Showing results by publisher "Spoken Realms" in Anthologies & Short Stories

Midnight. Some call it the witching hour. Others call it the devil’s hour. Here in the graveyard, midnight is a very special time. It is a time when ghostly spirits are at their strongest, when the veil between our world and theirs is at its thinnest. Legend has it, that while most of the world is asleep, the lack of prayers allow the spirits to communicate under the cover of darkness, among the headstones, their whispers rustling in the leaves of the old oak trees. But if you’re here in the graveyard, you can tell yourself it’s just the wind....

Today we have ghosts that haunted our ancestors, as well as our own modern revenants, and there appears to be no earthly use trying to banish or exorcise them by such a simple strategy as refusing to believe in them. Since man knows that whether or not he has seen a ghost, presently he will become one, and thus he has become fascinated with the subject. Therefore he creates ghosts, not merely in his own image, but according to his dreams of power.

Madness and incantations in the nightmares of poets. Vicious ancient cults in the mountains and swamps. A corpse city rising in the sea. After Professor Angell meets a sudden and mysterious end, Francis Thurston, while sorting through his uncle's papers, makes a fateful discovery that ties these malignant manifestations together.

Horror stalks the sideshow tents of the 40’s and runs a 70’s era dive bar steeped in murder… It preys from the frozen peaks of a small, 80’s Alaskan town and spills across the streets of modern-day New York City. From the Great Plains of Native America to war-torn North Korea and the cradle of civilization itself in ancient Mesopotamia, the Beast is out for blood but the werewolf hunter pursues and will not stop until the last drop of blood has fallen.

Some pictures tell a story, and a certain old print acquired by a collector proves to have a very dark tale to relate, and in a most uncanny fashion. A classic tale from the master of the English ghost story M. R. James. Originally written to read by the fireside to the members of the Chit Chat Club of Cambridge, this story was first published in James's first collection The Ghost Stories of an Antiquary in 1904. This telling comes with a short afterword which provides some notes and commentary on the text.

A GHOST you say? Well, when young Clayton tells his story of encountering a rather... incompetent apparition trapped in the "real" world, and how he helped the spook return to the ether, his friends at the Mermaid Club refused to believe him. Until he showed them HOW he helped the poor soul. And what happened next, changed everyone's view of the afterlife.

Count Dracula, the centuries-old legendary vampire and former soldier-nobleman, wishes to extend his horrific cult of Undead followers to England. Innocent British realtor Jonathan Harker visits the Count with the intention of transacting the purchase of a house in London.

One of the earliest creative approaches to feminist literature, this sinister horror story tells of a woman's mental anguish and unconscious struggle with conformity in a society that generally viewed women as weak and hysterical creatures unable to think for themselves. The author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935), a prominent American feminist, paved the way for other authors like Sylvia Plath and Alice Walker. She suffered mental illness during her life and ultimately committed suicide.

Thirteen classic stories of horror and the supernatural by some of the greatest writers in the genre. This compilation includes a mix of well-known classics by authors such as Edith Nesbit, J. Sheridan Le Fanu and M. R. James, alongside several tales by less familiar names who were hugely popular and prolific in their day.

Herbert West, who is a medical student and later qualifies as a doctor, becomes obsessed with the possibility of reanimating corpses. Unfortunately, the revived subjects do not adapt to reintegration into society. West himself eventually becomes the victim of one of the homicidal zombies.

"Just room for one inside, sir," isn't quite as bone-chilling as hearing "room for one more, honey" in one of the Twilight Zone's most popular episodes, "Twenty Two." The Rod Serling masterpiece was inspired by E.F. Benson's "The Bus-Conductor". A ghost bears the chilling news instead of a recurring dream in Benson's chiller.

Lost in the snow on a bleak, wide moor in Northern England, a newlywed husband begins to despair he will ever see his wife again. He finds refuge with a pair of mysterious strangers, who direct him to a remote crossroads where the night mail coach is due to pass by. Amelia Ann Blanford Edwards (1831-1892) was a prolific journalist, traveler, and Egyptologist, as well as a hugely popular English novelist of the Victorian era.

Although Anna Katharine Green was best known as a crime novelist, this anthology is essentially a collection of horror stories. The Old Stone House is the history of a disastrous love triangle involving a coquettish young girl and two ruthless men determined to win her heart. The other stories share the theme of a manipulative woman whose scheming places the people associated with her in difficult and unfamiliar situations.

"Azathoth" is the beginning of a never-completed novel written by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft. It was written in June 1922 and published as a fragment in the journal Leaves in 1938, after Lovecraft's death. It is the first piece of fiction to mention the fictional being Azathoth, one of the major entities in Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, though the entity only appears in the title.

Based in Oklahoma around 1889, a newly arrived couple learn about the local legends surrounding a "Snake God", Yig, who takes vengeance on anyone who kills a serpent by killing them or turning them into a half-snake monster. The husband has a snake phobia which isn't helped by the wife killing a nest of rattlesnakes.

As with most stories by Poe, there are far deeper meanings as the narrator takes us through his madness. Pluto his cat becomes a symbol of what is wrong in his, the narrator's, life. He tortures Pluto in a drunken stupor by cutting out his eye. He feels guilt for hurting a creature he once loved that also once loved him. The narrator continues to spiral into his web of self-destruction until he is penning his story the night before he will meet the same fate he imposed upon Pluto.

An anthology of chilling, classic horror stories, including "The Tale-Tell Heart", "The Pit and the Pendulum", and "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe; "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving; "The Hand", "Was it a Dream?", and "The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant; "The Red Room" by H.G. Wells; "Moon-Face" by Jack London; "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

How easily does love turn to hate? In what is arguably one of Edgar Allen Poe's most disturbing tales, we join our narrator as he cruelly injures and betrays his once beloved cat. Our deeply disturbed narrator shows a malicious streak and lack of conscience that is painful to witness. The narrative forces us to question to what extent we can escape our conscience. As we realize all is not as it seems.

What would you do in the name of revenge? In The Cask of Amontillado, our narrator Montresor feels that the pompous Fortunado has insulted him one too many times. Join us as Motresor takes advantage of his enemy's love of wine to exact an unspeakable revenge.

In this unnerving Edgar Allen Poe tale, our narrator insists on his sanity after carefully calculating and committing the brutal murder of an old man because of his monstrous eye. He argues that it is quite sane to cut the body into pieces and hide it under the floorboards. Will our narrator's guilt be his undoing? To what extent will he go to defend his sanity?