Showing results by publisher "Isis Publishing Ltd" in Gothic

Nancy has spent her whole life on the vibrant and gritty streets of Victorian London, first as one of Fagin's child pickpockets and now on the arm of violent and mercurial Bill Sikes. Nancy does what she must to get by. She's attuned to the harsh realities of life, but also knows how to find moments of beauty amid the grime, even if it is only the scent and taste of an orange - its miraculous colour and form. When she embarks on a relationship with enigmatic gentleman Mr Rufus, it awakens emotions she's never felt before, and makes a better life feel possible for the first time.

Thornfield Hall, 1821. Alice Fairfax takes up her role as housekeeper of the estate. But when Mr. Rochester presents her with a woman who is to be hidden on the third floor, she finds herself responsible for much more than the house. This is the story Jane Eyre never knew--a narrative played out on the third floor and beneath the stairs, as the servants kept their master's secret safe and sound.

Lachlan's younger brother Toby has gone missing in the remote East Pilbara region of Western Australia. The last thing he heard was that Toby was in a little town out in the arse-end of nowhere, a tiny place called Jasper Cliff. When Lachlan's car breaks down on the edge of the Cliff, he finds himself marooned at the local pub, surrounded by a cohort of ragtag locals.

On the first morning of her new job at Heartfield House, a care home for the elderly, Annie Jackson wakens from a terrifying dream. And when she arrives at the home, she knows that the first old man she meets is going to die. How she knows this is a terrifying mystery, but it is the start of horrifying premonitions...a rekindling of the curse that has trickled through generations of women in her family - a wicked gift known only as 'the murmurs'... With its reappearance comes an old, forgotten fear that is about to grip Annie Jackson.

As Autumn deepens into darkness in Lidingö, on the Stockholm archipelago, the island is plunged into chaos: in the space of a week, two teenagers, the son of the island's mayor and that of a powerful businessman, are brutally murdered. Their bodies are left deep in the forest, dressed in white tunics with crowns of candles atop their heads, like offerings to Saint Lucia. Maïa Rehn has fled Paris for Lidingö, where her husband has grown up, trying to come to terms with the death of their only daughter in a car accident...

Married couple Jack and Ali Gardiner move to a self-sufficient spiritual commune in the English Fens, desperate for fresh start. The local village is known for the witches who once resided there, and Rosalind House, where the commune has been established, is a former psychiatric home, with a disturbing history. When Jack and Ali arrive, a chain of unexpected and unexplained events is set off, and it becomes clear that they are not all that they seem. As the residents become twitchy, and the villagers suspicious, events from the past come back to haunt them, and someone is seeking retribution....

Vowing once again to remove herself from society, Annie is once more living alone in her little cottage by the shores of a loch. But when an old enemy – now locked up in a high-security hospital – comes calling, begging her to find the son that she was forced to give up at the age of 17, Annie is tempted out of seclusion. Annie and Lewis begin an investigation that takes them back to the past, a time etched in Scottish folklore, a period of history that may just be repeating itself.

Strangling vines and meat-hungry flora fill this unruly garden of strange stories, selected for their significance as the seeds of the villainous (or perhaps just misunderstood) 'killer plant' in fiction, film and video games. Step within to marvel at Charlotte Perkins Gilman's giant wisteria and H.G. Wells' hungry orchid; hear the calls of the ethereal women of the wood and the frightful drone of the moaning lily; and do tread carefully around E. Nesbit's wandering creepers. Every strain of vegetable threat can be found within this new collection.

When her grandmother dies, Catherine Llewellyn finds herself alone in the world. Her inheritance is a comfort, but her grandmother's will states she must go to the family home, Langland Hall, to live with her two unknown cousins, Garth and Jonathon. The harsh and inhospitable coast is a sharp contrast to Catherine's previous country existence, and the welcome she receives from Garth is equally cool. Only Jonathon seems happy to welcome her to her new home. But no sooner has she arrived than she realises that something dangerous is waiting for her.

Newly appointed as land agent to the youthful Lord Croft, Matthew Rowsley finds plenty to keep him busy as he attends to his lordship's neglected country estate. But he's distracted from his tasks by the disappearance of a young housemaid. Has Maggie really eloped with a young man, as her mother attests - or is the truth rather more sinister? What's been going on behind the scenes at the grand country estate and where has his lordship disappeared to?

Elizabeth Murray has been condemned to burn at the stake when a strange man visits her. He offers her a deal: her soul in return for immortality. What he offers is not a normal life. To survive, Elizabeth must become Death. Elizabeth must ease the passing of all those who die, using her compassion to guide them. She accepts and, for 500 years, whirls from one death to the next. Until one day, everything changes. She - Death - falls in love. Desperate to escape from her deal, she summons the man who saved her. He agrees to release her the condition that she gives him five lives.

Hiding from the world in her little white cottage on the shores of a loch, Annie Jackson is fighting to come to terms with the world of the murmurs, a curse that has haunted female members of her family for centuries. While she is within the ancient, heavy stone of the old dwelling, the voices merely buzz, but the moment she steps outside the door they clamour to torment her all over again, bringing with them shocking visions of imminent deaths. Into this oasis comes her adoptive mother, Mandy McEvoy, begging for Annie's help. Mandy's nephew Damien has gone missing.

It's 1921 in Widow's Peak, a gloomy fishing village on the south coast of New South Wales. Nineteen-year-old Missy Green fills her days helping her fisherman father on his trawler, and spending time with her grandfather, the town's reclusive lighthouse keeper. It's a dreary existence. Everything in her sea salt-soaked life is upended, though, when she glimpses something in the water—a mermaid ominously staring at her.

The Cornish village of St Petroc is the sort of place where people come to hide. Tom Killgannon is one such person. An ex-undercover cop, Tom is in the Witness Protection Programme, and St Petroc offers him a chance to live a safe and quiet life. Until he meets Lila. Lila is a 17-year-old runaway. When she breaks into Tom's house she takes more than just his money. His wallet holds everything about his new identity. He also knows that Lila is in danger from the travellers' commune she's been living at.

A positive spin on the supernatural, ‘Pirates’ sees ageing industrialist Peter Graham return to his former family home in Cornwall after more than 40 years. The ghosts of the house represent happy memories of his childhood.

A Charlotte Riddell novella from the British Library Tales of the Weird collection Haunted Houses. When his cousin Geoffrey dies, barrister Hercules Stafford Trevor agrees to act as his young widow’s guardian. But Trevor has troubles of his own when he discovers that the legends surrounding his country house might have more than a grain of truth in them, and it seems these hauntings are destined to become intertwined with the fate of the widow.

After the suicide of his uncle, Lucas Heathfield inherits Stoneborough Manor in Oxfordshire. He imagines it as a place where he and his tight-knit group of friends can spend time away from London. But from the beginning, the house changes everything. It begins to have a strange effect on Lucas and he becomes haunted by the death of his uncle, obsessed by ciné films of his uncle's friends at Stoneborough 30 years earlier. Within the claustrophobic confines of the house over a hot, decadent summer, secrets slide out of the past and sexual tensions escalate, shattering the group's friendship and changing their lives irrevocably.

Thomas Oulton has worked for a London banking house for 30 years and is widely respected by his colleagues, so when he seemingly disappears with a client’s money, everyone is shocked, none more so than his manager, Louis Carrington. When a friend comes to spend the weekend with Louis and his family at their Surrey home, a series of strange phenomena leads the narrator to discover what’s happened to Oulton.

Concerned for their recently widowed friend Harry, Vincent and Tom join him in Egypt for a boat trip along the Nile. Whilst the widower seems determined to forget his late wife, he recreates their honeymoon voyage, and their evening games of cards soon attract an unsettling presence.