A cemetery full of the restless dead. A town so wicked it has already burned twice, with the breath of the third fire looming. A rural, isolated bridge with a terrifying monster waiting for the completion of its summoning ritual. A lake that allows the drowned to return, though they have been changed by the claws of death. These are the shadowed, liminal spaces where the curses and monsters lurk, refusing to be forgotten.

In "Gothic Tales", Elizabeth Gaskell, the eminent Victorian author, brings us nine chilling gothic stories. Collected here are tales that set a precedent for ghost and horror stories of the era. In "The Poor Clare" a young innocent girl named Lucy is haunted by an unrelenting ghost invoked by her aging grandmother. In the novella "Lois the Witch" the young Lois sails to America to join her distant family. She is greeted by a New England engulfed in...

"In his first collection of short fiction, New York Times bestselling author John Connolly offers a selection of dark, daring, and utterly haunting tales. Here are lost lovers and missing children, predatory demons, and vengeful ghosts. In ""The New Daughter, "" a father comes to suspect that a burial mound on his land hides something very ancient, and very much alive; in ""The Underbury Witches, "" a pair of London detectives find themselves battling...

From the master of suspense comes a collection of contemporary literary horror, with stories from twenty-five writers representing today's most talented voices in the genre.

"The Castle of Otranto (1764) is the first supernatural English novel and one of the most influential works of Gothic fiction. It inaugurated a literary genre that will be forever associated with the effects that Walpole pioneered. Professing to be a translation of a mysterious Italian tale from the darkest Middle Ages, the novel tells of Manfred, prince of Otranto, whose fear of an ancient prophecy sets him on a course of destruction. After the grotesque...

"Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories" is a collection of supernatural stories by one of the greatest writers of such stories to have ever lived, Algernon Blackwood. This collection contains the title story, "Ancient Sorceries", which is the tale of a tourist who becomes enchanted by a strange French town and the ancient secrets that are hidden there. Also included in this collection is one of Blackwood's most celebrated stories, "The Willows",...

Stories include Don't look now and The birds.

Arthur Machen (1863–1947), Welsh novelist and essayist, is considered one of the most important and influential writers of his time. While displaying a preoccupation with pagan themes and matters of the occult - an interest he shared with his close friend, the distinguished scholar A. E. Waite - his writing transcends the genre of supernatural horror. Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as well as Paul Bowles and Jorge Luis Borges...

"For a small New England town, Shadow Grove has an uncanny ability to attract the worst kind of trouble. Not that the residents are too concerned about the various horrors living among them. As the leaves change color and the weather grows colder, a foul presence is making itself known by leaving peculiar gifts for the students of Ridge Crest High. At first, the presents seem harmless--and a rash of accidents seem coincidental--but when seniors Rachel...