So, you think you like to be scared.... Nominated for the World Fantasy Award, the Hugo Award, and the coveted Nebula, the unforgettable tales in this magnificent collection are the work of one of today's most respected masters of horror. Here are stories designed to carry the listener across fear's threshold, to terror...and beyond. 

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?

Some things are older than time. Older than darkness. Every line is not a straight line and everything must converge. A parable writ in dust and blood on warped barn wood. A journey in the classic sense, populated with dried husks of towns...and people both odd and anything but ordinary. Hornets, reverse-werewolves and one of the most vicious villains you’ll ever know are all part of it. Pull on your boots and saddle up, we’ll Walk The Darkness Down.

Nicholas, a would-be poet, and Nakota, his feral lover, discover a strange hole in the storage room floor down the hall - "Black. Pure black and the sense of pulsation, especially when you look at it too closely, the sense of something not living but alive." It begins with curiosity, a joke - the Funhole down the hall. But then the experiments begin. "Wouldn't it be wild to go down there?" says Nakota. Nicholas says "We're not." But they're not in control, not from the first moment, as those experiments lead to obsession, violence, and a very final transformation.

The rural town of Old Hickory. Tennessee was a quiet, picturesque community...until the O'Sheas came to town. Becoming the new proprietors of the town's only funeral parlor, with the help of their charming patriarch, Square McManus, the Irish family was wholeheartedly accepted by the local town folk. The thing began to happen. Strange things...horrible, unspeakable things...in the dead of night. The sighting of wolfish beasts congregating around an open grave in the town cemetery.

When three teenagers decide to explore the urban legend of the crazy old man on Samsonite farm and the army of scarecrows he has built, they soon discover that not all urban legends are false, and sometimes the biggest threat comes from within.

Murderers and monsters, shape-shifters and the unquiet dead, cryptids and clowns. Dangerous Toys explores a world of small horrors from the subtle to the brazen, the serious to the slapstick.

In the Russian criminal underworld, there is a man named Whitey. He is unstoppable and always gets what he wants. Some say he can't be hurt. Some say he can't be killed. Larry Gidson is about to find out. He is a dock worker on the run with Sondra Belov, a beautiful stripper. Whitey wants Sondra, and he will torture and kill to get her. Larry, his friends, and even his cat will never be safe unless they give him Sondra - or they kill Whitey. 

The cabin deep in the woods holds a secret. A secret that has the power to rip a family to pieces. When an 11-year-old boy stumbles upon it, a tense cat and mouse game begins that reaches closer to home than he ever dared imagine.

They came to the deserted island to compete on a popular reality television show. Each one hoped to be the last to leave. Now they're just hoping to stay alive, because the island isn't deserted after all. Contestants are disappearing, but they aren't being eliminated by the game. They're being taken by the monstrous, half-human creatures that live deep in the jungle. The men will be slaughtered. The women will be kept alive as captives. Night is falling, the creatures are coming, and rescue is so far away....

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. 

From out of a shadowy backwoods hollow echoes a dark threat from the past, nearly a century lost and forgotten. The rural town of Harmony, Tennessee, possessed a disturbing secret; a secret so ancient that most of its residents were completely unaware of it. Even the last survivors of a vigilante raid long ago have filed the tragic events of that autumn night away, totally unaware of the evil that remains, dormant, but forever patient, among the tall pines and thick-leaved kudzu of a place known only as Hell Hollow.

One day, it starts raining-and never stops. Global super-storms decimate the planet, eradicating most of mankind. Pockets of survivors gather on mountaintops, watching as the waters climb higher and higher. But as the tides rise, something else is rising, too. Now, in the midst of an ecological nightmare, the remnants of humanity face a new menace, in a battle that stretches from the rooftops of submerged cities to the mountaintop islands jutting from the sea. What hope does an already-devastated mankind have against this new supernatural adversary.

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.

Wild Things... They've been with us forever - prowling the smoky roadhouse dives that are their watering holes and hunting grounds. Predators, lurking amidst the human herd. Changing shape at will. Lusting for blood and meat they are gods in the wild. Gods in disguise. And they feed on the spark inside each of us. Syd was just another lonely working class guy singing the steel-town blues. Then he met Nora. She's sensual, Erotic. Amoral.