Dark Fantasy

Spark is everything and it blooms inside the bodies of Tau City’s young women. Once a decade, in exchange for enough power to keep the city modern and comfortable, a Spark Maiden must be sacrificed to their mysterious tower god in a ritual called The Extraction. Ten Maidens are Chosen, but only one enters the tower as a sacrifice, never to be seen again. The nine leftovers are elevated to celebrity status and spend the next decade living in the luxurious Maiden Tower, wearing couture gala gowns, and partying with the city’s most interesting and beautiful people.

Each year, the Nightlords choose a new Emperor to rule Yohuachanca. Delicious food graces his palate. The realm’s most beautiful women fill his vast palace. Four priestesses counsel him in all matters. The life of an emperor is good, luxurious, and short... For at the year’s end, he is sacrificed to the Nightlords under the light of the Scarlet Moon. Iztac is the piss-poor orphan chosen to be this year’s emperor. A sacrifice bound for the altar.

In the early 1990’s, Hellboy, Liz Sherman, and Abe Sapien are drawn into a bizarre case in New York, linked both to Hellboy’s 1980 adventure with Anastasia in Brazil and to The Lobster’s encounter with the Proteus Club in 1933. A strange community of bizarre humans has been living in secret beneath Manhattan for more than sixty years. Now, though, someone is stalking them, murdering them one by one—someone who claims to be the ancient goddess Sem-Karul. With aid from the now elderly Cynthia Tynan, Hellboy and the BPRD must face the Goddess of Manhattan, and the monsters who serve her.

In this chilling adventure, Vampire Hunter D has been dispatched to vanquish the ancient vampiric Noble Count Braujou, guardian of an ancient buried treasure. But when a mysterious object crashes into the earth, destroying half of the northern Frontier, D faces an even more terrifying opponent—the renegade vampire Valcua, the Ultimate Noble! Having been exiled to outer space, Valcua took his entire kingdom of strange and deadly creatures with him, and swore that when the time was right they would return to have their revenge.

The demon Vitrine—immortal, powerful, and capricious—loves the dazzling city of Azril. She has mothered, married, and maddened the city and its people for generations, and built it into a place of joy and desire, revelry and riot. And then the angels come, and the city falls. Vitrine is left with nothing but memories and a book containing the names of those she has lost—and an angel, now bound by her mad, grief-stricken curse to haunt the city he burned.

"Congratulations! You are the last survivor of the Hell Games. You have gained back your freedom." Huh? One moment I was running from demons and other competitors trying to do me in. The next, I was thrown back into yet another realm. Before me, some Princess started explaining that she had asked the gods for champions to help save her world in these dire times… and I was one of the chosen heroes. Yeah, right! I had been in Hell long enough to know I shouldn't trust my senses when it all seemed too good to be true.

A simple promise I made to myself after escaping a brutal childhood of abuse and being trained to enact violence on unblessed witches. Since that moment, I've managed to survive on the streets by successfully pickpocketing. Unfortunately, after years of hiding, the monster who stars in all my nightmares is closer than ever, and I'm faced with only one option—to seek refuge at the Dark Imaginarium Academy. The Academy is filled with the elite witches of our society. I should have expected I'd run into some of my previous targets. Normally, that wouldn't be a proble—except for my last hit.

Sarita has been watched over by a guardian angel her entire life. She calls him Angelo, and keeps him a secret. But secrets can’t stay buried forever. When Angelo murders someone she loves, Sarita begins to see what's really been lurking in the shadows surrounding her. And she will have to embrace the evil within if she hopes to make it out alive. Johnny Compton, critically acclaimed author of The Spite House and master of dread, takes you on a terrifying race of one woman against the hordes of hell.

Tarnishing our family name by being a powerless angel… that's the legacy I'll leave behind. After years of failed placement tests, and with the time limit to find my magic breathing down my neck, I've come to accept my fate. When the clock ticks zero, I'll have my wings brutally ripped from my body and be cast down to live with the humans. Rejected, alone, and afraid. When a man from my past reappears, he tells me there's a different option… another life I could lead, at his side.

Dublin, 1883. Another woman is found discarded in a coal pile on Dublin's south docks. Sub-Inspector Barn Blake, a policeman with a talent for solving macabre murders, is put on the case. However higher authorities in the state would prefer the murders to remain unsolved and make every effort to hinder him. In the course of his investigation, he is attacked and infected with a deadly affliction leaving him with only seven days to stop the killer.

Marjeta was never supposed to be Duke Calvai's wife. But the sudden death of her sister changed everything, and Marjeta was married off in her stead to seal the Duke's alliance with her father. Ill-prepared for the dangers of the Calvai court or her new role as stepmother to the duke's precious daughter, Marjeta finds herself in a hostile environment with a husband who preferred his dead first wife, a child too suspicious to love her, and no true allies. Worse, her traditional magic conflicts with the new religion taking hold of the court and if discovered, she will be executed.

No one ever said being a werewolf was easy. Take Delia, for instance. She’s spent much of her life fighting against her own nature, plagued by nightmares of childhood trauma, and trying to find her place in the world. Many werewolves are just like her: ostracized by their families, forced to live alone and in secret as they await those nights when the Change overtakes them.

Wren is a nightmare: a deadly manifestation of the frightening dreams of humans. She is forever bound to the insidious Para Warwick, the only night creature who can cross the boundary between the dream and waking realms. When she fails to retrieve information on a weapon that could finally end Warwick’s reign and is severely punished, she makes a snap decision to aid the growing rebellion in finding it. Here, she meets Alaric, another nightmare hell-bent on atoning for his sins. Though wildly suspicious of one another, they form a tentative pact to take down Warwick once and for all.

This collection contains all-new stories of coulrophobia (fear of clowns) from some of the most talented horror writers alive!

The year is 1949, the city London. Amidst the smog of the capital stumbles Dennis Knuckleyard, a hapless eighteen year-old employed by a second-hand bookshop. One day, on an errand to acquire books for sale, Dennis discovers a novel that simply does not exist. It is a fictitious book, a figment from another novel. Yet it is physically there in his hands. How? Dennis has stumbled on a book from the Great When, a magical version of London beyond time and space, where reality blurs with fiction and concepts such as Crime and Poetry are incarnated as wondrous, terrible beings.

L'Empire de Solaris est à une conquête de l'unification du continent, et la rare magie élémentaire qui sommeille en Vhalla Yarl, une apprentie bibliothécaire de dix-sept ans, pourrait faire basculer le cours de la guerre. Vhalla a toujours appris à craindre la Tour des sorciers, une mystérieuse société magique, et elle a toujours été heureuse dans le monde tranquille des livres. Mais après avoir, sans le savoir, sauvé la vie de l'un des plus puissants sorciers, le prince héritier Aldrik, elle se retrouve malgré elle entraînée dans ce monde.

In the lands of Deyadrum, where every Fae possesses power, Princess Emma is the only one forced without. Confined in the walls of her palace by her father, she's desperate for a taste of freedom. That is, until she discovers the truth: everything she thought she knew was a lie, for something evil plagues her lands-promising death and darkness.

Ein neues Retelling der Märchen-Queen: düster und romantisch. Serilda liebt Geschichten. Und vor allem liebt sie es, Geschichten zu erzählen. Doch im Königreich gelten Fiktion und Fantasie als Lüge und sind verboten. Als eines Tages auch der Erlkönig von ihren fesselnden Märchen hört, entführt er sie in sein düsteres Schloss, um einen unmöglichen Handel vorzuschlagen: Sie soll Stroh zu Gold spinnen oder sie muss sterben.

Sebastian Pana is a sin-eater, a shaman-like figure who can absolve the dead of their transgressions before they move on to the afterlife. But when a tear in the fabric of reality allows hideous beasts to invade the small arctic town he calls home, Sebastian must wage battle with them the only way he knows how: by unleashing the power of sin itself. Thus, the stage is set for an epic confrontation between the forces of good and evil, in which a mother monster strives to save the dying land around her.

Lucy Westenra is beautiful, rich, loved by three men—every inch a lady. But beneath this sparkling, flirtatious facade, she is fascinated by death, which has stalked her throughout her short life. For her, the dead do not slip away easily, as they do for her best friend, Mina; they linger. When Lucy departs for Whitby, her nightly sleepwalks introduce her to the mysterious Vlad, who seems to see parts of her she has never let show before. Vlad makes her an offer.

In an alternate Europe where the Roman Empire never fell, the expansive Empty Lands are inhabited by forces known collectively as the Evil. Yet Charles Harcourt is honor-bound to venture into that dangerous area to find his long-lost fiancee. He is joined on his trek by an abbot who hopes to locate a crystal prism that hold the soul of a saint; the non-human Knurly Man, who craves release from his pitiful existence; and the beautiful Yolanda, who seeks the answer to a secret mystery.

Venture inside Midnight Under the Big Top, where your wide eyes and pounding heart will discover: the world's grandest tales of murder, madness, and magic set in and around the circus by storytellers such as Stephen King, Joe Hill, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Neil Gaiman, Kelley Armstrong, Robert McCammon, Tananarive Due, Lisa Morton, Heather Graham, Richard Chizmar, Billy Chizmar, Amanda C. Davis, Nayad Monroe, Jeff Strand, Amanda Downum, Robert Brouhard, and Dominick Cancilla!

Erleben Sie das düstere und packende Abenteuer Solomon Kane - Schritte im Inneren von Robert E. Howard, eindrucksvoll gelesen von Benjamin Werner. In dieser fesselnden Erzählung stößt der gefangene und versklavte Solomon Kane, der unerschrockene Puritaner, auf geheimnisvolle und beunruhigende Geräusche, die ihn in eine uralte und finstere Welt führen. Dabei trifft er auf eine gefährliche Kreatur, älter als die Menschheit und muss sich seinen tiefsten Ängsten stellen.

Murdock purchased my mother and I at an exotic creature auction years ago. Escape has always been the plan. But it's not that simple. Murdock is a warlock, equipped with spells and enchantments that keep us here. We're trapped without options, and I'm filthy desperate. So, when I find a book of demon summoning rituals in Murdock's nightstand, I don't think twice. I summon a demon to kill my owner.

The Dark Prince has to die for her to live. The people who sent her expected her to die, but when Asi takes matter into her hands instead, she finds herself trapped and possessed by Prince Heron of Grothia who is said to be as dangerous and conniving as he is pleasing to look at. When tension rise between Grothia and a growing enemy empire, Asi is given the task again: to kill Prince Heron, only that now the life of her sister she'd long thought dead might be at stake too.