Historical Horror Fiction

For the first time ever, the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society has produced an audio recording of all of Lovecraft's stories. These are not dramatizations like our Dark Adventure Radio Theatre - rather, this is an audiobook of the original stories, in all-new, never-before-heard recordings made by the HPLHS' own Andrew Leman and Sean Branney exclusively for this collection. This collection spans his entire career from his earliest surviving works of childhood to stories completed shortly before his death. All tales include original music by HPLHS composer Troy Sterling Nies.

When the skeletal remains of a young woman and her baby are found entombed behind the kitchen wall of a historic Tudor house, Cassandra is overcome with grief. She seems to know who the young woman was, but not how she knows, or how she came to be there. Cassandra becomes inexplicably drawn to the house and the mystery of the bones of Blackfriars. As she begins to learn the truth about the Thorne siblings who occupied the house during the reign of Elizabeth I, her own life takes an unexpected turn, and she finds out that her fate is linked to the Thornes in ways she never imagined.

A new compilation of Bram Stoker’s cult vampire novels for the 100th anniversary of his death. This delightful new compilation of Bram Stoker's cult classics will be sure to satisfy any lover of vampire fiction, from Dracula to Twilight. All three novels were published after Dracula debuted in 1897. They flirt with vampirism, horror, and human folly in the best Gothic tradition - all attempts to duplicate Stoker's only success.

The men onboard HMS Terror have every expectation of finding the Northwest Passage. When the expedition's leader, Sir John Franklin, meets a terrible death, Captain Francis Crozier takes command and leads his surviving crewmen on a last, desperate attempt to flee south across the ice. But as another winter approaches, as scurvy and starvation grow more terrible, and as the Terror on the ice stalks them southward, Crozier and his men begin to fear there is no escape.

Demonstrating once again her gift for spellbinding storytelling, Anne Rice makes real for us a great dynasty of four centuries of witches—a family given to poetry and incest, murder and philosophy, a family that over the ages is itself haunted by a powerful, dangerous, and seductive being called Lasher who haunts the Mayfair women. Moving in time from today's New Orleans and San Francisco to long-ago Amsterdam and the France of Louis XIV, from the coffee plantations of Port-au-Prince to Civil War New Orleans and back to today, Anne Rice has spun a mesmerizing tale.

In 1893, there's no such thing as witches. There used to be, in the wild, dark days before the burnings began, but now witching is nothing but tidy charms and nursery rhymes. If the modern woman wants any measure of power, she must find it at the ballot box. But when the Eastwood sisters - James Juniper, Agnes Amaranth, and Beatrice Belladonna - join the suffragists of New Salem, they begin to pursue the forgotten words and ways that might turn the women's movement into the witch's movement.

All children mythologize their birth... So begins the prologue of reclusive author Vida Winter's beloved collection of stories, long famous for the mystery of the missing thirteenth tale. The enigmatic Winter has always kept her violent and tragic past a secret. Now old and ailing, she summons a biographer to tell the truth about her extraordinary life: Margaret Lea, a young woman for whom the secret of her own birth remains an ever-present pain.

A series of grisly murders rocks London. At each location, only a jumble of bones remains of the deceased, along with a bizarre sphere covered in strange symbols. The son of the latest victim seeks the help of Sherlock Holmes and his former partner, Dr. John Watson. They discover the common thread tying together the murders. Bizarre geometries, based on ancient schematics, enable otherworldly creatures to enter our dimension, seeking to wreak havoc and destruction.

Where does the story of the Owens bloodline begin? With Maria Owens, in the 1600s, when she’s abandoned in a snowy field in rural England as a baby. Under the care of Hannah Owens, Maria learns about the “Nameless Arts". Hannah recognizes that Maria has a gift and she teaches the girl all she knows. It is here that she learns her first important lesson: Always love someone who will love you back.

In the soft glow of the Scottish summer of 1900, Lucy James and Sherlock Holmes find themselves in the heart of Inverness, in the home of Scotland's famed whiskey trade. Yet, their purpose is far from leisurely. They are on the hunt for the culprits behind a nefarious plot that threatens to shatter the very foundations of the British government.

After receiving a frantic letter from her newly-wed cousin begging for someone to save her from a mysterious doom, Noemí Taboada heads to High Place, a distant house in the Mexican countryside. She’s not sure what she will find—her cousin’s husband, a handsome Englishman, is a stranger, and Noemí knows little about the region.

For over 300 years, a curse has kept the Owens family from love - but all of that is about to change. The novel begins in a library, the best place for a story to be conjured, when beloved aunt Jet Owens hears the deathwatch beetle and knows she has only seven days to live. Jet is not the only one in danger - the curse is already at work. A frantic attempt to save a young man’s life spurs three generations of the Owens women, and one long-lost brother, to use their unusual gifts to break the curse as they travel from Paris to London to the English countryside.

February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. “My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,” the president says at the time. “God has called him home.”

For the Owens family, love is a curse that began in 1620, when Maria Owens was charged with witchery for loving the wrong man. Hundreds of years later, in New York City at the cusp of the '60s, when the whole world is about to change, Susanna Owens knows that her three children are dangerously unique.

In the slums of 18th-century France, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with one sublime gift - an absolute sense of smell. As a boy, he lives to decipher the odors of Paris and apprentices himself to a prominent perfumer who teaches him the ancient art of mixing precious oils and herbs. But Grenouille's genius is such that he is not satisfied to stop there, and he becomes obsessed with capturing the smells of objects. Then one day, he catches a hint of a scent that will drive him on an ever-more-terrifying quest to create the "ultimate perfume" - the scent of a beautiful young virgin.

Set in 12th-century Jerusalem, Pilgrim follows the treacherous journey of a German knight and his companions as they return home after seven arduous years battling for God in the Holy Land. Within this sprawling tale lies a tapestry of medieval horror, intertwining history and folklore, encompassing both a metaphysical and literal odyssey.

New research has uncovered deeply buried military secrets—both the Allied and Axis special operations during WWII included monsters. Did the Soviets use a dragon to win the Battle of Kursk? Did a vampire fight for the Canadians in Holland? Did the US drop the second atomic bomb on a kaiju? This collection takes real events from World War II and injects them with fantastical creatures that mirror the “unreality” of war itself. Each story—and two poems—feature mythical, mystical, and otherwise unexplainable beings that change the course of history.

Late one night, exploring her father's library, a young woman finds an ancient book and a cache of yellowing letters. The letters are all addressed to "My dear and unfortunate successor", and they plunge her into a world she never dreamed of: a labyrinth where the secrets of her father's past and her mother's mysterious fate connect to an inconceivable evil hidden in the depths of history.

A Discovery of Witches introduced Diana Bishop, Oxford scholar and reluctant witch, and vampire geneticist Matthew Clairmont. Shadow of Night and The Book of Life carried Deborah Harkness's series to its spellbinding conclusion, and the trilogy has now sold more than two million copies in the United States and appeared in 38 editions around the world. All Souls fans have been captivated from the start by the many sources of inspiration Harkness draws on in her novels. Here, with her signature historian's touch, she offers an encyclopedic look at the series.

When struggling riverboat captain Abner Marsh receives an offer of partnership from a wealthy aristocrat, he suspects something’s amiss. 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.