Literary Horror

I am William Lee: brute, liar and graveside thief. But you will know me by another name. Heathcliff has left Wuthering Heights and is travelling across the moors to Liverpool in search of his past. Along the way, he saves Emily, the foul-mouthed daughter of a highwayman, from a whipping, and the pair journey on together. Roaming from graveyard to graveyard, making a living from Emily's apparent ability to commune with the dead, the pair lie, cheat and scheme their way across the north of England.

A portrait of Colonel Pyncheon looms over his family in the house of the seven gables - an ominous reminder of the curse he left behind over a century ago. The shadow still falls over the New England mansion's current residents, siblings Clifford and Hepzibah - unless they can expose the one secret that offers an escape from the hex. Set in seventeenth- and nineteenth-century Massachusetts, Nathaniel Hawthorne's gothic tale was inspired by the Salem Witch Trials and by a family home that still stands today.

Susan Hill meets Alfred Hitchcock in Alison Littlewood's latest chiller. Asylum doctor Nathaniel is obsessed with the beautiful Mrs Harleston - but is she truly delusional? Or is she hiding secrets that should never be uncovered? Haunted by his father's suicide, Nathaniel walks away from the highly prestigious life of a consultant to become an asylum doctor. He takes up a position at Crakethorne Asylum, but the proprietor is more interested in phrenology and his growing collection of skulls than the patients' minds.

Down on his luck and still pining for his ex-wife, South Carolina taxidermist Romie Futch spends his evenings drunkenly surfing the Internet before passing out on his couch. In a last-ditch attempt to pay his mortgage, he replies to an ad and becomes a research subject in an experiment conducted by the Center for Cybernetic Neuroscience in Atlanta, Georgia.

There is a man that haunts the streets by night. His visage provokes involuntary torrents of hatred. His voice is huskily whispered, and his deformity lies within.... This audiobook collection contains some of the finest short fiction from the great Robert Louis Stevenson: "The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde", "The Bottle Imp", "Markheim", "Olalla", and "The Body Snatcher". These files have been remastered, making this a perfect choice for the classic horror fan.

Set in the early 1900s, the novel follows young Lucia Rutkowska who, thanks to the influence of her beloved grandmother, escapes the Warsaw ghetto to work as a kitchen maid in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the bustling city of Paris. Too talented for her lowly position, Lucia is thrown out on the street. Her only recourse is to take a job working for a married couple - two disorganized, rather poor scientists so distracted by their work that their house and young child are often neglected.

Compulsively listenable and stylistically stunning, Black Dog Summer begins with a murder, a farmstead massacre, in the South African bush. Thirty-eight-year-old Sally is but one of the victims. Her life brutally cut short, she narrates from her vantage point in the afterlife and watches as her sister, Adele; her brother-in-law and unrequited love, Liam; her niece, Bryony; and her teenage daughter, Gigi, begin to make sense of the tragedy.

San Francisco Bay Area archaeologist Davis Lowry has everything - success, a fascinating profession - but he is troubled by a bout of sleepwalking. For a change of scenery, he travels to York, England, where a bog man has been unearthed. A series of macabre accidents plague the site, and Davis finds himself enmeshed in a modern-day horror with roots in the bloody past.

Evelyn Harbinger sees nothing wrong with a one-night stand. At 149 years old, Eve may look like she bakes oatmeal cookies in the afternoon and dozes in her rocking chair in the evening, but once the gray hair and wrinkles are traded for jet-black tresses and porcelain skin, she can still turn heads as the beautiful girl she once was. Can't fault a girl for having a little fun, can you?

The Barter is a ghost story and a love story, a riveting emotional tale that also explores motherhood and work and feminism. Set in present-day Texas, and at the turn of the 20th century, the novel follows two young mothers at the turning point of their lives. Bridget has given up her career as an attorney to raise her daughter, joining a cadre of stay-at-home mothers seeking fulfillment in a quiet suburb. But for Bridget, some crucial part of the exchange is absent: something she loves and needs.

On the family homestead where she grew up, Martha Mary saw ghosts. As a young woman, she hopes to distance herself from those spirits by escaping to an inland college town. There she is absorbed by a budding romance, relieved by separation from an unstable sister, and disinterested in the flyers seeking information about a young woman who has disappeared - until one Indian summer afternoon when the missing woman appears beneath Martha’s apartment window, wearing a winter coat, her hair coated with ice.

Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" is of the best "macabre" tales ever written. It is presented here in its entirety along with eight other incredible tales.

In isolated British Columbia, girls, mostly native, are vanishing from the sides of a notorious highway. Leo Kreutzer and his four friends are barely touched by these disappearances-until a series of mysterious and troublesome outsiders come to town. Then it seems as if the devil himself has appeared among them.

Julia Severn is a student at an elite institute for psychics. Her mentor, the legendary Madame Ackermann, afflicted by jealousy, subjects Julia to the humiliation of reliving her mother's suicide when Julia was an infant. As the two lock horns, and Julia gains power, Madame Ackermann launches a desperate psychic attack that leaves Julia the victim of a crippling ailment. But others have noted Julia's emerging gifts, and soon she's recruited to track down an elusive missing person who might have a connection to her mother.

Lady Sophia Kendall, 32nd in line to the throne of Anglion, is only days away from finding out if she will be blessed - or perhaps cursed - with magic. When a vicious attack by Anglion's ancient enemies leaves the kingdom in chaos, Sophia is forced to flee the court. Her protector by happenstance is Lieutenant Cameron Mackenzie, a member of the royal guard, raised all his life to be fiercely loyal to the Crown.

Evangeline grows up understanding the extraordinary effects of fragrance. Her grandmother Louise is a gifted aromata, a master of scent-making and perfume. When Eva was a girl, Louise carefully explained that lavender under her pillow would make her dream of the man she would marry; eucalyptus would make her taller; almandine, fatter; and jasmine, Louise promised, would wrap her life in a mystery. When Eva is eighteen, Louise leaves her the ultimate gift - a scent created just for her.

Ashley Parker was an ordinary woman who was also a "wild card", immune to the emerging zombie plague, drawn unwillingly into a shadowy paramilitary organization. Having been ambushed in San Francisco, which is now fully engulfed in the zombie plague, Ashley and the wild cards must pursue the enemy to San Diego. There they will discover a dark organization that seeks to weaponize the plague. But that isn't the worst news. The plague itself has gone airborne, making it transferable without physical contact.

Stories include: "The Raven"; "Hop-Frog"; "The Black Cat"; "The Cask of Amontillado"; "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar"; "The Fall of the House of Usher"; "The Gold-Bug"; "The Masque of the Red Death"; "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"; "The Purloined Letter"; "The Pit and the Pendulum"; and "The Tell-Tale Heart".

In the cold spring of 1936, Arthor Crandle, down-on-his luck and desperate for work, accepts a position in Providence, Rhode Island, as a live-in assistant for an unnamed shut-in. He arrives at the gloomy colonial-style house to discover that his strange employer is an author of disturbing, bizarre fiction. Health issues have confined him to his bedroom, where he is never to be disturbed. But the writer, who Crandle knows only as "Ech-Pi", refuses to meet him, communicating only by letters left on a table outside his room.

John Brandon has quickly become a critical darling thanks to his evocative prose and recognizable, yet quirky, characters. Citrus County introduces teenaged Shelby Register and her offbeat family. Moving to the swampy Citrus County region of Florida, Shelby is quickly confronted by life’s challenges and possibilities.