Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Audio, Inc." in Horror

A young graduate student travels to Walden Pond expecting to find inspiration in the quiet solitude but instead finds something eerie and malevolent living deliberately in Thoreau's woods. When graduate student Aine Cahill uncovers a journal proving that her aunt Bonnie was an intimate companion of Henry David Thoreau during his supposedly solitary sojourn at Walden Pond, she knows that she has found the perfect subject for her dissertation. She decides to travel to Walden Pond herself to hunker down and work on her writing, but it quickly becomes clear that all is not as it seems....

In "The Pit and the Pendulum," one of his most famous short works, a condemned man is judged guilty by the Spanish Inquisition and sentenced to die. Locked away in a pitch-black cell, he soon discovers a pit in the center of the room, a watery grave at its base. Above him hangs a large, razor-sharp pendulum. As the man is slowly tortured, he must face either the pit or the pendulum.

Gertrude Atherton was a gothic novelist and short story writer. A protégée of Ambrose Bierce, his influence can be seen in many of her stories, which often have overt references to the supernatural. In "Death and the Woman," a woman sits all alone in grief at her dying husband's side, waiting for Death to claim him. In the creepy, desolate surroundings, her imagination begins to get the best of her - but is it only her imagination?

M. R. James was a prolific and hugely successful author, nowc redited with redefining the ghost story form. By abandoning many of the formal gothic clichés of his predecessors and using more contemporary settings, James set the stage for future generations of writers. Originally published in 1904, Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad is the story of a man who digs up a bronze whistle, which, after blowing it, leads to unexpected consequences.

This collection includes five of the greatest stories of American classic horror. The richest of language is used to create extraordinary atmosphere - gloom, darkness, solitude, despair - and the relentless feeling of impending doom. Includes: "The Oval Portrait", by Edgar Allan Poe; "Ethan Brand", by Nathaniel Hawthorne; "The Yellow Sign", by Robert W. Chambers; "The Upper Berth", by F. Marion Crawford; and "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", by Ambrose Bierce.

In 1897, at the age of 50, Bram Stoker was touring manager to the actor Henry Irving and was enjoying a modest success as a journalist and writer. Publication in that year of Dracula was to bring him international and lasting fame.

The year is 1918. Alex White, a young American soldier recently wounded in the Great War, comes to Gatford to escape his troubled past. The pastoral English village seems the perfect spot to heal his wounded body and soul, but the neighboring woods are said to be haunted by capricious, even malevolent, spirits. He is warned to steer clear of the woods, and the perilous faerie kingdom it borders, but Alex cannot help himself.

It's midnight. Turn out the lights, cuddle with your true love, and shiver to fright-meisters Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, and H. P. Lovecraft. Quicken your pulse with the elegant terror of Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Guy de Maupassant. Chortle at the black glee of H. H. Munro and Ambrose Bierce.

When Casey Maldonado and Death hitch a desperate ride away from one disaster, they throw themselves right into the middle of another one. The semi in which they are traveling crashes, and before the Grim Reaper takes Evan the Trucker away, Evan whispers to Casey about a stash hidden in the truck that she should keep away from them.

Unable to approach her own long-buried history of loss and displacement, Historian Joan Severance takes refuge in the cool library rooms and the crumbling probate lists from Renaissance times. As Joan's disturbed, hyperintuitive mind falls increasingly under the spell of Valparuta and the charismatic resident archivist, Chiesa, a beautifully dressed heroin addict, she is forced to confront her long-submerged past.

David and Ellen Cooper came to the lonely beachside cottage in hopes of rekindling their troubled marriage. Yet they are not alone on their second honeymoon. Marianna, a beautiful and enigmatic stranger, comes to visit David whenever Ellen is away. Who is Marianna, and where has she come from? Even as he succumbs to her seductive charms, David realizes that Marianna is far more than a threat to his marriage, for her secrets lie deep in the past and beyond the grave.

Less than a hundred years in the future, pollution, economic disaster, and the rapacious greed of the corporate oligarchy have brought America to its knees and created dystopian urban nightmares, of which Los Angeles may be the worst. Curtis, Japh, and Jool are film extras, who - with the help of a couple of very gutsy women - survived being anonymous players in a "live-action" film in which death on-screen meant death in real life. Surviving the shoot made them rich enough to escape the post-apocalyptic hell that LA has become.

Fourteen-year-old Jeremy Barker is obsessed with zombie movies. He attends an all-boys Catholic High School where roving gangs in plaid make his days a living hell. His mother is an absentee pillhead, his older brother a self-diagnosed sex-addict, and his father an ex-Marine realtor who disappears night after night without explanation. Jeremy navigates it all with a code cobbled together from Night of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later, Planet Terror, Zombieland, and Shaun of the Dead.

In Shadow People, national best-selling author James Swain’s brilliant follow-up to Dark Magic, magician Peter Warlock has a dark secret. He’s a psychic who peers into the future, using the information to alert the authorities to pending trouble. During a séance, Peter is confronted by a group of evil spirits called shadow people, beings who have the power to kidnap a person’s soul. Peter is taken to another plane, where he confronts a serial killer about to claim his next victim. It’s a harrowing encounter that Peter only barely manages to survive.

Blackstone Audio presents an eclectic mix of stories, plays and sketches dedicated to the thinking paranoiac. Gore, sex, horror, literature and edifying morals - what more could you want from an audiobook?

In the 1940s, Coden, Alabama, was a hideaway for movie stars - an isolated playground tucked among live oaks and placid bay waters where pleasure and vice could be indulged. By the summer of 1974 Coden’s glamour has faded, but it doesn’t bother Mimi Bosarge, who is just happy to have a job as a live-in tutor with the wealthiest family in town, the Hendersons. When the Hendersons generously open their arms to Annie, a troubled teenager with no recollection of her past, Mimi’s greatest concern is creating a curriculum for the family’s new ward.

Peter Warlock is a magician with a dark secret. Every night, he amazes audiences at his private theater in New York, where he performs feats that boggle the imagination. But his day job is just a cover for his otherworldly pursuits: Peter is a member of an underground group of psychics who gaze into the future to help prevent crimes. No one, not even his live-in girlfriend, knows the truth about Peter - until the séance when he foresees an unspeakable act of violence that will devastate the city.

Southwest Arizona, a century ago: an uneasy truce exists between the remote frontier community of Picture City and the neighboring Apaches. That delicate peace is shredded when the bodies of two white men are found hideously mutilated. The angry townspeople are certain the “savages” have broken the treaty, but Billjohn Finley, the local Indian agent, fears that darker, more unholy forces may be at work. There’s a tall, dark stranger in town, who rode in wearing the dead men’s clothes. A stranger who may not be entirely human.

Out of the mist and darkness they come, child-creatures of the night who prey upon the unsuspecting.

Late one rainy night, a young school teacher arrives outside her apartment building and spies a mysterious, naked boy at the edge of Central Park. Thinking him injured or lost, she approaches him, despite the chilling fear slowly enveloping her. He flees, luring the young woman into the darkest, densest part of the park. There, out of the fog-laden woods, four more children emerge, restless and wild-eyed.

Taught the art of lace-making during her orphanage childhood, Heather Blackstone managed to earn her living in a Nottingham factory. But the legend of her ancestry haunted her dreams. When a gypsy-fortune teller predicted a journey, Heather knew that her destiny was clear: she must find a way to reclaim the castle that bore her family name and the fortune that was rightfully hers.