Night Shift

Hold tight. We are going into a number of dark places, but I think I know the way. Just don't let go of my arm.... Unrivalled master of suspense Stephen King takes the unsuspecting listener on a fantastic journey through the dark shadows of our innermost fears.

Winning stories from The Bazaar of Bad Dreams Hodder- Guardian competition. The number one best-selling writer Stephen King presents six gripping and chilling stories in this captivating anthology: 'Wild Swimming' by Elodie Harper. 'Eau-de-Eric' by Manuela Saragosa. 'The Spots' by Paul Bassett Davies. 'The Unpicking' by Michael Button. 'La Mort de L'amant' by Stuart Johnstone. 'The Bear Trap' by Neil Hudson.

In this classic collection of four novellas, the grand master takes you on irresistible journeys into the far reaches of horror, heartache and hope. 'Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption' is the story of two men convicted of murder - one guilty, one innocent - who form the perfect partnership as they dream up a scheme to escape from prison. In 'Apt Pupil' a golden schoolboy entices an old man with a past to join in a dreadful union.

The house looked right, felt right to Dr Louis Creed. Rambling, old, unsmart and comfortable. A place where the family could settle, the children grow and play and explore. The rolling hills and meadows of Maine seemed a world away from the fume-choked dangers of Chicago. Only the occasional big truck out on the two-lane highway, grinding up through the gears, hammering down the long gradients, growled out an intrusive threat. But behind the house and far away from the road: that was safe.

At midnight comes the point of balance. Of danger. The instant of utter stillness when, between two beats of the heart, an alternative reality can slip through, like a blade between the ribs, and switch you into a new and terrifying world. Four Past Midnight: four heart-stopping accounts of that moment when the familiar world fractures beyond sense, the fragments spinning away from the desperate, clutching reach of sanity....

A star-studded cast of readers presents unabridged tales of horror and suspense from master storyteller Stephen King. The Stephen King Amusement Park - an unnerving experience, with rides every which way to hell...and a few to glory. A solitary finger pokes out of a drain. Novelty teeth turn predatory. The Nevada desert swallows a Cadillac. Meanwhile, the legend of Castle Rock returns...and grows on you. What does it all mean? What else could it mean?

The sparrows are flying again. The idea - unbidden, inexplicable - haunts the edge of Thad Beaumont's mind. Thad should be happy. For years now it is his secret persona, George Stark, author of superviolent pulp thrillers, who has paid the family bills. But now Thad is writing seriously again under his own name, and his menacing pseudonym has been buried forever. And yet...the sparrows are flying again, and something is terribly wrong in Thad Beaumont's world.

Everything is familiar. But everything has changed. Coming back to the little community is like walking into a nightmare for Jim Gardener, poet, drunk, potential suicide. It all looks the same: the house; the furniture; Jim's friend, Bobbi; her beagle (though ageing); even the woods out at the back. But it was in the woods that Bobbi stumbled over the odd, part-buried object and felt a peculiar tingle as she brushed the soft earth away. Everything is familiar. But everything is about to change.

In a terrifying trip across America, young Jack Sawyer is searching for the Talisman, the only thing that can save his dying mother. His quest takes him into the menacing Territories where violence, surprise, and the titanic struggle between good and evil reach across a mythic landscape.

Welcome to Desperation. Once a thriving copper-mining town in the middle of the Nevada desert, Desperation is now eerily abandoned. It's the last place that travellers like the Carver family, bound for vacation, and writer Johnny Marinville, astride his Harley, would expect to be stopped and charged. But Desperation still has a local cop - a unique regulator who patrols the wilderness highway. The secrets buried in Desperation are as terrifying as the forces summoned to encounter them.

You'll lose a lot of sleep.... Ralph does. At first he starts waking up earlier. And earlier. Then the hallucinations start - the colours, shapes and strange auras. Not to mention the bald doctors who always turn up at the scene of a death. That's when Ralph begins to lose a lot more than sleep. When he begins to understand why his hitherto mild-mannered friend, Ed, is getting out of control - dangerously so. And why his hometown is about to become the new Armageddon....

When an 11-year-old boy is found murdered, forensic evidence and reliable eyewitnesses undeniably point to the town's popular Little League coach. But the jailed suspect, arrested in a public spectacle, has an alibi, and further research convinces Detective Ralph Anderson that the coach was indeed out of town. So how can he have been in two places at the same time?

In a future so real and near it might be now, something happens when women go to sleep: they become shrouded in a cocoon-like gauze. If they are awakened, if the gauze wrapping their bodies is disturbed or violated, the women become feral and spectacularly violent, and while they sleep they go to another place....

Every night they tuned in to the nation's favourite prime-time TV game show. They all watched, from the sprawling slums to the security-obsessed enclaves of the rich. They all watched the ultimate live death game as the contestants tried to beat not the clock but annihilation at the hands of the Hunters. Survive 30 days, and win the billion dollar jackpot - that was the promise. But the odds were brutal and the game rigged.

A game. A husband and wife game. Gerald's Game. But this time Jesse didn't want to play. Lying there, spread-eagled and handcuffed to the bedstead while he'd loomed and drooled over her, she'd felt angry and humiliated. So she'd kicked out hard. Aimed to hit him where it hurt. He wasn't meant to die, leaving Jesse alone and helpless in a lakeside holiday cabin. Miles from anywhere. No one to hear her screams.