In this sequel to The Night Inside, a vampire couple’s relationship is tested by the modern world as a mysterious stranger hunts them down. With a dark embrace from five-hundred-year-old vampire Dimitri Rozokov, Ardeth Alexander left behind her mortal life in Toronto. Now they are attempting to forge a new life in Banff, Alberta.—and They share an unspoken agreement not to feed on humans and hunt wild animals off the beaten paths of the national park instead. However, their new reality is far from easy, and elk blood can never fully satisfy their hunger. Angry and unhappy, Ardeth longs for the life she left behind and returns to Toronto. But the machinations of a century-old Japanese vampire soon reunite the couple. Once a feudal lord, now a yakuza boss, Sademori Fujiwara shares his extraordinary life story. It is a tale that can answer the questions of love, mortality, and morality threatening to tear Ardeth and Dimitri apart for good. But the price for those answers is dangerously high . . . “Baker writes about the vampires next door . . . they bicker over petty, everyday things. They are jealous when a partner flirts with someone. They worry about paying the rent . . . ‘They’re Canadian,’ she says.” —The Vancouver Sun “Baker evokes the various figures from Japanese culture familiar in the West—yakuza, samurai and medieval court ladies and their pillow books—but she goes beyond clichés and invests these characters with a solidity and poignancy that contrast sharply with the simpler Canadian horror of The Night Inside. This is a more contemplative offering.” —Paragraph

Vampire horror from the author of A Terrible Beauty. “Riveting . . . her compromised heroine . . . is a strikingly drawn and hauntingly memorable figure.” —USA Today Dependable grad student Ardeth Alexander finds herself trapped in a nightmare as the unwilling blood source for a captive vampire named Dimitri Rozokov. “Baker’s engrossing debut alternates the present-day story with the 1898 diary of obsessed businessman Ambrose Dale, who drove Rozokov into hiding and a 100-year sleep . . . Learning his story, Ardeth gradually loses her horror of Rozokov and begins to see their human jailers as the real monsters. Their only hope of salvation is to trace the links to Rozokov’s Victorian nemesis and discover the person behind his 20th-century captivity . . . In prose studded with passages of dark luster, Baker offers a truly original scenario” (Publishers Weekly). “It’s almost impossible not to finish The Night Inside in one frenzied, chocolate donut munching sitting. It’s also impossible not [to] root for its feisty, feminist vampiress heroine.” —Charles Busch, author of Vampire Lesbians of Sodom “Terrific . . . The unrelenting tension between the monstrous and the human propels this unique tale of gripping suspense.” —Katherine Ramsland, author of The Vampire Companion “The metamorphosis is achieved in a highly charged ritual as sensuous as any written: this is consummation as bloodbath, as mutual blood-letting and blood-sucking . . . breathless, lingering, erotic . . .” —The Globe and Mail (Toronto) “Baker has obviously thought about what surrendering to the dark side means that lifts this book up above the vast . . . morass of romantic vampire fiction.” —Quill & Quire

Horváth's setting for this black political farce is a seedy hotel in Central Europe in the 1920s where the only guest is a drunken, ageing nymphomaniac - wealthy and despotic. Under her sole occupancy the hotel is falling apart and sliding even deeper into decadence. There is no future and no hope until a young woman arrives with a fortune to spend. What follows is a riot of confusion and mistaken identities, satirising the despair and futility of a continent poised on the brink of fascism. Horváth (1901-1938) was accidentally killed in Paris after fleeing from the Nazis. The Belle Vue, one of 16 plays, was not performed until 1969. This translation marked the British premiere, in a production by the Actors Touring Company.

Hanna is what you'd call mentally ill. She'd call it being totally crazy. After running away to Portero, Texas to find her estranged mother, Hanna thinks this new town can't be any crazier than she is. She's wrong. Portero is haunted with doors to dimensions of the dead, and protected by demon hunters called Mortmaine. Hanna soon falls for a young Mortmaine named Wyatt, but when her mother is possessed by a murdering ghost, Hanna decides to do whatever it takes to save her, even if it means betraying the boy she loves. In the end no one will be left unscarred.