Dark Horror

Give your kids a fright! Haunted houses, prowling monsters, vengeful ghosts, and more are waiting for you. Inside you’ll find 35 original short scary stories for kids, including a room where everything is wrong and you can never leave, a forest guide who leads people on a walk they won’t forget, a monster dining in a graveyard, a ghost ship that hunts down treasure seekers, and a statue that comes to life—for a price. And many more! Just make sure you listen to these stories with the lights on.

Seventeen-year-old Mary Churchill feels helpless as London is ravaged by air raids and mandatory blackouts during the seemingly endless war. On a rare night out, she connects with a stranger named Evelyn and, after becoming fast friends, makes plans to meet her again the next day. Except Evelyn never shows up. When Mary searches for her, she finds her new friend brutally murdered.

As a devastating hurricane approaches, as the benighted creations of Victor Helios begin to spin out of control, as New Orleans descends into chaos and the future of humanity hangs in the balance, the only hope rests with Victor's first, failed attempt to build the perfect human. Deucalion's centuries-old history began as the original manifestation of a soulless vision - and it is fated to end in the ultimate confrontation between a damned creature and his mad creator. But first they must face a monstrosity not even Victor's malignant mind could have conceived.

The son of a schizophrenic, Jared Gordon has lived his entire life with a genetic time bomb coded into his DNA. So when the night terrors and hallucinations arrive in force, it seems undeniable that the same disease responsible for his father’s suicide is to blame.

Something unholy is hunting the streets of Burlington, Vermont, stalking the campus of the local university. Chris Gordon and his contingent of demon hunters is drawn to the northern Vermont city by a brutal murder of hellish proportions, ready to banish it from Earth. But this Hellion is direct from the Abyss, incarnate and fully possessed of all the powers of high Hell royalty - female royalty at that. It’s been said that the female of the species is deadlier than the male, and this one might be the deadliest of all.

A series of bizarre assaults is mystifying Boston police: an unknown attacker is viciously beating random strangers and leaving a note quoting an old warning about witchcraft. History professor Alex Maple was one of the victims, and now he's gone missing. Vickie Preston is certain that someone has taken her friend for malicious purposes. She's having blood-drenched visions that seem to be staining her waking life, and the escalating attacks suggest that a dangerous cult is at work behind the scenes.

When Jessica marries David, he is everything she wants in a family man: brilliant, attentive, ever youthful. Yet she still feels something about him is just out of reach. Soon, as people close to Jessica begin to meet violent, mysterious deaths, David makes an unimaginable confession: More than 400 years ago, he and other members of an Ethiopian sect traded their humanity so they would never die, a secret he must protect at any cost.

When her daughter Lotte was born, Dani had welcomed the chance to be a stay-at-home mother. To be good at something, for once. But now Dani can’t stop thinking about her seemingly healthy husband, Clark, dropping dead. Not because she hates him (not right now, anyway) but because it’s become abundantly clear to Dani that if he dies, she and Lotte will be left destitute. And then Dani discovers The Temple.

Vampires: murderous creatures in the shape of humans, they stalk the night feeding on the blood of innocents. Seemingly immortal, they can be destroyed only by the use of a stake through the heart, severing of their heads, or exposure to sunlight. By the year AD 12,090, vampires have ruled the Earth for almost 300 years, and it is only these weaknesses that have kept these foul monsters from totally overrunning the world. But what happens when those rules no longer apply?

Heather Morell is haunted. Otherworldly nightmares and monstrous hallucinations lurk around every corner, relics of childhood bereavement and schizophrenia. Until she meets Evelyn and Raine—a bad-tempered mage and her self-proclaimed bodyguard—and learns that she’s not insane after all. The monsters she sees are all too real, the god-thing in her nightmares is teaching her the secrets of creation, and her twin sister—the lost girl who supposedly never existed—might still be clinging on, a dwindling soul somewhere beyond the walls of reality, Outside.

Anita Blake is a vampire hunter. But when someone else sets his sights on her prey, she must save them both from the inferno.

Who are the Sawkill Girls? Marion: The newbie. Awkward and plain, steady and dependable. Zoey: The pariah. Luckless and lonely, hurting but hiding it. Aching with grief and dreaming of vanished girls. Val: The queen bee. Their stories come together on the island of Sawkill Rock, where gleaming horses graze in rolling pastures and cold waves crash against black cliffs. Where kids whisper the legend of an insidious monster at parties and around campfires. Where girls have been disappearing for decades, stolen away by a ravenous evil no one has dared to fight…until now.

The Dark Legion have been beaten back, and for the first time, the brothers are allied against the savagery that the UnderVerse has thrown at them, but the storm clouds of war are gathering, and not everyone will see the sun rise again. Jax has one chance to keep his people safe from the storm and the war that's building on the horizon, but it'll take balls of steel, brains of mince—and he's really going to need to be lucky as hell to pull this one off.

Growing stronger in War World is not for the faint of heart, and they have their first real dungeon to conquer, The Gray Depths. The undead patrol its boundaries, and they are hungry.

They've escaped the Tutorial with a heavy cost. Classes are chosen, destinies written, and the story unfolds in arterial threads of never ending fulcrums, slips of breath in chests heaving loss and hope. War World is now the sandbox, the arena, and they must grow stronger, much stronger if they want to save that which they treasure more than life itself.

Daniel Carter used to be a homicide detective, but his last case - the hunt for a serial killer - went wrong in strange ways and soured the job for him. Now he's a private investigator trying to live a quiet life. Strangeness, however, has not finished with him. First, he inherits a bookstore in Providence from someone he's never heard of, along with an indignant bookseller who doesn't want a new boss.

A haunting recollection of a mysterious boyhood event, The Man in the Black Suit leads off this masterful collection from Stephen King. Other dark tales include: All That You Love Will Be Carried Away, in which a man checks into a Lincoln, Nebraska Motel 6 to find the meaning in his life; That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French, presents the ultimate case of deja vu; and The Death of Jack Hamilton, a blistering tale of Depression-era outlaws on the run.

“Come home.” Vera’s mother called and Vera obeyed. In spite of their long estrangement, in spite of the memories — she's come back to the home of a serial killer. Back to face the love she had for her father and the bodies he buried there, beneath the house he'd built for his family.

Following in the footsteps of notorious serial murderer Jack the Ripper, a killer is stalking the streets of London. The self-dubbed Ripper King strikes at night, leaving a trail of eviscerated bodies in his wake. Fresh off a case with potential ties to the recent rash of killings, FBI agents Della Hamilton and Mason Carter are all too familiar with a slayer set to rule with a lethal fist. And they’ll stop at nothing to end his reign.

Captain Morgan Starling and her crew travel the stars, shipping cargo from one system to the next. Easy work, until first contact with another race devolved into all-out war. Now, they’re under attack from humanity’s mysterious alien foe, ambushed in the void between systems. When an unknown vessel comes to their aid, events spiral out of control, a twisted secret within its haunted corridors threatening to consume them, body and soul.