Spider Horror

E. Nesbit is rightly best known for her children's books, but she also wrote works for adults, including short stories in the genres of the uncanny, macabre, and supernatural. There are five of these in this collection.

Francis Marion Crawford (1854-1909) was an American writer, born in Italy and educated in the USA. He also studied at the universities of Cambridge and Heidelberg. He was a prolific writer in many fields, but it was his novels that were most popular, commanding a large following. His stories of the macabre and supernatural are very highly regarded. Roy Macready reads five of them from Uncanny Tales.

After the critically acclaimed epic fantasy The Wolf comes The Spider, book two in Leo Carew's Under the Northern Sky series. A battle has been won, but the war still wages on.... Roper, the Black Lord of the northern people, may have vanquished the Suthern army at the Battle of Harstathur. But the greatest threat to his people lies in the hands of more shadowy forces.

Sophie is an aspiring British Pakistani actress whose only claim to fame–despite her vast and unscrupulous ambitions–is the unplanned on-camera birth of her son, a clip which has become something of a cult favourite on the Indian B movie scene. Her husband, Tariq, is a pillar of Bradford’s Muslim community and her perfect match, until his sudden disappearance under mysterious circumstances. When a body is found, presumed to be his, but disfigured in a way that makes identification difficult, Sophie is distraught.

E. F. Benson (1867-1940) is probably best known today for his sparkling, comic Lucia novels. In his own day it was his ghost stories that were his most popular works. "Naboth's Vineyard" exemplifies Benson's fine literary style and his ability to create the most frightening of supernatural and macabre tales.

Herbert George Wells was an English writer. He was prolific in many genres, writing dozens of novels, short stories. He is now best remembered for his science fiction novels and is often called a "father of science fiction". Discover H. G. Wells best short stories and science fiction classics.

She is humanity's last hope. Sasha lives in a world destroyed by giant spiders - big as semitrucks and venomous enough to kill. What remains of humanity won't last much longer. Not unless someone can save them. This 5,000-word short story the perfect Halloween listen!

M.R. James (1862-1936) was provost of King's College, Cambridge, and Eton College. He was a highly regarded scholar and academic in his time but today is remembered for his ghost stories, which are considered among the finest in the genre. The seven stories in this Volume One are: "A School Story", "Rats", "A Warning to the Curious", "Two Doctors", "The Haunted Doll's House", "Casting the Runes", "There Was a Man Dwelt by a Churchyard".

George has always hated dirt, but somehow now into his retirement it feels like all he does is work with it. His days seem to fall into a pattern of working his garden to bring in its fruits and vegetables and make his wife happy. Today, though, is different and something else is brought in from the garden.

Let's do a spell. Just for kicks. What could go wrong? Billy Cheston, an outstanding business consultant, has his eye on a golden promotion. With high-achieving friends to look up to and a child on the way, the pressure weighs heavily on his shoulders. He would do anything to live up to his friends' standards and give his family the life they deserve. But when Billy's close friend, Kevin James, brings a spell book to their group weekend retreat, his life turns upside down. What starts as laughs and gags turns to death and terror. A deal was struck with a devil, and the terms are clear: ...

“The Gateway of the Monster” is a story featuring Thomas Carnacki, a detective who investigates cases of an occult or supernatural nature. It is one of five tales of Carnacki's ghost-hunting exploits that first appeared serially in The Idler magazine in 1910 and were published together with one more as the collection Carnacki the Ghost-Finder in 1913. After a good dinner, Mr. Carnacki relates his experiences of ghost finding to his limited circle of four friends whom he has summoned to his home in Chelsea.

Axel is hiding from the world. A killer robbed his happy marriage of its life. He has not recovered fully from the death of his wife. Now Metro of Vegas wants him back. Big time!! Can he return when the memories of his wife's death still so strong? Can he help stop a serial killer who has struck across the country? Axel is about to jump into a crime that has its roots in the darkest corners of humanity... ...THE OCCULT!

As the last female of her kind, Silvia knows that her freedom could bring the resurgence of her race. Her captivity ensures extinction. To her the answer is clear. Freedom at any cost. Loose in the universe, her kiss will spread genetic contamination—altering her victims into her spider brethren. Humanity's best interests are served if that never happens.

As one of the last survivors of a race of shape-shifting spiders, her will to survive and her lust for revenge both point to the same strategy—exterminate her enemies before they find her. For the Spider Queen, friends are hard to come by, and her one-time victim Count Darith may be her only hope.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is celebrated for his tales of the macabre and the supernatural. “The Tell-Tale Heart” is one of his most famous. In it, the narrator tells how, without any motive, but merely because he is obsessed with his eye (“The eye of a vulture”), he murders an old man, and of the consequences when the murdered man's heart seeks revenge.

Ambrose Bierce's collection of short stories of the supernatural and macabre Can Such Things Be? was first published in 1893 and republished in a revised edition in 1910. One of its most notable inclusions is "The Death of Halpin Frayser" a gothic tale of the murder of the fated hero by the reanimated corpse of his beloved mother.

E. Nesbit is best known for her children's books such as The Railway Children, the Psammead series, and the stories of the Bastable family. She was also a poet and wrote many works for adults including short stories in the genre of the supernatural and the macabre. "The Head" is one of her most strange and disturbing.

The Screaming Skull is one of F. Marion Crawford's Uncanny Tales, which was first published, posthumously, in London in 1911 and was issued two weeks later in America as Wandering Ghosts.

It is said that if ghosts were real, they'd be everywhere - at shopping malls, parking lots, in the parlor, the bathroom, on the sidewalks and boulevards. (After all, how many people have lived and died throughout human history?) But maybe, just maybe, they are everywhere - on your lap at this very moment, in the walk-in closet, in the grand oak tree just outside your window, in the shower, the cellar - mumbling, grinning, stumbling about, screaming - but only a chosen few of the living have been blessed with the awful gift of being able to see them, hear them, interact with them, tormented by them.

Flynn's work as an arachnologist is interrupted by a teenager insisting he has stumbled across a new species. Having given in to the teen's hounding, Flynn realizes he might be onto something. So, he treks into the mountains, his wife, Steph, and their faithful German shepherd, Solomon, in tow for a weekend of spider-hunting and tourism. Instead, what Flynn uncovers rips their world apart.