Literary Horror

1976. Loo and her sister Bee live in a run-down cottage in the middle of nowhere, with their artistic parents and wild siblings. Their mother, Cathy, had hoped to escape to a simpler life; instead the family find themselves isolated and shunned by their neighbours. At the height of the stifling summer, unexplained noises and occurrences in the house begin to disturb the family, until they intrude on every waking moment....

A phantom has haunted the Paris Opera House for years. Now he is infatuated with singer Christine Daaé. Despite an astonishing debut performance, Christine fails to win the lead in Faust, and the Phantom’s cursed retaliation on the opera house is spectacularly fatal. As the chandelier falls, he kidnaps Christine, and through hidden passages and behind trapdoors, shares his life story with her. To secure her escape, Christine promises to stay true to him forever. But when the Phantom learns of the prima donna’s intention to flee, his passion turns terrifying.

The seventh of Joan Grant's Far Memory novels, So Moses Was Born, is set in Egypt, in the time just before the birth of Moses. The story is a familiar one: Found in the bulrushes, Moses's upbringing in the court of Egypt gave him the influence and power to set the Israelites free. Joan Grant enlarges the picture by depicting the events that led up to the discovery of the baby Moses, convincingly portraying the man she believed was his father, Ramoses II, through the words of his reclusive half-brother Nebunefer.

Jasmyn and King Williams move their family to the planned Black utopia of Liberty, California hoping to find a community of like-minded people, a place where their growing family can thrive. King settles in at once, embracing the Liberty ethos, including the luxe wellness center at the top of the hill, which proves to be the heart of the community. But Jasmyn struggles to find her place. She expected to find liberals and social justice activists striving for racial equality, but Liberty residents seem more focused on booking spa treatments and ignoring the world’s troubles.

“What does ‘allegiance’ mean?” the New Teacher asked, hand over her heart. In this classic and chilling tale about an elementary school classroom in post-war occupied America, James Clavell brings to light the vulnerability of children and the power educators have to shape and change young minds. Originally written in the Cold War era, Clavell’s extraordinary and enduringly relevant allegory on the impressionability of the human mind is still read in schools around the globe today, and is a call to every person to keep questioning and keep learning.

A mind-bending, genre-twisting debut novel. In West Akron, there lived a reclusive elderly man who always wore mittens, even in July. He had no friends and no family; all over town, he was known only as The the Man from Primrose Lane. And on a summer day in 2008, someone murdered him.

"It is fitting that I'm beginning a new notebook up here. New surroundings and new ideas, a new beginning. Fresh air." This passage is from the first entry of a journal kept by the narrator of Daniel Kehlmann's spellbinding new novel. It is the record of the seven days that he, his wife, and his four-year-old daughter spend in a house they have rented in the mountains of Germany - a house that thwarts the expectations of the narrator's recollection and seems to defy the very laws of physics.

It begins with a call one snowy February night. Lying in her bed, young Sylvie Mason overhears her parents on the phone across the hall. This is not the first late-night call they have received, since her mother and father have an uncommon occupation: helping "haunted souls" find peace. And yet something in Sylvie senses that this call is different from the others, especially when they are lured to the old church on the outskirts of town.

Ten years after the collapse, Huxley has built a good life again. He has a loving wife, a farm with fields of golden barley, and a daughter with a strange and wonderful gift. Then the slavers come. Working out in the fields during the attack, Huxley returns too late. His daughter has been taken, and his wife is bleeding out, her last whispered words about a man with a scorpion tattoo on his neck. Where do the slavers go? Huxley has no idea. He knows only that they head east, and so will he, setting out on foot across the desert of the Wastelands.

Only very special people are chosen by children's author Laura White to join 'The Society', an elite group of writers in the small town of Rabbit Back. Now a 10th member has been selected: Ella, literature teacher and possessor of beautifully curving lips. But soon Ella discovers that the Society is not what it seems. What is its mysterious ritual, 'The Game'? What explains the strange disappearance that occurs at Laura's winter party, in a whirlwind of snow? Why are the words inside books starting to rearrange themselves?

Darkness has a way of creeping up when Ian is with Priss. Even when they were kids, playing in the woods of their small Upstate New York town, he could feel it. Still, Priss was his best friend, his salvation from the bullies who called him "loser" and "fatboy" - and from his family's deadly secrets.

Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, is Mary Shelley's passionate and Gothic tale of terror, in which a man's desire to know the unknowable sweeps him into a living nightmare. Victor Frankenstein's experiments with life itself give birth to an extraordinary force with the potential for either good or evil.

In the summer of 1959 Stella Raphael joins her psychiatrist husband, Max, at his new posting - a maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane. Stella soon falls under the spell of Edgar Stark, a brilliant sculptor who has been confined to the hospital for murdering his wife in a psychotic rage. But Stella's knowledge of Edgar's crime is no hindrance to the volcanic attraction that ensues -a passion that will consume Stella's sanity and destroy her and the lives of those around her.

The warning was inscribed on the entrance of the hidden tomb, forgotten for millennia in the sands of mystic Egypt. Then the archaeologists and grave robbers came in search of the fabled Jewel of Seven Stars, which they found clutched in the hand of the mummy. Few heeded the ancient warning, until all who came in contact with the Jewel began to die in a mysterious and violent way, with the marks of a strangler around their neck.

Isolated on the moors of northern England, the town of Moonwell has remained faithful to their Druid traditions and kept their old rituals alive. Right-wing evangelist Godwin Mann isn’t about to let that continue, and his intolerant brand of fundamentalism has struck a chord with the residents.

Writing to her only friend from her deathbed, Mathilda finally reveals the history that led to her isolated life of despairing melancholy. Of her mother dying in childbirth, her father's confession of his incestuous desire and subsequent suicide, and her relationship with a handsome young poet that fails to reverse Matilda's emotional withdrawal or prevent her lonely death. The haunting and relentlessly self-examining voice of Mary Shelley's protagonist is a bare narrative of trauma of a brave woman's failed search for love, atonement, and redemption.

A baffling series of incidents at the majestic Paris Opera sparks frightening rumors about a mysterious opera ghost. Performers are ill-at-ease when they sit alone in their dressing rooms, alleging to have seen the enigma in evening clothes moving about in the shadows. Then a young and beautiful prima donna is visited by a masked "Angel of Music" who teaches her to sing and jealously demands her devotion—but with a price. With an increasing pattern of fear and violence, the phantom of the opera begins to strike, but always with a beautiful young performer at the center of his deadly desires.

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.

As Tony follows his own path toward adulthood, he relies on the wisdom of Ultima, a magical healer, to forge his unique identity. With hundreds of thousands of copies in print, Bless Me, Ultima has been called the most widely read Mexican-American novel in the English language. Richly evocative, it has earned its place among the classics of modern literature, even drawing favorable comparisons to Herman Melville's legendary Moby Dick.

Brian Evenson’s hallucinatory and darkly comic stories of paranoia, pursuit, sensory deprivation, amnesia, and retribution rattle the cages of the psyche and peer into the gaping moral chasm that opens when we become estranged from ourselves. From sadistic bosses with secret fears to a woman trapped in a mime’s imaginary box, and from a post-apocalyptic misidentified Messiah to unwitting portraitists of the dead, the mind-bending world of this modern-day Edgar Allan Poe exposes the horror contained within our daily lives.