Nicholas, a would-be poet, and Nakota, his feral lover, discover a strange hole in the storage room floor down the hall - "Black. Pure black and the sense of pulsation, especially when you look at it too closely, the sense of something not living but alive." It begins with curiosity, a joke - the Funhole down the hall. But then the experiments begin. "Wouldn't it be wild to go down there?" says Nakota. Nicholas says "We're not." But they're not in control, not from the first moment, as those experiments lead to obsession, violence, and a very final transformation.

Grant, an ambitious photographer, is possessed by a young mental patient's strange drawings and becomes the disturbed young artist's confidant and guardian in a relationship that pushes Grant's own sanity to the edge.

Thomas Ligotti’s debut collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, and his second, Grimscribe, permanently inscribed a new name in the pantheon of horror fiction. Influenced by the strange terrors of Lovecraft and Poe and by the brutal absurdity of Kafka, Ligotti eschews cheap, gory thrills for his own brand of horror, which shocks at the deepest, existential, levels.

To serial slayer Andrew Compton, murder is an art, the most intimate art. After feigning his own death to escape from prison, Compton makes his way to the United States with the sole ambition of bringing his “art” to new heights. Tortured by his own perverse desires, and drawn to possess and destroy young boys, Compton inadvertently joins forces with Jay Byrne, a dissolute playboy who has pushed his “art” to limits even Compton hadn’t previously imagined.

Carolyn's not so different from the other human beings around her. After all, she was a normal American herself once. That was a long time ago, of course - before the time she calls "adoption day", when she and a dozen other children found themselves being raised by a man they learned to call Father.

By day, Maeve Fly works at the happiest place in the world as every child’s favorite ice princess. By the neon night glow of the Sunset Strip, Maeve haunts the dive bars with a drink in one hand and a book in the other, imitating her misanthropic literary heroes. But when Gideon Green—her best friend’s brother—moves to town, he awakens something dangerous within her, and the world she knows suddenly shifts beneath her feet. Untethered, Maeve ditches her discontented act and tries on a new persona.

Paul Sheldon is a best-selling novelist who has finally met his number-one fan. Her name is Annie Wilkes, and she is more than a rabid reader - she is Paul's nurse, tending his shattered body after an automobile accident. But she is also furious that the author has killed off her favorite character in his latest book. Annie becomes his captor, keeping him prisoner in her isolated house. Annie wants Paul to write a book that brings Misery back to life - just for her. She has a lot of ways to spur him on.

Judas Coyne is a collector of the macabre. But nothing he possesses is as unlikely or as dreadful as his latest discovery, a thing so terrible-strange, Jude can't help but reach for his wallet. For a thousand dollars, Jude will become the proud owner of a dead man's suit, said to be haunted by a restless spirit. But what UPS delivers to his door in a black heart-shaped box is no imaginary or metaphorical ghost. It's the real thing.

Welcome to Neverton, Montana: home to a God-fearing community with a heart of gold. Nestled high up in the mountains is Camp Damascus, the self-proclaimed “most effective” gay conversion camp in the country. Here, a life free from sin awaits. But the secret behind that success is anything but holy. And they’ll scare you straight to hell.

Joe works at a facility that performs human experimentation. His work just followed him home. The government wanted to unlock hidden abilities in the human mind. They put subjects in extreme sensory deprivation. All the test subjects went violently insane. But the research continued. Today it has been perfected. Almost perfected.

Little Marek, the abused and delusional son of the village shepherd, believes his mother died giving birth to him. One of Marek’s few consola­tions is his enduring bond with the blind village midwife, Ina, who suckled him when he was a baby. For some people, Ina’s ability to receive trans­missions of sacred knowledge from the natural world is a godsend. For others, Ina’s home in the woods is a godless place.

With nothing but the clothes on his back - and something horrific snapping at his heels - Jack Winter fled his rural Georgia home when he was just a boy. Watching the world he knew vanish in a trucker’s rearview mirror, he thought he was leaving an unspeakable nightmare behind forever. Now, years later, the bright new future he’s built suddenly turns pitch black, as something fiendishly familiar looms dead ahead. Surviving a violent car crash seems like a miracle for Jack’s family, but Jack knows there’s nothing divine about it.

In this striking and bleak, yet luminous debut collection, Nathan Ballingrud, winner of the inaugural Shirley Jackson Award, uses the trappings of the Gothic and the uncanny to investigate a distinctly American landscape: The loneliest and darkest corners of contemporary life. Ballingrud’s stories are love stories. They’re also monster stories. Sometimes the monsters collected here are vampires or werewolves.

Celeste Price is an eighth-grade English teacher in suburban Tampa. But Celeste's devotion lies elsewhere. She has a singular sexual obsession: 14-year-old boys. In slaking her sexual thirst, Celeste Price is remorseless and deviously free of hesitation, a monstress driven by pure motivation. She deceives everyone, and cares nothing for anyone or anything but her own pleasure. With crackling, rampantly unadulterated prose, Tampa is a grand, uncompromising, seriocomic examination of want and a scorching literary debut.

When a transphobic woman bombs Frankie’s workplace, she blows up Frankie’s life with it. As the media descends like vultures, Frankie tries to cope with the carnage: binge-drinking, sleeping with strangers, pushing away her friends. Then, she meets Vanya. Mysterious, terrifying Vanya. The two hit it off immediately, but as their relationship intensifies, so too does Frankie’s feeling that Vanya is hiding something from her. When Vanya’s secrets threaten to tear them apart, Frankie starts digging, and unearths a sinister conspiracy, the roots of which go deeper than she ever imagined.

Miracles are happening. Pray to God they stop. In the dead of winter, on a highway in Quebec, a man crashes his car and survives. In New York, a homeless person is run over by a bus and lives. In Tokyo, a teenager jumps off a high rise building and fails in taking her own life. All over the world, miracles like these transpire, and people breathe a sigh of relief. But for the next week, some people will begin to suspect a terrible truth. A handful will even search for it. One man will find it. And in seven days, all hell will break loose.

Hit me. Kick me. Hurt me. Hate me. There’s nothing that the students of Raleigh High can do to Silver Parisi anymore. Over the past year, she’s had to endure more pain and suffering than most people are asked to bear in their lifetimes. She’s a pariah, an outcast, a ghost. She’s also never been one to take shit lying down, though...despite what half the football team might say. With only 168 days left of the school year, it won’t be long until graduation, and Silver’s planning on skipping town and leaving Raleigh firmly in her rearview mirror. Until he comes along....

Ever since being part of the pot in a high-stakes poker game, elfin outcast Kai Gracen figures he used up his good karma when Dempsey, a human Stalker, won the hand and took him in. Following the violent merge of Earth and Underhill, the human and elfin races are left with a messy, monster-ridden world, and Stalkers are the only cavalry willing to ride to someone's rescue when something shadowy appears.

Bossy. Heart of stone. Snarly mess next door. Send help before I'm prick-matized.... My next big mistake has a name. Warren Ford. Best kept secret in this weird little town. An alpha's alpha. Spartan abs. Too blunt for everybody's good. Moody, broody, mysterious, and totally up in my business.

Rogue wizard Josiah Quinn never met a rule he wouldn’t break. Even though he knows he’ll face plenty of backlash from both good and evil, he braves the fires of Hell to spring Satan’s captive daughter. But before they return to their lives, he’s got to track down the missing pieces of her soul.... As he attempts to unite the fragmented spirit of the succubus by his side, Josiah has one little problem: a power-hungry wizard aiming to rule the underworld.

For Nasir, former Special Ops military man and bodyguard, his new job seems like an easy-money gig: Trail a Russian mobster’s runaway wife in Mexico, enjoy the sun, observe, and report. Just one rule: Don’t get too close. But it’s all Naz can do not to watch the alluring dancer’s every move. A closer look is irresistible - especially when she’s in trouble.

This is the way the world ends: with a nanosecond of computer error in a Defense Department laboratory and a million casual contacts that form the links in a chain letter of death. And here is the bleak new world of the day after: a world stripped of its institutions and emptied of 99 percent of its people. A world in which a handful of panicky survivors choose sides - or are chosen.

There are angels, and they are not beneficent or loving. But they do watch over us. They watch our lives unfold, analyzing us for repeating patterns and redundancies. When they find them, the angels simplify those patterns and remove the redundancies, and the problem that is "you" gets solved.

"You have two days to pass your audition. You better pass it, feller. You’re joining the circus. Ain’t that the best news you ever got?" Delivered by a trio of psychotic clowns, this ultimatum plunges Jamie into the horrific alternate universe that is the centuries-old Pilo Family Circus, a borderline world between Hell and Earth from which humankind’s greatest tragedies have been perpetrated. Yet in this place - peopled by the gruesome, grotesque, and monstrous - where violence and savagery are the norm, Jamie finds that his worst enemy is himself.

First published in 1989 and taking place in downtown Toronto, one of the earliest of the modern urban fantasies, Gate of Darkness, Circle of Light is the story of a fight against encroaching darkness by a developmentally handicapped young woman, a street musician with no idea of his potential, a bag-lady who's tired of picking up the pieces, and an adept of the light. Mixing actual Toronto ghost-stories with traditional Faire, a police procedural, and a cat, Gate of Darkness, Circle of Light opened a gate at street level to the urban fantasy that followed.

Welcome to Los Angeles - where anger, hunger and disease run rampant. Jonny is a black-market dealer in drugs that heal the body and cool the mind. All he cares about is his own survival. Until a strange new plague turns L.A. into a city of death, and Jonny is forced to put everything on the line to find the cure... if it can be found on Earth.

Meet Jake. A bit on the elderly side (he turns 201 in March), but you’d never suspect it. Nonstop sex and exercise will do that for you - and a diet with lots of animal protein. Jake is a werewolf, and after the unfortunate and violent death of his one contemporary, he is now the last of his species. Although he is physically healthy, Jake is deeply distraught and lonely.

Best friends Jack and Conner can’t stay away from Marbury. It’s partly because of their obsession with this alternate world and the unresolved war that still wages there. But it’s also because forces in Marbury - including the darkest of the dark, who were not revealed in The Marbury Lens - are beckoning the boys back in order to save their friends… and themselves.

Miriam Black knows when you will die. Still in her early twenties, she’s foreseen hundreds of car crashes, heart attacks, strokes, suicides, and slow deaths by cancer. But when Miriam hitches a ride with truck driver Louis Darling and shakes his hand, she sees that in thirty days he will be gruesomely murdered while he calls her name. Miriam has given up trying to save people; that only makes their deaths happen. No matter what she does, she can’t save Louis. But if she wants to stay alive, she’ll have to try.

School’s out for summer and that means one thing to Parker, Chloe, and their four friends: a well-deserved camping trip in the Pine Barrens, a million-acre forest deep in the heart of New Jersey. But when old grudges erupt, an argument escalates into the unthinkable, leaving one of them dead and the killer missing. As darkness descends and those left alive try to determine a course of action, the forest around them begins to change....

Nicholas, a would-be poet, and Nakota, his feral lover, discover a strange hole in the storage room floor down the hall - "Black. Pure black and the sense of pulsation, especially when you look at it too closely, the sense of something not living but alive." It begins with curiosity, a joke - the Funhole down the hall. But then the experiments begin. "Wouldn't it be wild to go down there?" says Nakota. Nicholas says "We're not." But they're not in control, not from the first moment, as those experiments lead to obsession, violence, and a very final transformation.

Grant, an ambitious photographer, is possessed by a young mental patient's strange drawings and becomes the disturbed young artist's confidant and guardian in a relationship that pushes Grant's own sanity to the edge.

Addiction is the perpetual epidemic, where swarms of human moths flutter to the flames of hell. Because that warm blanket of a heroin high, that joyful intoxication of a pint of vodka, that electric energy from a line of cocaine, over time leaves you with a cold loneliness and a bitter heart. Relationships destroyed, bodies deteriorate, loved ones lost, yet the craving continues for that which is killing us—living, as the title suggests, like an Orphan of Bliss.

From the award-winning author of The Cipher and Buddha Boy, comes Velocities: Stories, Kathe Koja's second electrifying collection of short fiction. Thirteen stories, two never before published, all flying at the speed of strange.

At a club in Missing Mile, N.C., the children of the night gather, dressed in black, look for acceptance. Among them are Ghost, who sees what others do not; Ann, longing for love; and Jason, whose real name is Nothing, newly awakened to an ancient, deathless truth about his father, and himself. Others are coming to Missing Mile tonight. Three beautiful, hip vagabonds - Molochai, Twig, and the seductive Zillah, whose eyes are as green as limes - are on their own lost journey, slaking their ancient thirst for blood, looking for supple young flesh.