In an isolated castle deep in the Austrian forest, Laura leads a solitary life with only her ailing father for company. Until one moonlit night, a horse-drawn carriage crashes into view, carrying an unexpected guest – the beautiful Carmilla. So begins a feverish friendship between Laura and her mysterious, entrancing companion. But as Carmilla becomes increasingly strange and volatile, prone to eerie nocturnal wanderings, Laura finds herself tormented by nightmares and growing weaker by the day… Pre-dating Dracula by twenty-six years, Carmilla is the original vampire story, steeped in sexual tension and gothic romance.

P.C. McPhee, in Australia to help his uncle solve an underwater mystery involving buried treasure, finds himself trapped in a deadly game of cat and mouse with an evil geologist determined to find the treasure at any cost. Reprint.

When mutant rats threaten to take over Staten Island, which has become a huge landfill, 14-year-old Sarah and her younger brother Mike try to figure out how to stop them.

Zack and a young Native American woman descend into the bowels of the mountains of Utah to find the baby dinosaur that infected him with reptilian qualities and discover creatures beyond their wildest imaginations. By the author of The Pigman.

Driving past Stonehenge on his way to visit his anthropologist aunt, 15-year-old Jackson sees a creature mauling a young man. It turns out that his aunt is leading a team of scientists and military personnel who are investigating a series of mutilations in the area. The creature, an intelligent but bloodthirsty hominid, kills several people, leading Jackson on a hunt for the beast before it kills again.

Loch and his sister are with their father on a scientific expedition to track lake monsters. Their father's boss, Anthony Cavenger, a ruthless publishing mogul, is determined to prove that the legends are fact. Until now, it has been a fruitless exercise. But suddenly, on a routine exploration, a hideous water beast explodes out of the water, and a photographer, hoping to get the picture of a lifetime, loses his life instead. The plesiosaurs terrorize the secluded lake community, but Loch encounters a baby plesiosaur and realizes that the monsters only attack when threatened. So he risks his life-and the lives of his family and friends-to save the prehistoric creatures from destruction. 1995 Quick Pick for Reluctant Young Adult Readers (ALA) 1995 Books for the Teen Age (NY Public Library)

The insidious Fleet Street barber slit his first throat in an 1846 "penny dreadful," one of those gaudy serialized novels that gleefully offered thrills and gore to sensation-hungry Victorians. Titled The String of Pearls, it told of Sweeney Todd, whose shop stood next to St. Dunstan's Church, just a few blocks from the Royal Courts of Justice. On this site, he robbed and murdered hundreds of customers. To dispose of their remains, he carried them to an underground bakery of one Mrs. Lovett, whose pie shop was a few blocks away. She ground the cadavers into stuffing for her meat pies, the favorite midday repast of the lawyers who worked nearby and who got their shaves from Sweeney Todd. The man you lunched with yesterday could be your lunch today! Before the serial's final chapters even hit the stands, the first stage version, pirated from the already published installments, was packing them in at a London theater. Since then there have been numerous stage, literary, and screen versions of the story, most notably the hit Sondheim musical. Blackstone Audio has commissioned this, the first audio version of the tale, from the Audie(R) award-winning Hollywood Theater of the Ear (The Sherlock Holmes Theatre, The Oresteia). With tongue in cheek, writer/producer/director Yuri Rasovsky has gone all the way back to the original penny dreadful to imbue an old string of pearls with new luster--and fresh blood.

The world's most vicious predator is back—and he's got Company. Tyrannosaurus Rex, Deinonychus, Brachiosaurus, all have been loosed into the modern world by Jane Penward, the vengeance-hungry nymphomaniac wife of the man who cloned them. David Pascal is a small-time Journalist who gets his Chance to make it big by cracking the dino story. But the key to the truth carries a high price—it's held by Jane. Before she's through with David, the carnage created by the dinosaurs will spread for miles and climax in an apocalyptic battle between the primal monsters and all the technological forces that modern man can muster. But can anything stand against the voracious prehistoric hunger of... Carnosaur.

First published pseudonymously in 1764, The Castle of Otranto purported to be a translation of an Italian story of the time of the crusades. In it Walpole attempted, as he declared in the Preface to the Second Edition, "to blend the two kinds of romance: the ancient and the modern." Crammed with invention, entertainment, terror, and pathos, the novel was an immediate success and Walpole's own favorite among his numerous works. The novel is reprinted here from a text of 1798, the last that Walpole himself prepared for the press.

In an isolated castle deep in the Austrian forest, Laura leads a solitary life with only her ailing father for company. Until one moonlit night, a horse-drawn carriage crashes into view, carrying an unexpected guest – the beautiful Carmilla. So begins a feverish friendship between Laura and her mysterious, entrancing companion. But as Carmilla becomes increasingly strange and volatile, prone to eerie nocturnal wanderings, Laura finds herself tormented by nightmares and growing weaker by the day… Pre-dating Dracula by twenty-six years, Carmilla is the original vampire story, steeped in sexual tension and gothic romance.

In a tale of ancient evil, Bram Stoker creates a world of lurking horrors and bizarre denizens: a demented mesmerist, hellbent on mentally crushing the girl he loves; a gigantic kite raised to rid the land of an unnatural infestation of birds, and which receives strange commands along its string; and all the while, the great white worm slithers below, seeking its next victim... Bram Stoker, creator of Dracula, is one of the most enduring and masterful influences on the literature of terror.

Get set for true terror in one of Edgar Allan Poe's most famous short stories. We enter the mind of a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition. The dank prison room is without light and he begins to feel his way around the walls. Later, as a little light enters the room, he discovers two things: a deep and dangerous pit in the centre into which he had almost fallen when he explored the cell blindly, and a scythe-like pendulum suspended from the ceiling which is slowly descending as it swings back and forth with his body as its target. You'll feel his terror. Contents: - The Pit and the Pendulum - The Black Cat - The Tell-Tale Heart - The Premature Burial