Occult Horror

For longtime Stephen King fans, the highlight of this volume will be The Little Sisters of Eluria, which is something of a prequel to the Dark Tower series. For "Constant Readers" and neophytes alike, all of the dark tales herein are intense, eerie, and instantly compelling. King "develops characters and atmosphere more fully in the span of 50 pages than many authors can in a full novel," says Amazon.com.

At the heart of these stories, as with all the best of Lovecraft’s work, is the belief that the Earth was once inhabited by powerful and evil gods, just waiting for the chance to recolonise their planet. Cthulhu is one such god, lurking deep beneath the sea until called into being by cult followers who – like all humans – know not what they do.

Repairman Jack doesn’t believe a house can be haunted. But he’s about to change that tune… In the borough of Queens, just across the river from Manhattan, two clever practitioners of spiritualist hocus-pocus use high-tech tricks to dupe their marks. Perhaps they’re too good: they’ve lured too many clients from other mediums and are now under attack. Unable to go to the police for fear of exposing their own scams, they hire Repairman Jack to fix their problem.

In this collection of classic ghost stories from Japan, beautiful princesses turn out to be frogs, paintings come alive, deadly spectral brides haunt the living and a samurai delivers the baby of a Shinto goddess with mystical help. Here are all the phantoms and ghouls of Japanese folklore: 'rokuro-kubi', whose heads separate from their bodies at night; 'jikininki', or flesh-eating goblins; and terrifying faceless 'mujina' who haunt lonely neighbourhoods.

How do you keep the people you care about safe from enemies you can’t remember? Ten years ago, Nate Garrett awoke on a cold warehouse floor with no memory of his past and the only clues to his identity were a piece of paper with his name on it and a propensity toward magic. Now he’s a powerful sorcerer and a successful thief for hire, but it turns out that those who stole his memories aren’t done with him yet. When they cause a job to go bad, threatening a sixteen-year-old girl, Nate swears to protect her.

A recent legacy made Cassandra Palmer heir to the title of Pythia, the world's chief clairvoyant. It's a position that usually comes with years of training, but Cassie's circumstances are a little...unusual. Now she's stuck with a whopping amount of power that every vamp, fey, and mage in town wants to either monopolize or eradicate - and that she herself doesn't dare use.

Without the threat of the Witch’s bloody harvest, the family elders have fallen into chaos. Internal squabbling has left them blind to this new enemy in their midst. Local legends have barely begun to fade when a group of tourists go missing. Some say the Witch has returned. But Basheba, Mina, and the others believe it could be something even worse. As the survivors dig deeper, they discover that one of their own may have been corrupted by an ancient evil - a power greater than anything they have faced before. But is the Bell Witch behind all this?

One winter, in the dark days of King Richard II, a tailor was riding home on the road from Gilling to Ampleforth. It was dank, wet and gloomy; he couldn't wait to get home and sit in front of a blazing fire. Then, out of nowhere, the tailor is knocked off his horse by a raven, who then transforms into a hideous dog, his mouth writhing with its own innards. The dog issues the tailor with a warning: he must go to a priest and ask for absolution and return to the road, or else there will be consequences.

Private investigator (and secret werewolf) Sara Flores has made a life out of rescuing people from men who think they can get away with murder. But this case is different. This time someone has taken Mason Spencer — her partner, her resident hacker, and the closest thing to family Sara has. Mason is the one person Sara can’t afford to lose. His computer skills were how they’d found all those missing people. Tracking them down was his job, not hers. She’d come in later — a one-person rescue committee with a big surprise for any bad guy trying to stop her.

The city streets are no longer safe. They are filled instead with the living dead, rotting predators driven only by a need to kill and eat. Some of the living still struggle to survive, but with each passing day, their odds grow worse. Some survivors have fled, frantically searching for a place to escape, even briefly, the slaughter around them.

Vril, the Power of the Coming Race (1870) by Edward Bulwer-Lytton is an early science fiction novel. The setting is a strange subterranean world inhabited by beautiful entities that resemble the angels described in scripture. The advanced beings known as Vril-ya live underground - using the mysterious "Vril" as an energy source - but intend to reclaim the surface of the earth as their own. The narrator ends up deep inside the Earth via a natural chasm in a mine shaft.

A long-buried family secret has come back to haunt Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast. It begins with murder. One of Pendergast's most implacable, most feared enemies is found on his doorstep, dead. Pendergast has no idea who is responsible for the killing, or why the body was brought to his home. The mystery has all the hallmarks of the perfect crime, save for an enigmatic clue: a piece of turquoise lodged in the stomach of the deceased. The gem leads Pendergast to an abandoned mine on the shore of California's Salton Sea.

The year is 1853. President-elect Franklin Pierce is traveling with his family to Washington, DC, when tragedy strikes. In an instant, their train runs off the rails, violently flinging passengers about the cabin. But when the great iron machine finally comes to rest, the only casualty is the president-elect’s beloved son, Bennie, which casts Franklin’s presidency in a pall of sorrow and grief. As Franklin moves into the White House, he begins to notice that something bizarre is happening.

Morgravia Sanctus is being hunted. Something terrible has happened to her, a profound trauma that has left behind ‘red dreams’ and a physical agony that can strike at any moment. Her life in danger and her memory fragmented, she arrives in the low-hive of Blackgheist to escape her pursuers and search for ‘the Broker’ – a trafficker in memories and psychic mind manipulation. Soon after, a plague sweeps the city, turning its citizens into blood-hungry monsters. Order collapses, death and slaughter are rampant.

Aidan Flynn, a private investigator and eldest of the Flynn brothers, scoffs at the haunted-house rumors - especially since Kendall Montgomery, a tarot card reader who has been living in the mansion, is the one to tell him the tale of a woman in white. But when he finds a human bone on the grounds and another by the river, Aidan delves into the dark history of the Flynn plantation.

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.

When the police are called to an affluent home in the middle of the night, they learn a seemingly normal 14-year-old boy has attacked his family. The boy exhibits signs of demonic possession, and even more troublingly, he knows too much about the Sweet 16 killings. Father Jason Crowder, a young priest assigned to the case, must marshal his courage in order to save the boy and the entire city from the forces of evil. But this is a darkness mankind has never encountered before. It craves more than blood. And it won’t rest until it possesses Father Crowder’s soul.

When a group of young people voyage to the monastery to explore its secrets, contact spirits, and party… they accidentally fall into the hands of St. Baron’s undead horrors. A night of liberation becomes a night of gut pulling, head cleaving, and body annihilating terror!

The details of the crime scene are no coincidence. The body — a promising starlet — has been battered, bloodied and then discarded between two of Manhattan’s oldest graveyards. One look and Detective Jude Crosby recognizes the tableau: a re-creation of Jack the Ripper’s gruesome work. But he also sees something beyond the actions of a mere copycat. Something more dangerous...and unexplainable.

The ninth Repairman Jack novel begins with a tragedy that throws Jack together with his brother Tom, a judge from Philadelphia. They've never been close and Jack, the career criminal, soon finds that he adheres to a higher ethical standard than his brother the judge. Determined to get to know his brother better, Tom convinces Jack to go on a wild treasure hunt together. Armed only with a map pointing the way to a desolate wreck off the coast of Bermuda, the brothers come across something much stranger, and much more dangerous than mere treasure.