Halloween, 1963. They call him the October Boy, or Ol' Hacksaw Face, or Sawtooth Jack. Whatever the name, everybody in this small Midwestern town knows who he is. How he rises from the cornfields every Halloween, a butcher knife in his hand, and makes his way toward town, where gangs of teenage boys eagerly await their chance to confront the legendary nightmare. Both the hunter and the hunted, the October Boy is the prize in an annual rite of life and death. Pete McCormick knows that killing the October Boy is his one chance to escape a dead-end future in this one-horse town.

Blackwood mansion looms, surrounded by nightmare pines, atop the hill over the small town of New Haven. Ben Bookman, bestselling novelist and heir to the Blackwood estate, spent a weekend at the ancestral home to finish writing his latest horror novel, The Scarecrow. Now, on the eve of the book’s release, the terrible story within begins to unfold in real life.

It’s the house of their dreams. Former marine Harry and his wife, Sasha, have packed up their life and their golden retriever, Dash, and fled the corporate rat race to live off the land in rural Idaho. Their breathtaking new home sits on more than forty acres of meadow, aspen trees, and pine forest in the Teton Valley. Even if their friends and family think it’s a strange choice for an up-and-coming pair of urban professionals, Harry and Sasha couldn’t be happier about the future they’re building, all by their lonesome.

When Margaret and her husband Hal bought the large Victorian house on Hawthorn Street—for sale at a surprisingly reasonable price—they couldn’t believe they finally had a home of their own. Then they discovered the hauntings. Every September, the walls drip blood. The ghosts of former inhabitants appear, and all of them are terrified of something that lurks in the basement. Most people would flee. Margaret is not most people. Margaret is staying.

When you first enter The Halloween Store, things seem normal. Fun and frightful decorations, ghastly costumes and masks of the season, and bags of candy galore. Then, as you travel farther into its shadowy depths, things begin to change. The air smells of damp autumn leaves and candle-scorched pumpkin. The shelves of All Hallows’ Eve fare grow darker and more disturbing. Strange and unsettling things of Halloweens past and present lurk amid the cobwebs and dust....

Eric Ross is on the run from a mysterious past with his two daughters in tow. Having left his wife, his house, his whole life behind in Maryland, he's desperate for money—it's not easy to find steady, safe work when you can't provide references, you can't stay in one place for long, and you're paranoid that your past is creeping back up on you.

It’s the mid-'90s. Grunge and flannel are fading as the Spice Girls and Hot Topic conquer the malls. Cherry gloss glistens on the lips of the youth. Modems hiss as America comes online. And in a fog-drenched cove at the edge of New England, something terrible awakens when a fisherman reels in a gruesome catch: the remains of a young woman. Remains still pulsing with furious life.

Here are 16 chilling, never-before-published tales that explore every aspect of our darkest holiday, Halloween, coedited by Ellen Datlow, one of the most successful and respected genre editors, and Lisa Morton, a leading authority on Halloween. Included are stories about scheming jack-o'-lanterns, vengeful ghosts, otherworldly changelings, disturbingly realistic haunted attractions, masks that cover terrifying faces, murderous urban legends, parties gone bad, cult Halloween movies, and trick-or-treating in the future.

In the summer of 1994, psychologist Daniel Hill buys a rustic farmhouse nestled in the rolling hills of West Virginia. Along with his wife and teenage daughter, the family uproots their lives in Ohio and moves south. They are initially seduced by the natural beauty of the country setting. That soon changes when they discover a hidden room in the basement with a well, boarded shut and adorned with crucifixes. Local legends about the previous owner being an exorcist come to light, but by then, all Hell has broken loose.

St. Vincent's Orphanage for Boys. Turn of the century, in a remote valley in Pennsylvania. Here, under the watchful eyes of several priests, thirty boys work, learn, and worship. Peter Barlow, orphaned as a child by a gruesome murder, has made a new life here. As he approaches adulthood, he has friends, a future...a family. Then, late one stormy night, a group of men arrive at their door, one of whom is badly wounded, occult symbols carved into his flesh. His death releases an ancient evil that spreads like sickness, infecting St. Vincent's and the children within.

For nearly two decades, Jamie Warren has been running from darkness. He's haunted by a traumatic childhood and the guilt at having disappeared from his disabled brother's life. But then a series of unusual events reunites him with his estranged brother and their childhood friends, and none of them can deny the sense of fate that has seemingly drawn them back together. Nor can they deny the memories of that summer, so long ago—the strange magic taught to them by an even stranger man, and the terrible act that has followed them all into adulthood.

Some art takes on a life of its own. A beautiful house. A loving family. Two kids, a dog, and a tenure-track professorship teaching art at the local university. Dan Rineheart is living the dream. But all dreams must end. When an anonymous painting arrives at the university, Dan is tasked with uncovering the artist. No title. No name. No signature or frame. It’s a disturbing work of grotesque perfection. A work of art...that changes with each viewing. So begins the nightmare. Where painted clocks tick-tock in the dark hours before dawn.

Long ago, Nathan lived in a house in the country with his abusive father—and has never told his family what happened there. Long ago, Maddie was a little girl making dolls in her bedroom when she saw something she shouldn’t have—and is trying to remember that lost trauma by making haunting sculptures. Long ago, something sinister walked in the mountains and the coal mines of their hometown in rural Pennsylvania. Now, Nate and Maddie Graves are married, and they have moved back to their hometown with their son, Oliver. And now what happened long ago is happening again...to Oliver.

Writer Ben Mears has returned to his hometown of Jerusalem's Lot with the hope that moving into a delapidated mansion, long the subject of town lore, might help him get a handle on his life and provide inspiration for a new book. But when two young boys venture into the woods and only one comes out alive, Mears begins to realize that there may be something sinister at work.

"Pray they are hungry." Kara finds these words in the mysterious bunker that she’s discovered behind a hole in the wall of her uncle's house. Freshly divorced and living back at home, Kara now becomes obsessed with these cryptic words and starts exploring the peculiar bunker - only to discover that it holds portals to countless alternate realities. But these places are haunted by creatures that seem to hear thoughts...and the more you fear them, the stronger they become.

Fifteen of the biggest names in weird literature come together to pay tribute to Hellboy and the characters of Mike Mignola’s award-winning line of books! Assembled by Joe Golem and Baltimore co-writer Christopher Golden, this anthology boasts 15 original stories by the best in horror, fantasy, and science fiction, including Seanan McGuire (October Daye series), Chelsea Cain (Heartsick), Jonathan Maberry (Joe Ledger series), and more! The new writer of Hellboy and the BPRD, iZombie co-creator Chris Roberson, pitches in as well!

The house on Old Mill Road has stood in an open field for longer than Jesse Wells has been alive, its crooked windows and jutting turret tormenting the kids of Warsaw, Michigan the way only a haunted house knows how. Everyone imagines that something terrible lurks within the house’s abandoned rooms - especially Jesse and his two closest friends, Casey and Reed. But when Reed chooses the house as a backdrop for his own suicide, childhood ghost stories are transformed into a nightmare that sends Jesse into a downward spiral of grief.

A terrifying, thrilling collection of must-listen horror stories chock-full of nightmarish supernatural beings and the murderously disturbed that are sure to keep you up all night long.

The annual Halloween block party is the pinnacle of the year on idyllic suburban cul-de-sac Ivy Woods Drive. An influential group of neighborhood moms—known as the Ivy Five—plans the event for months. Except the Ivy Five has been four for a long time. When a new mother moves to town, eager to fit in, the moms see it as an opportunity to make the group whole again. This year's block party should be the best yet... until the women start receiving anonymous messages threatening to expose the quiet neighborhood's dark past—and the lengths they've gone to hide it.

Erasmo Cruz is from the wrong side of the tracks. His dad was a junkie who overdosed. His mom chose to run off rather than raise him. His only passion is the supernatural, and his only family is his grandmother, whose aches and pains, he soon learns, aren’t just from old age but from cancer. Desperate to help his grandmother pay for treatment, Erasmo sets up shop as a paranormal investigator.

Hunting for big bad wolves was never part of Agent Cooper Dayton's plan, but a werewolf attack lands him in the carefully guarded Bureau of Special Investigations. A new case comes with a new partner: ruggedly sexy werewolf Oliver Park. Park is an agent of The Trust, a werewolf oversight organization working to ease escalating tensions with the BSI. But as far as Cooper's concerned, it's failing. As they investigate a series of mysterious deaths unlike anything they've seen, every bone in Cooper's body is suspicious of his new partner....

Bossy. Heart of stone. Snarly mess next door. Send help before I'm prick-matized.... My next big mistake has a name. Warren Ford. Best kept secret in this weird little town. An alpha's alpha. Spartan abs. Too blunt for everybody's good. Moody, broody, mysterious, and totally up in my business.

In the rugged Pacific Northwest lies the Olympic National Forest - nearly a million acres of impenetrable darkness and impossible beauty. From deep within this old growth forest, a six-year-old girl appears. Speechless and alone, she offers no clue as to her identity, no hint of her past.

Jo Carter never thought she'd return to Clear Springs, Minnesota. But when the former journalist receives a cryptic note about the disappearance of her friend Sam twenty years before, she's compelled to find out what really happened. During her investigation, she learns another high school friend has died in a mysterious accident. Nothing is as it seems, and Jo must probe Clear Springs' darkest corners and her own painful and unreliable memories to discover the truth - and save herself from the killer who could still be on the hunt.

Ever come across a situation that simply wasn't right - where someone was getting the dirty end of the stick and you wished you could make things right but didn't know how? Fourteen-year-old Jack knows how. Or rather he's learning how. He's discovering that he has a knack for fixing things. Not bikes or toys or appliances - situations...It all starts when Jack and his best friends, Weezy and Eddie, discover a rotting corpse - the victim of ritual murder - in the fabled New Jersey Pine Barrens. Beside the body is an ancient artifact carved with strange designs.

Surrounded by barren trees in a snow-covered wilderness with a dim, dusky sky forever overhead, Siberia’s Kolyma Highway is 1200 miles of gravel packed permafrost within driving distance of the Arctic Circle. A narrow path where drivers face such challenging conditions as icy surfaces, limited visibility, and an average temperature of 60 degrees below zero, fatal car accidents are common.

Halloween, 1963. They call him the October Boy, or Ol' Hacksaw Face, or Sawtooth Jack. Whatever the name, everybody in this small Midwestern town knows who he is. How he rises from the cornfields every Halloween, a butcher knife in his hand, and makes his way toward town, where gangs of teenage boys eagerly await their chance to confront the legendary nightmare. Both the hunter and the hunted, the October Boy is the prize in an annual rite of life and death. Pete McCormick knows that killing the October Boy is his one chance to escape a dead-end future in this one-horse town.

Christopher Golden's Ararat is the heart-pounding tale of an adventure that goes wrong - on a biblical scale. When an earthquake reveals a secret cave hidden inside Mount Ararat in Turkey, a daring, newly engaged couple are determined to be the first ones inside...and what they discover will change everything. The cave is actually a buried ancient ship that many quickly come to believe is Noah's Ark. When a team of scholars, archaeologists, and filmmakers make it inside the ark, they discover an elaborate coffin in its recesses.

Across Italy there are many half-empty towns, nearly abandoned by those who migrate to the coast or to cities. The beautiful, crumbling hilltop town of Becchina is among them, but its mayor has taken drastic measures to rebuild―selling abandoned homes to anyone in the world for a single Euro, as long as the buyer promises to live there for at least five years. It’s a no-brainer for American couple Tommy and Kate Puglisi. Both work remotely, and Becchina is the home of Tommy’s grandparents, his closest living relatives.

A secret sect of the Catholic Church, armed with an ancient book of the undead called The Gospel of Shadows, has been slowly destroying vampires for centuries. Now the book has been stolen, and the sect races to retrieve it before their purpose is discovered: a final purge of all vampires. As the line between saints and shadows grows ominously faint, private eye Peter Octavian is drawn into the search. And he'll do anything to find the book...for Peter Octavian is also a vampire.

When best-selling horror author Sam McGarver is invited to spend Halloween night in one of the country's most infamous haunted houses, he reluctantly agrees. At least he won't be alone; joining him are three other masters of the macabre, writers who have helped shape modern horror. But what begins as a simple publicity stunt will become a fight for survival. The entity they have awakened will follow them, torment them, threatening to make them a part of the bloody legacy of Kill Creek.

On his 59th birthday, Tyson Parks—a famous, but struggling, horror writer—receives an ornate antiquarian desk in the hopes it will rekindle his creative juices. Perhaps inspire him to write another best-selling book and prove his best years aren’t behind him… As Tyson begins to use the new desk, he finds himself writing copy at an unfathomable speed, becomes so focused on writing that he binges on all-night, all-day sessions that take a serious physical and psychological toll. Soon, Tyson begins acting strange. Violent.

Eric Ross is on the run from a mysterious past with his two daughters in tow. Having left his wife, his house, his whole life behind in Maryland, he's desperate for money—it's not easy to find steady, safe work when you can't provide references, you can't stay in one place for long, and you're paranoid that your past is creeping back up on you.

Blackwood mansion looms, surrounded by nightmare pines, atop the hill over the small town of New Haven. Ben Bookman, bestselling novelist and heir to the Blackwood estate, spent a weekend at the ancestral home to finish writing his latest horror novel, The Scarecrow. Now, on the eve of the book’s release, the terrible story within begins to unfold in real life.

When Alice's husband disappears while investigating a series of strange and terrible incidents in the bustling seaport of Salem, she is forced to bring her young daughter, Abigail, along from Boston while she takes up the search. But she soon learns of a terrible curse that has the entire town bracing for nightfall: One hundred years after the infamous witch trials, the vengeful spirit of a woman hanged for witchcraft will rise from hell to claim the souls of Salem's children.

When Tess Devlin runs into her ex-husband, Nick, on a Boston sidewalk, she's furious at him for pretending he doesn't know her. She calls his cell to have it out with him only to discover that he's in New Hampshire with his current girlfriend. But if Nick's in New Hampshire...who did she encounter on the street?

When Ryne Burdette inherits his family's old hunting cabin deep in the Yukon wilderness, he wants to say no. Nothing much is left in that place except for unpleasant memories and the smoke of old burns. But after a tragic year, he sees a weekend trip to the cabin with his best friends as a way to recuperate and begin again. But there is something strange about these woods.

Strang isn’t the small, quaint town it appears to be. It’s haunted every night by a creature the townsfolk refer to as Halloween. Once the sun sets each day, Halloween emerges to collect its treats: a small, live offering from each household. The residents comply because no one wants to be the target of Halloween’s tricks.

Who better to repel a body-snatching alien invasion than a group of teenage horror nerds? Billy and Tom are best friends, but each knows that at the end of the school year they'll be moving in different directions. But why not go out with a bang and throw one last video night? They can invite some girls over, order a pizza, then maybe try and fight the alien infection that's taken hold over their suburban town. It's The Breakfast Club meets The Night of the Creeps in this slime-drenched '80s horror romp.

After watching his asthmatic daughter suffer in the foul city air, Theodore Constantine decides to get back to the land. When he and his wife search New England for the perfect nineteenth-century home, they find no township more charming, no countryside more idyllic than the farming village of Cornwall Coombe. Here they begin a new life: simple, pure, close to nature - and ultimately more terrifying than Manhattan’s darkest alley.