Four seekers have come to the ugly, abandoned old mansion: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of the psychic phenomenon called haunting; Theodara, his lovely and lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, the lonely, homeless girl well acquainted with poltergeists; and Luke, the adventurous future heir of Hill House. At first, their stay seems destined to be merely a spooky encounter with inexplicable noises and self-closing doors, but...

"We Have Always Lived in the Castle" by Shirley Jackson is a haunting tale that unfolds within the walls of the Blackwood family estate. Narrated by Mary Katherine "Merricat" Blackwood, the story reveals the eerie isolation of the remaining Blackwood family members after a mysterious and tragic event. Merricat's rituals and charms provide an unsettling backdrop to the family's eccentricities and the community's suspicion. As secrets unravel, the novel...

The murder of an old man is revealed after the murderer keeps hearing the continued beating of his victim's heart. Includes an analysis of the story and a biography of the author.

"In a mega-stakes, high-suspense race against time, three of the most unlikely and winning heroes Stephen King has ever created try to stop a lone killer from blowing up thousands. In the frigid pre-dawn hours, in a distressed Midwestern city, hundreds of desperate unemployed folks are lined up for a spot at a job fair. Without warning, a lone driver plows through the crowd in a stolen Mercedes, running over the innocent, backing up, and charging...

Civilization doesn't end with a bang or a whimper. It ends with a call on your cell phone. What happens on the afternoon of October 1 came to be known as the Pulse, a signal sent though every operating cell phone that turns its user into something...well, something less than human. Savage, murderous, unthinking-and on a wanton rampage. Terrorist act? Cyber prank gone haywire? It really doesn't matter, not to the people who avoided the technological...

A collection of fantasy stories and poems. In Chivalry, a woman discovers the Holy Grail in a secondhand shop, in Murder Mysteries, an angel visiting Los Angeles provides the inside story on Lucifer's revolt against God, and there are revisionist stories on Snow White and Santa Claus.

Looking for excitement, Coraline ventures through a mysterious door into a world that is similar, yet disturbingly different from her own, where she must challenge a gruesome entity in order to save herself, her parents, and the souls of three others.

"In a feat of virtuoso storytelling, Anne Rice unleashes Akasha, the queen of the damned, who has risen from a 6,000-year sleep to let loose the powers of the night. Akasha has a marvelously devious plan to "save" mankind and destroy the vampire Lestat in this extraordinarily sensual novel of the complex, erotic, electrifying world of the undead."--Amazon.com.

"Two friends, Tonnison and Berregnog, stumble upon an old house in rural Ireland and discover the journal of "the Recluse," an unidentified man who recorded his last days in the house before its destruction. The journal recounts strange visions that dogged the Recluse-terrifying creatures that crawl up from below the house to torment him. But the journal is unfinished, and the friends are left to speculate on the man's fate-and their own. First published...

A collection of more than twenty-five short fictional works follows a theme of the intersections between life and death, perception and reality, and darkness and light.