Literary Horror

In Brexit Britain, a young transgender doctor called Ry is falling in love - against their better judgement - with Victor Stein, a celebrated professor leading the public debate around AI. Meanwhile, Ron Lord, just divorced and living with Mum again, is set to make his fortune launching a new generation of sex dolls for lonely men everywhere. Across the Atlantic, in Phoenix, Arizona, a cryogenics facility houses dozens of bodies of men and women who are medically and legally dead...but waiting to return to life.

For generations, the Lenore women have manufactured a fragrance unlike any other. Hidden in the quiet rolling hills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, their perfumery guards unique and mysterious ingredients. A secret known only to a select clientele of movie stars, politicians, artists, and CEOs, the Lenores' signature elixir is the key to success for the world's most powerful women. Capturing the essence of sisterhood with the sweetness of flowers, Season of the Dragonflies is a beguiling tale of practical magic, old secrets, and new love.

Ashley Parker was an ordinary woman who was also a "wild card", immune to the emerging zombie plague, drawn unwillingly into a shadowy paramilitary organization. Having been ambushed in San Francisco, which is now fully engulfed in the zombie plague, Ashley and the wild cards must pursue the enemy to San Diego. There they will discover a dark organization that seeks to weaponize the plague. But that isn't the worst news. The plague itself has gone airborne, making it transferable without physical contact.

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.

Prepare to be chilled, electrified and entertained - a gem of a novel from 'one of the most brilliantly inventive writers of this, or any country' ( Independent). Walk down narrow, clammy Slade Alley. Open the black iron door in the right-hand wall.Enter the sunlit garden of an old house that doesn't exactly make sense. A stranger greets you by name and invites you inside. At first, you won't want to leave. Too late, you find you can't....

From the author of the classic novel Wake in Fright comes a chillingly brilliant short novel that's part Wolf Creek and part Duel. Fear Is the Rider is a nail-biting chase into the outback, towards the devil lurking at its centre. It was quite silent in the scrub. No breeze stirred the leaves and no bird moved, except for the kite hawks wheeling silently, eternally, high in the hot air. She smelt her attacker before she saw him.

"Dog days and the fresh bodies are arriving once again." So begins the fall term at South Carolina Medical College, where Dr. Jacob Thacker is on probation for Xanax abuse. His interim career - working public relations for the dean - takes an unnerving detour into the past when the bones of African American slaves, over a century old, are unearthed on the campus. Out of the college’s dark past, these bones threaten to rise and condemn the present.

In the tradition of Sophie Kinsella and Lauren Weisberger comes this charming debut about a young woman who moves to Manhattan in search of romance and excitement, only to find that her apartment is haunted by the cantankerous ghost of an old beat-generation writer, who needs her help in finishing his life’s work.

After the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, every Catholic conspirator in England fled to a wild, untamed place far from the reach of London law. On Good Friday, 1612, deep in the woods of Pendle Hill, amid baptismal pools and low, thick fog, a gathering of 13 is interrupted by the local magistrate. Two of their coven have already been imprisoned for witchcraft and are awaiting trial, but those who remain are vouched for by the wealthy and respected Alice Nutter.

“Congratulations, you’ve won the lottery!” shouts the angel Prapura to a formless soul. The soul hasn’t been kicked out of the cycle of rebirth just yet - he’s been given a second chance. He must recall the biggest mistake of his past life while on "homestay" in the body of 14-year-old Makoto Kobayashi. It looks like Makoto doesn’t have a single friend, and his family don’t seem to care about him at all. But as the soul begins to live Makoto’s life on his own terms, he grows closer to the family and the people around him and sees their true colors more clearly.

A lay community of thoroughly mixed-up people is encamped outside Imber Abbey, home of an enclosed order of nuns. A new bell, legendary symbol of religion and magic, is rediscovered. Dora Greenfield, erring wife, returns to her husband. Michael Mead, leader of the community, is confronted by Nick Fawley, with whom he had disastrous homosexual relations, while the wise old Abbess watches and prays and exercises discreet authority. And everyone, or almost everyone, hopes to be saved whatever that may mean.

In November 2014 Arla Macleod bludgeoned her mother, father and sister to death with a hammer. Now incarcerated at a medium-security mental-health institution, Arla will speak to no one but Scott King, an investigative journalist, whose Six Stories podcasts have become an internet sensation. King finds himself immersed in an increasingly complex case, interviewing five witnesses and Arla herself as he questions whether Arla's responsibility for the massacre was a diminished as her legal team made out.

In the Old City of Québec, Kay Harper falls in love with a puppet in the window of the Quatre Mains, a toy shop that is never open. She is spending her summer working as an acrobat with the cirque while her husband, Theo, is translating a biography of the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge. Late one night, Kay fears someone is following her home. Surprised to see that the lights of the toy shop are on and the door is open, she takes shelter inside.

En la aldea medieval de Lapvona, el pequeño Marek vive en la más absoluta pobreza con su padre Jude, viudo, devoto y agresivo. Cojo, con la cara deforme y una concepción distorsionada de la realidad, Marek solo halla consuelo en su temor de Dios y en sus visitas a Ina, una anciana con saberes ocultos que vive alejada del mundo. Cuando una muerte violenta lo sitúa en el epicentro de la vida palaciega, Marek pasa a convertirse en un auténtico aristócrata dentro de la corte del corrupto y ensimismado señor feudal que gobierna Lapvona.

"Dracula" is a gothic novel by Bram Stoker, famous for introducing the character of the vampire Count Dracula. The novel tells the story of Dracula's attempt to move from Transylvania to England so that he may find new blood and spread the undead curse, and of the battle between Dracula and a small group of men and women led by Professor Abraham Van Helsing. The story is told in epistolary format, as a series of letters, diary entries, newspaper articles, and ships' log entries, whose narrators are the novel's protagonists.

A zombie outbreak forces a long-distance runner into the ultimate test of endurance. It was just another training day for Niles. Getting ready for a one-hundred-mile footrace takes dedication. Twenty-five miles into his run and Niles is faced with the unthinkable. A campground overrun. People dead. Corpses reanimated, eating the living. With his skills and training, Niles could outrun the zombies. But when he stops to help two hunters, he needs to slow his pace and teach them to run. Can endurance running be taught on the go? Will they make it out alive? Listen to find out more.

"If it were I who were to be always young and the picture to grow old, I would give my soul for it." So says Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde's brilliant creation who sells his soul for youth and beauty.

Told in a variety of narrative voices, what at first appears to be a constellation of random events begins to cohere as the work of a shadow organization - or is it justcoincidence? Tying the strands together is Larry Zagorski, an early pulp-fiction writer turned U.S. airman turned "American gnostic", who looks back on his long and eventful life, searching for connections between the seemingly disparate parts. The teeming network of interlaced secrets he uncovers has personal relevance...

Hell - part mystery, part domestic meditation, part horror story - is a brilliantly eerie novel in which three households coexist in a single restless vision: a dollhouse; a dysfunctional family in 1950s Philadelphia; and the cottage home of Edwina Moss, a 19th-century expert on domestic management. While the inhabitants of the dollhouse are powerless to shape their destiny, the four members of the Philadelphia family dedicate themselves to mutual vigilance. Edwina Moss concedes domestic control to the imagination and, finally, to the spirit of Antonin Careme.

It wasn’t just the bad breakup that turned Eleanor Mellett’s life upside down. It was the cancer. And all the demons that came with it. Luckily, Eleanor discovers Talbingo, a remote little town looking for a primary-school teacher. Unfortunately, Talbingo is a bit creepy. It’s not just the communion-wine-guzzling friar prone to mad rants. Or the unstable, overly sensitive kids, always going on about Miss Barker, who vanished. It’s living alone in a remote cabin, with no cell or Internet service, wondering why there are so many locks on the door and who is knocking on it late at night.