Literary Horror

February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. “My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,” the president says at the time. “God has called him home.”

For 30 years, a secret agency called the Southern Reach has monitored expeditions into Area X - a remote and lush terrain mysteriously sequestered from civilization. After the 12th expedition, the Southern Reach is in disarray, and John Rodriguez (a.k.a. "Control") is the team's newly appointed head. From a series of interrogations, a cache of hidden notes, and more than two hundred hours of profoundly troubling video footage, the secrets of Area X begin to reveal themselves....

Ryder is hiding a dark secret from her coworkers at Midnight Liaisons. Every time she's sexually attracted to a man, her dragon side breaks through. Not exactly man-bait! But she needs to lose her virginity before her 25th birthday or she'll become a dragon forever. Her solution? Big, hunky Hugh, the appointed guardian of her chastity. He's clearly hot for her, but he has powerful reasons to resist Ryder. Can temptation - and love - possibly find a way?

Jenna and her father Rick, who works for the EPA as an investigator, are summoned to an ancient Tobacco plantation deep in the heart of Louisiana. Little do they realize, that beneath the majestic mansion lies a sinister evil, which has been waiting and festering for over a hundred years. In the gathering darkness, Jenna begins having strange visions of the plantation’s sordid past, people who have an intimate connection to Jenna’s family. Within days, the blackness begins growing larger and larger, sweltering… forcing demon infested dolls and other ancient horrors to begin roaming ...

Jewell Parker Rhodes follows up her acclaimed Voodoo Dreams with a present-day mystery surrounding the gifts of an ancestor of the Voodoo Queen. Doctor Marie Levant can't explain why she's drawn to New Orleans, or why it's comforting and unsettling at the same time. And she can't shake her haunting dreams. But when she delivers a dead woman's baby, Marie knows malevolent forces are at work, and it's up to her to stop them.

Patrick Bateman moves among the young and trendy in 1980s Manhattan. Young, handsome, and well educated, Bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we cannot begin to fathom. Expressing his true self through torture and murder, Bateman prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront.

Bound to life old and new, the sins of the departed still haunt her. When wickedness infects the innocent, can she see the curse undone? Western Australia. Clarisse Garcia is ready to return stronger than ever. With her husband by her side, the plucky spirit hunter is back on familiar territory with an assignment for Benedictine monks. And now she’s out to vanquish whatever evil is plaguing the monastic village that caused orphans to mysteriously die. With what could be a voracious demon on her hands, Clarisse partners up with a man who grew up in the local orphanage to investigate ...

What happens when the monsters aren't supernatural—they're systematic? In this chilling collection of modern Gothic tales, five classic stories of horror are reimagined for our contemporary world, revealing that the most terrifying threats come not from ghosts or ghouls, but from the very institutions and systems we trust to protect us. From a billionaire's pandemic party that becomes a dance with death, to a corporate executive's systematic abuse that finally provokes the ultimate reckoning—these stories expose the horror hiding in plain sight within our modern society. "Isla Dorada" ...

A little girl and her mother haunted by mental illness become entangled in the paranoia of the early 1990s Satanic Panic.

Located off a desolate stretch of Interstate 50, Desperation, Nevada, has few connections with the rest of the world. It is a place, though, where the seams between worlds are thin. And it is a place where several travelers are abducted by Collie Entragian, the maniacal police officer of Desperation. Entragian uses various ploys for the abductions, from an arrest for drug possession to "rescuing" a family from a nonexistent gunman.

🕯 “If you want eternal love, give it to me, give it to me, give it to me…” 🕯 In the 1800s, a grieving poet made a deal with the devil. In exchange for one last glimpse of the woman he lost, he was given immortality — and cursed to feed on longing itself. Through beautiful, tragic poems whispered across generations, he lives on… sustained by those who read his words and ache for something more. One poem in particular became legend: "Give It to Me" — a haunting love verse that, when spoken aloud three times, seals the soul to the curse. Now, in a modern high school English ...

Dive into the mysteries of Area X, a remote and lush terrain that has inexplicably sequestered itself from civilization. Twelve expeditions have gone in, and not a single member of any of them has remained unchanged by the experience - for better or worse.

The lives of the Barretts, a normal suburban New England family, are torn apart when 14-year-old Marjorie begins to display signs of acute schizophrenia. To her parents' despair, the doctors are unable to stop Marjorie's descent into madness. As their stable home devolves into a house of horrors, they reluctantly turn to a local Catholic priest for help. Father Wanderly suggests an exorcism; he believes the vulnerable teenager is the victim of demonic possession.

Stephen King's first full-length solo novel since Dreamcatcher, the long-awaited From a Buick 8 is "nearly flawless and one terrific entertainment," says Publishers Weekly. A strange car acts as a conduit between our world and some other...and the boogeyman of this creepy story is our collective fascination with deadly things.

Evil is alive in Libertyville. It inhabits a custom-painted red and white 1958 Plymouth Fury named Christine and young Arnold Cunningham, who buys it. Along with Arnold's girlfriend, Leigh Cabot, Dennis Guilder attempts to find out the real truth behind Christine and finds more than he bargained for: From murder to suicide, there's a peculiar feeling that surrounds Christine - she gets revenge on anyone standing in her path. Can Dennis save Arnold from the wrath of Christine?

For the Owens family, love is a curse that began in 1620, when Maria Owens was charged with witchery for loving the wrong man. Hundreds of years later, in New York City at the cusp of the '60s, when the whole world is about to change, Susanna Owens knows that her three children are dangerously unique.

A masterful, intensely suspenseful novel about a reader whose obsession with a reclusive writer goes far too far - a book about the power of storytelling, starring the same trio of unlikely and winning heroes King introduced in Mr. Mercedes. "Wake up, genius." So begins King's instantly riveting story about a vengeful reader. The genius is John Rothstein, an iconic author who created a famous character, Jimmy Gold, but who hasn't published a book for decades.

In Reconstruction-era America, vampire Henry Sturges is searching for renewed purpose in the wake of his friend Abraham Lincoln's shocking death. It will be an expansive journey that will first send him to England for an unexpected encounter with Jack the Ripper, then to New York City for the birth of a new American century, the dawn of the electric era of Tesla and Edison, and the blazing disaster of the 1937 Hindenburg crash.

A dark and sweeping adventure, Dreamcatcher is set in the haunted city of Derry - the site of Stephen King's It and Insomnia. In it, four young boys stand together and do a brave, good thing, an act that changes them in ways that they hardly understand. A quarter-century later, as grown men who have gone their separate ways, these friends come together once a year to hunt in the woods of Maine.

Announced thirty years ago from the now-defunct Pulphouse Press, S.P. Somtow's theme collection of stories about Fathers and Sons has been "about to come out" ever since. Diplodocus Press now brings the collection into print just as it would have been in the 1990s, an interesting snapshot of Somtow's career up to that moment. There are four stories in this mini-collection, with far-flung settings. "Kingdoms in the Sky," about a mafia don taking his son to Peru to participate in an ancient and terrifying ceremony; "Fire from the Wine-Dark Sea," in which a tormented poet with twin sons meets ...