The second Spoken Ink collection of superb short stories by H. G. Wells, who was a master of the form. Humour and wit abound in his writing, as does sharp social observation. Among the 17 stories in this collection, The Plattner Story tells of a chemistry teacher who analyses a most unusual powder one of the boys brings to class, in The Cone a woman married to a bullying industrialist is having an affair with his young friend.

Summer details the sexual awakening of Charity Royall, who lives unhappily with her hard-drinking adoptive father in an isolated New England village. Lucius Harney, a visiting architect, awakens her sexual passion and her hope for escape. Exploring Charity's relation to her father and her lover, Edith Wharton delves into dark cultural territory: repressed sexuality, small-town prejudice, and, in subtle hints, incest.

First published in 1917 by Alfred A. Knopf, this collection of Algernon Blackwood's short stories includes some of his most beloved classics.

Love and Mr Lewisham is a hugely uplifting tale from the pen of one of our greatest writers. Wells drew on his own experience as a young teacher to provide the background and, one suspects, the emotional drama. The plot enables him to satirise the educational establishment and deliver many wry observations on Victorian morality and the obsession with the supernatural. One day Mr Lewisham sits at his makeshift desk at his lodgings. He is an assistant master at Whortley proprietary school.

With a wide range of themes and styles, ranging from traditional ghost stories to contes cruels, black humor, tales of dark fantasy and surreal nightmare, and perhaps the best story about a ventriloquist and his dummy ever written, there are stories here to suit the tastes of any connoisseur of horror and weird fiction. 

Ambrose Bierce's collection of short stories of the supernatural and macabre Can Such Things Be? was first published in 1893 and republished in a revised edition in 1910. This selection contains two of his most famous tales: "The Moonlit Road" and "The Death of Halpin Frayser" together with 10 others.

Long lost to the public in out-of-print pulp magazines, dusty Victorian anthologies, and the pages of now defunct newspapers, these vintage vampire stories have truly proved immortal. Resurrected now for the year 2011, this is a stunning collection of nineteenth-century vampire stories by heavyweights such as Sabine Baring-Gould and Bram Stoker. These rare stories are arranged in chronological order from 1846 to 1913 and are compiled by two of the world's leading vampire anthologists and experts.

The modern audience hasn't had a chance to truly appreciate the unknowing dread that readers would have felt when reading Bram Stoker's original 1897 manuscript. Most modern productions employ campiness or sound effects to try to bring back that gothic tension, but we've tried something different. By returning to Stoker's original storytelling structure - a series of letters and journal entries voiced by Jonathan Harker, Dr. Van Helsing, and other characters - with an all-star cast of narrators, we've sought to recapture its originally intended horror and power.

Ten extraordinary tales of terror, penned by the prolific horror masters of old, from Lovecraft's relentless "Rats in the Walls" and the view from Saki's "Open Window", to the guilt of Poe's "Tell-Tale Heart" and the ghostly musings on greed of Wharton's "Afterward".

Ambrose Ashley, Philip's cousin, guardian, and god, married Rachel in Italy and died there. Jealous of his marriage and grief-stricken by his death, Philip prepares to meet his cousin's widow with hatred in his heart.

This volume features William F Harvey's original undead hand story "The Beast with Five Fingers" that sparked many movies including Sam Raimi's "The Evil Dead". Poe's classic "The Tell Tale Heart" is joined by Lovecraft's creepy tale of alienation "The Outsider", and a chilling Dickens ghost story "The Signalman".

Published in 1922, Fitzgerald's second novel chronicles the relationship of Anthony Patch, Harvard-educated, aspiring aesthete, and his beautiful wife, Gloria, as they await to inherit his grandfather's fortune. A devastating satire of the nouveaux rich and New York's nightlife, of reckless ambition and squandered talent, it is also a shattering portrait of a marriage fueled by alcohol and wasted by wealth. The Beautiful and the Damned, Fitzgerald wrote to Zelda in 1930, "was all true."

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Fear collected by Roald Dahl, read by Julian Rhind-Tutt, Kevin Eldon, Tom Felton and Rory Kinnear. An audio collection of deliciously dark ghost stories for adults, picked by Roald Dahl himself. Do you enjoy being scared? Featuring 14 classic spine-chilling stories chosen by Roald Dahl, these terrible tales of ghostly goings-on will have you shivering with fear as you listen.

These five chilling tales make perfect night time listening - and, for the fearful, can be heard in a group, rather than experienced as solo bedtime reading. Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, W. L. George, A. M. Burrage, and Guy de Maupassant provide the terrifying text; Ian Holm and Julie Peasgood provide the spoken spooks.

The Woodlanders is vintage Hardy. The story revolves around the young woman Grace Melbury, who returns to the leafy world of Little Hintock and soon finds herself at the center of a number of tragic events. In penetrating, incisive and beautiful prose, Hardy tells a moving tale of unrequited love as fate and the constraints of society thwart the happiness of our heroine.