Historical Horror Fiction

Welcome to the Gothic London of the 1800s. These saucy tales quicken the pulse, thrill the mind, and excite parts of the body that other, lesser books fail to reach. Short stories featured in this sweet confection of blood, sex, and Gothic melodrama include "Holmes of the Baskervilles", "Miss Katie Bell - Victorian Vampire", "Joan Dark Is Lost", and "The Vampire Alice Through the Looking Glass". Here, vampires walk the streets and your favorite characters from Victorian literature are twisted until they snap.

In a sleepy, little New England village stands a dark, weather-beaten, many-gabled house. This brooding mansion is haunted by a centuries-old curse that casts the shadow of ancestral sin upon the last four members of the distinctive Pyncheon family. Mysterious deaths threaten the living. Musty documents nestle behind hidden panels carrying the secret of the family’s salvation - or its downfall.

It is 1995 in North Carolina and high-school student Taylor Hanes is struggling to escape his small-minded dying textile town. He finds his ticket out by lying on the application in order to get a full-ride scholarship to a state university. His actions generate unexpected consequences from his family and his hometown, but worse yet, he awakens the wrath of the scholarship’s long dead benefactor.

Herbert Powyss lives in an estate in the Welsh Marches, with enough time and income to pursue a gentleman's fashionable investigations and experiments in botany. But he longs to make his mark in the field of science - something consequential enough to present to the Royal Society in London. He hits on a radical experiment in isolation: For seven years a subject will inhabit three rooms in the basement of the manor house, fitted out with rugs, books, paintings, and even a chamber organ. Meals will arrive thrice daily via a dumbwaiter.

Lucina of Greece was orphaned at a young age and brought up by foster parents. Now aged 13, she is sent to be educated by her philosopher guardian in the place he calls Elysium. There, she finds herself the only female in a masculine world: While she proves herself an intellectual equal, she cannot accept the rigidity of the scientific skepticism that disallows her intuition, psychic talents, and capacity for love.

Helen Gunn moves to the Wirral, England, an area rich in ancient history, with her estranged husband and their three-year-old daughter Charlotte, in the hope of saving their marriage. When Charlotte starts talking to an imaginary friend and dark shadows threaten the family, Helen must face a parent’s worst nightmare and save her child. The Viking Einaar brought his family to England to farm the land and live in peace, but when a sickness walks among his people and his child is blamed, Einaar must protect his family from the people he trusted the most; his tribe.

Isoline Beresford has beautiful yet haunting dreams. In them, a man she doesn't know is calling to her. She's inexplicably, inexorably drawn to him, until he's more real to her than her own fiancé. When she calls off her engagement, her enraged father sends her to live with her 90-year-old grand-aunt, the Dowager Countess Bellamira Granville. If she won't do her duty at home, he reasons, perhaps she can at least convince Lady Granville to leave her fortune to Isoline. But life at Thornrush Manor is not what Isoline expected. Her aunt is as spry and elegant as a woman half her age.

Photographer Septimus Blackwood is on a quest to rebuild and rise up of the ashes of his own ambitions. He encounters many unforeseen obstacles, including the mysterious inhabitants of a long abandoned theater, a nefarious foe, and an elusive nocturnal gang. As the luminescence of gas lamps stretches across a dark city, a power struggle ensues. Among the mayhem is Rick Best, a reporter turned detective with an obsession to track down one of London’s most notorious villains, Spring-Heeled Jack. The Movement of Light will linger long in the shadows of your mind.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the book that changed the world. Published to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and a movie starring Elle Fanning as Mary Shelley, Monster is a brilliant fictionalized biography akin to The Other Boleyn Girl. Two centuries ago this year, the young woman who invented science fiction was only 20 when she wrote the book that became Frankenstein. Mary Shelley said, “People ask how I, then a young girl, could think of, and dilate upon, so hideous subject?”

The year is 1922. The carnival is Pontilliar's Spectactular Star Light Miraculum, set up on the Texas-Louisiana border. One blazing summer night, a mysterious stranger steps out onto the midway, lights a cigarette, and forever changes the world around him. Tattooed snake charmer Ruby has traveled with her father's carnival for most of her life and, jaded though she is, can't help but be drawn to the tall man in the immaculate black suit who has joined the carnival as a geek, a man who bites the heads off live chickens.

When famed poet Hugh de Bonne is discovered dead of a heart attack in his bath one morning, his cousin Robert Highstead, a historian turned postmortem photographer, is charged with a simple task: transport Hugh’s remains for burial in a chapel that has been locked and abandoned for 16 years, housing the remains of his beloved wife, Ada. However, Ada’s grief-stricken niece refuses to open the chapel for Robert unless he agrees to her bargain: Before he can lay Hugh to rest, Robert must record Isabelle’s story of Ada and Hugh’s ill-fated marriage over the course of five nights.

Anno Domini 1095. Cresciuta all'estremo nord del Sacro Romano Impero, Viridiana è abituata a viaggiare ed esercitare l'arte della guarigione. Fino a quando re Jonas dei Naconidi irrompe nel suo villaggio e la reclama come ostaggio in cambio della pace, ammaliato dalla chioma di fuoco e dallo spirito fiero che la contraddistinguono. Perché proprio a lei è toccato in sorte un simile sacrificio? Jonas è un sovrano arrogante e un guerriero spietato. Non c'è limite alla sua forza, né al suo desiderio di proteggere il figlio Andreas, unico vincolo con il suo perduto amore.

Summer Tyme's eidetic memory and computer-hacking skills made her the ideal con artist, until she ran afoul of the mob. She thought she managed to escape their clutches, but now her murderous enemies are forcing her to participate in a high-stakes robbery at the Belleview Biltmore Hotel, where the annual McNeal Foundation Art Auction is to be held. If she fails, Summer and her twin brother will be killed. Things go from bad to worse when spirits of soldiers who occupied the hotel during WWII invade her dreams, unintentionally putting Summer in even more danger.

Ruin and desolation have fallen on the Roman Empire. The undead have destroyed everything in their path. The greatest city in the world in nothing more than a wasteland. Men gather in the furthest corners of the empire, preparing for their final stand. The last army of Rome, the last fighting force of mankind. Across the empire, a group of desperate friends carry with them one last hope. They must travel to the heart of the undead. They must be willing to sacrifice. They must be ready to give everything they have in order to save Rome and each other. Out of ruin there may be rebirth.

In the trenches of Europe during the Great War, Tomás Cordero operated a weapon more devastating than any gun: a flame projector that doused the enemy in liquid fire. Having left the battlefield a shattered man, he comes home to find yet more tragedy - for in his absence, his wife has died of the flu. Haunted by memories of the woman he loved and the atrocities he perpetrated, Tomás dreams of fire and finds himself setting match to flame when awake....

Shipwrecks are part of life in the remote village of Porthmorvoren, Cornwall. And as the sea washes the bodies of the drowned onto the beach, it also brings treasures: barrels of liquor, exotic fruit, the chance to lift a fine pair of boots from a corpse, maybe even a jewel or two. When, after a fierce storm, Mary Blight rescues a man half dead from the sea, she ignores the whispers of her neighbours and carries him home to nurse better. Gideon Stone is a Methodist minister from Newlyn, a married man.

A mysterious woman pleads for the help of Inspectors Frey and 'Nine-Nails' McGray. Her son, illegitimate scion of the Koloman family, has received an anonymous death threat - right after learning he is to inherit the best part of a vast wine-producing estate. In exchange for their protection, she offers McGray the ultimate cure for his sister, who has been locked in an insane asylum after brutally murdering their parents: the miraculous waters that spring in a small island in the remote Loch Maree.

After the frightful events of last autumn, 17-year-old Louisa Ditton has settled into her role as a maid at Coldthistle House, but she has not settled into what that means for her humanity. As Louisa struggles to figure out whether she is worthy of redemption, the devilish Mr. Morningside plans a fete - one that will bring new guests to Coldthistle House. From wicked humans to Upworlders, angelic beings who look down on Mr. Morningside’s monstrous staff, all are armed with their own brand of self-righteous justice.

Diana Cooke was "born with the century" and came of age just after World War I. The daughter of Virginia gentry, she knew early that her parents had only one asset, besides her famous beauty: their stately house, Saratoga, the largest in the commonwealth, which has hosted the crème of society and Hollywood royalty. Though they are land-rich, the Cookes do not have the means to sustain the estate. Without a wealthy husband, Diana will lose the mansion that has been the heart and soul of her family for five generations.

The Man Behind the Glass is based around a character called Septimus Blackwood, a Victorian photographer with a difference. The tale is set in London’s East End in the year 1860. A mysterious Gothic adventure of a man’s quest to capture life and cheat death through photography. Septimus races against time to discover his family’s long lost legacy buried deep among the forgotten rivers and cellars of old London. Unbeknownst to him a mysterious old woman looks on....