Tales Of Unease

HORROR & GHOST STORIES. Selected and with an introduction by David Stuart Davies, this gripping set of tales by the master storyteller Arthur Conan Doyle is bound to thrill and unnerve you. In these twilight excursions, Doyle's vivid imagination for the strange, the grotesque and the frightening is given full rein. We move from the mysteries of Egypt and the strange powers granted by "The Ring of Thoth" to the isolated ghostlands of the Arctic in "The Captain of the Polestar", we encounter a monstrous creature in "The Terror of Blue John Cap" and the beings that live above our heads in "The Brazilian Cat" and "The Leather Funnel"; and we shudder at the thing in the next room in Lot 249. Sit down in your uneasy chair and enjoy this unique collection of chillers.

This collection brings together 15 specially commissioned stories by internationally acclaimed writers and filmmakers, to explore and update Freud's classic theory of 'The Uncanny' - his piercing and all-encompassing dissection of what gives us the creeps.

SOMETHING HAS FALLEN AWAY. We have lost a part of ourselves, our history, what we once were. That something, when we encounter it again, look it straight in the eyes, disgusts us, makes us retch. This is the horror of the abject. Following the success of Comma’s award-winning New Uncanny anthology, The New Abject invites leading authors to respond to two parallel theories of the abject – Julia Kristeva’s theory of the psychoanalytic, intimate abject, and Georges Bataille’s societal equivalent – with visceral stories of modern unease. As we become ever-more isolated by social media bubbles, or the demands for social distancing, our moral gag-reflex is increasingly sensitised, and our ability to tolerate difference, or ‘the other’, atrophies. Like all good horror writing, these stories remind us that exposure to what unsettles us, even in small doses, is always better than pretending it doesn’t exist. After all, we can never be wholly free of that which belongs to us.

DARK AND DEEPFive short stories of psychological/supernatural suspense by David Heaton.Featuring:SOMETHING OTHER: A widowed father faces the horror of seeing his only son abducted by a strange entity.But when his son returns, the real terror only just begins. SKIN DEEP: The secrets of your soul are known only to you. Aren't they? That's what one man believes until a violent near-death experience transforms his vision in a unique way. Battling against a sceptical medical profession and his own inner turmoil, 'Skin Deep' charts one man's reactions, mentally and physically, to the events of one horrific, life-changing night.ECHOES: Doing the right thing is always the best policy. So when a man out walking one day witnesses a bizarre and inexplicable event he duly reports it to the correct authorities.But that sets in motion a chain of events that begin to make him doubt his own mind...EVERYTHING UNDER THE SUN: A loner settles in a new area to escape the pressures of the big city. For a while he enjoys it, glad of the change that the move has brought about. Then one day an innocent shopping trip unexpectedly transforms his life forever.SANCTUARY: When two men go on a crime spree in the Scottish Highlands they run into far more than they had bargained for. ('Something Other' and 'Sanctuary' previously published as individual stories. 'Echoes', 'Skin Deep' and 'Everything Under The Sun' previously published in the anthology 'Trinity - Three Tales of Unease')

GROTESQUE TALES... UNEASY TALES... "The emaciated sodden legs beat a ceaseless march on the unresisting veil, like those of a gallows victim marking time in air. The battered, half-eaten arms clawed blindly at nothing. The eyes were gone, and within their ragged-edged hollows was manifest the coiling purposeful movement of reptilian life." ('Animate in Death') Squadron Leader Leslie Allin Lewis (1899-1961) was a veteran of both world wars, flying Sopwith Camels over France in 1918 and Hurricanes over England in 1940. He was also one of the best writers in the macabre and supernatural genre between wars. "Lewis undoubtedly earns a high place among the best masters of supernatural and macabre literature that Britain has ever produced." (Richard Dalby) "A brilliant collection." (Mark Samuels) FIRST TIME IN PAPERBACK.

“A wonderful nightmare of a book: tender and frightening, disturbing but compassionate. Fever Dream is a triumph of Schweblin’s outlandish imagination.” –Juan Gabriel Vasquez, author of The Sound of Things Falling and Reputations A young woman named Amanda lies dying in a rural hospital clinic. A boy named David sits beside her. She’s not his mother. He's not her child. Together, they tell a haunting story of broken souls, toxins, and the power and desperation of family. Fever Dream is a nightmare come to life, a ghost story for the real world, a love story and a cautionary tale. One of the freshest new voices to come out of the Spanish language and translated into English for the first time, Samanta Schweblin creates an aura of strange psychological menace and otherworldly reality in this absorbing, unsettling, taut novel.