Book picks similar to
Omens by Richard Gavin


horror
weird-fiction
short-stories
weird-tales

Ghosts and Grisly Things


Ramsey Campbell - 1998
    A three-time winner of the World Fantasy Award and an eight-time winner of the British Fantasy Award, his writing has struck a chord with readers worldwide. But throughout his career he has also written insightful, terrifying, and disturbing short fiction. Ghosts & Grisly Things is a collection of the best of Campbell's short works from the past two decades. This book also features the story "Ra*e" which appears here for the first time anywhere.

Daughters of Darkness


Blair Daniels - 2019
    All by women.When you were little, you had a nanny. A nanny only you could see.There are clumps of dark hair in the swimming pool. Curling around your toes, slowly tugging you down."The Love Simulator" shows your perfect life with 'The One'... which turns out to be your worst nightmare.DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS brings you 46 tales of terror from the depths of the female mind. Pull up a chair and listen to the horrors of murderous femme fatales, fiercely protective mothers, and daughters who realize their childhood isn't quite what it seemed.Hundreds of backers on Kickstarter brought this anthology to life, through a successful campaign that raised several thousand dollars. Our authors have won awards, written bestsellers, and gained international popularity on the 13 million subscriber forum NoSleep.Daughters of Darkness is guaranteed give you nightmares you'll never forget. Read... if you dare!

The Collected Ghost Stories of E.F. Benson


E.F. Benson - 2001
    Tilly's seance --Mrs. Amworth --In the tube --Roderick's story --Reconciliation --Face --Spinach --Bagnell terrace --A tale of an empty house --Naboth's vineyard --Expiation --Home sweet home --"And no bird sings" --Corner house --Corstophine --Temple --Step --Bed by the window --James Lamp --Dance --Hanging of Alfred Wadham --Pirates --Wishing-well --Bath-chair --Monkeys --Christopher comes back --Sanctuary --Thursday evenings --Psychical mallards --Clonmel witch burning.

In Ghostly Company


Amyas Northcote - 1997
    The silent group by the fire once more broke forth into wild gesticulations and cries, Stella prostrated herself, the Form on the altar grew clearer and with a cry of horror Mr Fowke turned away and rushed madly across the moor'. Amyas Northcote's In Ghostly Company is a rare and splendid collection of strange and disturbing tales from the golden age of ghost stories. His style is akin to that of the master of the genre M.R. James: it is measured and insidiously suggestive, producing unnerving chills rather than shocks and gasps. Northcote's tales make the reader unsettled and uneasy. This is partly due to the fact that the hauntings or strange occurrences take place in natural or mundane surroundings - surroundings familiar to the reader but never before thought of as unusual or threatening. Long out of print, this book remains an enthralling and chilling read.

The Abyssal Plain: The R'lyeh Cycle


William Holloway - 2019
    A cup full of tentacles mixed with existential nihilism and sprinkled with liberal quantities of gore, this is Lovecraftian horror with a bloody bent that few others have dared to explore. --Peter Rawlik, author of ReanimatorsThey called it the Event.The Event changed everything. The earthquakes came first, including the Big One, shattering the Pacific Rim and plunging the world into chaos. Then the seas came, the skies opened, and the never-ending rain began. But as bad as that was, there is something worse.The Rising has begun.A lone man who abandoned the world for his addictions searches a waterlogged Austin for something, anything to cling to. Little does he know that something else searches for him.In the Sonoran Desert, the downtrodden of the world search for a better life north of the border, only to see the desert become an ocean: an ocean that takes life and gives death.In the woods of Alabama, survivors escape to Fort Resistance, but soon discover that it isn't just the horrors of the deep places of the world that they need to fear; but rather a new and more deadly pestilence that has grown in their own ranks.In England, it's too late to fight, and all that's left is to survive. One man reaches for his own humanity, but what to do when humanity is an endangered species?And in the Pacific, He is rising.In The Abyssal Plain: The R'lyeh Cycle, authors William Holloway, Michelle Garza and Melissa Lason, Brett J. Talley, and Rich Hawkins have created a timely and uniquely modern reimagining of the Cthulhu Mythos.

The Innsmouth Cycle: The Taint of the Deep Ones


Robert M. PriceDave Carson - 1997
    / My journey to your depths begins tonight / To serve immortal till the stars turn right."These lines from a poem by Ann K. Schwader are the coda for this fine collection of tales about H.P. Lovecraft's Innsmouth--that decadent, smugly rotting New England town where half-human creatures with forbidding batrachian faces follow the arcane practices of the Esoteric Order of Dagon. In his erudite and witty introduction, Robert M. Price calls Innsmouth "the most effective, most evocative ... example of Lovecraft's full-blown alien civilizations." The Innsmouth Cycle includes 13 stories and 3 poems, including the three tales by Lord Dunsany, Robert W. Chambers, and Irvin S. Cobb that inspired Lovecraft's "The Shadow over Innsmouth." This collection is planned as the first of a pair, the second half of which will be Tales of Innsmouth, containing (according to Price) all new works of "fishy fiction."A fun detail: this book is "respectfully dedicated to Ben Chapman, the Creature from the Black Lagoon." --Fiona Webster

Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts


Orrin Grey - 2015
    That is abundantly clear in the stories he spins. No matter where he draws inspiration from, whether the weird tales of Lovecraft, Machen, and Poe or the films of Murnau, Corman, and Argento, the end result is inevitably fresh and new. And wonderfully monstrous.If you love monsters—the macabre, the murderous, the misunderstood; the strange, the sinister, the sympathetic; the cinematic and the literary—you will find plenty to love in Orrin Grey’s Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts.

Collected Ghost Stories


M.R. James - 1931
    R. James is widely regarded as the father of the modern ghost story, and his tales have influenced horror writers from H. P. Lovecraft to Stephen King. First published in the early 1900s, they have never been out of print, and are recognized as classics of the genre. This collection contains some of his most chilling tales, including A View from a Hill, Rats, A School Story, The Ash Tree, and The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance. Read by BAFTA and Emmy-award winning actor Derek Jacobi, and with haunting and evocative music, these tales cannot fail to send a shiver down your spine.

Fear of Gravity


Brian Keene - 2004
    As in life, there are no happy endings, and no matter how high one flies, theres always gravity.

Ana Kai Tangata: Tales of the Outer the Other the Damned and the Doomed


Scott Nicolay - 2014
    "A sprawling treatise of the macabre" in short stories, novelettes, and novellas.

The White People and Other Weird Stories


Arthur Machen - 1904
    LovecraftActor, journalist, devotee of Celtic Christianity and the Holy Grail legend, Welshman Arthur Machen is considered one of the fathers of weird fiction, a master of mayhem whose work has drawn comparisons to H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe. Readers will find the perfect introduction to his style in this new collection. With the title story, an exercise in the bizarre that leaves the reader disoriented virtually from the first page, Machen turns even fundamental truths upside down. "There have been those who have sounded the very depths of sin," explains the character Ambrose, "who all their lives have never done an 'ill deed.'"

Lovecraft Unbound


Ellen DatlowWilliam Browning Spencer - 2009
    Howard Phillips Lovecraft may have been a writer for only a short time, but the creations he left behind after his death in 1937 have shaped modern horror more than any other author in the last two centuries: the shambling god Cthulhu, and the other deities of the Elder Things, the Outer Gods, and the Great Old Ones, and Herbert West, Reanimator, a doctor who unlocked the secrets of life and death at a terrible cost. In Lovecraft Unbound, more than twenty of today's most prominent writers of literature and dark fantasy tell stories set in or inspired by the works of H. P. Lovecraft. 9 • Introduction (Lovecraft Unbound) • essay by Ellen Datlow 11 • The Crevasse • short story by Dale Bailey and Nathan Ballingrud 31 • The Office of Doom • [Dust Devil] • short story by Richard Bowes 43 • Sincerely, Petrified • short fiction by Anna Tambour 73 • The Din of Celestial Birds • (1997) • short story by Brian Evenson 85 • The Tenderness of Jackals • short fiction by Amanda Downum 99 • Sight Unseen • short fiction by Joel Lane 113 • Cold Water Survival • short story by Holly Phillips 139 • Come Lurk With Me and Be My Love • short fiction by William Browning Spencer 161 • Houses Under the Sea • (2006) • novelette by Caitlín R. Kiernan 195 • Machines of Concrete Light and Dark • short story by Michael Cisco 213 • Leng • short fiction by Marc Laidlaw 239 • In the Black Mill • (1997) • short story by Michael Chabon 267 • One Day, Soon • short fiction by Lavie Tidhar 277 • Commencement • (2001) • novelette by Joyce Carol Oates 305 • Vernon, Driving • short fiction by Simon Kurt Unsworth 315 • The Recruiter • short fiction by Michael Shea 331 • Marya Nox • short fiction by Gemma Files 347 • Mongoose • [Boojum] • novelette by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette 375 • Catch Hell • short fiction by Laird Barron 413 • That of Which We Speak When We Speak of the Unspeakable • short fiction by Nick Mamatas

Greener Pastures


Michael Wehunt - 2016
    Where nature rubs against small towns, in mountains and woods and bedrooms, here is strangeness seen through a poet’s eye.They say there are always greener pastures. These stories consider the cost of that promise.

North American Lake Monsters


Nathan Ballingrud - 2013
    Monsters, real and imagined, external and internal, are the subject. They are us and we are them and Ballingrud's intense focus makes these stories incredibly intense and irresistible.These are love stories. And also monster stories. Sometimes these are monsters in their traditional guises, sometimes they wear the faces of parents, lovers, or ourselves. The often working-class people in these stories are driven to extremes by love. Sometimes, they are ruined; sometimes redeemed. All are faced with the loneliest corners of themselves and strive to find an escape.Nathan Ballingrud was born in Massachusetts but has spent most of his life in the South. He worked as a bartender in New Orleans and New York City and a cook on offshore oil rigs. His story "The Monsters of Heaven" won the inaugural Shirley Jackson Award. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with his daughter.

Antisocieties


Michael Cisco - 2021
    An ominously quiet town. A haunting young adult novel from the turn of the century. Two starving captives frozen in agony. A young boy from a doting family. A man in a cheap Halloween mask. A succession of portraits of people trapped in their own identities, some of whom insist on their own ideas because they would have nothing at all without them. People for whom being seen by another is terrifying. And, like any collection of portraits, ANTISOCIETIES is also a collection of speculative mirrors ...