Elise and her boyfriend, Tom, set off for Minnesota, hoping the paycheck from the sugar beet harvest will cover the rent on their Brooklyn apartment. Amidst the grueling work and familiar anxieties about her finances, Elise starts noticing strange things: threatening phone calls, a mysterious rash, and snatches of an ominous voice coming from the beet pile. When Tom and other coworkers begin to vanish, Elise is left alone to confront the weight of her past, the horrors of her uncertain future, and the menacing but enticing siren song of the beets.

Muriel McAuley has lived in the Scottish fishing village of Witchaven all her life. She was born there, and she intends to die there. But when an overseas property developer threatens to evict the residents from their homes and raze Witchaven to the ground in the name of progress, all seems lost . . . until the day a mysterious fog bank creeps inland.

Grim Wolds, England: Winifred Notty arrives at Ensor House prepared to play the perfect governess—she’ll dutifully tutor her charges, Drusilla and Andrew, tell them bedtime stories, and only joke about eating children. But long, listless days spent within the estate’s dreary confines come with an intimate knowledge of the perversions and pathetic preoccupations of the Pounds family—Mr. Pounds can’t keep his eyes off Winifred’s chest, and Mrs. Pounds takes a sickly pleasure in punishing Winifred for her husband’s wandering gaze.

In The Sundowner's Dance, an elderly widower relocates to a retirement community and discovers his new neighbors are worshipping a meteorite.

Derrick Stockton is in his mid-twenties, approaching three years sober, and working a stable job in Ohio. After surviving the seemingly random horrors of his childhood at the hands of a sinister neighbor, he believes he's finally moved on. All that changes when a brutal murder occurs in his home state of West Virginia. His name is written in blood at the crime scene, and the only evidence is a blurry surveillance video offering a glimpse of the killer, one he knows to be long dead.

This forest isn't charted on any map. Every car breaks down at its treeline. Mina's is no different. Left stranded, she is forced into the dark woodland only to find a woman shouting, urging Mina to run to a concrete bunker. As the door slams behind her, the building is besieged by screams. Mina finds herself in a room with a wall of glass, and an electric light that activates at nightfall, when the watchers come above ground. These creatures emerge to observe their captive humans and terrible things happen to anyone who doesn't reach the bunker in time.

Roos Beckman has a spirit companion only she can see. Ruth—strange, corpse-like, and dead for centuries—is the light of Roos' life. That is, until the wealthy young widow Agnes Knoop visits one of Roos' backroom seances, and the two strike up a connection.

After secrets and betrayal shatter his marriage, Josh Mallory seeks solace on the Pacific Crest Trail, in the mountains of Washington. On the trail, he’s just another hiker. On the trail, he can outrun the memories. When wild animals destroy his food, Josh detours through a small mountain town. Missing hiker posters hang in the windows, and residents won’t look him in the eyes, let alone speak to him or help him. Trapped on a mountain ridge beneath a full moon and desperate for help, Josh moves on, only to encounter a mysterious group who call themselves the Woodkin.

Since time immemorial, the Haddesley family has tended the cranberry bog. In exchange, the bog sustains them. The staunch seasons of their lives are governed by a strict covenant that is renewed each generation with the ritual sacrifice of their patriarch, and in return, the bog produces a “bog-wife.” Brought to life from vegetation, this woman is meant to carry on the family line. But when the bog fails—or refuses—to honor the bargain, the Haddesleys, a group of discordant siblings still grieving the mother who mysteriously disappeared years earlier, face an unknown future.

“Back then, when I was a young woman, there were still witches”: That was how Nana Alba always began the stories she told her great-granddaughter Minerva—stories that have stayed with Minerva all her life. Perhaps that’s why Minerva has become a graduate student focused on the history of horror literature and is researching the life of Beatrice Tremblay, an obscure author of macabre tales.

Lilly Bly desperately wants to have a baby. She is struggling with infertility and bad spending habits when her husband, Jack, gets a new job that moves them from Chicago to a small town in Wisconsin. Impractical Lilly falls in love with a decrepit mansion well out of their price range—she is convinced that she will finally get pregnant and have a baby in this house—and Jack agrees to it. But when Lilly learns that her dream house was the site of a gruesome triple homicide/suicide in the 1950s, she begins to experience strange occurrences that soon lead her to believe the house is haunted.

Thrift fashionista Dez Lane doesn't want to date Patrick Ruskin; she just wants to meet his mother, the editor-in-chief of Nouveau magazine. When he invites her to his family's big Easter reunion at their ancestral home, she's certain she can put up with his arrogance and fend off his advances long enough to ask Marie Caulfield-Ruskin for an internship someone with her pedigree could never nab through the regular submission route. But once all the family members are on the island and the ferry has departed, things take a dark turn.

Sam Wakefield's ancestral home, a decaying mansion built on the edge of a swamp, isn't a place for children. Its labyrinthine halls, built by her mad ancestors, are filled with echoes of the past: ghosts and memories knotted together as one. In the presence of phantoms, it's all Sam can do to disentangle past from present in her daily life. But when her pregnant sister Elizabeth moves in after a fight with her husband, something in the house shifts. Already navigating her tumultuous relationship with Elizabeth, Sam's even more unsettled by the appearance of a new ghost: a faceless boy.

Rose is in her late 70s, living out her golden years at the Autumn Springs Retirement Home. When one of her friends dies alone in her apartment, Rose isn’t too concerned. Accidents happen, especially at this age! Then another resident drops dead. And another. With bodies stacking up, Rose can’t help but wonder: are these accidents? Old age? Or something far more sinister? Together with her best friend Miller, Rose begins to investigate. The further she digs, the more convinced she becomes: there’s a killer on the loose at Autumn Springs, and if she isn’t careful, Rose may be their next victim.

Since the hurricane, the town of Mercy, Louisiana has been overtaken by a strange red algae bloom. Noon and her mother have carved out a life in the wreckage, trawling for the mutated wildlife that lurks in the water and trading it to the corrupt harbormaster. When she’s focused on survival, Noon doesn’t have to cope with what happened to her at the Cove or the monster itching at her skin.

Scuttler's Cove is a working village, nestling in dramatic coastal scenery in Cornwall, where life has gone on uninterrupted for centuries... until this seaside idyll was discovered by the rich. Now the quaint harbour-front cottages have been snapped up by second-homers and rental companies, and the locals can barely afford to live in their own town. It is a very different place for Merrin Moon, who left for university at the age of eighteen and never looked back. Now in her thirties, she returns to the Cove for the first time since, after the death of her mother.

On the idyllic island of Lute, every seventh summer, seven people die. No more, no less. Lute and its inhabitants are blessed, year after year, with good weather, good health, and good fortune. So it’s only fair that every seven years, on the day of the tithe, the island’s gift is honored. Nina Treadway is new to The Day. A Florida girl by birth, she became a Lady through her marriage to Lord Treadway, whose family has long protected the island. Nina’s heard about The Day, of course. It's all superstitious nonsense. Then The Day begins. And it's a day of nightmares.

In Edwardian Suffolk, a manor house stands alone in a lost corner of the Fens: a glinting wilderness of water whose whispering reeds guard ancient secrets. Maud is a lonely child growing up without a mother, ruled by her repressive father. When he finds a painted medieval devil in a graveyard, unhallowed forces are awakened. Maud's battle has begun. She must survive a world haunted by witchcraft, the age-old legends of her beloved fen - and the even more nightmarish demons of her father's past.

This collection, from an acclaimed master of dark fiction, consists of 21 tales. Some are straight genre entries, others are stories of psychological terror, and a few are shorts that include science-fiction elements. The first 18 are short stories written solely by Rick Hautala; the final three are collaborations with Jesse and Matti Hautala, Matthew J. Costello, and Jim Connolly.

An unnamed narrator arrives at Cambridge University in the early aughts determined to reinvent himself. His northern accent marks him as an outsider, but thanks to his musical gifts, he manages to fall in with his wealthy classmate, Bryn Cavendish. A charismatic party host and talented magician, Bryn enthralls the narrator. But something seems to happen to those who challenge or simply irk Bryn—and they aren’t ever the same again. The narrator begins to suspect that Bryn may be concealing terrifying gifts under the guise of magic tricks.

Following the accidental drowning of her sister, 16-year-old Nif and her family move to a small village on the Welsh borders to escape their grief. But rural seclusion doesn't bring any relief. As her family unravels, Nif begins to put together her own form of witchcraft, collecting talismans from the sun-starved land. That is, until she meets Mally, a teen boy who takes a keen interest in her and has his own secret rites to divulge.

In the dystopian 22nd century, Lauren Ramirez is an Assassin 13, the best at her profession. Betrayed by her employer, the president of the United States, on an off-planet op, she escapes when her spacecraft hurtles through time and crash-lands in 1927 Prohibition Hollywood, with its silent film stars and bootlegging gangsters. She finds herself an alien in an alien land.

Thrift fashionista Dez Lane doesn't want to date Patrick Ruskin; she just wants to meet his mother, the editor-in-chief of Nouveau magazine. When he invites her to his family's big Easter reunion at their ancestral home, she's certain she can put up with his arrogance and fend off his advances long enough to ask Marie Caulfield-Ruskin for an internship someone with her pedigree could never nab through the regular submission route. But once all the family members are on the island and the ferry has departed, things take a dark turn.

The moor is a difficult place for a young woman to grow up in the eighteenth century, and life for Hettie Gale is no different. Abused by her father and abandoned by her family, she builds a new life for herself and her young son. But when she’s assaulted by men who lie about the encounter and accuse her of a heinous crime, Hettie is sentenced to death. In the present day, Alice receives news that her cousin has gone missing from her cottage on the moor, where Alice spent many of her childhood summers. Wanting to help find Fleur, she heads to the village.

In 1933, nine-year-old Stella is left in the care of her grandmother, Motty, in the backwoods of Tennessee. The mountains are home to dangerous secrets, and soon after she arrives, Stella wanders into a dark cavern where she encounters the family's personal god, an entity known as the Ghostdaddy. Years later, after a tragic incident that caused her to flee, Stella - now a professional bootlegger - returns for Motty's funeral, and to check on the mysterious 10-year-old girl named Sunny that Motty adopted.

Violet Zennor was raised fighting in underground arenas. Ruthless and skilled, she becomes an heiress after her father's death. But her freedom is short-lived. Her father planned to send her to the Darklands, where her stillborn brother was sold. Despite pressure, Violet refuses. After an assassination attempt, she realizes she must confront her father's legacy. Seeking help from Miren, Ellie, and Asher, she prepares for the ultimate journey: into the Darklands, to the Anchorhold. This gripping tale explores a sinister fantasy world where blood is power and magic is a weapon.

Struggling with money, raising a child alone, and fleeing a volatile ex, Jess McMachen accepts a job caring for an elderly patient. Flo Gardner–a disturbed shut-in and invalid. But if Jess can hold this job down, she and her daughter, Izzy, can begin a new life. Flo's vast home, Nerthus House, may resemble a stately vicarage in an idyllic village, but the labyrinthine interior is a dark, cluttered warren filled with pagan artefacts.

Piper Lowery, a public library clerk in charge of liaising with the local middle school, can tell right away there’s something strange about the new girl in eighth grade. Avery Wallace won’t touch any kind of technology, not even the computers at the library, and her mother comes to school with her every day, refusing to leave her side—not even when Avery uses the restroom. And then there are the rumors, the whispers Piper hears from kids in the hallway and parents around town: Avery’s mother is a witch. Her sister and father were killed by something supernatural. A strange virus killed them.

In this horror story set in colonial New England, a law-abiding Puritan woman goes missing. Or perhaps she has fled or abandoned her family. Or perhaps she's been kidnapped, and set loose to wander in the dense woods of the north. Alone and possibly lost, she meets another woman in the forest. Then everything changes.

The year is 1901, and Ada Byrd―spinster, schoolmarm, amateur naturalist―accepts a teaching post in isolated Lowry Bridge, grateful for the chance to re-establish herself where no one knows her secrets. She develops friendships with her neighbors, explores the woods with her students, and begins to see a future in this tiny farming community. Her past―riddled with grief and shame―has never seemed so far away. But then Ada begins to witness strange and grisly phenomena: a swarm of dying crickets, a self-mutilating rabbit, a malformed faun.