From Nick Roberts, the best-selling author of The Exorcist's House and Anathema, comes fifteen dark tales that are as horrific as they are moving. Witness absolute evil in “Sally Under the Bed” and “It Haunts the Mind.” Endure vengeance and violence in “The Noose” and “The Bitter End.” Face the realities of addiction and grief in “Thanks for Sharing” and “The Weeping Wind.”

When her seven-year-old daughter Lizzy disappeared into a corn maze on Halloween night in 1984, Catherine Bryant didn’t think she’d survive the loss. For nearly 40 years, Catherine has struggled with her grief and guilt, so when her doctor delivers a fatal diagnosis, it’s almost a relief. But something is happening to Catherine. Whether a result of her medications or from the disease that’s destroying her brain, Catherine is experiencing vivid nightmares that spill over to waking hallucinations of a malicious cartoon scarecrow.

Something festive is growing in the sewer... After last year’s tragedy, Douglas’ parents are ignoring Christmas. But when Douglas finds an eerie strand of lights slithering through the sewer, he unwittingly unleashes merry terror upon his neighborhood’s tacky lights contest. String lights spread like invasive kudzu, turning festive decorations into surreal, predatory nightmares.

In the turbulent summer of 1974, Kate Mularkey has accepted her place at the bottom of the eighth-grade social food chain. Then, to her amazement, the "coolest girl in the world" moves in across the street and wants to be her friend. Tully Hart seems to have it all - beauty, brains, ambition. On the surface they are as opposite as two people can be: Kate, doomed to be forever uncool, with a loving family who mortifies her at every turn.

Even four years after the sudden death of his wife, best selling novelist Mike Noonan can't stop grieving, nor can he return to his writing. He moves into his isolated house by the lake, which becomes the site of ghostly visitations, ever-escalating nightmares, and the sudden recovery of his writing ability. What are the forces that have been unleashed here - and what do they want of Mike Noonan?

Tananarive Due, author of The Living Blood won the American Book Award and is praised as Stephen King's equal by Publishers Weekly. In The Good House, Due sets a story of ancient powers and modern retribution in a small Pacific Northwest town. When a young woman returns to her grandmother's empty mansion, she is pitted against demonic forces that have poisoned her family for generations.

An intricate tale of love, haunting memories, and renewal, Second Glance begins in current-day Vermont, where an old man puts a piece of land up for sale and unintentionally raises protest from the local Abenaki Indian tribe, who insist it's a burial ground. When odd, supernatural events plague the town of Comtosook, a ghost hunter is hired by the developer to help convince the residents that there's nothing spiritual about the property.

Florence Day is the ghostwriter for one of the most prolific romance authors in the industry, and she has a problem—after a terrible breakup, she no longer believes in love. It’s as good as dead. When her new editor, a too-handsome mountain of a man, won't give her an extension on her book deadline, Florence prepares to kiss her career goodbye. But then she gets a phone call she never wanted to receive, and she must return home for the first time in a decade to help her family bury her beloved father.

Thirteen-year-old Julie Whitaker was kidnapped from her bedroom in the middle of the night, witnessed only by her younger sister. Her family was shattered, but managed to stick together, hoping against hope that Julie is still alive. And then one night: the doorbell rings. A young woman who appears to be Julie is finally, miraculously, home safe. The family is ecstatic - but Anna, Julie's mother, has whispers of doubts. She hates to face them.

When Apollo Kagwa's father disappeared, all he left his son were strange recurring dreams and a box of books stamped with the word improbabilia. Now Apollo is a father himself - and as he and his wife, Emma, are settling into their new lives as parents, exhaustion and anxiety start to take their toll. Apollo's old dreams return and Emma begins acting odd.

Chizmar assembles 35 stories, including a previously unpublished novella, and presents us with A Long December. This massive new collection features more than 150,000 words of Chizmar's very best short fiction and includes 8,000 words of autobiographical story notes. Eerie, suspenseful, poignant, the stories in A Long December range from horror to suspense, crime to dark fantasy, mainstream to mystery.

Tallulah James comes from a long line of intelligent college professors with strong Southern roots - and long-buried family secrets. Tallulah's childhood is a tumultuous one: Her mother is often absent as she puts her goals to save the world over her family. Her father's ignored bipolar disorder results in bouts of depression and manic behavior that often leave Tallulah afraid and confused.

There's a stranger living in Kimber Hannon's house. He tells the police that he has every right to be there, and he has the paperwork to prove it. But Kimber definitely didn't invite this man to move in. He tells her that he knows something about her, and he wants everyone else to know it too. "I was there. I saw what you did." These words reveal a connection to Kimber's distant past, and dark secrets she'd long ago left buried. This trespasser isn't after anything as simple as her money or her charming Craftsman bungalow.

Kimberly Leamy is a photography teacher in Melbourne, Australia. Twenty-six years earlier, Sammy Went, a two-year-old girl vanished from her home in Kentucky. An American accountant who contacts Kim is convinced she was that child, kidnapped just after her birthday. She cannot believe the woman who raised her, a loving social worker who died of cancer four years ago, crossed international lines to steal a toddler. But with proof she and Sammy are in fact the same person, Kim travels to America to reunite with a family she never knew she had and to solve the mystery of her abduction.

In the four years since breaking off her engagement, Maggie Kincaid has fled from city to city, seeking to escape her ex-fiance Michael's relentless pursuit. Abandoned by a criminal justice system that cannot seem to protect her despite multiple restraining orders, she is ready to give up. Determined to end her ordeal one way or another, Maggie confronts Michael, and he disappears, seeming to have tired of the chase. Instead, the hunter has decided to make himself the hunted, in a way that no one could have imagined.

In number-one New York Times best-selling author Charlaine Harris’s "Dahlia Underground,” venerable vampire Dahlia Lynley-Chivers survives an attack by an anti-vampire terrorist group, only to show them they tried to blow up the wrong bloodsucker. Bailey Ruth Raeburn, a ghost assigned to assist humans in trouble, steps into the middle of a marital dispute with surprising twists in Carolyn Hart’s “Riding High”....

It's been twenty years since the night Jake Marcott was brutally murdered at St. Elizabeth High School. It's a night that shattered the lives of Lindsay Farrell, Kirsten Daniels, and Rachel Alsace. It's a night they'll never forget. A killer will make sure of that....

The best stories pull readers in and keep them turning the pages, eager to discover more—to find the answer to the question: "And then what happened?" The true hallmark of great literature is great imagination, and as Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio prove with this outstanding collection, when it comes to great fiction, all genres are equal.

Ray Bradbury - peerless storyteller, poet of the impossible, and one of America's most beloved authors - is a literary giant whose remarkable career spanned seven decades. Now 26 of today's most diverse and celebrated authors offer new short works in honor of the master; stories of heart, intelligence, and dark wonder from a remarkable range of creative artists.

Only God knew why Jillian Slater agreed to return to New Orleans on the news that her father had finally drunk himself to death. It's not like they were close. She hadn't seen him - or her grandmother, the ice queen - in almost 20 years. But when Adella Atwater, the manager of her grandmother's apartment house, called and said her expenses would be paid if she'd fly in for the burial, a free trip to New Orleans was too intriguing to resist.

Margo is not like other girls. She lives in a derelict neighborhood called the Bone, in a cursed house, with her cursed mother, who hasn't spoken to her in over two years. She lives her days feeling invisible. It's not until she develops a friendship with her wheelchair-bound neighbor, Judah Grant, that things begin to change. When a neighborhood girl, seven-year-old Neveah Anthony, goes missing, Judah sets out to help Margo uncover what happened to her. What Margo finds changes her, and with a new perspective on life she's determined to find evil and punish it.

Jenna Rosen returns to the place in Alaska where her young son, Bobby, disappeared without a trace two years before. Jenna is determined to lay to rest the aching mystery of his death. But ancient legends may have had a hand in Bobby’s fate, forcing Jenna to sift through her own Native American ancestry to uncover the truth.

Life under Apartheid has created a secure future for Robin Conrad, a 10-year-old white girl living with her parents in 1970s Johannesburg. In the same nation but worlds apart, Beauty Mbali, a Xhosa woman in a rural village in the Bantu homeland of the Transkei, struggles to raise her children alone after her husband's death. Both lives have been built upon the division of race, and their meeting should never have occurred...until the Soweto Uprising.

As a boy, Will Klein had a hero: his older brother, Ken. Then, on a warm suburban night in the Kleins’ affluent New Jersey neighborhood, a young woman—a girl Will had once loved—was found brutally murdered in her family’s basement. The prime suspect: Ken Klein. With the evidence against him overwhelming, Ken simply vanished. And when his shattered family never heard from Ken again, they were sure he was gone for good.

The Van Ripper women have been the talk of Tarrytown, New York, for centuries. Some say they're angels; some say they're crooks. In their tumbledown "Stitchery", not far from the stomping grounds of the legendary Headless Horseman, the Van Ripper sisters - Aubrey, Bitty, and Meggie - are said to knit people's most ardent wishes into beautiful scarves and mittens, granting them health, success, or even a blossoming romance. But for the magic to work, sacrifices must be made - and no one knows that better than the Van Rippers.

Now: Sixteen-year-old Jesse is used to living with the echoes of the past. Her older brother died in the September 11th attacks, and her dad since has filled their home with anger and grief. When Jesse gets caught up with the wrong crowd, one momentary hate-fueled decision turns her life upside down. The only way to make amends is to face the past, starting Jesse on a journey that will reveal the truth about how her brother died. Then: In 2001, 16-year-old Alia is proud to be Muslim....it's being a teenager that she finds difficult.

Something dark and dangerous had long shadowed Skye Dearborn’s life. She had seen the fear of it in her mother’s eyes. It was there, locked in her memories of blood spilling across a gleaming floor. In the sound of her own screams. And in the terror she’d felt the night her mother disappeared. Then fortune smiled on Skye. With help she was able to put the horror behind her and look to the future. But now that same fortune is leading her into the arms of danger - and back into the nightmare of her past. For the evil that has haunted her dreams has a human form....

Daisy Parker is Jasper's lover and mother to Jay, his nine-year-old son. But when Jasper doesn't come home one too many nights, Daisy decides she's had enough. But Jasper hasn't been partying; he's been murdered. In shock, Daisy is further devastated to learn that Jasper was married and has left everything to his wife. Now without a home or a job, Daisy must figure out a way to support herself and Jay. And when a sexy ex-boyfriend resurfaces, Daisy's life becomes even more complicated.

In her tour-de-force first novel, Juliann Garey takes us inside the restless mind, ravaged heart, and anguished soul of Greyson Todd, a successful Hollywood studio executive who leaves his wife and young daughter and for a decade travels the world giving free reign to the bipolar disorder he's been forced to keep hidden for almost 20 years.

Jack and Laurel have been married for 39 years. They've lived a good life and appear to have had the perfect marriage. With his wife cradled in his arms, and before Jack takes his last breath, he scribbles his last “Wednesday Letter.” When their adult children arrive to arrange the funeral, they discover boxes and boxes full of love letters that their father wrote to their mother each week on Wednesday. As they begin to open and read the letters, the children begin to uncover the shocking truth about the past.