Elizabeth Hand

Cass Neary made her name in the 1970s as a photographer embedded in the burgeoning punk movement in New York City. Her pictures of the musicians and hangers on, the infamous, the damned, and the dead, got her into art galleries and a book deal. But thirty years later she is adrift, on her way down, and almost out. Then an old acquaintance sends her on a mercy gig to interview a famously reclusive photographer who lives on an island in Maine. When she arrives Downeast, Cass stumbles across a decades-old mystery that is still claiming victims, and into one final shot at redemption.

From three-time Shirley Jackson, World Fantasy, and Nebula Award-winning author Elizabeth Hand comes the first-ever authorized novel to return to the world of Shirley Jackson's  The Haunting of Hill House:  a suspenseful, contemporary, and terrifying story of longing and isolation all its own.   Holly Sherwin has been a struggling playwright for years, but now, after receiving a grant to develop her play, The Witch of Edmonton, she may finally be close to her big break. All she needs is time and space to bring her vision to life. When she stumbles across Hill House on a weekend getaway upstate, she is immediately taken in by the ornate, if crumbling, gothic mansion, nearly hidden outside a remote village. It’s enormous, old, and ever-so eerie—the perfect place to develop and rehearse her play.   Despite her own hesitations, Holly’s girlfriend, Nisa, agrees to join Holly in renting the house out for a month, and soon a troupe of actors, each with ghosts of their own, arrive. Yet as they settle in, the house’s peculiarities are made known: strange creatures stalk the grounds,  disturbing sounds echo throughout the halls, and time itself seems to shift.  All too soon, Holly and her friends find themselves at odds not just with one another, but with the house itself. It seems something has been waiting in Hill House all these years, and it no longer intends to walk alone . . .   

When the young members of a British acid-folk band are compelled by their manager to record their unique music, they hole up at Wylding Hall, an ancient country house with dark secrets. There they create the album that will make their reputation, but at a terrifying cost: Julian Blake, the group’s lead singer, disappears within the mansion and is never seen or heard from again. Now, years later, the surviving musicians, along with their friends and lovers—including a psychic, a photographer, and the band’s manager—meet with a young documentary filmmaker to tell their own versions of what happened that summer. But whose story is true? And what really happened to Julian Blake?

Like all new students, Sweeney moves with caution at Washington, D.C.'s University of the Archangel and St. John the Divine. It is a strange place of brooding shrines and gleaming towers, guarded by stone angels. For Sweeney, college is a time to experiment with sex, to explore new friendships. It is a time of freedom and discovery--until she makes the wrong discovery.

From Shirley Jackson Award-winner Elizabeth Hand comes a haunting and atmospheric new mystery perfect for fans of White Lotus, about a young man hired to work as a caretaker in Hawaiʻi who is drawn into the island's darkest secrets. Grady Kendall applies to work as a live-in caretaker for a luxury property in Hawaiʻi on a whim—it's as far from small-town Maine as he can imagine. But within days he's on a flight toward beautiful Kolihiʻi and his new home, a remote mansion on legendary Hokuloa Road. With little to do, Grady settles into a lonely routine, one that slowly reveals a lesser-known side of Kolihiʻi's reputation: it seems the island has long been a place where people go missing. When the next to disappear is Jessie, a young woman from Grady’s flight in, Grady becomes determined—and soon desperate—to figure out what's happened to her, and to all those staring out of the “lost” posters that paper the island. But maintaining an alliance with Raina, Jessie’s best friend, is anything but easy, and with a sinister presence stalking his every step, Grady can only hope he'll find the answer before it's too late . . . and that it might hold the key to what's been terrorizing Kolihiʻi all along.

Madeleine and Rogan are first cousins, best friends, twinned souls, each other’s first love. Even within their large, disorderly family—all descendants of a famous actress—their intensity and passion for theater sets them apart. It makes them a little dangerous. When they are cast in their school’s production of Twelfth Night, they are forced to face their separate talents and futures, and their future together. This stunning short novel, winner of the World Fantasy Award, is the perfect introduction to Elizabeth Hand’s singular voice. Her many novels offer a window into what it means to create art, to experience it, to feel passionately about the world. Illyria throws her talent into high relief—it is magic on paper.

It is 1978. Merle is in her first year at the Corcoran School of Art, catapulted from her impoverished Appalachian upbringing into a sophisticated, dissipated art scene. It is also 1870. The teenage poet Arthur Rimbaud is on the verge of breaking through to the images and voice that will make his name. The meshed power of words and art thins the boundaries between the present and the past—and allows these two troubled, brilliant artists to enter each other’s worlds.

The privileged daughter of famous television actors, Charlotte, "Lit, " Moylan is ready to enjoy one last wild fling before college and adulthood. In fact, the whole idyllic hamlet of Kamensic, New York, is ready to party, for legendary avant-garde film director--and Lit's godfather--Alex Kern is coming back to reopen his fabulous mansion, Bolerium. But it won't be just any party. It'll be the event of all time.The whole town is invited, young and old, famous and obscure. But other, more disturbing guests are arriving, too--seen at the edges of the forest, at the margins of the night. Kern's connections extend far beyond Hollywood, beyond even the modern age . . . and in Bolerium's echoing halls a fearsome confrontation is gathering, between ancient powers of the darkness and those sworn to stop them at any cost, no matter what--or who--the sacrifice...even an innocent girl.

The year is 1915 and Pin, the fourteen-year-old daughter of an amusement park fortune teller, disguises herself as a boy to run with the teenage boys who thrive in the dregs of Chicago's street scene. Unbeknownst to the well-heeled city-dwellers and visitors who come to enjoy its attractions, Riverview Park is also host to a brutal serial killer, a perfumed pedophile who uses the secrecy of a dark amusement park ride to conduct his crimes. When Pin sees a man enter the Hell Gate ride with a young girl, and leave without her, she knows that something deadly is afoot. The crime will lead her to the iconic outsider artist Henry Darger, a brilliant but seemingly mad man obsessed with his illustrated novel about a group of young girls who triumph over adult oppressors. Together, the two navigate the seedy underbelly of a changing city to uncover a murderer few even know to look for.

These “superbly crafted tales” showcase the World Fantasy Award–winning author’s “beautifully nuanced, often disquieting style” (Booklist). America boasts no finer, more acclaimed or accomplished literary fantasist than Elizabeth Hand. Poetry, magic, and love intermingle as she tears down the walls that separate the mundane from faerie and fancy. In this stunning collection of eight “strange stories,” the multiple Nebula Award– and World Fantasy Award–winning author weaves spells that enrapture her readers, ranging freely from Greek mythology to the contemporary nightmares of AIDS and 9/11. The celebrated chiller “Cleopatra Brimstone” chronicles the aftermath of a brutal rape and the bizarre transformation of a young entomology student into a vengeful angel of death. An emotionally unmoored tattoo artist discovers an unusual deck of tarot cards that enables her to profoundly alter bare skin and her personal reality in the mind-expanding masterwork “The Least Trumps.” An artist attempts to capture her wayward modern-day Odysseus in oils and otherwise; a woman tragically in love isolates herself from a catastrophe-prone world; the death of a dear friend inspires profound personal reflections and strange pagan rituals; and in the brilliant concluding story, an artifact from a lost world reveals the inescapable vulnerability of our own. Odd and touching, provocative and disturbing, the selections in this magnificent collection showcase a master of the fantastic at the very peak of her storytelling powers.

Beneath the surface of North Texas, something has been sleeping for more than thirty-five thousand years, since the last ice age until the present, when a group of young boys stumble upon something unspeakable deep inside a cavern. Their discovery draws the attention of the mysterious group known only as the syndicate--but will the syndicate save humanity, or bring on a viral Armageddon? In nearby Dallas, FBI special agents Fox Mulder And Dana Scully save hundreds of lives from a terrorist attack on a federal building. But in the government investigation that follows, their careers--and lives--are on the line, as the bureau attempts to pin the blame on them. Why? Mulder and Scully's search for answers takes them from FBI headquarters in Washington, D. C., to a hidden laboratory on the Texas border and finally to a frozen wilderness, where their worst suspicions about a global conspiracy are confirmed. And when Scully is kidnapped and infected with an extraterrestrial virus, Mulder has only hours to find the antidote and his partner before it s too late--for all of us. Will one man be able to fight the future?

When the young members of a British acid-folk band are compelled by their manager to record their unique music, they hole up at Wylding Hall, an ancient country house with dark secrets. There they create the album that will make their reputation, but at a terrifying cost: Julian Blake, the group’s lead singer, disappears within the mansion and is never seen or heard from again. Now, years later, the surviving musicians, along with their friends and lovers—including a psychic, a photographer, and the band’s manager—meet with a young documentary filmmaker to tell their own versions of what happened that summer. But whose story is true? And what really happened to Julian Blake?

It begins in a strange place in the heart of Washington, D.C. - the University of the Archangels and St. John the Divine, with its brooding shrines, its gleaming towers, and its imposing halls guarded by androgynous stone angels. Until Katherine Sweeney makes the wrong discovery. One evening, opening a door in one of the Divine's ancient towers, Sweeney learns what she was never supposed to know - that the university is controlled by a clandestine order, the Benandanti, which secretly manipulates every government, every church, every institution in the world, and has done so since long before the Fall of Rome.