Edward E. French
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The novel that introduced the world to its deadliest villain In the Burmese rainforest, an arrow steeped in the venom of the hamadryad snake, the deadliest reptile of the East, strikes colonial police commissioner Nayland Smith. His only hope is to immediately cauterize the wound using a sharp knife, a match, and a broken cartridge. For three delirious days, he lies on the forest floor, too weak to move. When the fever finally breaks, he walks out...
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Abraham Merritt's Burn, Witch, Burn! -is like a detective novel masquerading as a dark fantasy novel. It's a cross-genre experimentation from the late 20's, blending horror, fantasy, and crime drama.
An unfortunate neurologist named Dr. Lowell, finds himself confronted with a series of mysterious deaths. Each victim falls into a state of paralysis, before later convulsing and finally expiring, stiffening into an abrupt rigor mortis. Merritt weaves...
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Sinister early American satire from Washington Irving (April 3, 1783 — November 28, 1859) author of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle. The classic short story "The Devil and Tom Walker" is the dark and eerie tale of a foolish man's greed, hypocrisy and ambition. Puritan writing at its finest. Tom is a debased man, miserly and cruel to his fellows, and even to his wife. The Devil, shows him a grove of rotting trees, representing souls....
4) Hop-Frog
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First published in a 1849 edition of The Flag of Our Union, Hop-Frog is a revenge tale akin to The Cask of Amontillado. Told from the perspective of a crippled jester who was taken from his homeland and has been abused by the king he serves, the story focuses on the revenge Hop-Frog takes after the king strikes his fellow countrywoman and performer, the dancer Trippetta.
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The narrative of Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'Young Goodman Brown' unfolds like a horror film, as the pious protagonist goes to an appointment in the woods near the town of Salem. The author's use of tongue-in-cheek humor serves to intensify the ultimate horror of the story. One by one, a series of revelations shakes Brown to the core. First he meets a figure with the combined features of a demon and of his grandfather, then he sees the shadow side of his...
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First published in a 1842 edition of Graham's Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine, The Masque of the Red Death tells the story of Prince Prospero as he tries to avoid a plague by confining himself and his nobles to a masquerade in an abbey. Often considered a gothic allegory, the story reflects on not only life and death but also the illusion of control.
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In Amundsen's Tent is a short horror fiction inspired in part by various expeditions to the South Pole, beginning in the late 1890s. These culminated in the famous effort led by Roald Amundsen, who was the first to reach the South Pole on December 14, 1911. In Amundsen's Tent, a three man expedition to Antarctica arrives at the deserted camp of an earlier trio of explorers. In the tent is the journal of Robert Drumgold, who with two other men, perished...
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A classic short story. By turns scary and funny, it's the greatest "severed hand" story ever written. After Eustace Borlsover's blind uncle dies, the nephew receives in the mail the uncles' severed hand as part of his inheritance. It soon emerges that the hand is alive in some sense, intelligent and very mobile. Eustace and his secretary immediately assume the hand is evil, but to be honest it seems more mischievous than malevolent, Until, of course,...
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In the ancient country of Orn an old man called the Bee-man spends his life in the company of bees. He lives humbly and contentedly until a Junior Sorcerer happens by with some disturbing news: The Bee-man, he says, has been transformed--he once was someone (or something) entirely different. But who? Or what? A giant or a prince? A dog or a dragon? The now restless Bee-man sets out on a quest to ascertain his original form, telling himself, "When...
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The Voice In The Night by William Hope Hodgson
It was a dark, starless night. We were becalmed in the Northern Pacific. Our exact position I do not know; for the sun had been hidden during the course of a weary, breathless week, by a thin haze which had seemed to float above us, about the height of our mastheads, at whiles descending and shrouding the surrounding sea.
With there being no wind, we had steadied the tiller, and I was the only man on...
11) Who Goes There?
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Classic Sci-Fi and horror. A group of scientific researchers, isolated in Antarctica discover an alien spaceship where it crashed twenty million years before. They also recover the alien pilot from the ancient ice. Thawing revives the alien, a being which can assume the shape, memories, and personality of any living thing it devours, while maintaining its original body mass for further reproduction. That's when the paranoia justifiably kicks in. How...