Thomas Ligotti’s debut collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, and his second, Grimscribe, permanently inscribed a new name in the pantheon of horror fiction. Influenced by the strange terrors of Lovecraft and Poe and by the brutal absurdity of Kafka, Ligotti eschews cheap, gory thrills for his own brand of horror, which shocks at the deepest, existential, levels.

A recurrent, unidentifiable noise in her apartment. A memo to her boss that's replaced by obscene insults. Amanda - a successful architect in a happy marriage - finds her life going off kilter by degrees. She starts smoking again, and one night for no reason, without even the knowledge that she's doing it, she burns her husband with a cigarette. At night she dreams of a beautiful woman with pointed teeth on the shore of a blood-red sea.

When high school senior Charlotte agrees to babysit the Wilbanks twins, she plans to put the six-year-olds to bed early and spend a quiet night studying: the SATs are tomorrow, and checking the Native American/Alaskan Native box on all the forms doesn’t mean jack if you choke on test day. But tomorrow is also Halloween, and the twins are eager to show off their costumes—Ron is a nurse, in an old-fashioned white skirt-uniform, and Desi has an Authentic Squaw costume, complete with buckskin and feathered headdress. Excitement is in the air.

The universe, in its farthest recesses, unbeknownst to humankind, has abetted the creation of a sinister entity, a malign force capable of rearing bedlam and instilling fear to all that has life. With the world’s impending destruction carefully insured by the extraterrestrial body that lurks in the glitches of nature, life as we know it hangs by a precariously thin thread. Meanwhile, around the globe, uneasiness continues to foster - world leaders have finally taken notice of the invisible enemy.

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.

Alma Katsu calls My Heart Is a Chainsaw “a homage to slasher films that also manages to defy and transcend genre.” On the surface is a story of murder in small-town America. But beneath is its beating heart: a biting critique of American colonialism, Indigenous displacement, and gentrification, and a heartbreaking portrait of a broken young girl who uses horror movies to cope with the horror of her own life.

John Langan, author of the Bram Stoker Award-winning novel The Fisherman, returns with ten new tales of cosmic horror in Corpsemouth and Other Autobiographies. In these stories, he continues to chart the course of twenty-first century weird fiction, from the unfamiliar to the familial, the unfathomably distant to the intimate.

The lives of the Barretts, a normal suburban New England family, are torn apart when 14-year-old Marjorie begins to display signs of acute schizophrenia. To her parents' despair, the doctors are unable to stop Marjorie's descent into madness. As their stable home devolves into a house of horrors, they reluctantly turn to a local Catholic priest for help. Father Wanderly suggests an exorcism; he believes the vulnerable teenager is the victim of demonic possession.

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.

Art Barbara was so not cool. He was a seventeen-year-old high school loner in the late 1980s who listened to hair metal, had to wear a monstrous back-brace at night for his scoliosis, and started an extracurricular club for volunteer pallbearers at poorly attended funerals. But his new friend thought the Pallbearers Club was cool. And she brought along her Polaroid camera to take pictures of the corpses.

Nicholas, a would-be poet, and Nakota, his feral lover, discover a strange hole in the storage room floor down the hall - "Black. Pure black and the sense of pulsation, especially when you look at it too closely, the sense of something not living but alive." It begins with curiosity, a joke - the Funhole down the hall. But then the experiments begin. "Wouldn't it be wild to go down there?" says Nakota. Nicholas says "We're not." But they're not in control, not from the first moment, as those experiments lead to obsession, violence, and a very final transformation.

All Rob wanted was a normal life. She almost got it, too: a husband, two kids, a nice house in the suburbs. But Rob fears for her oldest daughter, Callie, who collects tiny bones and whispers to imaginary friends. Rob sees a darkness in Callie, one that reminds her too much of the family she left behind. She decides to take Callie back to her childhood home, to Sundial, deep in the Mojave Desert. And there she will have to make a terrible choice.

In this striking and bleak, yet luminous debut collection, Nathan Ballingrud, winner of the inaugural Shirley Jackson Award, uses the trappings of the Gothic and the uncanny to investigate a distinctly American landscape: The loneliest and darkest corners of contemporary life. Ballingrud’s stories are love stories. They’re also monster stories. Sometimes the monsters collected here are vampires or werewolves.

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.

Lowen Ashleigh is a struggling writer on the brink of financial ruin when she accepts the job offer of a lifetime. Jeremy Crawford, husband of best-selling author Verity Crawford, has hired Lowen to complete the remaining books in a successful series his injured wife is unable to finish. Lowen arrives at the Crawford home, ready to sort through years of Verity's notes and outlines, hoping to find enough material to get her started. What Lowen doesn't expect to uncover in the chaotic office is an unfinished autobiography Verity never intended for anyone to read.

Hot on the heels of her 2018 This Is Horror Award–winning short story collection Spectral Evidence, critically horror author Gemma Files compiles fifteen more of her most startling recent nightmares—a creepily seductive downward spiral of dark poetry and existential dread, entirely suitable to the slow apocalypse going on all around us. So take your mind off your troubles and send it somewhere the rules still operate, if only to punish those who violate them.

The novelization of a fictional film trilogy, Demon Theory details the horrifying events set in motion by a tragic childhood incident. When a medical student is called home by his ailing mother on Halloween night, he and a group of friends become trapped in an inescapable cycle of violence.

In 1910, 11-year-old Iris Villarca lives with her father at Rawblood, a lonely house on Dartmoor. Iris and her father are the last of their name. The Villarcas always die young, bloodily. Iris knows it's because of a congenital disease that means she must be strictly isolated. Papa told her so. Forbidden to speak to other children or the servants, denied her one friend, Iris grows up in solitude. But she reads books. And one sunlit autumn day, beside her mother's grave, she forces the truth from her father. The disease is biologically impossible. A lie to cover a darker secret.

Strange things exist on the periphery of our existence, haunting us from the darkness looming beyond our firelight. Black magic, weird cults, and worse things loom in the shadows. The Children of Old Leech have been with us from time immemorial. And they love us.... Donald Miller, geologist and academic, has walked along the edge of a chasm for most of his nearly 80 years, leading a charmed life between endearing absent-mindedness and sanity-shattering realization. Now, all things must converge.

Felix Allsey is a travel writer with a keen eye for the paranormal, and he's carved out a unique, if only slightly lucrative, niche for himself in nonfiction; he writes travelogues of the country's most haunted places, after haunting them himself. When he convinces the owner of the infamous Rotterdam Mansion to let him stay on the premises for two weeks, he believes he's finally found the location that will bring him a best seller. Then things start going wrong: screams from upstairs, figures in the thresholds, and more than what should be in any basement.

After a tragic accident at work, all Grady Miller wanted was an escape. He finds it months later with two of his closest friends. Together, the three of them travel south to Prism Lake for the upcoming holiday, where they plan on spending the sunny weekend drinking, grilling, and relaxing. But when a series of monstrous blizzards cover the Eastern United States in feet of snow, knocking out communications and making the roads impossible to drive on, they realize their weekend of fun could turn into a lifetime of survival.

State Road 177 runs along the Suwannee River, between Fargo, Georgia, and the Okefenokee Swamp. Drive that route from east to west, and you'll cross six bridges. Take it from west to east, and you might find seven. But you'd better hope not. Titus and Melanie Bell leave their hotel in Fargo for a second honeymoon canoeing the Okefenokee Swamp. But shortly before they reach their destination, they draw up to a halt at the edge of a rickety bridge with old stone pilings, with room for only one car....

The Oaks is an idyllic, up-market country club—but its ornately carved walls hide a horrific past. Sixty years ago the house was an asylum, home to crazed psychopaths. One night all of them disappeared, never to be seen again. Jack Reed, the owner of The Oaks, has no idea about the building's terrible history. It is only when Jack's son is dragged into the walls of the mansion that he realises what happened sixty years ago—and just where the inmates have been living all this time...

On a damp October night, beautiful young Ashley Cordova is found dead in an abandoned warehouse in lower Manhattan. Though her death is ruled a suicide, veteran investigative journalist Scott McGrath suspects otherwise. As he probes the strange circumstances surrounding Ashley’s life and death, McGrath comes face-to-face with the legacy of her father: the legendary, reclusive, cult-horror-film director Stanislas Cordova - a man who hasn’t been seen in public for more than 30 years.

Julie and James settle into a house in a small town outside the city where they met. The move - prompted by James' penchant for gambling, his inability to keep his impulses in check - is quick and seamless; both Julie and James are happy to leave behind their usual haunts and start afresh. But this house, which sits between lake and forest, has plans for the unsuspecting couple.

Four brand-new horror novellas all about books, stories, manuscripts—the written word has never had sharper teeth. In The Skin of Her Teeth, a cursed novel drives people to their deaths. A delivery job turns deadly in The Dark Brothers' Last Ride. In This Book Belongs to Olo, a lonely child has dangerous control over an usual pop-up book. A choose-your-own adventure game spirals into an uncanny reality in The Story. Full of creepy suspense, these collected novellas are perfect for fans of Paul Tremblay, Stephen King, and Joe Hill.

Fans of The Conjuring and The Amityville Horror will love this chilling new novel unraveling the tale of a family haunted by the ghosts of their malevolent ancestors’ disturbing past. The decrepit well has been a fountain of terror for generations, an abyss of dread that emits tragedy and death like fog. Its darkness touched Jacob’s soul some twenty years ago, and since moving back to his ancestral home, the chilling feeling of being in front of the old well hasn’t left his troubled mind. But this time, the shadows that creep from the well have taken on a malevolent sentience, ...

Money's tight and their new home is a fixer-upper. Deep in rural South West England, with an ancient wood at the foot of the garden, Tom and his family are miles from anywhere and anyone familiar. His wife, Fiona, was never convinced that buying the money-pit at auction was a good idea. Not least because the previous owner committed suicide. Though no one can explain why.

Ford Atticus Ford, former lead ghost hunter on the hit paranormal reality show Graveyard: Classified, has more than a few regrets - especially after young Chelsea Hopper was attacked by a demon . . . on live television. Assisting police departments by conducting paranormal investigations and uncovering buried clues now provides him with an ounce of redemption, but it will never be enough. With the show cancelled and his reputation destroyed, Ford sets out to avenge little Chelsea, and save his own soul - if he can.

Five years ago, Coburn went to sleep - wasn't exactly planned - and he's just woken up to find most everybody in the world dead. And not cool, interesting dead like him; oh, no. Coburn looks basically human, and these guys...really don't. He likes blood, and they like flesh. He's smart; them, not so much. But they outnumber him by about a million to one, and their clotted blood cannot sustain him.