A mysterious dirge in human form, Gaston Leroux's Phantom of the Opera is both man and monster, the villain of one of the more famous novels of the early 20th century. Fittingly, the Opera ghost has inspired grandiose movies and an award-winning musical. And now, an impressive anthology of horror and weird fiction, edited by Steve Berman. What has happened to the purloined body of Lon Chaney? Who is convinced that the Phantom is alive after the events of Paris? And contemporary haunting st...

What happens when we go looking for trouble? Delights or dismay? Many horror stories and films, as do plenty of hook-ups, begin with this premise. When you can't sleep and begin browsing Grindr or Scruff, why not invite the guy without a face pic who has been taunting you to come over? Dancing at the club? The fierce-looking man gesturing with a shake of his head to the back alley door seems promising. How about picking up a hitchhiker late at night on a lonely road? The allure of trouble ...

It's a wonder humanity ever survived into the twenty-first century. Even Neanderthals knew to bury the dead beneath stones to prevent corpses from rising. Ancient civilizations feared slain warriors would return from battlefields, medieval physicians worried that bodies would rise from plague pits, many cultures buried the dead at crossroads to prevent the dead from walking. In Zombies: Shambling Through the Ages, editor Steve Berman has collected stories that reveal the threat of...

The 2009 edition of Wilde Stories, edited by Steve Berman, promises readers a range of imaginative gay-themed fiction culled from the prior year. These are tales that range from the horrorific (Lee Thomas' "I'm Your Violence") to the surreal (Sven Davisson's "Dim Star Descried") to the fantastical ("Firooz and His Brother" by Alex Jeffers). Many of the authors included have won awards for their fiction, and their stories seek to press new boundaries of loneliness, loss and love between men...

Children are supposed to be all sugar and spice and everything nice . . . but we know that's not the truth. Dark tales of wicked tykes and dangerous kids playing vicious games that lead adults—sometimes their own parents—to their demise are a staple of frightening fiction. Beware the schoolyards and playgrounds, even the sanctity of the familial home, especially after dark. And don't be fooled by a trickle of tears or tiny hands reaching for you. These youngsters do not want to love or com...

On a chilly, autumn night, on a lonely New Jersey highway, a teenager meets the boy of his dreams dressed in vintage clothing. When the boy vanishes, the teenager discovers he's encountered the local legend, the ghost of a young man who died four decades earlier and has haunted that stretch of road ever since. Curious and smitten, the next evening the teen returns with his best friend. So begins an unusual story of boy-meets-ghost complete with Ouija boards, hours spent in cemeteries, scar...

One of the more admired characters in Western literature happens to be a murderer, a villain, a fiend: Count Dracula. Irish author Bram Stoker's classic novel stands high in the canon of speculative fiction, influencing countless twentieth- and twenty-first-century storytellers in a variety of mediums.It is only natural for the outsiders of society to reinterpret the world's most infamous vampire through the lenses of their own experience. Who is more outside of society than Dracul...

What has been missing from the daring tales of fairy tale heroes is quite simply some heft. In Burly Tales, Lambda Literary Award-winning editor Steve Berman has gathered a dozen stories of whimsy and romance that feature gay men with plenty of curves and fur. Run away with us to enchanted woods, where the cubs and bears are not going to eat you (not without informed, enthusiastic consent), where no one will judge if you take up residence in a house with seven bearded men and only one bed,...

"Entertaining tales of the macabre, sure to cause shivers and indigestion." - Kirkus Reviews, starred reviewThese are stories of men facing strange appetites within their own physicality, within a lover or, perhaps, a stranger's hungers. A young athlete attends an exclusive wrestling camp, but some of the campers are more focused on the unwelcome boys they claim lurk inside their bellies. A fixit man on a mission to retrieve a runaway finds himself forced into impersonating a pulp ...

The canon of Edgar Allan Poe, one of the foremost writers of dark and atmospheric fiction and poetry, offers readers haunted shores teeming with various erudite men brooding in the waning light over their feelings for unobtainable women. Yet, whether the tales or verses are grotesque or sinister, Poe's narrators are Outsiders, dealing with emotions that so many queer individuals feel: isolation and abandonment as well as loneliness and lost love. In Where Thy Dark Eye Glances, editor Steve...

The final volume in the series that offers readers the best gay-themed stories of the strange, uncanny, and fantastical is out! In these pages are work by such acclaimed spec fic authors as Richard Bowes, Sam J. Miller, Sean Eads, and John Chu. Turn a page and walk the halls of a library shelved with every book never completed by authors before they passed away, a fish grants a young man wishes without ever explaining their true cost, ghosts relive their erotic past, Captain Hook and the G...

The latest volume in the acclaimed Heiresses of Russ series features stories that are anything but invisible: the women in these tales are not hiding and are not easily overlooked but rather are choosing the harder path, the more dangerous route, whether that leads to love or loss or adventure. Included in these pages are stories that have won a World Fantasy Award, a Tiptree Award, and a British Fantasy Award...but every one of these stories chosen by guest editor A.M. Dellamonica (hersel...