depravity and the darkest sensuality. Yet the real Dracula was just as alluring, just as terrifying, his tale not one of a monster but of a man... and a contradiction.His tale is told by those who knew him best. The only woman he ever loved...and whom he had to sacrifice. His closest comrade...and traitor. And his priest, betraying the secrets of the confessional to reveal the mind of the man history would forever remember as The Impaler. This is the story of the man behind the legend...as it has never been told before.
Longinus The Vampire
Alan Kinross - 2013
Love, lust and revenge never die - they smoulder and explode with all the fury of the abyss. Present-day Scotland and New York...Lord Branislav Cervenka rules the New York vampire coven and criminal underworld with an iron fist. He is building a vampire army and plans to conquer all other covens in the United States.His hunters torture and destroy a female vampire in the Highlands of Scotland and steal a strange, ancient tome. Then all hell breaks loose: a mysterious vampire warrior is killing his vassals and disrupting his criminal activities; a horrific vampire plague is spreading throughout the city; New York is descending into anarchy, and the National Guard is on the streets.Who is this vampire and what does he want?The identity and full horror of their ancient adversary is revealed as the coven's historian translates the hideous book.As his depraved kingdom is ripped apart in a sea of fire and blood, Cervenka commands his malignant horde to find and kill his enemy. But it is too late for both the hunters and their elusive prey. Something else is coming: something powerful and terrifying.And She will destroy them all.There is no redemption for the damned.------------------------------------Longinus the Vampire is a dark, anarchic, exciting, bloodthirsty and disturbing HORROR novel.It contains scenes of violence, depravity and retribution that will keep humans awake at night.The evil that humans do is carried with them into the afterlife and reborn with a vengeance. No one is safe and nothing is sacred.The hideous tome is scribed in the tongue of the Britons.Gird your loins, mortal, and enter of your own free will.You may never return...
John Eyre: A Tale of Darkness and Shadow
Mimi Matthews - 2021
Darkness abounds, punctuated by odd bumps in the night, strange creatures on the moor, and a sinister silver mist that never seems to dissipate. And at the center of it all, John’s new employer—a widow as alluring as she is mysterious.Sixteen months earlier, heiress Bertha Mason embarked on the journey of a lifetime. Marriage wasn’t on her itinerary, but on meeting the enigmatic Edward Rochester, she’s powerless to resist his preternatural charm. In letters and journal entries, she records the story of their rapidly-disintegrating life together, and of her gradual realization that Mr. Rochester isn’t quite the man he appears to be. In fact, he may not be a man at all.From a cliff-top fortress on the Black Sea coast to an isolated estate in rural England, John and Bertha contend with secrets, danger, and the eternal struggle between light and darkness. Can they help each other vanquish the demons of the past? Or are some evils simply too powerful to conquer?
NOS4A2
Joe Hill - 2013
On her Raleigh Tuff Burner bike, she makes her way to a rickety covered bridge that, within moments, takes her wherever she needs to go, whether it’s across Massachusetts or across the country.Charles Talent Manx has a way with children. He likes to take them for rides in his 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith with the NOS4A2 vanity plate. With his old car, he can slip right out of the everyday world, and onto the hidden roads that transport them to an astonishing – and terrifying – playground of amusements he calls “Christmasland.” Then, one day, Vic goes looking for trouble—and finds Manx. That was a lifetime ago. Now Vic, the only kid to ever escape Manx’s unmitigated evil, is all grown up and desperate to forget. But Charlie Manx never stopped thinking about Victoria McQueen. He’s on the road again and he’s picked up a new passenger: Vic’s own son.
An Unattractive Vampire
Jim McDoniel - 2016
After three centuries trapped underground, thousand-year-old Yulric Bile, also known as The Cursed One, The Devil's Apprentice, He Who Worships the Slumbering Horrors, awakens only to find that no one believes he is a vampire. Apparently he's just too ugly. Modern vampires, he soon discovers, are pretty, weak, and, most disturbing of all, good. Determined to reestablish his bloodstained reign, Yulric sets out to correct this disgusting turn of events or, at the very least, murder the person responsible. With the help of part vampire-wannabe Amanda; Simon, the eight-year-old reincarnation of his greatest foe; and a cadre of ancient and ugly horrors, Yulric prepares to battle the glamorous undead. But who will win the right to determine, once and for all, what it truly means to be a vampire?
The Route of Ice and Salt
José Luis Zárate - 1998
The cargo? Fifty boxes filled with Transylvanian soil. The route? From Varna to Whitby. The Demeter has made many trips like this. The captain has handled dozens of crews. He dreams familiar dreams: to taste the salt on the skin of his men, to run his hands across their chests. He longs for the warmth of a lover he cannot have, fantasizes about flesh and frenzied embraces. All this he’s done before, it’s routine, a constant, like the tides. Yet there’s something different, something wrong. There are odd nightmares, unsettling omens and fear. For there is something in the air, something in the night, someone stalking the ship. The cult vampire novella by Mexican author José Luis Zárate is available for the first time in English. Translated by David Bowles and with an accompanying essay by noted horror author Poppy Z. Brite, it reveals an unknown corner of Latin American literature.
Gothic Tales of Haunted Love
Hope NicholsonScott Chantler - 2018
Beiko (Scion of the Fox).In 1950s Vietnam, a lost soul comes to the aid of his lover's field under attack by American troops.In Victorian Boston, a new governess comes to care for the rogueish widower of a stately manor and his charming brood of children.A fashion journalist lands the interview of her dreams – but it unearths the deadly secrets of Taiwan’s most popular fashion designer.A Sioux elder revives a recently deceased woman who sets out to recover her lost love.A Jamaican slave faces the horrors of her hateful mistress, on the eve of her liberation.A Brazilian writer-in-exile discovers the dark history of an abandoned mansion inhabited by a charming and sensual ghost.And a young bride spins a story of murder and deceit that paints her husband as a killer . . . but is there any truth to her tale?Featuring 19 original stories from some of modern comics’ finest talent, Gothic Tales of Haunted Love collects fragments of lovers torn apart, romantic liasons with the unliving, ghostly revenge, and horrific deeds, in the vein of the short-lived 1970s gothic romance comics.A foreword on gothic romance comics is provided by historian Jacque Nodell, and the collection also features a reprint of the 1970s Korean horror-romance comic "The Promise" by Sanho Kim.
Rawblood
Catriona Ward - 2015
She dares to fall in love.And only then do they discover the true horror of the Vallarca curse.
Vampire
Peter Cawdron - 2015
Bram Stoker wrote Dracula over the course of a decade, researching historical figures and compiling notes from scattered diary entries. What was supposed to be a work of fiction holds far more truth than he realized. Dr. Jane Langford is investigating a murder-suicide unlike anything she's ever encountered before. Sleepy Boise, Idaho, is a haven to an evil that has passed unnoticed down through the centuries.
The Classified Dossier: Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula
Christian Klaver - 2021
His body lies in a solitary grave on the Sussex Downs. But Dr. Watson survives, and is now given permission to release tales in Sherlock's 'black box', those cases that are, dear reader, unbelievable - for their subject matter is of the most outré and grotesque nature.Beginning with 'The Adventure of the Lady's Finger', Holmes and Watson discover a dark, uncanny world beyond their imagining. It starts with a victim whose flesh reacts adversely to silver and sunlight, whose blood does not thicken when exposed to oxygen. And then a Transylvanian nobleman arrives at Baker Street demanding Holmes's assistance in the kidnapping of his beloved wife, Mina.
The Book of Shadows
James Reese - 2002
A child alone in the nineteenth-century French countryside, she makes her way to the secluded convent, where she is taken in as a foundling orphan and raised by nuns who teach the children of the privileged to fear a wrathful God. But shy, unworldly Herculine is not like the others in this cold, forebidding place. And when she is led down a dark path by a rebellious fellow student, she soon finds herself convicted of crimes unimaginable.But death at the hands of the ignorant and falsely pious is not to be Herculine's lot. Held captive in the convent library, she is visited by four unexpected saviors with timeless needs of their own: the incubus priest Father Louis; the tragic, damned beauty Madeleine; the demonic Asmodei; and Sebastiana d'Azur, a witch. By dawn, Herculine is free yet forever changed as she follows her liberators into a world of sensuous pleasures and great mysteries both wondrous and strange.Secreted away in Sebastiana's once-grand manor high above the Breton sands, Herculine sets out to find out why she has been "chosen" and for what purpose. Her quest - ripe with erotic discovery, dark magic, heresy, and blood - propels her headlong through the perils of the age, across borders between the living and the dead, and back through a time when hysteria and madness reigned, when noble heads were impaled and paraded through the streets of Paris. For only when her mysterious mission is completed - and the terrible, otherworldly roots of a gruesome Revolution are finally revealed - can she understand who and what she truly is. Until then, she must simply trust...and learn.
Fevre Dream
George R.R. Martin - 1982
But when he meets the hauntingly pale, steely-eyed Joshua York, he is certain. For York doesn’t care that the icy winter of 1857 has wiped out all but one of Marsh’s dilapidated fleet. Nor does he care that he won’t earn back his investment in a decade. York has his own reasons for wanting to traverse the powerful Mississippi. And they are to be none of Marsh’s concern—no matter how bizarre, arbitrary, or capricious his actions may prove. Marsh meant to turn down York’s offer. It was too full of secrets that spelled danger. But the promise of both gold and a grand new boat that could make history crushed his resolve—coupled with the terrible force of York’s mesmerizing gaze. Not until the maiden voyage of his new sidewheeler Fevre Dream would Marsh realize he had joined a mission both more sinister, and perhaps more noble, than his most fantastic nightmare...and mankind’s most impossible dream. Here is the spellbinding tale of a vampire’s quest to unite his race with humanity, of a garrulous riverman’s dream of immortality, and of the undying legends of the steamboat era and a majestic, ancient river.
Interview with the Vampire: Claudia's Story
Ashley Marie Witter - 2012
Though she spends many years of happiness with her two vampire fathers, she gradually grows discontent with their insistence upon treating her like a little girl, even though she has lived as long as any mortal man...and her lust to kill is certainly no less than theirs...