When Daniel Miller wakes up one morning, something has gone terribly wrong. The power is out. The phones are dead. The house is silent. The street is shrouded in fog. Both his partner and their adopted daughter are missing. So are their neighbors. And so is everyone else in the world. Daniel Miller is the last person left on Earth...or is he?

Bent on taking over the earth, the deadly Thone have planted a monstrous device on our planet's surface. Trapped inside is a group of scientists, spies, and innocent bystanders. Part maze, part torture chamber, part laboratory, the house of doors is a test. If its captives survive, the Thone will withdraw from earth and leave us in peace.  

Editors Randy Chandler and Cheryl Mullenax put the call out to horror writers and editors of extreme stories, the hardcore stuff that breaks boundaries and trashes taboos, the transgressive tales you can't "unread" (as Chuck Palahniuk says). Some of the stories you'll find here are loaded with very graphic descriptions of violence, sex, and depravities, while others may contain only one shocking moment of brutality. In others, the hardcore aspect may be less graphic and subtler than you might expect.

Something very strange is happening in LeHorn's Hollow. Eerie, piping music is heard late at night, and mysterious fires have been spotted deep in the woods. Women are vanishing without a trace overnight, leaving behind husbands and families. When up-and-coming novelist Adam Senft stumbles upon an unearthly scene, it plunges him and the entire town into an ancient nightmare. Folks say the woods in LeHorn's Hollow are haunted, but what waits there is far worse than any ghost.

Hovern Bog. People live in terror of it - especially the residents of Fenchurch St. Jude, the little village located at its edge. They think of it as a living being. When 2,000-year-old bodies are recovered from the bog, perfectly preserved, it is the discovery of a lifetime for archaeologist David Macauley. But close examination of the corpses reveals a curious fact: all were cruelly, mysteriously murdered, gnawed to death by some unimaginable creature.

The Rising is the story of Jim Thurmond, a determined father battling his way across a post-apocalyptic zombie landscape, to find his young son. Accompanied by Martin, a preacher still holding to his faith, and Frankie, a recovering heroin addict with an indomitable will to survive, Jim travels from state to state and town to town facing an endless onslaught of undead hordes and the evils perpetrated by his fellow man.

There was no warning. No chance to escape. They came suddenly. Naked. Bloodthirsty. Sadistic. They descended upon the Pine Village Apartment Complex, relentlessly torturing and killing anyone they could find. Fearing for their lives, the residents of the complex must band together. Eleven strangers. The only thing they have in common is the unstoppable horde that wants to kill them. If they are to make it through the night, they must fight back.

Fan favorite ex-Amish occult detective Levi Stolzfus, the star of Ghost Walk and A Gathering of Crows, returns in two novellas of demons and monsters!

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. 

Bryan Armstrong and Kyle Detwiler, two college students on the cusp of graduation, are the lucky winners of a contest to become interns on the paranormal television show The Specter Slayers. Their excitement turns to jubilation when they discover that they'll be aiding in the investigation of The Danver Church, one of the most haunted places in America. Nestled in the remote mountains of Pennsylvania, the church is world renowned for the massacre that occurred there forty years earlier.

Each tale is a magic trick, luring you toward the light while leading you down an ever-darkening path. There is hope mingled with horror, and that s Chizmar s secret power. His storytelling always beats with a huge, passionate heart. Stephen King says he writes terrific stories served with a very large slice of disquiet pie, and with The Long Way Home, Richard Chizmar has taken his evocative and compelling storytelling to an entirely new level.

In the isolated farming community of Harlowe, New Hampshire, John Moore and his wife, Mim, work the land that has been in his family for generations. But from the moment the charismatic Perly Dinsmore arrives in town and starts soliciting donations for his auctions, things begin slowly and insidiously to change in Harlowe. As the auctioneer carries out his terrible, inscrutable plan, the Moores and their neighbors will find themselves gradually but inexorably stripped of their freedom, their possessions, and perhaps even their lives.... 

To many thousands of listeners world-wide, Titus Crow is the psychic sleuth - the cosmic voyager and investigator - of Brian Lumley's Cthulhu Mythos novels, from The Burrowers Beneath to Elysia. But before The Burrowers and Crow's transition, his exploits were chronicled in a series of short stories and novellas uncollected in the USA, except in limited editions.

A Coven of Vampires features a collection of 13 classic vampire tales, including "What Dark God?", "Back Row", "The Strange Years", and "The Kiss of the Lamia".... 

On a rare warm day in January, James witnesses a man suffer a heart attack. The paramedics arrive in minutes and whisk the man away, failing to see the pair of glasses lying on the ground where the man collapsed. For James and his abandonment issues, this will not do. It’s time for a little payback on behalf of everyone — and every thing — that has ever been neglected or discarded. James is going to set things right again: one body part at a time.