This is a critical study of many of the leading writers of horror and supernatural fiction since World War II. The primary purpose is to establish a canon of weird literature, and to distinguish the genuinely meritorious writers of the past fifty years from those who have obtained merely transient popular renown. Accordingly, the author regards the complex, subtle work of Shirley Jackson, Ramsey Campbell, Robert Aickman, T.E.D. Klein, and Thomas Ligotti as considerably superior to the best...

As Stephen King will attest, the popularity of the occult in American literature has only grown since the days of Edgar Allan Poe. American Supernatural Tales celebrates the richness of this tradition with chilling contributions from some of the nation’s brightest literary lights, including Poe himself, H. P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and—of course—Stephen King. By turns phantasmagoric, spectral, and demonic, this is a frighteningly good additi...

Katharine Vance had supposedly committed suicide in 1932, but when she surfaces under another name a year later, with no memory of her previous life, private eye Joe Scintilla is hired to investigate. He must travel from his native New York to Los Angeles to Italy, to uncover the nefarious schemes of "The Removal Company." A thrill-a-minute hard-boiled adventure, the first of a series!

Baltimore native Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956) was an essayist, literary critic, magazine editor, novelist, and journalist. Starting as a reporter for the Baltimore Morning Herald at the turn of the century, Mencken eventually became associated with the Baltimore Sun and his work for the newspaper spanned five decades.In H.L. Mencken: An Annotated Bibliography, S.T. Joshi provides the most exhaustive and comprehensive bibliography of the writings of H. ...

These 23 chilling tales tell of the returning dead, haunted places, weird creatures, and the supernatural in "The Return of the Soul" by Robert Hichens, "The Mummy's Foot" by Theophile Gautier, Lafcadio Hearn's "Of a Promise Broken," as well as spine-tinglers by Algernon Blackwood, J. Sheridan LeFanu, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, Lord Dunsany, and other masters.

This original anthology presents 19 short stories that cover nearly a century of speculative fiction by women authors. Selections range from Mary Shelley's "Transformation" (1830), a pendant to Frankenstein in its themes and motifs, to "Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched" (1922) by May Sinclair, a tale of time travel that follows its heroine to Hell and back.Gripping narratives include Virginia Woolf's "A Haunted House," in which a ghostly couple revisit their former home; "A...

**A stunningly creepy deluxe hardcover edition with spot gloss, black sprayed edges, black-stained pages, and black endpapers.Part of a six-volume series of the best in classic horror, selected by Academy Award-winning director of The Shape of Water Guillermo del Toro.**American Supernatural Tales is the ultimate collection of weird and frightening American short fiction. As Stephen King will attest, the popularity of the occult in American literature has only grow...

Returning to the horror story genre again and again during the first 20 years of his literary career, Rudyard Kipling produced a substantial body of work in the genre. This collection includes 17 of the best of these tales.Written in Kipling’s vigorous, plain-spoken manner and gathered together for the first time in one volume, the stories vary widely in tone, style, and subject matter — from comic ghost stories (“Haunted Subalterns”) to grim tales of psychological terror (“The Wand...

This original compilation presents chilling tales of terror by an unjustly neglected author. Inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe as well as his own vivid nightmares, Edward Lucas White (1866–1934) weaves a tapestry of weird stories populated by ghouls, monsters, a witch doctor, and creatures of ancient myths.The collection features White's most famous story, "Lukundoo," a gripping fable of an American explorer who incurs the wrath of an African sorcerer. Other tales include "So...

H. L. Mencken’s reputation as a journalist and cultural critic of the twentieth century has endured well into the twenty-first. His early contributions as a writer, however, are not very well known. He began his journalistic career as early as 1899 and in 1910 cofounded the Baltimore Evening Sun. The next year he initiated a column—The Free Lance—that ran six days a week for four and a half years, until the Sun discontinued it, partially in response to Mencken’s controver...

A FEAST OF TERROR In the second volume of the critically acclaimed Black Wings series, S.T. Joshi— the world's foremost Lovecraft scholar—has assembled eighteen more brand-new and imaginative horror tales, inspired by the twentieth century's greatest writer of the supernatural, H. P. Lovecraft. Leading contemporary horror authors, including John Shirley, Tom Fletcher, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Jonathan Thomas, Nick Mamatas, Richard Gavin, Melanie Tem, John Langan, Jason C. Eckhardt, Don Webb, Da...

Volume 6 in the successful and critically acclaimed series of Lovecraftian horror anthologies by the most prominent acolytes of the horror master.From claustrophobic fear in isolated New England towns to terrifying threats that span the infinite cosmos, the tales herein are fuelled by H. P. Lovecraft's creations. While his horrors originate in a vast cosmos outside of space and time, the terrors they bring strike ordinary humans caught up in conflicts far beyond their control. This volume ...