Horror Essay

Every tale of terror, every poem of unearthly beauty, every essay of dark philosophy — collected in one definitive volume. This is the complete and unabridged collection of Edgar Allan Poe's works: the gothic horror tales that invented a genre, the poems that still haunt the English language, the mystery stories that created the detective novel, and the critical essays that changed how we think about literature. Includes all tales of horror and suspense: "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Masque of the Red Death," "The Black Cat," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "...

A book that contains another book — a fictional play in two acts whose second act drives every reader insane. The play does not exist. Robert W. Chambers never wrote it. What he wrote instead, in 1895, was one of the most audacious works of horror fiction in the English language. This Erato Press critical edition reads The King in Yellow as the structurally radical and genuinely disturbing book it has always been. Published at the height of the decadent movement — the same moment that produced Oscar Wilde's trial and The Yellow Book — Chambers drew on his years as an art student in ...

Edgar Allan Poe was a writer, poet, editor and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre, and is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States and of American literature. Poe was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story and considered to be the inventor of the detective fiction genre, as well as a significant contributor to the emerging genre of science fiction.

H.P. Lovecraft invented a new kind of fear. This edition reads twelve of his essential tales as the philosophical project they always were. The oldest and strongest kind of fear, Lovecraft wrote, is fear of the unknown. Not the monster in the dark — the monster you understand, the one with rules, the one that can be defeated. The fear that cannot be defeated: the universe's complete indifference to your existence. No gods who care. No cosmic order that includes you. Only vast, cold, ancient forces that predate consciousness and will outlast it. Lovecraft called this cosmic horror. Before ...

Every word Oscar Wilde published — the novel, the plays, the poems, the essays, the fairy tales, and the two masterpieces he wrote in disgrace — in a single authoritative edition. Oscar Wilde lived two lives simultaneously: the most celebrated wit in Victorian London, and a man whose inner life was at war with everything the society around him demanded. He understood, better than almost anyone before or since, that style is not decoration but argument — that how you say something is inseparable from what you are saying. He paid for that understanding with two years in Reading Gaol and...

Still Floating: 40 Years of Pennywise delivers a complete and heartfelt look into Stephen King's masterpiece and its impact on generations of fans, the horror genre, and pop culture. In September of 1986, Stephen King published IT, a sprawling 1,138 page novel that he later dubbed in an...

The detective who solved crimes not by reading clues but by reading souls. The most radical inversion of Sherlock Holmes ever written — and, a century later, still the strangest and most morally serious detective fiction in the English language. This Erato Press critical edition brings together four complete Father Brown collections with a critical essay that examines what Chesterton was actually doing: smuggling theology into the detective story and making it work. In 1910, G. K. Chesterton introduced a small, round-faced Catholic priest who carried a shabby umbrella and solved crimes by...

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER A humorous collection of autobiographical essays from comedian andEmmy Award–winning actor Jeff Hiller, who shares his journey from growing up “profoundly gay” in 1980s Texas to his experiences as an inept social worker and how he clawed, scraped, and brawled to...

Winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Short Nonfiction Finalist for the World Fantasy Special Award – Professional A captivating anthology and heartfelt tribute to the horror genre featuring essays from several of the most celebrated contemporary horror writers including...

In Thomas Ligotti's first nonfiction outing, an examination of the meaning (or meaninglessness) of life through an insightful, unsparing argument that proves the greatest horrors are not the products of our imagination but instead are found in reality. "There is a signature motif discernible in...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER A fascinating, first-of-its-kind exploration of Stephen King and his most iconic early books, based on groundbreaking research and interviews with King—all conducted by the first scholar to be given extended access to his private archives “A treat for fans of Stephen...

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Presumed Innocent comes a compelling new legal mystery featuring George Mason from Personal Injuries. Originally commissioned and published by The New York Times Magazine, this edition contains additional material. Life would seem to have gone...

A down-and-out rodeo champion follows a mysterious woman on the run with half a million dollars back to the bright lights of Las Vegas in the sequel to Hey, Cowboy, Wanna Get Lucky? “Baxter Black is Mark Twain served up with a little Groucho Marx.”—The Weekly Standard Two years after...

The second Sherlock Holmes novel opens with a cocaine injection and ends with a marriage proposal — and between those two acts of self-destruction, as Holmes himself might observe, lies one of the most structurally ambitious detective stories of the nineteenth century. This Erato Press critical edition reads The Sign of the Four as the darker, stranger, and more interesting novel it actually is. Commissioned at a London dinner in 1889 — the same dinner at which Oscar Wilde was commissioned to write The Picture of Dorian Gray — The Sign of the Four begins with the most famous opening ...

Every poem Edgar Allan Poe ever wrote — in one volume, with a critical essay and biography Edited by Henry Bugalho — philosopher, writer, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Before horror had a name, before the gothic became a genre, there was a man in a dark room writing poems about loss, madness, beauty, and the dead women he could not stop mourning. Edgar Allan Poe did not invent melancholy — but he gave it a music that no one has surpassed. This edition brings together all 61 poems — from the famous to the forgotten, from the early Byronic experiments to the final, ...

A young woman in a ruined Apennine castle, alone with a candle, lifts a black veil to see what is behind it — and the novel does not tell the reader what she saw for another five hundred pages. Every ghostly event in The Mysteries of Udolpho eventually receives a rational, mundane explanation. Contemporary readers found this maddening, then imitated it for the next thirty years anyway. Radcliffe herself later drew the distinction her name is still cited for: terror, which expands the mind by suggestion, against horror, which contracts and freezes it by direct display. This novel is the ...

was nineteen when he wrote it and twenty when it made him instantly, scandalously famous. Published anonymously in 1796, The Monk provoked one of the most hostile reviews in English literary history — Coleridge called parts of it blasphemous and warned that a magistrate could prosecute it — and the outcry was severe enough that Lewis himself cut and softened the text for a later edition. This is not that softened text. This edition restores the original, unexpurgated 1796 version, before the author's own revisions. The novel follows Ambrosio, a monk celebrated across Madrid for his ...

John Updike reads six stories he has selected from the hundred-odd he has published. "A&P", recounting a moral crisis on the checkout counter, is his most anthologized story. "Pigeon Feathers," the longest story included, tells of a fourteen-year-old boy's fear of death and the answer he finds...

The greatest detective story ever written is also, at its heart, a ghost story that refuses to stop haunting even after the ghost has been explained. This Erato Press critical edition restores The Hound of the Baskervilles to what it has always been beneath the surface: a Gothic novel in disguise. Before bringing Holmes back from the dead, Conan Doyle found an elegant compromise — a case from the earlier days, set not in the gaslit rationalism of Baker Street but on the vast, fog-shrouded expanse of Dartmoor, where reason itself seems to lose its footing. The result was the finest of the ...

Take a wildly entertaining tour through the horror paperback boom of the 1970s and ’80s as Grady Hendrix unearths forgotten authors, bizarre plots, publishing history, and gloriously lurid vintage book covers. Horror author and vintage paperback book collector Grady Hendrix offers killer...