Gothic Worlds

Siblings Bert, Willet, and Pansy know better than to go swimming at the old rock quarry. According to their father, it's the Devil's place, a place that's been cursed and forgotten. But Mississippi Delta summer days are scorching hot, and they can't resist cooling off in the dark, bottomless water - until the day six-year-old Pansy vanishes...not drowned, not lost, simply gone. When their father disappears as well, Bert and Willet leave their childhoods behind to try and hold their broken family together.

I was raised a poor girl in the streets of Sinaloa. When my family died during a turf war, I was taken away to Navolato to start over anew. I thought I would be safer here. That the life that had been taken from me in a hail of bullets and rage would stay where I left it. And that’s when he found me. El Señor. In his name, I shed the blood of his enemies and reap whatever rewards he deems fit. My name is Ana Sofia De la Cruz. Everyone knows me as La Carnicera. Either you’re with us or against us. And if you’re against us... corre, pequeño conejo.

Elizabeth Gaskell, famed author of Cranford, is cherished for her incise social observations and portrayals of the changing nature of English life through the Industrial Revolution of the Victorian era. In Cousin Phillis, Paul Manning has only recently left home to work on the railway line for the dashing Mr Holdsworth. Lodging with an Independent Minister on the outskirts of London, he becomes acquainted with his distant cousins, where he is delighted to meet his genial relations, and not least his cousin Phyllis

"The Horla" is the chilling tale of one man's descent into madness. Maupassant established a reputation in France as an absolute master of the short story, before himself succumbing to the mental illness that ravaged his later life. This story is the terrifying tale of an invisible vampire, told by a narrator himself on the brink of insanity, and written by a master of the macabre clearly at the peak of his powers.

The absurd, the grotesque Thomas Clapperton, hypochondriac, egomaniac, Scotsman, misanthrope, misogynist, menagerie keeper...has a date. His romantic rendezvous is with the girl across the road, Trudy Otter. Although Trudy only has an incestuous eye for her brother, Rex. The most dysfunctional of all beings rub against each other in the desperate search for human happiness in John Herdman's gothic miserene, Clapperton.