Dread of the unknown fills us with both unease and curiosity. We laugh, nervously, at tales of haunted houses and phantoms, yet something looms. There is a shadow behind life that creeps through its walls and knocks, and we know it is a fear of the unknown that makes each heart beat faster. Life is uncanny. We are equally attracted to and repulsed by what scares us. The unknown will persist thanks to literature, and that is where the ghosts will always live. This collection presents twenty-nine eerie narratives drenched in an otherworldly fog. Ghosts stalk these pages, and the ominous specter of Death peers out with an amused grin. Separated into two parts, this collection contains both ghastly stories of death and bizarre tales of the unknown. These tales were all chosen for their uncanny aesthetics and their compelling narratives. Marvel at the literary and haunting expertise of classic writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ambrose Bierce, Bram Stoker, and more.

From the deeply unsettling to the possibly supernatural, these thirty-one border-crossing stories from around the world explore the uncanny in literature, and delve into our increasingly unstable sense of self, home, and planet. The Uncanny Reader: Stories from the Shadows opens with "The Sand-man," E.T.A. Hoffmann's 1817 tale of doppelgangers and automatons—a tale that inspired generations of writers and thinkers to come. Stories by 19th and 20th century masters of the uncanny—including Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, and Shirley Jackson—form a foundation for sixteen award-winning contemporary authors, established and new, whose work blurs the boundaries between the familiar and the unknown. These writers come from Egypt, France, Germany, Japan, Poland, Russia, Scotland, England, Sweden, the United States, Uruguay, and Zambia—although their birthplaces are not always the terrains they plumb in their stories, nor do they confine themselves to their own eras. Contemporary authors include: Chris Adrian, Aimee Bender, Kate Bernheimer, Jean-Christophe Duchon-Doris, Mansoura Ez-Eldin, Jonathon Carroll, John Herdman, Kelly Link, Steven Millhauser, Joyce Carol Oates, Yoko Ogawa, Dean Paschal, Karen Russell, Namwali Serpell, Steve Stern and Karen Tidbeck.

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form… As may naturally be expected of a form so closely connected with primal emotion, the horror-tale is as old as human thought and speech themselves. H. P. Lovecraft Horror intends to create an eerie and frightening atmosphere for the reader. Prevalent elements include ghosts, demons, vampires, werewolves, ghouls, the Devil, witches, monsters, dystopian and apocalyptic worlds, serial killers, cannibalism, psychopaths, cults, dark magic, Satanism, the macabre, gore, and torture. Edgar Allan Poe The Murders in the Rue Morgue The Gold Bug The Black Cat The Pit and the Pendulum The Tell-Tale Heart The Fall of the House of Usher The Masque of the Red Death The Cask of Amontillado The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar Hop-Frog The Raven Bram Stoker Dracula Mary Shelley Frankenstein Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu Carmilla Robert Louis Stevenson The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde H.P. Lovecraft The Alchemist At the Mountains of Madness Azathoth The Beast in the Cave Beyond the Wall of Sleep The Book The Call of Cthulhu The Case of Charles Dexter Ward The Cats of Ulthar The Colour out Of Space Dagon The Descendant The Doom that Came to Sarnath The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath The Dunwich Horror The Evil Clergyman Ex Oblivione Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family The Festival From Beyond The Haunter of the Dark He Herbert West-Reanimator The History of The Necronomicon The Horror at Red Hook The Hound Hypnos Ibid In the Vault the Little Glass Bottle Memory The Moon-Bog The Music of Erich Zann The Nameless City Nyarlathotep Old Bugs The Other Gods The Outsider Pickman's Model The Picture in the House Polaris The Quest of Iranon The Rats in the Walls A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson The Secret Cave or John Lees Adventure The Shadow Out Of Time The Shadow Over Innsmouth The Shunned House The Silver Key The Statement of Randolph Carter The Strange High House in the Mist The Street The Temple The Terrible Old Man The Tomb The Transition of Juan Romero The Tree Under the Pyramids The Very Old Folk What the Moon Brings The Whisperer in Darkness The White Ship Supernatural Horror in Literature Algernon Blackwood The Willows Francis Marion Crawford The Doll's Ghost Robert W. Chambers The King in Yellow M.R. James Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book Lost Hearts The Mezzotint The Ash-Tree Number 13 Count Magnus The Treasure Of Abbot Thomas A School Story The Rose Garden The Stalls Of Barchester Cathedral The Diary Of Mr. Poynter An Episode Of Cathedral History The Story Of A Disappearance And An Appearance An Evening's Entertainment A Warning To The Curious A Neighbour's Landmark The Uncommon Prayer-Book The Haunted Dolls' House Wailing Well There Was A Man Dwelt By A Churchyard Rats After Dark In The Playing Fields The Experiment The Malice Of Inanimate Objects A Vignette

These 26 short stories are SCARY and BIZARRE. When you are camping, pull this book from your backpack, and you’ll have plenty of short scary stories to tell around the fire. We all know things are out there, you know, the creatures that live in the dark, the witches who haunt our dreams, and the terrible monsters who live in the blackness. Read these stories, and when you go to bed, be sure to keep one eye open.

"This is absorbing, headlong reading, a play on classic horror with an inventiveness of its own... As with all the best illusions, you are left feeling not tricked, but full of wonder." – The New York Times The haunting new thriller from Alex North, author of the New York Times bestseller The Whisper Man You knew a teenager like Charlie Crabtree. A dark imagination, a sinister smile--always on the outside of the group. Some part of you suspected he might be capable of doing something awful. Twenty-five years ago, Crabtree did just that, committing a murder so shocking that it’s attracted that strange kind of infamy that only exists on the darkest corners of the internet--and inspired more than one copycat. Paul Adams remembers the case all too well: Crabtree--and his victim--were Paul’s friends. Paul has slowly put his life back together. But now his mother, old and suffering from dementia, has taken a turn for the worse. Though every inch of him resists, it is time to come home. It's not long before things start to go wrong. Paul learns that Detective Amanda Beck is investigating another copycat that has struck in the nearby town of Featherbank. His mother is distressed, insistent that there's something in the house. And someone is following him. Which reminds him of the most unsettling thing about that awful day twenty-five years ago. It wasn't just the murder. It was the fact that afterward, Charlie Crabtree was never seen again...

For fans of Small Spaces, Coraline, A Series of Unfortunate Events, and James Howe's Bunnicula classics comes the first book in the award-winning, New York Times bestselling Books of Elsewhere series. This house is keeping secrets . . . When eleven-year-old Olive and her parents move into the crumbling mansion on Linden Street and find it filled with mysterious paintings, Olive knows the place is creepy—but it isn’t until she encounters its three talking cats that she realizes there’s something darkly magical afoot. Then Olive finds a pair of antique spectacles in a dusty drawer and discovers the most peculiar thing yet: She can travel inside the house’s spooky paintings to a world that’s strangely quiet . . . and eerily sinister. But in entering Elsewhere, Olive has been ensnared in a mystery darker and more dangerous than she could have imagined, confronting a power that wants to be rid of her by any means necessary. With only the cats and an unusual boy she meets in Elsewhere on her side, it’s up to Olive to save the house from the shadows, before the lights go out for good.

When Elaine was working late at the office, she thought she was all alone. But something sinister was in the elevator shaft--working its way to her floor. Miles, too, thought he was alone in his new house, the house of a murderer, but he, too, had an unwanted companion. And Knox will never forget what had been waiting for him in the dense fog.