"For the past century, what's left of mankind has hidden in a giant, three-walled city, trapped in fear of the bizarre, giant humanoids known as the Titans. Little is known about where they came from or why they are bent on consuming humankind, but the sudden appearance of an enormous Titan is about to change everything..."

"In the summer of 1988 , the mutilated bodies of several of several missing girls begin to turn up in a small Maryland town. The grisly evidence leads police to the terrifying assumption that a serial killer is on the loose in the quiet suburb, and soon a rumor begins to spread that the evil stalking local teens is not entirely human. But law enforcement and members of the FBI are certain the killer is a living, breathing madman - and that he's playing games with them. For a once peaceful community trapped in the depths of paranoia and suspicion, it feels like a nightmare that will never end. Recent college graduate Richard Chizmar returns to his hometown just as a curfew is enacted and a neighborhood watch group is formed. In the midst of preparing for his wedding and embarking on a writing career, he soon finds himself thrust into a real-life horror story. Inspired by the terrifying events, Chizmar writes a personal account of the serial killer's reign of terror, unaware that his time back home will continue to haunt him for years to come."

"H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) was a reclusive scribbler of horror stories for the American pulp magazines that specialized in Gothic and science fiction in the interwar years. He often published in "Weird Tales" and has since become the key figure in the slippery genre of 'weird fiction'. Lovecraft developed an extraordinary vision of feeble men driven to the edge of sanity by glimpses of malign beings that have survived from human prehistory or by malevolent extra-terrestrial visitations. The ornate language of his stories builds towards grotesque moments of revelation, quite unlike any other writer. This new selection brings together nine of his classic tales, focusing on the 'Cthulhu Mythos', a cycle of stories that develops the mythology of the Old Ones, the monstrous creatures who predate human life on earth. It includes a vital extract from Lovecraft's critical essay, 'Supernatural Horror in Literature', in which he gave his own important definition of 'weird fiction'. In a fascinating contextual introduction, Roger Luckhurst gives Lovecraft the attention he deserves as a writer who used pulp fiction to explore a remarkable philosophy that shockingly dethrones the mastery of man."

"The place is Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, an enclave of rigid piety huddled on the edge of a wilderness. Its inhabitants believe unquestioningly in their own sanctity. But in Arthur Miller's edgy masterpiece, that very belief will have poisonous consequences when a vengeful teenager accuses a rival of witchcraft - and then when those accusations multiply to consume the entire village. First produced in 1953, at a time when America was convulsed by a new epidemic of witchhunting, 'The Crucible' brilliantly explores the threshold between individual guilt and mass hysteria, personal spite and collective evil. It is a play that is not only relentlessly suspenseful and vastly moving but that compels readers to fathom their hearts and consciences in ways that only the greatest theater ever can."

"'Dracula' (1897) begins with a young solicitor, Jonathan Harker, on his way to Transylvania to meet Count Dracula, who is buying property in London. Harker endures a nightmarish stay at Dracula's castle, which foreshadows some bizarre events in England. First, a huge wolf-like creature is seen to leap from the deck of a Russian ship which has run aground on the shores of Whitby, its captain dead at the helm and its crew mysteriously absent; and then Lucy - a friend of Harker's fiancee, Mina - develops a strange wasting disease and red marks on her throat. Vampire expert Professor Van Helsing convinces Harker and his friends that if Mina is not to share the same fate as poor 'undead' Lucy, Dracula must be caught and ritually killed."

"'Frankenstein' is the most famous novel by Mary Shelley: a dark Faustian parable of science misused that was an immediate success on its publication in 1818. Purporting to be the record of an explorer, it tells of Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant but wayward student of science, who builds a human from dead flesh. Horrified at what he has done, he abandons his creation. The creature, an outcast for his horrific appearance, learns language and becomes civilized. In time, he attempts to join society but is rejected because he is assumed to have murderous intentions. Spurned, he seeks vengeance on his creator. So begins a cycle of destruction, with Frankenstein and his 'monster' pursuing each other to the extremes of nature until all vestiges of their humanity are lost in monomaniacal hatred. In 1831, Mary Shelley succumbed to conservative pressures and toned down the more radical elements of the work. The novel is here presented in its original, unexpurgated form."

"'We need a new way of reading Poe, a way just as informed as the new readings of Mark Twain and Herman Melville, which in the last few decades have saved their works from consignment to the adolescent's bookshelf. We must divorce ourselves from the traditional Gothicist view of Poe... Almost everything that Poe wrote is qualified by, indeed controlled by, a prevailing 'irony' in which the artist presents us with slyly insinuated mockery of both ourselves as readers and himself as writer. The view of art (and life) informing both the tales and the poems, and to an extent the criticism... ambivalently and ironically explored the fads of the Romantic Age. All of Poe's fiction, and the poems as well, can be seen as one coherent piece-as the work of one of the greatest ironists of world literature... The present anthology includes works which represent the range of Poe's imagination, form the best of his comic and satiric works to the best of his Gothic works... The fundamental ironic and skeptical consistency informing the seemingly diverse performance collected here is a remarkable literary achievement-perhaps one of the most remarkable of the nineteenth century.' - G.R. Thompson, form the Introduction"

"Four seekers have arrived at the rambling old pike known as Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of psychic phenomena; Theodora, his lovely and lighthearted assistant; Luke, the adventurous future inheritor of the estate; and Eleanor, a friendless, fragile young woman with a dark past. As they begin to cope with chilling, even horrifying occurrences beyond their control or understanding, they cannot possibly know what lies ahead. For Hill House is gathering its powers-and soon it will choose one of them to make its own."

"To the children, the town was their whole world. To the adults, knowing better, Derry, Maine, was just their home town: familiar, well-ordered, a good place to live. It was the children who saw-and felt-what made Derry so horribly different. In the storm drains, in the sewers, It lurked, taking on the shape of every nightmare, each person's deepest dread. Sometimes It reached up, seizing, tearing, killing... The adults, knowing better, knew nothing. Time passed and the children grew up, moved away. The horror of It was deep-buried, wrapped in forgetfulness. Until the grown-up children were called back, once more to confront It as It stirred and coiled in the sullen depths of their memories, reaching up again to make their past nightmares a terrible present reality."

"After receiving a frantic letter from her newlywed cousin, Noemi Taboada heads to High Place, a distant house in the Mexican countryside, unsure what she will find. Noemi is an unlikely rescuer: She's a glamorous debutante, more suited to cocktail parties than amateur sleuthing. But she's also tough, smart, and not afraid: not of her cousin's new English husband, a stranger who is both menacing and alluring; not of his father, the ancient patriarch who seems fascinated by Noemi; and not even of the house itself, which begins to invade Noemi's dreams with visions of blood and doom. Noemi's only ally in this inhospitable place is the family's youngest son. But he too may be hiding something dark. For there are many secrets behind the walls of High Place, as Noemi discovers when she begins to unearth stories of violence and madness. Mesmerized by this terrifying yet seductive world, Noemi may soon find it impossible to save her cousin - or even escape this enigmatic house."

"A mysterious island. An abandoned orphanage. A strange collection of very peculiar photographs. It all waits to be discovered in 'Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children', an unforgettable novel that mixes fiction and photography in a thrilling reading experience. As our story opens, a horrific family tragedy sets sixteen-year-old Jacob journeying to a remote island off the coast of Wales, where he discovers the crumbling ruins of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. As Jacob explores its abandoned bedrooms and hallways, it becomes clear that Miss Peregrine's children were more than just peculiar. They may have been dangerous. They may have been quarantined on a deserted island for a good reason. And somehow-impossible though it seems-they may still be alive."

"In the shadow of Mount hood, sixteen-year-old Tennant is checking rabbit traps with her eight-year-old sister, Sophie, when the girls are suddenly overcome by a strange vibration rising out of the forest, building in intensity until it sounds like a deafening crescendo of screams. From out of nowhere, their father sweeps them up and drops them through a trapdoor into a storm cellar. But the sound only gets worse..."

"First published in 1983, PET SEMATARY has since been regarded as one of Stephen King's most frightening and controversial novels. Daring to cross the boundaries of conventional fiction, King has woven a tale so fundamentally startling that he himself was hesitant for it to see the light of day upon its completion. A multilayered examination into the nature of untimely death, shattering loss, and utter desperation, PET SEMATARY tears asunder the very fabric connecting our seemingly normal world and the afterlife... leaving readers with an awful truth too haunting to ever forget."

"Since its original publication fifty-five years ago, Daphne du Maurier's 'Rebecca' has been a perennial favorite - a classic - throughout the world. Set at the great Cornwall estate of Manderley, one of the most famous country houses in England, the story has an immediate urgency, a brilliantly created atmosphere of suspense. As the novel opens, Manderley's glamorous mistress, Rebecca, has been dead for eight months - drowned in a tragic sailing accident. But her legacy lives on, especially in the mind of Maxim de Winter's young and frightened second wife. Through her eyes we come to know Rebecca, from the tall and sloping 'R' with which she signed her name, to the way she so meticulously organized the magnificent annual costume ball that was attended by the whole countryside."

"This is the place. It breathes. It eats. And, at night, beneath a crawling ground fog with the luster of vaporized pearl, it dreams; dreams while tiny predators stage a nightmare ballet in sharp black grass. It is a living thing. It has a soul. It has a face. At night you can almost see it. At night you can almost imagine what it might look like if the swamp were boiled down to its essence, and distilled into corporeal form; if all the much, the forgotten muskrat bones, and all the luscious decay would rise up and wade on two legs through the shallows; if the swamp had a spirit and that spirit walked like a man... At night, you can almost imagine. You can stare into those places where the evening has pooled beneath the distant trees, and glimpse an ambiguous shifting of the darkness: something large, large and slow, its movements solemn and inevitable, heavy with clotted, sodden weed that forms its flesh. Its skeleton of tortured root creaks with each funereal pace, protesting at the damp and sullen weight. Within their sockets its eyes float like blood-poppies in puddles of ink. You can inhale through flared nostrils, drinking in its musk, green and pungent. There is the delicate scent of mosses and lichens adorning its flanks. There is the dry and acrid aftertaste of the pinmold that spreads across its shoulders, fanning out in a dull gray rash. You can stand alone in the blind darkness and know that were you to raise your arm, reaching out to its full extremity, your fingernails would brush with something wet, something supple and resilient. Something moving."

"The Overlook Hotel claimed the most beautiful physical setting of any resort in the world; but Jack Torrance, the new winter caretaker, his wife Wendy, and their five-year-old son Danny saw much more than its splendor. Jack saw the Overlook as an opportunity, a desperate way back from failure and despair; Wendy saw this lonely sanctuary as a frail chance to preserve their family; and Danny?...Danny, who was blessed or cursed with a shining, precognitive gift, saw visions hideously beyond the comprehension of a small boy. He sensed the evil coiled within the Overlook's one hundred and ten empty rooms; an evil that was waiting just for them."

"The carnival rolls in sometime after the midnight hour of a chill Midwestern October eve. Ushering in Halloween a week before its time, a calliope's shrill siren song beckons to all with a seductive promise of dreams and youth regained. Young boyhood companions James Nightshade and Will Halloway are the first to heed its call. From a place of safety, they watch a midway come to spectral life, their emotions a riot of eagerness, trepidation, bravado, and uncertainty. For they can sense the change that's in the air; that this is the Autumn in which innocence must vanish in the harsh, acrid smoke of disillusionment...and horror. In this season of dying; Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show has come to Green Town, Illinois, to destroy every life touched by its strange and sinister mystery. And two inquisitive boys standing precariously on the brink of adulthood will soon discover the secret of the satanic raree-show's mazes and mirrors, as they learn all too well the heavy cost of wishes and the stuff of nightmares. All those who still dream and remember-and those who have heard the whispering but have yet to experience its dark, poetic power-you are welcome. Step inside and take a seat. A shadow show like none other is about to begin...again."