"One of the most original American writers, Edgar Allan Poe shaped the development of both the detective story and the science-fiction story. Some of his poems--"The Raven," "The Bells," "Annabel Lee"--Remain among the most popular in American literature. Poe's tales of the macabre still thrill readers of all ages. Here are familiar favorites like "The Purloined Letter." "The Fall of the House of Usher," and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," together...

This is the collection that true fans of horror fiction must read: sixteen of H.P. Lovecraft's most horrifying visions....

Our earliest lessons come from stories-heirlooms of warning passed down to us at our grandmothers' knees. Within these pages, Bram Stoker Award-winning author Sarah Read delivers fresh cautions and disturbances across eighteen grim tales. Prepare to inherit stories of fossil-haunted houses, of doorways to the afterlife. In the woods, learn of vengeful wolves and women. In the water, discovers shipwrecks stuck in time, Devonian monsters, and islands...

A darkly luminous new anthology collecting the most terrifying horror stories by renowned female authors, presenting anew these forgotten classics to the modern reader. Readers are well aware that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein: few know how many other tales of terror she created. In addition to Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote some surprisingly effective horror stories. The year after Little Women appeared, Louisa May Alcott published...

H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) was a reclusive scribbler of horror stories for the American pulp magazines that specialized in Gothic and science fiction in the interwar years. He often published in Weird Tales and has since become the key figure in the slippery genre of "weird fiction." Lovecraft developed an extraordinary vision of feeble men driven to the edge of sanity by glimpses of malign beings that have survived from human prehistory or by malevolent...

Stephen King introduces each of these short stories with a passage about its origins or his motivations for writing it. There are connections between stories -- themes of morality, the afterlife, guilt, what we would do differently if we could see into the future or correct the mistakes of the past. "Afterlife" is about a man who died of colon cancer and keeps reliving the same life, repeating his mistakes over and over again. Several stories feature...

A collection of thirteen short stories showing how horribly wrong food, dating, jobs, and even a bed pillow can be.