Historical Horror Fiction

Chicago, 1881. The idea of a female detective is virtually unheard of. But when famed crime buster Allan Pinkerton opens his agency's doors to a handful of women, one intrepid actress with her own troubled past is driven to defy convention and take on a new and dangerous role. Since the age of 11, when her mother was murdered, the life of the theater is all Lilly Long has known. Now 22, she has blossomed into an accomplished Shakespearean actress.

The most unexpected Dollanganger story of them all, new from the author of Flowers in the Attic and Petals on the Wind—both now major Lifetime movie events. A young boy suffers amnesia from a trauma he suffered in what feels like must have been another life. He’s adopted into a wealthy...

In the spring of 1912, American writer Arthur Pearce is reeling from the wounds inflicted by a disastrous marriage. But his plans to travel abroad, write a new novel, and forget about his ex-wife are interrupted by a young woman he encounters on a London-bound train. Her name is Sarah Coyle, and the tale she tells him chills his blood. Sarah’s younger sister has been entranced by Count Richard Dunning, who is rumored to dabble in bizarre religious rites and experimental medicine. Arthur agrees to help, but he has no idea of what awaits him at Altarbook, Sarah’s ancestral mansion

When young Emily Brontë helps a wounded man she finds at the foot of an ancient pagan shrine in the remote Yorkshire moors, her life becomes contentiously entwined with his. He is Alcuin Curzon, embittered member of a sect working to eradicate the resurgent plague of lycanthropy in Europe and northern England. But Emily's father, curate of the Haworth village church, is responsible for having unwittingly brought a demonic werewolf god to Yorkshire forty years ago—and it is taking possession of Emily's beloved but foolish and dissolute brother.

Swedish Lapland, 1717. Maija, her husband Paavo and her daughters Frederika and Dorotea arrive from their native Finland, hoping to forget the traumas of their past and put down new roots in this harsh but beautiful land. Above them looms BlackAsen, a mountain whose foreboding presence looms over the valley and whose dark history seems to haunt the lives of those who live in its shadow.

As Tony follows his own path toward adulthood, he relies on the wisdom of Ultima, a magical healer, to forge his unique identity. With hundreds of thousands of copies in print, Bless Me, Ultima has been called the most widely read Mexican-American novel in the English language. Richly evocative, it has earned its place among the classics of modern literature, even drawing favorable comparisons to Herman Melville's legendary Moby Dick.

The year is 1901, and Ada Byrd―spinster, schoolmarm, amateur naturalist―accepts a teaching post in isolated Lowry Bridge, grateful for the chance to re-establish herself where no one knows her secrets. She develops friendships with her neighbors, explores the woods with her students, and begins to see a future in this tiny farming community. Her past―riddled with grief and shame―has never seemed so far away. But then Ada begins to witness strange and grisly phenomena: a swarm of dying crickets, a self-mutilating rabbit, a malformed faun.

A USA Today Best Mystery of All Time Steeped in the folklore of Eastern Europe, and set in the shadow of Nazi darkness erupting just beyond the Czech border, this bone-chilling, richly imagined novel is propulsively entertaining, and impossible to put down. "A wildly entertaining story...

A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER A NEW YORKER ESSENTIAL READ From “one of the most acute and lasting writers of her generation” (The New York Times)—a ghost story set in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, an elegiac consideration of grief, devotion (filial and...

Nell Martin is moving again, this time to the Winslow Grand Hotel, built in 1878. As Nell is settling in, strange things begin to happen. Doors lock of their own accord, writing appears on bathroom walls - and most horrifying of all - visions of a dead boy permeate her waking life. Thinking it was her mind playing tricks on her, she soon finds the past and the present colliding as she learns horrific details of a murder that happened at the hotel in 1907 involving a girl named Lea.

Norman Mailer's dazzlingly rich, deeply evocative novel of ancient Egypt breathes life into the figures of a lost era: the eighteenth-dynasty Pharaoh Rameses and his wife, Queen Nefertiti; Menenhetet, their creature, lover, and victim; and the gods and mortals that surround them in intimate and telepathic communion. Mailer's reincarnated protagonist is carried through the exquisite gardens of the royal harem, along the majestic flow of the Nile, and into the terrifying clash of battle.

Dracula. A name of horror, depravity and the darkest sensuality. Yet the real Dracula was just as alluring, just as terrifying, his story not of a monster but of a man - and a contradiction. For the one they called 'The Devil's Son' was both tyrant and lawgiver, crusader and mass slaughterer, torturer and hero, lover and murderer. His tale is told by those who knew him best. The only woman he ever loved, who he must sacrifice. His closest comrade and traitor.

Dark Adventure Radio Theatre presents Robert E. Howard's tale of horrors in Eastern Europe in a 1930s-style radio drama. Charlie Tower seeks refuge from the horrors of the Great War in Berlin's most notorious nightclubs. There a chain of events is set in motion that will lead him across Europe to investigate the mysterious Black Stone. Is it merely a creation of superstitious peasants, or is it a nexus for hideous gods of the ancient world to set foot into ours?

The year is 1950, and a great tragedy has struck the town of Crowford. Three local men have been killed in a storm, after their fishing boat the Mercy Belle sank. A mysterious fourth man, however, was rescued. Nobody knows who he is, or what he was doing on the Mercy Belle...and the man has lost his memory.

Phantom of the Opera meets Beauty and the Beast in this gothic-inspired dark fantasy romance. A haunted tower, a mysterious instructor, and the lure of the music of the night...After the death of her father, Aria is left penniless and destitute. To avoid working the streets, she becomes the ward of a Count and moves to a remote town called High Tower. High Tower is a gloomy place with one vivid attraction: The theater. Lords and ladies come from afar to be seduced by a night of unforgettable entertainment.

A year in the life of a family as they strike out into the unknown (aka Vermont), leaving all the comforts of home behind—a rollicking, lyrical novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason, the bestselling author of North Woods and one of America’s greatest living writers Miles Krzelewski...

The first book in the critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling Gemma Doyle trilogy, the exhilarating and haunting saga from the author of The Diviners series and Under the Same Stars. It’s 1895, and after the suicide of her mother, 16-year-old Gemma Doyle is shipped off from the life...

Parrots are flying loose all over a convention hotel, making trouble and imitating everything everyone says. Monkeys are swinging from chandelier to chandelier. Michael is a teacher moonlighting as an actor in the show Porfiria, Queen of the Jungle, and the cast, crew, and their exotic animal...

From one of our most accomplished storytellers, an extraordinary and arresting novel about a women’s asylum in the nineteenth century, and a terrifying doctor who wants to change the world In this harrowing story based on authentic historical documents, we follow the career of Dr. Silas Weir...

From the acclaimed author of Infected comes an epic and exhilarating story of humanity’s secret battle against a horrific enemy. Across America, a mysterious pathogen transforms ordinary people into raging killers, psychopaths driven by a terrifying, alien agenda. The human race fights back...