Literary Horror

A dramatic portrait of the dissolution of a marriage, written with brutal and lyrical precision, and nominated for the Nordic Prize. Jon, who is losing his wife to another man, is trying to understand what happened to his Great Love, by working, painfully, to see the story from her perspective...

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.

Ever since high school, somebody’s been playing the echo game on Will Williams. A look-alike with the same tattoos and the same name has been following him. Starting by implicating Will in petty crimes, and escalating to offenses with serious prison terms, he’s undermined every attempt Will has made to get his life on track. Now, drifting from city to city, Will’s doing everything in his power to outrun his shadow.

Nick Antosca's The Girlfriend Game is a tumble through the looking glass into a vortex of violence and desire. The 12 stories in the newest collection by the Shirley Jackson Award-winning author are brutal, urgent and unforgettable. In "Predator Bait", a decoy in a sex-sting news show questions her job and the man who shares her bed. An undependable son watches his mother become a creature he hardly recognizes in "Amphibian". A young man plots the death of his girlfriend's killer in "Winter Was Hard".

Among the ancient artifacts concealed in a London Victorian mansion lies an ornate human-sized sarcophagus which houses the body of an ancient Egyptian sorceress dead for centuries...or is she?

In Dark Property, a woman carries a dying baby across a desert waste, moving toward a fortress harboring a mysterious resurrection cult. Menaced by scavengers, she nevertheless begins to suspect that the reality within the fortress may be even more unsettling than the blasted environment outside. In Contagion and Other Stories, Evenson takes his audiences into a world that is at once apocalyptic, dark, observant, and grotesque without ever dipping into static genre conventions.

From the New York Times bestselling author, a first novel as spellbinding as her acclaimed nonfiction At thirty-four, Nick Walsh is a broken, deeply cynical man. Since the violent deaths of his parents thirteen years earlier, he has been living alone in his childhood home in the suburban Midwest...

It only takes a moment for a life to change forever. Ethan Denton is a lucky man. Most things have gone his way, and being granted full custody of Nate, his young son and “North Star,” has given him a near-perfect life. On a crisp winter morning just before the start of deer season, Ethan...

A powerful, eerily unsettling story collection from a major international literary star. Unearthly and unexpected, the stories in Mouthful of Birds burrow their way into your psyche and don't let go. Samanta Schweblin haunts and mesmerizes in this extraordinary, masterful collection. Schweblin's...

The Castle of Otranto is regarded as the first Gothic novel. The son of Manfred, Prince of Otranto, is mysteriously killed on his wedding day by a huge helmet. The event leads to a fast-paced story of jealous passion, intrigue, murder, and supernatural phenomena unfolding in an atmosphere of thunderclaps, moonlight, and dark castle walls, mirroring the inner turmoils of the characters themselves. Horace Walpole's tale, an immediate success when it first appeared in 1764, is a classic of its genre.

Aimee Bender’s Willful Creatures conjures a fantastical world in which authentic love blooms. This is a place where a boy with keys for fingers is a hero, a woman’s children are potatoes, and a little boy with an iron for a head is born to a family of pumpkin heads. With her singular mix of...

Dr Jekyll creates a potion whereby he can divide the good and evil parts of his personality and thus free the good side to work for the benefit of mankind without the distraction of his baser instincts. Unfortunately, he undertakes the experiment while the depraved side of his nature is in the ascendancy and turns into the repulsive Mr Hyde, whose very presence ‘emanates with foulness and decay’, and who bears the ‘signature of Satan’ on his face.

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde ranks alongside Frankenstein, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Dracula as one of the top horror stories to emerge from the late 19th Century. Film and stage adaptations have never been able to fully relate the agony and conflict that permeates the mind of Dr Jekyll, but the audio version read by Ian Holm adds an extra spine-chilling dimension to the original text by Robert Louis Stevenson.

"Dog days and the fresh bodies are arriving once again." So begins the fall term at South Carolina Medical College, where Dr. Jacob Thacker is on probation for Xanax abuse. His interim career - working public relations for the dean - takes an unnerving detour into the past when the bones of African American slaves, over a century old, are unearthed on the campus. Out of the college’s dark past, these bones threaten to rise and condemn the present.

Ever since he nearly drowned in the ocean three years earlier, 10-year-old Jack Peter Keenan has been deathly afraid to venture outdoors. Refusing to leave his home in a small coastal town in Maine, Jack Peter spends his time drawing monsters. When those drawings take on a life of their own, no one is safe from the terror they inspire.

"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" is the most famous supernatural wild chase in all of literature. One of the best-known American short stories, this tale has been produced countless times for television and film. A Halloween classic!

Meet Anna, a thirtysomething Mid-westerner living alone in New York City. A schoolteacher by day, she is a medium by night, covertly helping people reunite with their lost loved ones. Anna leads a double life, guarding her secret as much as she guards her heart—until Edward, a gangly yet...

Few authors in America write with such sheer love of story, language, and imagination as T.C. Boyle, and nowhere is that passion more evident than in his inventive, wickedly funny, and widely praised short stories. In After the Plague, Boyle speaks of contemporary social issues in a range of...

From the New York Times bestselling author of NOS4A2 and Horns comes this e-short story—from Joe Hill’s award-winning collection 20th Century Ghosts. Imogene is young and beautiful. She kisses like a movie star and knows everything about every film ever made. She's also dead and waiting in...

"Had me hooked from the first line. The characters are complex in a way that makes it impossible to tell who to trust. I was surprised by every twist." —Tasha Coryell, author of Love Letters to a Serial Killer On the evening she met exonerated murderer Thomas Danver, Melissa Burke let him help...