Books

Clive Barker is widely acknowledged as the master of nerve-shattering horror. The Hellbound Heart is one of his best, one of the most dead-frightening stories you are likely to ever read, a story of the human heart and all the great terrors and ecstasies within. It was also the book behind the cult horror film, Hellraiser.In a quiet house on a quiet street Frank and Julia are having an affair. Not your ordinary affair. For Frank it began with his own insatiable sexual appetite, a mysterious lacquered box- and then an unhinged voyage through a netherworld of imaginable pleasures and unimaginable horror… Now Frank - or what is left of Frank - waits in an empty room. All he wants is to live as he was before. All Julia can do is bring him her unfulfilled passions… and a little flesh and blood…

Down-and-out drunk Terry Lennox has a problem: his millionaire wife is dead and he needs to get out of LA fast. So he turns to the only friend he can trust: private investigator Philip Marlowe. Marlowe is willing to help a man down on his luck, but later Lennox commits suicide in Mexico and things start to turn nasty. Marlowe is drawn into a sordid crowd of adulterers and alcoholics in LA's Idle Valley, where the rich are suffering one big suntanned hangover. Marlowe is sure Lennox didn't kill his wife, but how many stiffs will turn up before he gets to the truth?

In H.P. Lovecraft's, "The Dunwich Horror", we are told the story of Wilbur Whateley, the son of a deformed albino mother and an unknown father (alluded to in passing by the mad Old Whateley as "Yog-Sothoth"), and the strange events surrounding his birth and precocious development. Wilbur matures at an abnormal rate, reaching manhood within a decade. All the while, his sorcerer grandfather indoctrinates him into certain dark rituals and the study of witchcraft.

When junior manager Frank Dominio is suddenly demoted and then sacked it seems there was more than a grain of truth to his persecution fantasies. But as he prepares to even the score with those responsible for his demise, he unwittingly finds an ally in a dark and malevolent force that grants him supernatural powers. Frank takes his revenge in the most ghastly ways imaginable - but there will be a terrible price to pay once his work is done.Destined to be a cult classic, this tale of corporate horror and demonic retribution will strike a chord with anyone who has ever been disgruntled at work. Also contains the stories "I Have A Special Plan For This World" and "The Nightmare Network".

It was winter time, and there were black terrible woods hanging from the hills all round; it was like seeing a large room hung with black curtains, and the shape of the trees seemed quite different from any I had ever seen before. I was afraid. Then beyond the woods there were other hills round in a great ring, but I had never seen any of them; it all looked black, and everything had a voor over it. It was all so still and silent, and the sky was heavy and grey and sad, like a wicked voorish dome in Deep Dendo.

The supernatural stories that make up Robert W. Chambers’s classic piece of weird fiction are tied together by a play that brings madness to all who read it: The King in Yellow. It’s a book that draws readers in with an irresistible yet innocent opening act, then drives them insane with the poisonous words of Act 2. It’s a book that cannot be suppressed, spreading like a disease from city to city, continent to continent. An influence on writers from H. P. Lovecraft to Neil Gaiman, The King in Yellow is one of the most important works of American supernatural fiction. In this dangerously unputdownable graphic-novel adaptation, I. N. J. Culbard brings to life a thrilling tale of horror that will make readers laugh and cry and tremble with fright . . . Read at your own risk.

First published in 1967 and re-issued in 1983, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream contains seven stories with copyrights ranging from 1958 through 1967. This edition contains the original introduction by Theodore Sturgeon and the original foreword by Harlan Ellison, along with a brief update comment by Ellison that was added in the 1983 edition. Among Ellison's more famous stories, two consistently noted as among his very best ever are the title story and the volume's concluding one, Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes.Since Ellison himself strongly resists categorization of his work, we won't call them science fiction, or SF, or speculative fiction or horror or anything else except compelling reading experiences that are sui generis. They could only have been written by Harlan Ellison and they are incomparably original.CONTENT"I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream""Big Sam Was My Friend""Eyes of Dust""World of the Myth""Lonelyache""Delusion for Dragonslayer""Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes"

A short and entertaining book on the modern art of writing well by New York Times bestselling author Steven PinkerWhy is so much writing so bad, and how can we make it better? Is the English language being corrupted by texting and social media? Do the kids today even care about good writing? Why should any of us care?In The Sense of Style, the bestselling linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker answers these questions and more. Rethinking the usage guide for the twenty-first century, Pinker doesn’t carp about the decline of language or recycle pet peeves from the rulebooks of a century ago. Instead, he applies insights from the sciences of language and mind to the challenge of crafting clear, coherent, and stylish prose. In this short, cheerful, and eminently practical book, Pinker shows how writing depends on imagination, empathy, coherence, grammatical knowhow, and an ability to savor and reverse engineer the good prose of others. He replaces dogma about usage with reason and evidence, allowing writers and editors to apply the guidelines judiciously, rather than robotically, being mindful of what they are designed to accomplish. Filled with examples of great and gruesome prose, Pinker shows us how the art of writing can be a form of pleasurable mastery and a fascinating intellectual topic in its own right.

First published in 1959, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House has been hailed as a perfect work of unnerving terror. It is the story of four seekers who arrive at a notoriously unfriendly pile called Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of a "haunting"; Theodora, the lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, a friendless, fragile young woman well acquainted with poltergeists; and Luke, the future heir of Hill House. At first, their stay seems destined to be merely a spooky encounter with inexplicable phenomena. But Hill House is gathering its powers—and soon it will choose one of them to make its own.

When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse.'The tale of Carrie Meeber's rise to stardom in the theatre and George Hurstwood's slow decline captures the twin poles of exuberance and exhaustion in modern city life as never before. The premier example of American naturalism, Dreiser's remarkable first novel has deeply influenced such key writers as William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Saul Bellow, and Joyce Carol Oates. This edition uses the 1900 text, which is regarded as the author's final version.

Nathan Ballingrud's Shirley Jackson Award winning debut collection is a shattering and luminous experience not to be missed by those who love to explore the darker parts of the human psyche. Monsters, real and imagined, external and internal, are the subject. They are us and we are them and Ballingrud's intense focus makes these stories incredibly intense and irresistible.These are love stories. And also monster stories. Sometimes these are monsters in their traditional guises, sometimes they wear the faces of parents, lovers, or ourselves. The often working-class people in these stories are driven to extremes by love. Sometimes, they are ruined; sometimes redeemed. All are faced with the loneliest corners of themselves and strive to find an escape.Nathan Ballingrud was born in Massachusetts but has spent most of his life in the South. He worked as a bartender in New Orleans and New York City and a cook on offshore oil rigs. His story "The Monsters of Heaven" won the inaugural Shirley Jackson Award. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with his daughter.

The first career retrospective of terrifying stories by "one of the greatest writers of the 20th century" (Ray Bradbury), edited by award-winning author Victor LaValle.Among the greats of 20th-century horror and fantasy, few names stand above Richard Matheson. Though known by many for novels like I Am Legend and his sixteen Twilight Zone episodes, Matheson truly shines in his chilling, masterful short stories. Since his first story appeared in 1950, virtually every major writer of science fiction, horror, and fantasy has fallen under his influence, including Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Peter Straub, and Joe Hill, as well as filmmakers like Stephen Spielberg and J.J. Abrams. Matheson revolutionized horror by taking it out of Gothic castles and strange cosmos and setting it in the darkened streets and suburbs we recognize as our own. He infused tales of the fantastic and supernormal with dark explorations of human nature, delving deep into the universal dread of feeling alone and threatened in a dangerous world. The Best of Richard Matheson brings together his greatest hits as chosen by Victor LaValle, an expert on horror fiction and one of its brightest talents, marking the first major overview of Matheson's legendary career.

Color Out of Space author: H.P. Lovecraft A horrific tale written from the perspective of an unnamed surveyor from Boston. In order to prepare for the construction of a new reservoir in Massachusetts, he surveys a rural area that is to be flooded near the town of Arkham. He comes across a mysterious, abandoned farmstead, which is completely devoid of all life. At the center of the farmstead is an old well. The site fills him with an unnatural sense of dread, and he hurries past it....

What an odd fantasy! No swords, no sorcery, no elves, no thieves, no imaginary beasts, no multiple planes of existence . . . nothing but a cavernous castle peopled by eccentrics with Dickensian names (Sepulchrave, Prunesquallor, Swelter, Flay) whose lives are determined by centuries--perhaps millenia--of complex rituals. Although the people themselves seem to be British, the enormous burden of tradition under which they labor seems Asiatic in its detailed intensity, and it is instructive to learn that Peake spent his formative years in China, not far from the Imperial City.This is superior fantasy, but like The Worm Ouroboros it is not immediately accessible. Peak was a painter, and as a writer he exercises his painterly imagination by creating scenes--particularly his major ones, like the death-duel of Flay and Swelter--as if each moment were a tableau, part of a series of individual canvases. The reader is then faced with the duty of internalizing each of these stationary images, combining them into a progression, and then animating them--sort of like ruffling the pages of a cartoonist's flip book--in order to release the cinematic power of the scene. For someone like myself who possesses a third-rate visual imagination, this requires re-reading certain passages more than a couple of times.I must admit, though, that Peake's approach has a certain cumulative power. It serves to preserve these odd, angular characters of his like flies in amber, trapped forever in their traditions like individual frames in an epic film, circumscribed by the labyrinthine spaces of the monstrous castle that is Gormenghast.

This early work by H. P. Lovecraft was originally published in 1924. Born in 1890 in Rhode Island, USA, Lovecraft began writing at a very young age, quickly developing a deep and abiding interest in science. In 1913, Lovecraft joined the UAPA (United Amateur Press Association) but it was four years later, in 1917, that he began to focus on fiction, producing such well-known early stories as 'Dagon' and 'A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson'. However, it was during the last decade of his life that Lovecraft produced his most notable works, such as 'the Dunwich Horror' and 'The Call of Cthulhu' which subsequently earned him his place as one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th century. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900's and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions.

This was no ordinary war. This was a war to make the world safe for democracy. And if democracy was made safe, then nothing else mattered - not the millions of dead bodies, nor the thousands of ruined lives... This is no ordinary novel. This is a novel that never takes the easy way out: it is shocking, violent, terrifying, horrible, uncompromising, brutal, remorseless and gruesome... but so is war. Winner of the National Book Award.

I don't think one can truly rate Ghost Story as a novel without acknowledging the fact that it's a literary homage to the classics of the genre. Indeed, two characters bear the surnames of Hawthorne and James.This is my introduction to the work of Peter Straub. Having read The Talisman and Black House which he co-authored with Stephen King I was anxious to know how he writes on his own, and Ghost Story came recommended by virtually everyone who has read it. As mentioned in the first paragraph, Ghost Story is a homage to the old masters who paved the road of fright for future generations. Peter Straub himself says that "[Ghost Story] started as a result of my having just read all the American supernatural fiction I could find". It is noticeable; the first part is largely a reworking of The Turn of The Screw. The theme of a story within a story is everpresent, as the work deals with a group of old men who tell themselves ghost stories on regular meetings. Shades of Lovecraft, Poe and Hawthorne brood in the corners of the rooms they sit in.The men find themselves terrorized by terrible, realistic nightmares. Terrible things start happening in the small, sleepy town of Millburn.They remember the crime they had committed years before...and wonder if the time of retribution has finally arrived.What's not to like? Several things. first of all, the pace: the book is monstrous slog. A chore to get through. Straub switches between several narrative viewpoints (much like Stoker in Dracula) and the plot plods frequently and slows down so much that reading soon becomes a challenge. There's no doubt that Straub is a great writer - some of his passages I've read several times, because I simply enjoyed them so much - but he becomes lost in what he tries to do, the references he includes so subtly vanish in the detail he describes so voraciously.The protagonists discuss ghost stories they tell to each other, but for some reason refuse to talk about the one they all share even when darkness has fallen upon their city. Instead of trying to scheme how to fight or at least delay the danger, they remain passive. No one fights back. No one things of moving away and running from the deadly force. The passivity, the stupidness of their actions drastically slows down the plot and kills any tension that might have emerged. It would be understandable if the novel featured only one protagonist who witnessed these events and who would be afraid to entrust his story to others (in fear of being considered insane) - but Ghost Story features a group of men who believe each other, and do nothing.The theme of a town besieged by malevolent forces or beings has been done previously, most notably by Peter Straub's fellow writer and friend Stephen King in Salem's Lot. Straub acknowledges the influcence: "I wanted to work on a large canvas. 'Salem's Lot showed me how to do this without getting lost among a lot of minor characters. Besides the large canvas, I also wanted a certain largeness of effect."However, while Salem's Lot was swift, fast-paced and competent in dealing with the theme, Ghost Story doesn't quite deliver. The town of Millburn is described as a small town, but it completely lacks any awareness and interaction. The characters seem to be detached from reality - everyone walks everywhere, and there's little mention of pop culture - music, television and such. The novel is supposed to take time in the 1970s, but for all we are shown it might just as well be the 1870s.Last, the Evil with a capital E. While the concept of the Evil is really interesting, the Evil is really inconsistent and incompetent. There's no sense of looming presence of Evil, ready to fall upon the heads of innocent people and end their lives at any moment, like in Salem's Lot or Phantoms. Evil seems to be employed when it is needed by the narrative, and then pushed back, only to be called again later. I don't want to spoil anything, but the nature of the Evil and it's actions don't follow any pattern of logic and reason. Evil is at times omniscient and capable of incredible power, only to have its abilities reduced to humanlike status, and then go back to the supernatural and all-powerful again. Evil capable of everything is boring - why, it'd take a snap of fingers to eliminate a human being, much like a child breaking a twig in two - but one might wonder why the author chose to grant his menace that priviledge, only to take it back...and then allow it to be all poweful again, several times.Overall, I'm sad to say that Ghost Story doesn't live up to the hype that surrrounds it. While it is a complex, multilayered work, a homage to the creators of the genre, It's not very compelling and in fact is pretty easy to put down and leave unfinished. The concept, the idea of the novel - the premise, the prose, the situations - everything works, but not as a whole. I think I like the idea of the book better than the book itself - Peter Straub tends to be meandering and repetitive. There are sections of Ghost Story that are narrated brilliantly, but there are sections that are stale and uninteresting. For each flash of suspense and atmosphere, there's a whole lot of mundane and ordinary. The idea of the novel deserves five stars, but I can't give the novel itself more than three - I liked it, but I liked analysing the text more than reading it. Nevertheless, Peter Straub is an ambitious writer who's much more "literary" than most horror authors - his prose and style easily rivals the so-called "serious" writers - and I most certainly will read his other novels.

Diane, it’s 8:43 p.m. on May the 22, and I have just completed what I believe to be a monumental and not insignificant undertaking: over the course of the last 10 days, I have successfully devoured all 30 episodes of the original “Twin Peaks” show, survived the bleak terror that is “Fire Walk with Me,” consumed all four episodes of Showtime’s new season, and now–last, but certainly not least–I have dissected all 368 fascinating pages of Mark Frost’s “The Secret History of Twin Peaks.” Diane, while I will admit that I am, at least for the moment, feeling a bit “Twin Peaks”-ed out, please also believe me when I tell you that I am also feeling something else right now, something that–if I am not mistaken–bears a striking resemblance to love. Much like the love that I have for donuts. Or coffee. Especially coffee.Forgive my rambling, Diane, but it just can’t be helped; when you experience something as wonderful as “Twin Peaks” for the first time, cogency and focus are among the first casualties. In particular, “The Secret History of Twin Peaks” is something to behold, a literary tour de force that’s every bit as absorbing as the television program that inspired it (if not MORE so). While I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting Mark Frost in person, the man’s inventiveness cannot, and should not, be overlooked. Allow me a moment to ponder something aloud: although the brilliance of “Twin Peaks” often seems to be attributed solely to David Lynch–not shocking, given his flashy and defiantly non-mainstream style–I can’t help but suspect, now having read “The Secret History of Twin Peaks” and all of its labyrinthine detours into conspiracies and the realms of the paranormal, that it’s actually Frost’s uncanny ability to construct worlds and mythologies that pull the reader/viewer into their absorbing depths that is every bit as responsible for this property’s success. “The Secret History of Twin Peaks” is a testament to Frost’s constructive genius–somehow, the man manages to weave everything from UFOs, the Freemasons, Aleister Crowley, ancient Indian spirits, L. Ron Hubbard, Lewis and Clark, and even Richard Nixon together into a cohesive and original vision that is as baffling as it is hypnotic.What I’m trying to say, Diane–and again, please forgive my rambling, I now fear that perhaps I shouldn’t have had that extra cup this morning–is that this is a damn fine book, filled with damn fine research, damn fine Easter eggs, and good old fashioned, damn fine storytelling panache, and you simply MUST find the time to check it out for yourself, Diane–preferably after you’re done transcribing my tapes, of course. And preferably consumed with a cup of Good Morning America to go with it.