We’re prepared for you to question our choices, we ask only that you leave the chainsaw at home before doing so. Fans of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves and fellow ‘80s scribe Jack Cady’s The Well should appreciate navigating this maze. This collection of Joe R. Lansdale stories represents the best of the “Lansdale” genre—a strange mixture of dark crime, even darker humor, and adventure tales. —Steve Foxe, Rebecca didn’t coin the term “gaslighting,” but it’s one of literature’s most chilling examples of psychological harassment. While Horns is fast and punchy and NOS4A2 is sprawling and darkly fantastical, Heart-Shaped Box is like a long motorcycle ride straight into despair. 9. Horrorstör, his 2014 horror breakthrough, plopped readers into a haunted faux-IKEA full of torture instruments—beyond what the real-life stores already stock. You've seen Salo. It hooks you with unnerving stories of dread and evil, pushes your limits and pokes every phobia. And a desert island is the scene of the most terrifying struggle for survival ever waged. If Gillian Flynn is the queen of modern suspense, Ruth Ware is the knight presiding over the Round Table. Among them, his presence as Nephren-Ka, the dread Black Pharaoh of dynastic Egypt, dominates. Now, add demons, other dimensions, monsters, revenge, human sacrifice, and a dash of the truly inexplicable. Something of a punk-rock-ified, video-game-esque tear and tumble into the Weird Tales tradition, Wong (a.k.a. Cutting between the events of the show and an interview with Marjorie’s younger sister, filmed 15 years after the show’s conclusion, Tremblay walks a razor-thin edge between confirming and denying which forces are actually at play within Marjorie’s head, keeping readers guessing well after the final page is turned. This is the story of the (fictional) San Francisco music venue, The Shantyman.In Welcome to the Show, seventeen of today's hottest writers of horror and dark fiction come together in devilish harmony to trace The Shantyman's history from its disturbing birth through its apocalyptic encore.Featuring stories by Brian Keene, John Skipp, Mary SanGiovanni, Robert Ford, Max Booth III, Glenn Rolfe, Matt Hayward, Bryan Smith, Matt Serafini, Kelli Owen, Jonathan Janz, Patrick Lacey, Adam Cesare, Alan M Clark, Somer Canon, Rachel Autumn Deering and Jeff Strand.Compiled by Matt Hayward. These enthusiastic tales are not ashamed of visceral horror, of blood splashing freely across the page: "The Midnight Meat Train," a grisly subway tale that surprises you with one twist after another; "The Yattering and Jack," about a hilarious demon who possesses a Christmas turkey; "In the Hills, the Cities," an unusual example of an original horror premise; "Dread," a harrowing non-supernatural tale about being forced to realize your worst nightmare; "Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament," about a woman who kills men with her mind. But you don’t know. Like the great Michael McDowell and Karen Russell, Piccirilli mines his southern setting for the full range of the region’s complicated, messy magic. Some of the tales are more successful than others, but all are distinguished by strikingly beautiful images of evil and destruction. Douglas E. Winter presents a collection of all-new, tantalizingly terrifying stories by masters of horror. If that sounds comedic, that’s because there is a perverted sense of dark humor punctuating the novel’s scenes of shocking violence and grotesquery. Some names you know very well, but other names will surprise you. .an expedition that hunts dinosaurs across the fragile and dangerous chasm of time. But the interesting thing about I Am Legend is that it is an apocalyptic survival story. and other horrors that lurk in the water’s shivery depths. Madness in particular has captivated the imaginations of audiences consistently since it was first published in 1936, and its bitterly cold, ice-caked horrors can be felt reverberating through the ages and all the way into modern AMC TV series such as the first season of The Terror. Struggling is how you get stronger.” Neil Gaiman was probably thinking similar things when he wrote Coraline, an insidious middle-grade masterpiece with the power to unsettle any generation. This volume of stories and poems illustrates the ubiquitous presence of Nyarlathotep and shows him in several different guises. Rankings of this nature are subject. The horror genre has been around for centuries, but it really came into its own during the second half of the 20th century. —Tyler Kane, It’s a little odd getting around The Silence of the Lambs’ third-person present tense: “Starling looks down the corridor,” etc., but once you get used to it, it’s a device that ends up perfectly suiting the novel. Lovecraft has inspired writers of supernatural fiction, artists, musicians, filmmakers, and gamers. A little door that opens to a world of fairy tale wonders becomes the blood-drenched stomping ground for a gang of hunters in “Faun.” A grief-stricken librarian climbs behind the wheel of an antique Bookmobile to deliver fresh reads to the dead in “Late Returns.” In “By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain,” two young friends stumble on the corpse of a plesiosaur at the water’s edge, a discovery that forces them to confront the inescapable truth of their own mortality . If you’ve seen Roman Polanski’s film, then you know the story well: a young couple moves into a new apartment building, and there’s more to the kindly old neighbors than one might assume. The first story in the book is titled "The Veldt." 13 V/H/S. Both sides of Bradbury's vaunted childhood nostalgia are also on display, in the celebratory "Uncle Einar," and haunting "The Lake," the latter a fine elegy to childhood loss. 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