Literary Horror

Augustus Reid’s mortal life ended in 1794. He did not ask for immortality, but when it visited he spent the centuries trying to hide. The cause of his condition, in the form of Tilly Tayler, has returned and everything has begun to change. She wants help with the birth of her child, a child that has taken two centuries to develop in her womb.

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.

When Willow is born and her mother dies moments later, only the narrator of this spellbinding debut novel knows the death isn't from complications of childbirth. Amelie-Anais, buried on the Nebraska hilltop where the family home resides, tells the story of deceit, survival, and love from beyond the grave. Following Willow's life and Willow's incredible passion to paint despite loneliness, a physical handicap, and being raised by a father plagued with secrets, Amelie-Anais weaves together the lives of four enigmatic generations.

The Snakes exposes the damage wreaked by parents on children as observed by a new member of the family, Dan, a mixed-race man from Peckham who marries Bea, the daughter who refuses to take any of her father’s filthy money. But when Bea’s brother, Alex (who runs a shabby hotel in Paligny, France), dies suddenly in unexplained circumstances, the confusion and suspicion which arise bring other dark family secrets - and violence - to the surface. And none of the family, even the good members, go untouched.

Storms and flooding are worsening around the world, and a mysterious immune disorder has begun to afflict the young. Sophie Perella is about to begin her senior year of high school in Toronto when her little sister, Kira, is diagnosed. Their parents' marriage falters under the strain, and Sophie's mother takes the girls to Oxford, England, to live with their Aunt Irene.

Eleven-year-old Jane Grandison, tormented by her stutter, sits in the back seat of a car, letter in hand inviting her to live and study at the Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing-Mouth Children. Founded in 1890 by Headmistress Sybil Joines, the school - at first glance - is a sanctuary for children seeking to cure their speech impediments. Inspired by her haunted and tragic childhood, the Headmistress has other ideas.

When heroin-addicted vampire and gang leader, RJ, reluctantly takes in a 12-year-old prostitute called Bait, humanity is introduced to his otherwise lifeless existence. An unforgiving, vicious, and realistic horror story, Knuckle Supper explores chemical dependency, inner-city brutality, religion, molestation, abortion, and the very nature of evil itself.

Death, accidental and early, has always been Abby Walters's preoccupation. Now 33 and eager to settle down with her commitment-shy boyfriend, a recurring dream from her past returns: a paralyzing nightmare of being buried alive, the taste of dirt in her mouth cloying and real. But this time the dream reveals a name from her family's past. Looking for answers, Abby returns home to small-town Minnesota for the first time in 14 years, where she reconnects with her high school crush, now a police detective on the trail of a violent criminal.

Sixteen modern fiction superstars shine a startling light on the romance and pain of the infamous literary pair Heathcliff and Cathy. Short stories to stir the heart and awaken vital conversation about love.

After an acclaimed career in ceramics making things and breaking things, it is now Jay herself who has cracked. Recovering from a breakdown, she and her husband, Simon, move to the desolate edges of the Yorkshire moors, where they find and fall in love with the Two Houses: a crumbling Victorian property whose central rooms were supposedly so haunted that a previous owner had them cut out from the building entirely.

Jim Byrd died. Technically. For a few minutes. The diagnosis: heart attack at age 30. Revived with no memory of any tunnels, lights, or angels, Jim wonders what—if anything—awaits us on the other side. Then a ghost shows up. Maybe. Jim and his new wife, Annie, find themselves tangling with holograms, psychics, messages from the beyond, and a machine that connects the living and the dead. As Jim and Annie journey through history and fumble through faith, they confront the specter of loss that looms for anyone who dares to fall in love.

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.

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.

A gripping gothic page-turner told in a startlingly different and wonderfully captivating voice. In a remote and crumbling New England mansion, 12-year-old orphan Florence is neglected by her guardian uncle and banned from reading. Left to her own devices she devours books in secret and talks to herself in a unique language of her own invention. By night, she sleepwalks the corridors and is troubled by a recurrent dream in which a mysterious woman appears to threaten her younger brother Giles.

New England, 1890. Doctor John Shepherd arrives at a women's mental hospital to begin work as assistant to the owner. As Shepherd struggles to conceal his secrets, he finds the asylum has plenty of its own. Intrigued by a girl who is fascinated by books but cannot read, Shepherd embarks upon an experiment to help her. In this chilling literary thriller everyone has something to hide and no one is what they seem.

"If it were I who were to be always young and the picture to grow old, I would give my soul for it." So says Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde's brilliant creation who sells his soul for youth and beauty.

Estranged patriarch Richard Walker has died, leaving behind a country house full of rooms packed with the detritus of a lifetime. His alienated family - bitter ex-wife Caroline, troubled teenage son Trenton, and unforgiving daughter Minna - have arrived for their inheritance. But the Walkers are not alone. Alice and Sandra, two long-dead and restless ghosts, linger within the house's claustrophobic walls, bound eternally to its physical structure.

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.