Classic Horror Fiction

Published a year before her death at the age of 30, Emily Bronte's only novel is set in the wild, bleak Yorkshire Moors. Depicting the relationship of Cathy and Heathcliff, Wuthering Heights creates a world of its own, conceived with an instinct for poetry and for the dark depths of human psychology. Emily Jane Bronte was born July 30, 1818 at Thornton in Yorkshire. Emily's mother died in 1821 and her two eldest sisters died in 1825, leaving Emily, her brother and two sisters to be raised by their aunt. Later all three daughters were to publish poems and stories.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, first published in 1890, is still one of the most riveting novels ever written. The genius plot has everything to capture and hold the imagination, from lust, debauchery, and doomed romance though blackmail, murder, and the disastrous effect of a morally depraved French novel. That’s not even counting the visits to the opium den, the addiction, the stalking, or the string of deaths - accidental or self-inflicted.

Charles Dexter Ward is a young man from a prominent Rhode Island family who has disappeared from a mental asylum. He had been incarcerated during a prolonged period of insanity, during which he exhibited minor and inexplicable physiological changes. His empty cell is found to be very dusty. The bulk of the story concerns the investigation conducted by the Wards' family doctor, Marinus Bicknell Willett, in an attempt to discover the reason for Ward's madness and physiological changes.

Beware the black cat. Good luck escaping the pit. Don’t go to that party without your masque. Delight in these and many more stories and poems from the master of dark prose, Edgar Allan Poe. This collection has been specially curated and performed by award-winning audiobook narrator Joe Arden. Dive in to the darkness.

During the Outbreak, like billions of others, a man finds himself infected with the Phage. Desperate to spare his family from watching him become a walking nightmare, he flees. Soon after, he is dead. Two years later, he wakes up. Not in the afterlife, but in his own body. Trapped, unable to control the monster that carries him, and forced to witness the horror of its existence.

In best-selling author Katie MacAlister’s Love in the Time of Dragons, suburban mom Tully Sullivan wakes up in a far-off place surrounded by strangers—many of them muscular, sexy ones—claiming to be dragons. They insist Tully is a dragon, too, and that she’s committed crimes deserving of death. Now Tully must disprove the allegations before time runs out.

The story is narrated by the scion of the Delapore family, who has moved from Massachusetts to his ancestral estate in England, known as Exham Priory. On several occasions, the protagonist and his cats hear the sounds of rats scurrying behind the walls. Upon investigating further, he finds that his family maintained an underground city for centuries and that the inhabitants of the city fed on human flesh, even going so far as to raise generations of human cattle, who eventually began to de-evolve due to their sub-human living conditions.

The story is told from the first person perspective of an unnamed narrator and details his experiences with a scientist named Crawford Tillinghast. Tillinghast creates an electronic device that emits a resonance wave, which stimulates an affected person’s pineal gland, thereby allowing them to perceive planes of existence outside the scope of accepted reality.

Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, was an Irish writer known also by the Japanese name Koizumi Yakumo. His book Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, comprises two parts, the first being the "Kwaidan Proper" and the second, "Insect-Studies", which consists of an essay each on ants, butterflies and mosquitos. According to the author, most of the folk tales and ghost stories in the first part were translated from old Japanese texts. The themes encompass resurrection, sacrifice, magic, and the realm of dreams.

"Les chats d'Ulthar", extrait : "On raconte que dans Ulthar, de l'autre côté de la rivière Skaï, aucun homme n'a droit de tuer un chat. J'en suis d'autant plus convaincu que mes yeux se posent sur celui qui est assis là, ronronnant près du feu. Le chat est un animal mystérieux. Il devine et voit des choses que les humains ne perçoivent pas. N'est-il pas l'âme de l'antique Égypte et le sujet des contes oubliés de Meroe et Ophir ? De plus, il est apparenté au Seigneur de la Jungle, et comme tel, il est l'héritier des secrets de la sombre et inquiétante Afrique.

The four stories in this compilation, not by James, are meant to serve as prime illustrations of the best work of a few of his contemporaries and immediate antecedents.

Working in the ER, Dr. Marie Lavant sees the darkest side of New Orleans. But the bloody wounds of patients are not the only things that haunt her. As the descendent of a legendary voodoo queen, Marie is cursed with the ability to communicate with spirits of the dead.

Nelson Olmsted reads some of the finest short horror stories ever written.

The warning was inscribed on the entrance of the hidden tomb, forgotten for millennia in the sands of mystic Egypt. Then the archaeologists and grave robbers came in search of the fabled Jewel of Seven Stars, which they found clutched in the hand of the mummy. Few heeded the ancient warning, until all who came in contact with the Jewel began to die in a mysterious and violent way, with the marks of a strangler around their neck.

This is a story from the Fall of the House of Usher collection. The horrors of the Spanish Inquisition, with its dungeon of death, and the overhanging gloom on the House of Usher demonstrate unforgettably the unique imagination of Edgar Allan Poe. Unerringly, he touches upon some of our greatest nightmares: Premature burial, ghostly transformation, words from beyond the grave. Written in the 1840s, they have retained their power to shock and frighten even now.

Sarah Crowe left Atlanta, and the remnants of a tumultuous relationship, to live alone in an old house in rural Rhode Island. Within its walls she discovers an unfinished manuscript written by the house's former tenant - a parapsychologist obsessed with the ancient oak growing on a desolate corner of the property. And as the gnarled tree takes root in her imagination, Sarah risks her health and her sanity to unearth a revelation planted centuries ago.

Wuthering Heights is Emily Bronte's only novel. Written between October 1845 and June 1846, Wuthering Heights was published in 1847 under the pseudonym "Ellis Bell"; Bronte died the following year, aged 30. Wuthering Heights and Anne Bronte's Agnes Grey were accepted by publisher Thomas Newby before the success of their sister Charlotte's novel, Jane Eyre.

Frankenstein di Mary Shelley fu pubblicato la prima volta nel 1818, e modificato dall'autrice per una seconda edizione nel 1831...

Victor Frankenstein learns how to create life and creates a being in the likeness of man, but larger and more powerful than the average man. Frankenstein rejects the creature, and lives to regret his desire to create life, after it kills his brother William. Frankenstein is a warning against the "over-reaching" of modern man and the Industrial Revolution, alluded to in the novel's subtitle, The Modern Prometheus.

A young man commits all types of sins, but only his portrait shows the ravages of his life. Oscar Wilde's Faustian classic. Gothic horror at its best.