Download or read book Toplin Valancourt 20th Century Classics written by Michael McDowell and published by Valancourt Books. This book was released on 2015-12-11 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DEATH IN THE FAMILY BUT COME BACK SOON, the sign said. Obviously it was a lie. The people in the grocery store just wanted to make sure he couldn't buy the spice he needed to make the recipe he'd selected for that night (recipes must be followed exactly). Obviously they wanted him to eat out ... to meet the waitress, Marta, ... to see her horrible, unspeakable, unbearable ugliness. It was obvious to him: her maimed, twisted face was the living desire to be dead. He had to help Marta be dead. His teeth are perfectly white. He can't see colors. He keeps a combination lock on his door and has twelve shelves of cookbooks. His walls bleed blood. His suits each have a number, S-1 through S-6. And life goes on. Life goes on, if you can stand it. Life goes on, for the brave and the damned. Life goes on, but come back soon ... "An ambitious novel of psychological horror." - "Publishers Weekly" "Compelling-a tour-de-force of storytelling and style ... considerable artistry, marvelous pacing, and a welcome dose of macabre humor." - "Fantasy Review" "One of the best writers of horror in this country." - "Peter Straub"
Download or read book Blood Rubies written by Michael McDowell and published by Valancourt Books. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: BLOOD RUBIES It would bring bad luck, they said. But she split her pair of ruby earrings and gave one to each of her beautiful twin babies. Within hours she was burned to death in a fire. The twins lived. KATHERINE Raised by a poor, childless couple, Katherine was shy and withdrawn, except in her love for the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception. In her heart, Katherine had found God. In her father’s heart, they found a butcher knife. ANDREA She grew up with all that money could buy. She was pretty and popular and went to the best schools. Her parents loved her dearly, and gladly did anything to please her. But what made Andrea happy, would make them dead. THEY MET IN THEIR NIGHTMARES In the dark of sleep, Katherine and Andrea had terrible dreams of being the other. Until the hand of evil that guided their waking lives brought them face to face with each other . . . and the crossed fate of horror awaiting them both.
Download or read book Gilded Needles Valancourt 20th Century Classics written by Michael McDowell and published by . This book was released on 2015-06-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published by Avon Books in 1980.
Download or read book Candles Burning written by Tabitha King and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2007-05-01 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A mix of magic realism and Southern gothic, this stunning collaboration between King and McDowell…moves at a hypnotic pace, like an Alabama water moccasin slipping through black water.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) Calliope “Calley” Dakin is no normal little girl. She hears things that maybe a little girl shouldn’t hear—and knows things a little girl should never know. Just seven when her beloved father is tortured, murdered, and dismembered by two women with no discernable motivation, Calley and her mother find themselves caught up in inexplicable events that exile them to Pensacola Beach. There—in a house that’s a dead ringer for Calley’s late great-grandmother’s house—another woman awaits their presence. A woman who understands what Calley is, but can’t begin to imagine just how strong her bond is with her father—even after death... Known for his chilling Blackwater series, author Michael McDowell left behind the unfinished manuscript for Candles Burning on his death in 1999. In the spirit of the ghost stories that Michael loved, Tabitha King has taken up where he left off.
Download or read book Cold Moon Over Babylon Valancourt 20th Century Classics written by Michael McDowell and published by Bright Sparks. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Welcome to Babylon, a typical sleepy Alabama small town, where years earlier the Larkin family suffered a terrible tragedy. Now they are about to endure another: fourteen-year-old Margaret Larkin will be robbed of her innocence and her life by a killer who is beyond the reach of the law. But something strange is happening in Babylon: traffic lights flash an eerie blue, a ghostly hand slithers from the drain of a kitchen sink, graves erupt from the local cemetery in an implacable march of terror ... And beneath the murky surface of the river, a shifting, almost human shape slowly takes form. Night after night it will pursue the murderer. And when the full moon rises over Babylon, it will seek a terrible vengeance ...
Download or read book Katie Valancourt 20th Century Classics written by Michael McDowell and published by . This book was released on 2015-03-17 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published by Avon Books in 1982.
Download or read book Wicked Stepmother written by Michael McDowell and published by Valancourt Books. This book was released on 2016-04-05 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seducing a proper Bostonian was easy. Making him die of a heart attack a week after the wedding was hardly any trouble at all. Now she has money, social status, everything she has cunningly schemed to get since she was a poor little girl. Everything except the Brookline mansion and the multi-million dollar trust fund left to the three children. But what wicked stepmother couldn't get rid of three children? Jonathan, too smart for his own good and suspicious about his father's death, has to be the first to go. Then there's pretty, spoiled Verity, hooked on cocaine and perpetually drunk - who'd ask any questions if she died suddenly? And clever Cassandra, just out of college and beginning a career as a literary editor, will simply have to get over being dead. Wicked Stepmother (1983) is the second of the camp classics written by Michael McDowell (co-author of Beetlejuice and The Nightmare Before Christmas) in collaboration with Dennis Schuetz. Five of McDowell's classic horror novels are also available from Valancourt.
Download or read book The Woodwitch Valancourt 20th Century Classics written by Stephen Gregory and published by . This book was released on 2015-01-06 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Andrew Pinkney is a young English lawyer with boyish good looks and a gentle manner, but a dark side emerges when his girlfriend Jennifer laughs at his impotence. He lashes out in a violent rage, knocking her unconscious. At the suggestion of his employer, Andrew heads to an isolated cottage in the dark Welsh countryside to take a break and get a grip on himself. In the woods, he discovers the grotesque stinkhorn mushroom, whose phallic shape seems to rise in obscene mockery of his own shortcomings. But the stinkhorn gives him an idea, a way to win Jennifer back. As the seeds of obsession take root in Andrew's mind, he embarks on a nightmarish quest, with unexpected and horrifying results.
Download or read book The Elementals written by Michael McDowell and published by . This book was released on 2014-06-17 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Something terrifying waits in the decaying Victorian house on the coast, something that has haunted two men since they were children, something that may be ready to kill...again.
Download or read book The Amulet written by Michael McDowell and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When a rifle range accident leaves Dean Howell disfigured and in a vegetative state, his wife Sarah finds her dreary life in Pine Cone, Alabama made even worse. After long and tedious days on the assembly line, she returns home to care for her corpselike husband while enduring her loathsome and hateful mother-in-law, Jo. Jo blames the entire town for her son's mishap, and when she gives a strange piece of jewelry to the man she believes most responsible, a series of gruesome deaths is set in motion. Sarah believes the amulet has something to do with the rising body count, but no one will believe her. As the inexplicable murders continue, Sarah and her friend Becca Blair have no choice but to track down the amulet themselves, before it's too late . . .
Download or read book The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories Volume One written by John Blackburn and published by Valancourt Books. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume, you will encounter tales of ghosts, haunted houses, witchcraft, vampirism, lycanthropy, and sea monsters. Stories of cruelty and vengeance, of a body that refuses to be cremated, a deranged performer with one last shocking show, a frozen corpse that may not be dead. With stories ranging from frightening to horrific to weird to darkly funny, by a lineup of authors that includes both masters of horror fiction and award-winning literary greats, this is a horror anthology like no other. Spanning two hundred years of horror, this new collection features seventeen macabre gems, including two original tales and many others that have never or seldom been reprinted, by: Charles Birkin • John Blackburn • Michael Blumlein • Mary Cholmondeley • Hugh Fleetwood • Stephen Gregory • Gerald Kersh • Francis King • M. G. Lewis • Florence Marryat • Richard Marsh • Michael McDowell • Christopher Priest • Forrest Reid • Bernard Taylor • Hugh Walpole 'The things were there and they were hiding in the slime; waiting ... waiting to clutch and claw and savage’ - AUNTY GREEN by John Blackburn ‘The sound that came from her throat, a small, pleading cry of terror, was cut off before she’d hardly had a chance to utter it’ - OUT OF SORTS by Bernard Taylor ‘The words filled her with an indescribable fear, and she turned to run; but her way was blocked by a figure, gigantic in stature – and its monstrous shape moved towards her, and she knew it was the incarnation of evil itself ’ - THE TERROR ON TOBIT by Charles Birkin
Download or read book Ratman s Notebooks written by Stephen Gilbert and published by Viking Adult. This book was released on 1969 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Face That Must Die written by Ramsey Campbell and published by Millipede Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Complete novel, interior photographs, introduction by Poppy Z. Brite, new afterword, and a related short story.
Download or read book Blackwater written by Michael McDowell and published by . This book was released on 2017-10-02 with total page 800 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blackwater is the saga of a small town, Perdido, Alabama, and Elinor Dammert, the stranger who arrives there under mysterious circumstances on Easter Sunday, 1919. On the surface, Elinor is gracious, charming, anxious to belong in Perdido, and eager to marry Oscar Caskey, the eldest son of Perdido's first family. But her beautiful exterior hides a shocking secret. Beneath the waters of the Perdido River, she turns into something terrifying, a creature whispered about in stories that have chilled the residents of Perdido for generations. Some of those who observe her rituals in the river will never be seen again ... Originally published as a series of six volumes in 1983, Blackwater is the crowning achievement of Michael McDowell, author of the Southern Gothic classics Cold Moon Over Babylon and The Elementals and screenwriter of Beetlejuice and The Nightmare Before Christmas. This first-ever one-volume edition, with a new introduction by Shirley Jackson Award-winning author Nathan Ballingrud, marks Blackwater's first appearance in print in three decades and will allow a new generation of readers to discover this modern horror classic.
Download or read book The Cormorant written by Stephen Gregory and published by Parthian Books. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young family receives a welcome surprise when old Uncle Ian dies and leaves them a cottage in north Wales. For Ian's nephew and his wife Ann, it seems a stroke of incredible good fortune, enabling them to leave their unfulfilling lives in the city for a newfound freedom in the remote seaside cottage. There's just one catch. Uncle Ian's will has a strange condition: the couple must care for his pet cormorant or forfeit the bequest. They think nothing of it at first: Uncle Ian was eccentric, and the bird is amusing in a way. But when the cormorant begins to show a violent and malevolent side, they soon find that Uncle Ian's gift may not be a blessing, but a curse.
Download or read book The Great White Space written by Basil Copper and published by 20th Century. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The best writer in the genre since H. P. Lovecraft." - Los Angeles Herald-Examiner "Outstanding in the genre." - August Derleth "In the same class as M.R. James and Algernon Blackwood." - Michael and Mollie Hardwick "One of the last great traditionalists of English fiction." - Colin Wilson Frederick Plowright, a well-known scientific photographer, is recruited by Professor Clark Ashton Scarsdale to accompany his research team in search of "The Great White Space," described in ancient and arcane texts as a portal leading to the extremities of the universe. Plowright, Scarsdale, and the rest of their crew embark on the Great Northern Expedition, traversing a terrifying and desolate landscape to the Black Mountains, where a passageway hundreds of feet high leads to a lost city miles below the surface of the earth. But the unsettling discoveries they make there are only a precursor of the true horror to follow. For the doorway of the Great White Space opens both ways, and something unspeakably evil has crossed over-a horrifying abomination that does not intend to let any of them return to the surface alive . . . One of the great British horror writers of the 20th century, Basil Copper (1924-2013) was best known for his macabre short fiction, which earned him the World Horror Convention's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010. The Great White Space (1974) is a tale in the mode of H. P. Lovecraft and is recognized as one of the best Lovecraftian horror novels ever written. This edition, the first in more than 30 years, includes a new introduction by Stephen Jones.
