Thriller Anthology

For The Penguin Book of Murder Mysteries, writer and anthologist Michael Sims did not summon the usual suspects. He sought the unfamiliar, the unjustly forgotten, and little-known gems by writers from outside the genre. This historical tour of one of our most popular literary categories includes stories never before reprinted, features rebellious early “lady detectives," and spotlights former stars of the crime field—Austrian novelist Auguste Groner and prolific American Geraldine Bonner among them.

Brian Evenson's fifth story collection constructs a human landscape as unearthly as it is mundane. Replete with the brutality, primordial waste, and savage blankness familiar to listeners of his earlier works, Evenson's Kafkaesque allegories entice the mind while stubbornly disordering it.

The ghost story has long been a staple of world literature, but many of the genre's greatest tales have been forgotten, overshadowed in many cases by their authors' best-selling work in other genres. In this spine-tingling anthology, little known stories from literary titans like Charles Dickens and Edith Wharton are collected alongside overlooked works from masters of horror fiction like Edgar Allan Poe and M. R. James. In bringing these masterful tales back from the dead, Ghost Stories will enlighten and frighten both longtime fans as well as new listeners of the genre.

Un recueil de 14 nouvelles inédites : envoûtantes, effrayantes, captivantes. Deux jeunes couples accros au tourisme macabre, des enfants face à la cruauté de leur famille d'accueil, un présentateur télé prêt à tout pour faire exploser l'audience, des animaux subitement délivrés des hommes, un prêtre trop beau pour être honnête, des chats animés d'étranges intentions, un aviateur de la Première Guerre mondiale confronté à une entité primitive et perverse.

Love is supposed to be a fairy tale. Ours is a death wish. I'm the executioner for the Bedlam Brotherhood. She's a con artist working for my greatest enemy. I use her. She manipulates me. We find ourselves on opposite sides of a bloody war. My heart and head tell me I have to stay away. My lust for her says otherwise. Eventually, war breaks out in Lacking. Just when I think things can't get any worse, an unexpected guest arrives. I'm forced to make a choice between the life I've always wanted and a life I never knew I could have.

Originally published in 1922 and translated by Takashi Kojima, this classic short story was the inspiration for Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film Rashomon, about the murder of a samurai. Told from the perspective of multiple witnesses.

A thriller writer is embroiled in a real-life whodunit when a friend drops dead with her hatpin impaled in his back. The violation of a sealed West Bank tomb, its rock walls intact, provides a Thebes investigator with a mystifying conundrum. Two sisters take shelter in a shuttered old house at the end of a country road . . . only to discover they're not alone. And the author's most beloved characters, Amelia Peabody and Radcliff Emerson, make an appearance in a newly uncovered tale with a witty nod to Sherlock Holmes.

They say you can never get too much of a good thing. But for those who crave fear and horror, how much is too much? And how far are you willing to go to test your limits? Scare Street brings you volumes three and four of Short Horror Stories in a single edition. Six macabre morsels of fear brought together for your listening pleasure. And each tale packs enough spine-tingling chills to last a lifetime.

After suffering a personal tragedy, Abby Sullivan buys a huge old seaside mansion she has never even seen, packs up her life in San Francisco, and moves to Holiday Bay Maine, where she is adopted, quite against her will, by a huge Maine Coon Cat named Rufus, a drifter with her own tragic past named Georgia, and a giant dog with an inferiority complex named Ramos. What Abby thought she needed was alone time to heal.

It seems straightforward enough: Get a foot in the door by posing as a potential investor in a lucrative underground business—then bring the place down from the inside. There’s more here than meets the eye. What it triggers in Nameless is uncontrollable rage and brutal retribution. What it reveals is a clue to his forgotten past. Is it a breach on his handler’s part? Or a test? Either way, something’s not right.

Deadwood meets Cthulhu in this wild and profane Western romp featuring zombies, werewolves, evil spirits, and one pissed-off gunslinging preacher. The Wild West has never seen the likes of the Reverend Jebidiah Mercer, a hard man wielding a burning Bible in the battle between God and the devil, in an endless struggle he's not sure he cares who wins. With its five stories laced with fast-paced action, nonstop humor, and spine-tingling horror, Deadman's Road is your ride to hell....

Berlin does not make it easy to write noir fiction - or perhaps Berlin makes it too easy. Noir tradition casts a long, influential, and even daunting shadow. Neither Döblin nor Benn, Brecht nor Lang, catered to any crime fiction traditions. They merely steeped their literary projects in a great deal of noir. And so it is with most of the stories in our anthology: they do not necessarily follow the usual patterns of crime fiction, but regard noir as a license to write as they wish, a certain way of approaching the city, and a prism through which its nature is viewed....

In the title story, a young boy becomes obsessed with his cousin's doll after she tragically passes away from leukemia. As he grows older, he begins to collect "found dolls" from the surrounding neighborhoods and stores his treasures in the abandoned carriage house on his family's estate. But just what kind of dolls are they?In The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror, Joyce Carol Oates evokes the “fascination of the abomination” that is at the core of the most profound, the most unsettling, and the most memorable of dark mystery fiction.

It is a world of power and privilege, secrets and sacred duty. It is the world of ancient Rome. And it is the esteemed Vestal Virgins—priestesses of Vesta, goddess of the home and hearth—who protect the Eternal Flame that protects the Eternal City. This collection includes Brides of Rome, To Be Wolves, and Empire of Iron.

The following books are included: Over the Edge and Stalking the Nightmare.

In a masterpiece of supernatural mystery and apocalyptic prophecy, New York Times bestselling authors James Rollins and Rebecca Cantrell bring to a thunderous conclusion their epic trilogy of novels set between the worlds of shadow and light, between salvation and damnation, where the very gates...

Constance is a fiercely independent high school senior living in rural James City County, Virginia. After their father abandons the family, she and her sister Abigail move into their late cousin's home with their mother, Delilah. Constance quickly becomes frustrated by her new life and her mother’s obsession with their family’s legacy. In defiance, she aspires to make a new life for herself and leave this place forever. But when a life-altering tragedy strikes, Constance is thrust into adulthood and a fight for survival against unimaginable forces.

Newly widowed at twenty-two, Tabitha, Lady Pembroke, is determined never again to be anyone’s pawn. Her late husband’s cousin and heir, Jeremy “Wolf” Chesterton, is a former thief-taker whose rough edges and razor intellect make him both an unlikely earl and an even less likely ally. Yet when murder intrudes upon London’s drawing rooms and country estates, it is Tabitha’s keen mind and Wolf’s streetwise instincts that form an irresistible, if occasionally frustrating, team.

From the collection Mary Russell's War, "Mary's Christmas" delivers the author's signature blend of narrative mastery and historical detail while shining light on previously unexplored corners of the Russell-Holmes universe. Laurie R. King blends her long-running brand of crime fiction with historical treats and narrative sleight of hand.

Edgar Award winner Otto Penzler returns with a new anthology of exhilarating mysteries, assembling Victorian society's lords and ladies and most miserable miscreants. Behind the velvet curtains of horse-drawn carriages and amid the soft glow of the gaslights are the detectives and bobbies sniffing out the safecrackers and petty purloiners who plague everything from the soot-covered side streets of London to the opulent manors of the countryside. Brush off your dinner jackets and straighten out your ball gowns for these exciting, glitzy mysteries.