Literary Horror

Evenson's first collection of 25 short stories and one novella, Altmann's Tongue (1994), garnered comparisons to Paul Bowles, Poe, and Kafka and is considered by many an existential masterpiece.

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.

The hauntingly atmospheric English-language debut from the acclaimed Welsh author: a love story between a young Welsh woman and a Syrian mapmaker, rich with magic, mystery and the wonder of the sea. Nefyn has always been an enigma, even to her brother, Joseph, with whom she lives in a small cottage above a blustery cove. Hamza is a Syrian mapmaker, incarcerated in a military base a few miles up the coast. A violent storm will bring these two lost souls together—but other forces will soon try to tear them apart.

The old house waited. For years there had been rumors that the owner, Lilith Martin, had been part of an unholy cult. People spoke of blasphemous rituals, black rites filled with blood, sex...and sacrifices. Then Lilith died and the house sat empty. Until now. Lilith’s nephew, Chris, and his wife, Ellie, are moving in. Ellie isn’t happy about living in such a dark, foreboding place, but she wants to get pregnant and this house has a lot more room to raise a baby than their apartment. Unfortunately, she and Chris will soon learn that Lilith has other plans.

David is a modest man who works in a bank, lives in a rooming house, and enjoys books and quiet walks by the lake. Three months after unexpectedly being fired from his job, he takes a temporary position at a mortuary. There, sitting alone in the "slumber room" one late afternoon, he sees something he cannot comprehend, something no science can explain, something that will force him to question everything he believes in, including himself.

After she nearly ruins her family with a terrible misstep, Elena Spira is sent to Venice to escape disgrace and to atone by caring for the ailing Samuel Farber. But the crumbling and decaying Ca' Basilio palazzo, where Samuel is ensconced, holds tragic secrets, and little does Elena know how profoundly they will impact her.

In 1961, Derek Leech emerges fully formed from the polluted Thames, destined to found a global media empire. In 1978, three ambitious young men strike a deal with Leech. They are offered wealth, glamour, and success, but a price must be paid. In 1994, Leech's purpose moves to its conclusion, and as the men struggle, they realize to truth of the ultimate price.

Though published second after Altmann's Tongue, The Din of Celestial Birds (1997) consists of the best of Evenson's early stories. They take place in a country (perhaps several countries) that seems at once everywhere and nowhere, haunted by birds, ghosts, poverty, tyranny, and the permeability of the line between the living and the dead. These stories offer a heady mix of absurdity and bleakness on the one hand and exuberant magic realism on the other.

Stanley Maddox lives a mundane life in a nondescript town. His wife is cheating on him, his colleagues at work don’t recognize him, and he has recently noticed a mysterious creature darting its way through his house. When he notices a flap of skin on his face, he begins pulling. Beneath his skin lies another person, an evil person, with the power to change his life forever.

Dove sono finite le persone scomparse lungo l'autostrada sull'Appennino? Il mistero è fitto e l'indagine è affidata a due agenti molto speciali: Sara Milani, giovane poliziotta dal grande intuito, e Lauro Sebino, adolescente dotato di facoltà paranormali. Insieme hanno scoperto segreti inconfessabili, risolvendo i casi più complicati: questo non fa eccezione. Forse la chiave di tutto è nelle visioni di Lauro, infestate da occhi color del ghiaccio: a chi appartengono questi occhi letali? Per scoprirlo serve una nuova indagine... da brividi.

Caty non è come tutti gli altri fantasmi: non sa fluttuare e quando dorme sogna. Spesso i suoi sogni si trasformano in incubi terrificanti. Da quando è uno spettro, poi, lei e i suoi amici, il gatto Pinky e lo scienziato Doc, hanno lottato uniti contro il Male, affrontando mostri terribili. Un giorno però tra loro arriva un nuovo spettro, che cerca di metterli uno contro l'altro. Cosa vuole veramente questo intruso? Per non perdere i suoi compagni, Caty è pronta ad affrontare anche le paure più insormontabili: così ha inizio la sua più spaventosa avventura.

L'agente Sara Milani e il suo giovane braccio destro, Lauro, tornano a lavorare insieme per un'indagine all'ultimo sospiro... In un piccolo paese nella ridente e florida Val Vignè si aggira un pericoloso assassino, che nessuno riesce a fermare. Ma chi o cosa sarà questa creatura che uccide, per poi svanire nel nulla? Solo due veri esperti del brivido come Lauro e Sara potranno risolvere il caso, a patto di riuscire a sopravvivere alla misteriosa mano che colpisce ogni dodici del mese, senza lasciare scampo.

Caty sa che un'orribile sciagura sta per abbattersi su Mirandola, il suo paese, già devastato dal terremoto: lo ha capito grazie agli incubi che la tormentano nel sonno. Ma i fantasmi come lei non dovrebbero fare né sogni né incubi, e questo è solo il primo di molti, inquietanti episodi che si ripetono un giorno dopo l'altro. Per fortuna, Caty non è sola: c'è Pinky, il suo gatto e animale-guida, e Doc, il fantasma-scienziato, e molti altri spettri, uno più strano dell'altro. Riusciranno Caty e i suoi amici a sventare la terribile minaccia?