Literary Horror

In this exquisite, transporting debut, 15-year-old Polly Kimball sets fire to the family farm, killing her abusive father. She and her young brother find shelter in a Massachusetts Shaker community called The City of Hope. It is the Era of Manifestations, when young girls in Shaker enclaves all across the Northeast are experiencing extraordinary mystical visions, earning them the honorific of "Visionist" and bringing renown to their settlements.

Birmingham, Alabama, is infested with malevolence. Prejudice and hatred have consumed the minds and hearts of its populace. A murderer, unimaginatively named "Harry the Hacker" by the press, has been carving up citizens with a hatchet. And from the church known as Chapelwood, an unholy gospel is being spread by a sect that worships dark gods from beyond the heavens.

Novela clave en la literatura latinoamericana del siglo veintiuno, Vivir abajo es un audiolibro de aventuras, un relato de horror, un misterio policial, una historia hecha de mil historias y una crónica de viajes por los territorios de la locura y el espanto. También es una novela de humor quijotesco, poblada por artistas enloquecidos, espías eruditos, poetas fantasmales y venganzas equivocadas. Comienza en Perú, cuando un cineasta americano comete un tenebroso homicidio en el sótano de una casa el día de la captura de Abimael Guzmán, líder de Sendero Luminoso.

A swirling, psychedelic, bleakly funny fugue by the Booker-shortlisted author of The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto. Una Fogarty, suffering from dementia in a seaside nursing home, would be all alone without her brother Dan, whose epic free-verse monologue tells their family story. Exile from Ireland and immigrant life in England. Their mother’s trials as a call girl. Young Una’s search for love in a seemingly haunted hippie squat, and the two-timing Scottish stoner poet she’ll never get over.

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....

Enter a cruel palindrome world: a symmetric place where disturbing situations displace the common; where good acts transmute to evil ones; where windows and mirrors are interchangeable. Within, characters influence each other through macabre arrangements of involuntary happenstance, and learn the inevitabilities of coincidence. A segmented story of a mother and daughter intertwines the others.

1892: James Norbury, a shy would-be poet newly down from Oxford, finds lodging with a charming young aristocrat. Through this new friendship, he is introduced to the drawing-rooms of high society and finds love in an unexpected quarter. Then, suddenly, he vanishes without a trace. Alarmed, his sister, Charlotte, sets out from their crumbling country estate determined to find him. In the sinister, labyrinthine city that greets her, she uncovers a hidden, supernatural world populated by unforgettable characters.

If it had another name, I never knew, but the locals called it the Loney - that strange nowhere between the Wyre and the Lune where Hanny and I went every Easter time with Mummer, Farther, Mr. and Mrs. Belderboss and Father Wilfred, the parish priest. It was impossible to truly know the place. It changed with each influx and retreat, and the neap tides would reveal the skeletons of those who thought they could escape its insidious currents. No one ever went near the water.

Simon Inescort is no longer bodily present in his marriage. It's been several months since he keeled over the rail of a Nova Scotia-bound ferry, a massive heart attack to blame. Simon's widow, Lorca Pell, has sold their farmhouse to newlyweds Zachary and Muriel. He spends time replaying his marriage in his own mind, while also engaging in occasionally intimate observation of the new homeowners. But soon the crisis of a missing child, a local 11-year-old, threatens the tenuous domestic equilibrium, as the weight of the case falls to Zachary, a rookie private detective.

Gaston Leroux's phenomenal novel, which inspired the hit Broadway musical, remains one of the most original suspense stories ever written. Erik, a brilliant but hideously disfigured musical genius, lives in the basement of Paris's National Academy of Music, where he haunts the opera crowd in his mask and fancy clothes. A haunting tale of obsession, a touching story about internal beauty, and a top-notch detective drama, The Phantom of the Opera is a remarkable novel, narrated to perfection by Henry Butler.

This annotated edition of the classic Gothic novel, Frankenstein, by Mary Shelly includes an historical introduction, an overview, study of the themes present in the book, and a list of famous quotes.

Lives separated by time and space have collided, and an exiled Englishman, a writer trapped far from home, and a girl destined to die too young, have each glimpsed a world that is not their own. Travelling through the centuries, between colonies on the moon and an ever-changing Earth, together their lives will solve a mystery that will make you question everything you thought you knew to be true.

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.

“All the tales are a variety of detective story,” wrote Bowles of this, his first short story collection, “in which the reader is the detective; the mystery is in the motivation for the charcters’ behavior.” In such stories as “A Distant Episode” and How Many Midnights,” Bowles pushes human character beyond socially defined limits and maps a transformed (often horribly transformed) reality.

The evil soul of a witch doctor lives on in the body of Simon, the great jungle beast who leads his human followers - the Panther People - in their orgies of lust and blood. Now the innocent Martin family, George, Peg, and their beautiful daughter, Jenny, on vacation, will stumble upon this gruesome cult, trapped in a desert nightmare of terror and death - waiting. In the quiet wasteland, the sound of their own pulses will be all they can hear.

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde ranks alongside Frankenstein, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Dracula as one of the top horror stories to emerge from the late 19th Century. Film and stage adaptations have never been able to fully relate the agony and conflict that permeates the mind of Dr Jekyll, but the audio version read by Ian Holm adds an extra spine-chilling dimension to the original text by Robert Louis Stevenson.

It begins with a call one snowy February night. Lying in her bed, young Sylvie Mason overhears her parents on the phone across the hall. This is not the first late-night call they have received, since her mother and father have an uncommon occupation: helping "haunted souls" find peace. And yet something in Sylvie senses that this call is different from the others, especially when they are lured to the old church on the outskirts of town.

Ronan Szepessy promised himself he’d never return to Hudson. The sleepy upstate town was no place for a restless gay photographer. But his father is ill and New York City’s distractions have become too much for him. Ronan reconnects with two friends from high school: Dom, his first love, and Dom’s wife, Attalah. The three former misfits mourn what their town has become—overrun by gentrifiers and corporate interests. With friends and neighbors getting evicted en masse and an election coming up, Ronan and Attalah craft a plan to rattle the newcomers and expose their true motives.

In a small logging town in northern California, young Emma Rose Finnis was born and died. Now, no one remembers her hardworking life and her grand dreams - but she remembers. She remembers everything. Emma Rose is still here, one hundred years after her death...and she doesn't plan on leaving. But when a determined hunter arrives with instructions to "clean" Emma Rose out of her haunt, the stately Lambry mansion, death suddenly isn't the worst fate imaginable.

Edgar Allan Poe is the undisputed "Father" of the Detective story and his Detective C. Auguste Dupin set the stage for eccentric, logic-wielding sleuths like Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. This is the first audio collection of Poe's detective stories, plus one non-Dupin detective tale, "Thou Art the Man". Celebrity narrator Bronson Pinchot delivers amazing performances of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt", "The Purloined Letter", and "Thou Art the Man".