Literary Horror

A ruined city of the future lives in fear of a despotic, gigantic flying bear, driven mad by the tortures inflicted on him by the Company, a mysterious biotech firm. A scavenger, Rachel, finds a creature entangled in his fur. She names it Borne. At first Borne looks like nothing at all - a green lump that might be a discard from the Company. But he reminds Rachel of her homeland, an island nation long lost to rising seas.

Call me Drood, Eddie Drood. Some know me as Shaman Bond and most simply don' t want to know me at all. For centuries, my family has been keeping the things that lurk on the darker side of existence as far away as possible from humans like you, without you even knowing we' re there. Unfortunately for us, not everybody appreciates what we Droods do. Recently, I personally managed to survive yet another attempt on my life, but the rest of my relatives weren' t so lucky.

"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" is the most famous supernatural wild chase in all of literature. One of the best-known American short stories, this tale has been produced countless times for television and film. A Halloween classic!

Jane Eyre remains a classic of 19th-century English literature and is the most famous and influential novel by Charlotte Bronte. Published in 1847, one of the most popular of all English novels, the story tells of the rise of a poor orphan girl against overwhelming odds. It is a work of fiction with memorable characters and vivid scenes exploring themes that have as much relevance today as in the time it was written.

The Mercy of Thin Air entwines two heartbreaking and redemptive love stories that echo across three generations and culminates in a finish that will leave readers breathless. It is a poignant and brilliant first novel that beautifully captures the nature of love and shows how it transcends all barriers, even death.

Dracula is the seminal gothic horror novel of its time as Bram Stoker introduced the world to the legendary vampire Count Dracula. Published in 1897 and told through a series of diary entries and letters, the story journeys into the dark world of Count Dracula through the eyes of several different narrators. The novel explores many themes, the role of women in Victorian culture, conventional and conservative sexuality, immigration, colonialism, post colonialism and folklore.

In Dark Property, a woman carries a dying baby across a desert waste, moving toward a fortress harboring a mysterious resurrection cult. Menaced by scavengers, she nevertheless begins to suspect that the reality within the fortress may be even more unsettling than the blasted environment outside. In Contagion and Other Stories, Evenson takes his audiences into a world that is at once apocalyptic, dark, observant, and grotesque without ever dipping into static genre conventions.

A decade after Nocturnes first terrified and delighted listeners, John Connolly, best-selling author of 13 acclaimed thrillers featuring private investigator Charlie Parker, gives us a second volume of tales of the supernatural.

In an abandoned mansion at the heart of Barcelona, a young man, David Martín, makes his living by writing sensationalist novels under a pseudonym. The survivor of a troubled childhood, he has taken refuge in the world of books, and spends his nights spinning baroque tales about the city's underworld. But perhaps his dark imaginings are not as strange as they seem, for in a locked room deep within the house lie photographs and letters hinting at the mysterious death of the previous owner.

‘When you hide the truth from yourself, you keep the Devil’s secret...’ Sarah Kingsmoor has built a successful career as a family doctor in an idyllic market town. She lives in the cottage of her dreams, enjoys rewarding friendships, and leads the life she’s always wanted for herself. She’s convinced of this. One spring evening, Sarah stumbles upon a brutal mugging. Her intervention saves the victim’s life. And a series of events is set in motion which will jar Sarah loose from her comfortable existence, and change her forever. As she finds herself drawn increasingly closer to ...

Medusa's Ankles celebrates the very best of A. S. Byatt's short fiction, carefully selected from a lifetime of writing. Peopled by artists, poets, and fabulous creatures, the stories blaze with creativity and color. From ancient myth to a British candy factory, from a Chinese restaurant to a Mediterranean swimming pool, from a Turkish bazaar to a fairy-tale palace, Byatt transports her listeners beyond the veneer of the ordinary - even beyond the gloss of the fantastical - to places rich and strange and wholly unforgettable.

モルグ街のアパートで親子が惨殺されるという事件が勃発した。母親の遺体は、のどを切られ、アパートの中庭に投げ落とされ、その娘は、暖炉の煙突の中に、押し込められていた。現場で犯人の声を聞いた人々の証言にはスペイン語、イタリア語、フランス語とさまざまだった。警察が解決できないこの不可解な事件をオーギュスト・デュパンが、見事な推理で犯人を鮮やかに突き止める。エドガー・アラン・ポーの生み出した世界初の名探偵オーギュスト・デュパンの推理をオーディオブックでお楽しみください! ※本作品は発表時の未熟な時代背景から、今日の社会では一般的でなく、不適切と思われる表現が含まれている箇所がございます。しかし作品のオリジナル性を最大限に尊重し、なるべく当時のまま忠実に再現することを優先いたしました。(C)2008青空文庫

Abby Cooper senses a convicted killer is innocent, but she'll need hard evidence to save the woman before it's too late.... A ticked-off judge has tossed Abby in the slammer for contempt of court, and during her brief but unpleasant stay she learns the story of a condemned woman who is facing a far more serious sentence. Skylar Miller has been found guilty of murder and faces the death penalty. Everyone believes she's guilty, including her own family and her ex-husband - everyone, that is, except Abby.

Alison Hart, a medium by trade, tours the dormitory towns of London's orbital ring road with her flint-hearted sidekick, Colette, passing on messages from beloved dead ancestors. But behind her plump, smiling persona hides a desperate woman: she knows the terrors the next life holds but must conceal them from her wide-eyed clients. At the same time she is plagued by spirits from her own past, who infiltrate her body and home, becoming stronger and nastier the more she resists....

Siblings Bert, Willet, and Pansy know better than to go swimming at the old rock quarry. According to their father, it's the Devil's place, a place that's been cursed and forgotten. But Mississippi Delta summer days are scorching hot, and they can't resist cooling off in the dark, bottomless water - until the day six-year-old Pansy vanishes...not drowned, not lost, simply gone. When their father disappears as well, Bert and Willet leave their childhoods behind to try and hold their broken family together.

Far from the concrete and steel of Boston, the town of Northwood nestles beneath the summit of Mount Sugarloaf. The quiet community seems like the perfect place for Steve and Diane Nailer to raise their family of two children with a third on the way. Their new home is perched on the edge of a forest. A trail through the woods leads to an old Victorian mansion that once housed the town mortuary. But the memories of the dearly departed are the least of what lurks there....

Screenwriter and noted film critic C. Robert Cargill continues the story begun in his acclaimed debut Dreams and Shadows in this bold and brilliantly crafted tale involving fairies and humans, magic and monsters - a vivid phantasmagoria that combines the imaginative wonders of Neil Gaiman, the visual inventiveness of Guillermo Del Toro, and the shocking miasma of William S. Burroughs.

Darkness has a way of creeping up when Ian is with Priss. Even when they were kids, playing in the woods of their small Upstate New York town, he could feel it. Still, Priss was his best friend, his salvation from the bullies who called him "loser" and "fatboy" - and from his family's deadly secrets.

Though published second after Altmann's Tongue, The Din of Celestial Birds (1997) consists of the best of Evenson's early stories. They take place in a country (perhaps several countries) that seems at once everywhere and nowhere, haunted by birds, ghosts, poverty, tyranny, and the permeability of the line between the living and the dead. These stories offer a heady mix of absurdity and bleakness on the one hand and exuberant magic realism on the other.

In a city teeming with stories, how do lost souls find one another? It’s a question Meg Rhys doesn’t think she’s asking. Meg is a self-identified spinster librarian, satisfied with living with her cat, stacks of books, and her dead sister’s ghost in her New York City apartment. Then she becomes obsessed with an intriguing library patron and the haunted house he’s trying to research. The house has its own story to tell too, of love and war, of racism’s fallout and the ghost story that is gentrification, and of Brooklyn before it was Brooklyn.