Short Horror

With tales from Laird Barron, Stephen King, John Langan, Peter Straub, and many others, and featuring Datlow’s comprehensive overview of the year in horror, now, more than ever, The Best Horror of the Year provides the petrifying horror fiction readers have come to expect - and enjoy.

Horror favorite T.W. Grim invites you to pull up a chair and watch the sun slip past the horizon with this dark and macabre collection of short stories.

Karl Edward Wagner (1945-1994) has earned a reputation as one of the finest horror writers of the modern era, but his work has been out of print and nearly unobtainable for many years. His seminal volume In a Lonely Place collects eight of his best tales, including "In the Pines," a classic ghost story evocatively set in the Tennessee woods, "Beyond Any Measure," an original take on the vampire story.

En cada uno de los cuentos de El buen mal, Samanta Schweblin nos abduce a otra dimensión donde quedamos en contacto íntimo con sus personajes. Encandilados por el fulgor de la inminente tragedia, vulnerables y profundamente humanos, advierten cuánto podría transformarlos la irrupción de lo inesperado. A algunos los dejará de pie frente al dolor, a otros dialogando con la culpa y a todos atravesados por la incertidumbre. ¿Importa saber qué es verdad? Se trata, de principio a fin, de ser partícipes de un fenomenal artificio literario.

Time slips. Doomsday scenarios. Killer butterflies. C. J. Tudor's novels are widely acclaimed for their dark, twisty suspense plots, but with A Sliver of Darkness, she pulls us even further into her dizzying imagination. Riveting, macabre, and explosively original, A Sliver of Darkness is C. J. Tudor at her most wicked and uninhibited.

Over the course of two award-winning collections and a critically acclaimed novel, The Croning, Laird Barron has arisen as one of the strongest and most original literary voices in modern horror and the dark fantastic. Melding supernatural horror with hardboiled noir, espionage, and a scientific backbone, Barron's stories have garnered critical acclaim and have been reprinted in numerous year's best anthologies and nominated for multiple awards, including the Crawford, International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy awards.

A cemetery full of the restless dead. A town so wicked it has already burned twice, with the breath of the third fire looming. A rural, isolated bridge with a terrifying monster waiting for the completion of its summoning ritual. A lake that allows the drowned to return, though they have been changed by the claws of death. These are the shadowed, liminal spaces where the curses and monsters lurk, refusing to be forgotten.

In Matheson's vampire classic I Am Legend, a plague has decimated the world and transformed the unfortunate survivors into bloodthirsty creatures of the night. Robert Neville is the last living man on Earth. Every other man, woman, and child has become a vampire hungry for Neville's blood. By day he is the hunter, stalking the sleeping undead through the abandoned ruins of civilization. By night he barricades himself in his home and prays for the dawn. How long can one man survive in a world of vampires?

In “The Net,” a girl and her mother arrive at their secluded cabin on a frozen lake to find their fishing net has been attacked, a massive hole ripped through the middle. After the net has been mended and the night’s catch eaten, the daughter sits awake playing with a bit of leftover netting string. When she was a girl, her grandmother taught her to make string figures—just as her mother had taught her—a game played by Inuit for generations, but a game not to be taken lightly . . .

Nitya, a single child ignored by her parents, makes an unlikely friend - a boy with a strange power who has mysteriously manifested in her room. Nikhil creates a replacement for his dead mother - a clay doll that has her likeness. Things take a bizarre turn when his clay mother starts communicating with him. Nihar, a teenage orphan, has walked a long way to seek shelter in an orphanage he has heard a lot about, unaware that it is the house of a terrifying secret.

Uncover the secret annals of untold history in these eighteen medieval manuscripts. Each tortured scribe will bring you face to face with ancient horrors lurking in cursed castles, wild woodlands, haunted hamlets, and mysterious monasteries. Including a lineup of authors both established and emerging, HOWL Society Press presents the first-ever anthology of historical horror from the medieval period, fittingly introduced by the writer who arguably started it all: Christopher Buehlman, author of the medieval horror epic Between Two Fires.

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.

Welcome to Doug Bradley's Spinechillers, Volume Four, part of what is on the way of becoming the world's largest collection of high quality, classic horror short-story audiobooks. We start with Doug Bradley's well-researched introduction to the authors and stories featured in this volume. Launching us into "Lost Hearts", M. R. James' creepy tale of ghostly children seeking revenge and peace from the man who caused their untimely demise.

The Books of Blood combine the ordinary with the extraordinary while radiating the eroticism that has become Barker's signature. Weaving tales of the everyday world transformed into an unrecognizable place, where reason no longer exists and logic ceases to explain the workings of the universe, Clive Barker provides the stuff of nightmares in packages too tantalizing to resist.

CONTENTS: A Suspicious Gift [Algernon Blackwood], Skeleton Lake: An Episode in Camp [Algernon Blackwood], The Wood of the Dead [Algernon Blackwood], A Baby Tramp [Ambrose Bierce], The Damned Thing [Ambrose Bierce], Dagon [H.P Lovecraft], The Horror of the Heights [Arthur Conan Doyle], The Descendant [H.P Lovecraft], The Cats of Ulthar [H.P Lovecraft], The Evil Clergyman [H.P Lovecraft], He [H.P Lovecraft], The Book [H.P Lovecraft], In the Vault [H.P Lovecraft], Nyarlathotep [H.P Lovecraft], Death and the Woman [Gertrude Atherton], The Striding Place [Gertrude Atherton].

A novelette set in the hard-scrabble world of James S. A. Corey's NYT-bestselling Expanse series, The Butcher of Anderson Station deepens the story of Colonel Fred Johnson's past as seen on the fifth episode of Season 1 of The Expanse. Now a Prime Original series. HUGO AWARD WINNER FOR BEST...

From the void come twisted tales to regale you with horror and intrigue. Ten stories from the creepypasta author Cesly1987 have been gathered into this collection. A deputy must confront a supernatural demon during a raining flood, a soldier and his men must battle abominations of a bloodthirsty god for the sake of mankind’s survival, an actress must uncover why there is a video game about her brutal murder, a hunted woman must survive the night against a pack of werewolves, and a new tenant will discover why her cat has been acting so strange at her new apartment. All of this and more!

Johannes Cabal, a brilliant scientist and notorious snob, is single-mindedly obsessed in heart and soul with raising the dead. Well, perhaps not soul.... He hastily sold his years ago in order to learn the laws of necromancy. But now, tormented by a dark secret, he travels to the fiery pits of Hell to retrieve it. Satan, who is incredibly bored these days, proposes a little wager: Johannes has one year to persuade 100 people to sign over their souls, or he will be damned forever.

Perhaps Blackwood's most celebrated story, The Willows was influenced heavily by his own trips down the Danube River. It tells the story of two campers who pick the wrong place to sleep for the night, a place where another dimension impinges on our own. H.P. Lovecraft considered this the finest supernatural tale in English literature.

These stories present electric messiahs, identity constructs, the Beatles, and even a nuclear Armageddon, which serve as comic foils for Lain's everyman characters. Here is an America where packets of Sea Monkeys arrive in the mail containing secret messages, and the girl next door can breathe underwater. With Last Week's Apocalypse, Douglas Lain arrives with a punch line and a warning.