Occult Horror

One morning, the residents of Walden, Virginia, woke up to find the rest of the world gone. Just...gone. Surrounding their town was a wall of inky darkness, plummeting Walden into permanent night. Nothing can get in - not light, not people, not even electricity, radio, TV, internet, food, or water. And nothing can get out.

When guests arrive at a séance to contact a man's lost sons, it becomes clear that everyone has dark secrets - secrets that result in the death of a guest.

Night Visions: At The Crossroad presents eight tales of horror and dark fantasy by Richard Laymon, Chet Williamson, and Gary Brandner. Prepare to enter a world where your darkest nightmare can become a chilling reality...A world of Night Visions.

As the Blue Jays edge closer to their first World Series win since 1993, the pressure on Toronto feels like it's about to explode. Between the separatist bombings and violent protests at castration clinics, you'd think Toronto had enough to deal with. But when a doomsday cult promising freedom for everyone sweeps the city, high strangeness reigns, and it gets even weirder. Grassfinch is a psychedelic fever dream filled with alien abduction, psychics, organ theft, and, of course, raccoons.

Alyssa Mann isn’t adventurous, not since her husband died and she found herself the single mom of a teenage daughter. But there’s no way to avoid celebrating the big 4-0, so when her best friends drag her out for drinks and a tarot reading, she throws caution to the wind and decides to see what the spirits have to say. It’s all fun and games, until she wakes up the next morning with a wicked hangover—and a ghost perched on the edge of her bed.

Jack learns that his father is in a coma after a car accident in Florida. They’ve been on the outs, but this is his dad, so he heads south to Gateways, a retirement community on the Everglades. The woman Semelee, who has strange talents and lives in an isolated area of the Everglades with a group of misshapen men, feels his presence. She senses that he’s “special,” like her. To protect his father from becoming the next fatality at Gateways, there are questions Jack must answer, secrets he must uncover.

For decades, a dark force has terrorized the Languille Lake reservation. Only spoken of in whispers as "the sandman," he lurks in the Hidden Atlantis Lake Resort and Casino, the reservation's main attraction and source of revenue, leeching its patrons' dreams and ambitions and also preventing the ghosts that linger there from moving on. Fleeing a breakup, Marion Lafournier, a mid-twenties Ojibwe, seeks solace in the slot machine's siren song.

The waiting room stands on a crumbling railway platform at the edge of a retired rock star’s vast estate. Abandoned to dereliction and isolated by a moat of thorny wilderness, it used to be a playground for his children. Until strange music and the terrifying spectre of a leering soldier frightened them away. Julian Creed is TV’s most popular ghost hunter. Only his small production team knows he is a complete fake who doesn’t even believe in the paranormal. Until he spends one night in the waiting room.

Hours after throwing a third birthday party for their twins Kathy and Kelly in their Connecticut home, Margaret and Steve Frawley return home from a dinner in New York to discover the police in the house, their daughters missing, and an eight million dollar ransom note. The Frawleys meet the kidnapper's demands, but the abandoned car they're led to contains only Kelly, the body of the driver, and a suicide note, saying he had inadvertently killed Kathy and dumped her body in the ocean.

On a foggy winter morning, high school kids Luca and Emma discover the impossible: the wreck of an eighteenth-century ship stranded in a flower field. Emma enters the hatch on the deck and is never seen again. And she isn’t the last to disappear. . . . Soon a government agency begins to investigate, determined to uncover the ship’s secrets before a media storm erupts. They enlist Robert Grim, a retired specialist of the occult, to unravel the mystery, and he soon realizes the ship could be a harbinger of an ancient doom awakened under the sea.

Barely surviving his last battle against malevolent forces, retired marine and ghost hunter Shane Ryan is surprised to receive an invitation to a new Iron Tournament. But before he can turn his attention to this supernatural death match, he must first track down a shipment of unusual metal, torn from the foundation of a cursed cathedral.

"Who am I? Why, I'm you. Or parts of you. The best parts. I'm the touch of Richard Speck, Ed Gein, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, and Bin Laden in all of you. I am the thousand tiny angers and fleeting rages of your day - at the car that cuts you off on the freeway, at the kid who sneaks ahead of you in line at the movies, at the old fart with the full basket in the eight-items-only express checkout at the supermarket. I'm the nasty glee in the name-callers and the long-suffering pain, the self-loathing, the smoldering resentment, the suppressed rage, and the never-to-be-fulfilled promises of revenge in their targets.

Just when I thought it was safe to step onto my porch, the power of the Oracle has sent another person in need to my stairs. He thinks he's searching for his missing husband, but the moment I smell him, I know he's dragging along a curse from a necromancer with a stench strong enough to curl the leg hairs I haven't had time to shave. Which reminds me—I should probably do some grooming before my date. Did I mention I have an arraignment in court? For murder? It's all I can do to put this legal nonsense to bed before the rotten bouquet of necromancy wafts into my world yet again.

When Lucas Smoke learns the Ojibway art of carving from his grandfather, he proves to be a natural. He can literally make people come to life in wood. Then Lucas’s growing reputation attracts a mysterious stranger, who offers him a large advance to carve a spirit mask. This mask is to represent the master, but Lucas must find its face in his dreams. As his dreams become more and more disturbing, he feels himself changing. And the mask takes control of his life. Then an encounter with an old woman introduces him to the identity of the master: an ancient sorcerer named Him Standing.

Leadership is a mantle I never wanted, but when the responsibility is foisted upon me, I have no choice but to take the reins at least until I can find a worthy replacement. Even with newly found alliances that alter my very existence, I have every intention of returning to the shadows when my job is done. Until secrets surface that make it nearly impossible to ignore what’s been taken from me. Our rules may be few, but the repercussions are swift and brutal when broken.

It’s the mid-'90s. Grunge and flannel are fading as the Spice Girls and Hot Topic conquer the malls. Cherry gloss glistens on the lips of the youth. Modems hiss as America comes online. And in a fog-drenched cove at the edge of New England, something terrible awakens when a fisherman reels in a gruesome catch: the remains of a young woman. Remains still pulsing with furious life.

Hank Flynn is a tormented man. He’s an outcast among humans and condemned to confront evil for as long as he lives. Serving a higher power, Hank wanders the earth alone, until he stumbles into Protection, Kansas. Mortally wounded and delirious after a demonic encounter, Hank Flynn is desperate for help. Wallace Bixby, a local merchant and man of faith, graciously opens his home to the broken stranger. Hank Flynn discovers the meaning of family and community, and the avenging drifter finds peace with Josie Bixby, the young woman who heals his body and his heart.

After surviving the bloody ordeal of the Iron Tournament, retired marine and ghost hunter Shane Ryan is out for blood. He’s hot on the trail of Guthrie, the man who organized the supernatural fighting ring. And behind him lurks Lazarus, the sinister entity who draws power from the dead.

When a flash flood seals off Tall Pines, Georgia, ex-Air Force investigator Archer Lucas is dropped into a nightmare. Locals whisper about the Wampus Cat. The truth is uglier: A secret research lab has turned the Appalachian woods into a live test range for gene-spliced predators. Cut off by rising water and dirty politics, Archer’s only reliable ally is A.L.I.C.E., an off-grid AI with her own secrets. By dawn, the bodies will stack up unless Archer can expose the operation, outmaneuver a federal smokescreen, and survive the hunt.

John Talon and his son have survived the Upheaval, the event that saw the dead rising to feed on the living. After two years of fighting off the worst the infection had to throw at them, a new danger emerges that threatens to take apart their small hold on humanity and the one chance they have to rebuild the country.