Leisure Reads: Fiction and Popular Non-Fiction

Complete Tales and Poems by Edgar Allen Poe This single volume brings together all of Poe's stories and poems, and illuminates the diverse and multifaceted genius of one of the greatest and most influential figures in American literary history.

A Treasury of Victorian Ghost Stories by Everett F. Bleiler A nice collection of short ghost stories by many well known authors. Dickens, Julian Hawthorne, Wilkie Collins, and Ambrose Bierce are a few easily recognized contributors. However, my favorite stories were by authors previously unknown to me. "Death and the Woman" by Gertrude Atherton and "The Mystery of the Semi-Detached" were uniquely creepy. This is the perfect collection of ghost stories for those who like creepy stories but not gory/horror Halloween extravaganzas. - A Goodreads reader.

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson Part of a new six-volume series of the best in classic horror, selected by Academy Award-winning director of The Shape of Water Guillermo del Toro   Filmmaker and longtime horror literature fan Guillermo del Toro serves as the curator for the Penguin Horror series, a new collection of classic tales and poems by masters of the genre. Included here are some of del Toro's favorites, from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Ray Russell's short story "Sardonicus," considered by Stephen King to be "perhaps the finest example of the modern Gothic ever written," to Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and stories by Ray Bradbury, Joyce Carol Oates, Ted Klein, and Robert E. Howard. Featuring original cover art by Penguin Art Director Paul Buckley, these stunningly creepy deluxe hardcovers will be perfect additions to the shelves of horror, sci-fi, fantasy, and paranormal aficionados everywhere. The Haunting of Hill House The classic supernatural thriller by an author who helped define the genre. First published in 1959, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House has been hailed as a perfect work of unnerving terror. It is the story of four seekers who arrive at a notoriously unfriendly pile called Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of a "haunting;' Theodora, his lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, a friendless, fragile young woman well acquainted with poltergeists; and Luke, the future heir of Hill House. At first, their stay seems destined to be merely a spooky encounter with inexplicable phenomena. But Hill House is gathering its powers--and soon it will choose one of them to make its own.

Mark Z. Danielewski's House of leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet ... The story remains unchanged, focusing on a young family that moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story -- of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.

Ghost Stories of an Antiquary by M. R. James; Everett F. Bleiler (Editor); John MacBride (Illustrator) In the twentieth-century literature of the supernatural, the single most important book, in the opinion of most scholars and enthusiasts, is Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, by Montague Rhodes James. First printed in 1904, it is the landmark book that established the modern horror story. It has been reprinted more times than any other book in this field, and it contains several of the best ghost stories in the English language. The antiquary here is M. R. James, Provost of Eton, one of the most formidable scholars that England has ever produced, who has drawn upon an unmatched knowledge of the hidden byways of the past to form a series of inimitable stories. Among them are such favorites as "Number Thirteen," "Canon Alberic's Scrap-book," and "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad." Common to all of them is the breath of "the evil that dieth not but lieth in wait." This edition reprints for the first time in recent years the four original illustrations that James McBride prepared while James was working on this, his first collection.