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(0)William Roberts
22) What comes next
23) The naked face
24) Clandestine
25) Billy Budd
A young sailor in the eighteenth-century Royal Navy is falsely accused of mutiny in this classic tale of good and evil by the celebrated author of Moby Dick.
England, 1797. Billy Budd, a young sailor aboard the merchant ship Rights-of-Man is conscripted to serve on a Royal Navy warship, the HMS Bellipotent. Innocent and charming despite his stutter, Billy is quickly accepted by the crew—and resented by the
...The horrors of the Spanish Inquisition, with its dungeon of death, and the overhanging gloom on the House of Usher demonstrate unforgettably the unique imagination of Edgar Allan Poe. Unerringly, he touches upon some of our greatest nightmares – premature burial, ghostly transformation and words from beyond the grave. Written in the 1840s, they have retained their power to shock and frighten even now.
At the Mountains of Madness first appeared in 1936, in the February, March and April editions of the American magazine Astounding Stories. One of H. P. Lovecraft's most chilling works, it draws on Edgar Allan Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, as well as Lovecraft's deep fascination with the Antarctic. The sinister discoveries made by a group of explorers in At the Mountains of Madness are testament to the author's enormous
...At the heart of these stories, as with all the best of Lovecraft's work, is the belief that the Earth was once inhabited by powerful and evil gods, just waiting for the chance to recolonise their planet. Cthulhu is one such god, lurking deep beneath the sea until called into being by cult followers who—like all humans—know not what they do. It is because of these dark, mythic tales with their terrified awareness of the limits of Man's
...H.P. Lovecraft never found fame during his lifetime and died in 1937 in relative obscurity. But in the decades that followed his death, his importance as a unique and original visionary in the genre of science fantasy and 'weird fiction' has grown monumentally, so that even talents such as author Stephen King and film-maker John Carpenter have described him as a prime influence upon their creative lives. Here, then, is a selection of his stories.
...The Shadow Over Innsmouth and The Whisperer in Darkness are counted amongst H.P. Lovecraft's most popular stories. In the first we are transported to the decrepit coastal town of Innsmouth, whose amphibian-like citizens betray a dark and sinister secret. The second takes us to Vermont, where a university professor becomes embroiled in a mind- bending, celestial mystery after strange things are seen floating in the rivers. Dark, brooding and suspenseful,
...Five great American short story writers, dating from the turn of the 19th/20th centuries are represented here. Different in atmosphere and writing style, they nevertheless caught the mood and concerns of the day in a way that was distinctly American. Bierce's "An Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge" leaves echoes in the imagination; the stories by Crane and London recall the themes of the Civil War and the Klondike for which they are well known. Twain's
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