Literary Horror

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.

Marisol vanished during the Cuban Revolution, disappearing with hardly a trace. Now, shaped by atrocities long-forgotten, her foul-mouthed spirit visits her nephew, Ramon, in modern-day New Jersey. Her hope: That her presence will prompt him to unearth their painful family history. Ramon launches a haphazard investigation into the story of his ancestor, unaware of the forces driving him on his search. Along the way, he falls in love, faces a run-in with a murderous gangster, and uncovers the lives of the lost saints who helped Marisol during her imprisonment.

When Michael "Blue" Whitley -- a former party boy turned up-and-coming Brooklyn chef -- returns with three friends to the remote Canadian commune of his birth, he discovers that his entire life has been a carefully orchestrated lie. He is in fact someone else altogether, a replacement for a local child who disappeared twenty-five years earlier. He is something not quite human.

Innocence is a modern gothic coming-of-age story, a devastating X-ray of American culture, and a piercing exploration of a teenage girl growing up in New York City. Narrated by 14-year-old Becket, the novel traces her relationship with her widowed father, her encounters with the intimidating Beautiful Girls at school, her attraction to the mysterious and dangerous school nurse, her attachment to the raffish Tobey, and a series of devastating nightmares that threaten Becket's life.

On a quiet Christmas Eve, a governess’ manuscript detailing her encounters with the supernatural is read. She tells the story of moving into an estate to take care of two children and becoming slowly aware that the area is overrun with ghosts of the previous inhabitants - and that the children are aware that these ghosts exist.

James' chilling Gothic horror novella read by Nicki White, reprising her role as the governess.

A young governess arrives at Bly, a country home in Essex, England, to care for Miles and Flora, two precocious and pure children. But as ghostly visions take shape, the obsessively protective governess soon fears for the safety of her wards - only to wonder if these hauntings are a conjuring of her own imagination.

One of the most daunting ghost stories to ever be written, Henry James' The Turn of the Screw follows the transformation of Miles (age 10) and Flora (age eight) from well-behaved children to deceitful liars. When a governess comes to their country estate to look after the children, she and Flora are separately visited by a ghost; however Flora denies the experience and Miles claims to never have been visited by one, even when evidence supports an evil plot between the children and the ghosts.

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2016. Timothy Buchannan buys an abandoned house on the edge of an isolated village on the coast, sight unseen. When he sees the state of it, he questions the wisdom of his move but starts to renovate the house for his wife, Lauren, to join him there. When the villagers see smoke rising from the chimney of the neglected house, they are disturbed and intrigued by the presence of the incomer, intrigue that begins to verge on obsession.

A master of terror and nightmarish visions, H.P. Lovecraft solidified his place at the top of the horror genre with this macabre supernatural tale. When a geologist leads an expedition to the Antarctic plateau, his aim is to find rock and plant specimens from deep within the continent. The barren landscape offers no evidence of any life form—until they stumble upon the ruins of a lost civilization. Strange fossils of creatures unknown to man lead the team deeper, where they find carved stones dating back millions of years.

The five stories that made up R.B. Russell's debut collection, Putting the Pieces in Place, were described on first publication as demonstrating 'a subtle mastery of the macabre. Enigmatic and enticing, they combine a pleasing respect for the great tradition of supernatural fiction with a chilling contemporary European resonance.'

In this tantalizing tale of Victorian ghost stories and family secrets, timid, solitary librarian Gerard Freeman lives for just two things: his elusive pen pal Alice and a story he found hidden in his mother's drawer years ago. Written by his great-grandmother Viola, it hints at his mother's role in a sinister crime. As he discovers more of Viola's chilling tales, he realizes that they might hold the key to finding Alice and unveiling his family's mystery - or will they bring about his untimely death, as they seem to foretell?

National Book Award winner Ann Arensberg brings listeners a modern horror story about evil descending on an insular Maine town. It begins with the theft of six candles from the church altar, a few herbs found strewn in the local graveyard. In the summer of 1974, the prosperous farming community of Dry Falls, Maine, is hit by a brutal heat wave. Crops fail. Drought blights once-verdant lawns. Men inexplicably lose all interest in sex, while women complain of erotic nocturnal visitations.

Alex and Leslie Twisden lead charmed lives - fabulous jobs, a town house on Manhattan's Upper East Side, a passionate marriage. What they don't have is a child, and as they try one infertility treatment after the next, yearning turns into obsession. As a last-ditch attempt to make their dream of parenthood come true, Alex and Leslie travel to Slovenia, where they submit to a painful and terrifying procedure that finally gives them what they so fervently desire...but with awful consequences.

The haunting tale of a desolate cottage, and the hair-thin junction between this life and the next, from best-selling National Book Award finalist Gail Godwin. After his mother's death, 11-year-old Marcus is sent to live on a small South Carolina island with his great aunt, a reclusive painter with a haunted past. Aunt Charlotte, otherwise a woman of few words, points out a ruined cottage, telling Marcus she had visited it regularly after she'd moved there 30 years ago because it matched the ruin of her own life.

She was a daughter, a wife, a mother. She was a friend. But what secrets did Eloise take to her grave? Compulsively listenable and haunting, this is the Sunday Times best-selling debut novel from Book Club champion Judy Finnigan.

On the top floor of a small hospital, an unlikely piano prodigy lies in a coma, attended to by his gruff, helpless father. Outside the clinic, a motley vigil assembles beneath a reluctant New Mexico winter - strangers in search of answers, a brush with the mystical, or just an escape. To some the boy is a novelty, to others a religion. Just beyond this ragtag circle roams a disconsolate wolf on his nightly rounds, protecting and threatening, learning too much.

After sending their only daughter off to boarding school, Cookson Selway and his wife, Ellen, travel to London to escape their empty house. But their quiet hotel has guests other than those on the register, and the vacation turns into a journey not only to another city but to another time. As Selway is drawn into a series of mysterious encounters with a young girl who died in a fall from his hotel window sixty years earlier, the characters of her life become more real to him than those of his own.

“All the tales are a variety of detective story,” wrote Bowles of this, his first short story collection, “in which the reader is the detective; the mystery is in the motivation for the charcters’ behavior.” In such stories as “A Distant Episode” and How Many Midnights,” Bowles pushes human character beyond socially defined limits and maps a transformed (often horribly transformed) reality.

Laura lives alone in a cabin deep within the forest, making her living translating medical documents and tutoring the children of affluent locals. She spends her days climbing the mountains outside her door and roaming the woods, and soon begins a relationship with a waiter some years her junior, which brings new rhythms to her life. But late one night there is a knock on the door, and on the other side stands someone from her past who has finally found her.