Gothic Fiction Short Stories

Anne is barely keeping it together. A frazzled ghostwriter and aspiring novelist, she juggles nine-year-old twins and a listless marriage from an overcrowded Manhattan apartment, spreading herself thinner each day. Just as Anne is about to give up on her dreams, she lands her biggest client yet: Melody Wells. Melody paints a picture of serenity and empowerment in the lavender haze of her visualization workshops—however, the one thing she can’t manifest are the pages her publisher is demanding for her new motivational book. Enter Anne.

Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart. They can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that are difficult to achieve elsewhere. The Gothic short story is one of the most enduring of genres. In this volume we explore works by classic authors from all corners of Europe as they explore and exploit narratives with their undeniable talents.

Arthur Conan Doyle was the greatest genre writer Britain has ever produced. Throughout a long writing career, he drew on his own medical background, his travels, and his increasing interest in spiritualism and the occult to produce a spectacular array of Gothic tales. Many of Doyle's writings are recognized as the very greatest tales of terror. They range from hauntings in the polar wasteland to evil surgeons and malevolent jungle landscapes. This collection brings together over 30 of Conan Doyle's best Gothic tales

A chilling collection of Ray Bradbury short stories, The October Country combines dark fantasy, classic horror stories, imaginative tales, and gripping mystery and suspense, offering an unforgettable exploration of the human soul's darkest corners. “That country where it is always turning late...

John Glover reads a selection of unabridged short stories, including "Graveyard Shift," from Stephen King's best-selling collection Night Shift...

In this original collection from Skyboat Media and Blackstone Publishing, Elizabeth Gaskell showcases the height of gothic fiction's ability to delight in the otherworldly and to dig deep into what truly haunts us. Set against the backdrop of the Salem witch trials, "Lois the Witch" reveals much about the complicity of mankind. Recently orphaned, Lois is forced to leave the English parsonage that had been her home and sail to America.

The Ultimate Gothic Horror Collection is a fully indexed collection of classic gothic stories, read by four Audie-winning narrators. Included here are stories by Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sheridan Le Fanu, Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe.

Our story begins in 1785 when a young seafarer, Captain Thornhill, disappears while visiting the shop of a barber in London, a certain Sweeney Todd whose shop in Fleet Street is situated by St. Dunstan's church, just round the corner from the famous and popular meat pie shop run by Mrs. Lovett. Thornhill was carrying a string of pearls as a gift for Johanna Oakley, the sweetheart of his friend Mark Ingestrie who is missing, presumed lost at sea.

In this volume we examine Gothic short stories from the woman’s point of view. More usually in this genre the main examples are almost always given as male. Well, in this volume we prove that view needs severely testing. Here we explore works by classic women authors who, with the sheer breadth of their talents and narratives, can make mere men seem tame by comparison.

This is a story from the Fall of the House of Usher collection. The horrors of the Spanish Inquisition, with its dungeon of death, and the overhanging gloom on the House of Usher demonstrate unforgettably the unique imagination of Edgar Allan Poe. Unerringly, he touches upon some of our greatest nightmares: Premature burial, ghostly transformation, words from beyond the grave. Written in the 1840s, they have retained their power to shock and frighten even now.

A ghostly presence in “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” desires revenge against a tyrannical husband. In “Mr. Jones”, Lady Jane Lynke inherits an estate unexpectedly, and can’t make sense of how to manage the servants - especially since the caretaker has been dead for decades, but keeps giving orders. Meanwhile, in “Afterward”, a newly wealthy American couple moves into a large, isolated house in southern England complete with a ghost...and the mysteries surrounding the husband’s business are slowly uncovered.

At the age of 12, Joel Knox is summoned to meet the father who abandoned him at birth. But when Joel arrives at the decaying mansion in Skully's Landing, his father is nowhere in sight. What he finds instead is a sullen stepmother who delights in killing birds; an uncle with the face - and heart - of a debauched child; and a fearsome little girl named Idabel who may offer him the closest thing he has ever known to love.

After more than a decade, the handsome amateur detective Xavier Kilgarvan has returned to Winterthurn just in time to see the fifth young woman’s body carried from Devil’s Half Acre. A brutal fiend has left her mutilated body in this desolate plot of land filled with hulking boulders, quicksand, and twisted trees. Can detective Kilgarvan discover the forces motivating the mysterious “Gentleman Suitor” who has lured five innocent women to their deaths?

Here 19 classic tales from masters of the genre. The collection comprises 'Schalken the Painter' by J. S. Lefanu; 'Sredni Vashtar' by Saki (H. H. Munro); 'The Room in the Tower' by E. F. Benson; 'Charles Ashmore's Trail' by Ambrose Bierce; 'The Mark of the Beast' by Rudyard Kipling; 'The Castle of Ratcliffe Cross' by J. Wadham; 'The Bead Necklace' by Alice Perrin; 'The Oval Portrait' by Edgar Allan Poe; 'The Leather Funnel' by Arthur Conan Doyle; 'Berenice' by Edgar Allan Poe; and many more.

Did you know that heaven keeps a prisoner? Or that the grim reaper's scythe isn't there to harvest you? It's really to protect you against something on your journey. This is a huge collection of 52 psychological horror and supernatural horror stories, the second volume to the Amazon best-selling horror collection, 51 Sleepless Nights.

Indulge in the darkest-hunger fantasies your body craves but your real life will never dare to satisfy. Do you ever ache for explicit, shamelessly taboo vampire erotica that goes way beyond soft-core teasing and actually delivers the primal submission, feeding play, harem domination, and breeding lust you fantasize about?

Beneath the brilliance that was behind The Age of Innocence and Ethan Frome was a dark side. A dark side which produced magnificent tales of the unseen influences in our lives, such as "Mr. Jones", "The Eyes", "Kerfol", "The Ladie's Maid's Bell", and "The Looking Glass".

At the heart of Dark Romanticism is its brooding, pessimistic tone, its emphasis on the supernatural and the sins of humanity, and its use of iconic symbols and horrifying imagery. The classic Dark Romantic authors (Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville) are represented in the stories and poems in this volume, as well as some authors who are not commonly included in this genre.

Florida Gothic Stories contains 11 of Vicki Hendricks’ best, some previously published and some new to this volume. Hendricks’ stories are riveting and unsettling - some offer surreal sojourns into the dark side of magical realism while others are pure Florida noir, with a full menu of characters twisted and damaged, yet with a gritty determination to survive.

Gwythn wants nothing more than to marry Prince Alwen and become a princess in the court of King Blethen, the redeemer who rescued their lands from the tyrannical rule of the dragon shifters. But when she seems close to getting exactly what she wishes, new truths are revealed about the dragon shifters who were vanquished, truths about King Blethen and his sons, and truths that will make her question her loyalties...and her love.