Penguin Books Australia

The lights are refusing to go out all over Stockholm.  There's a mysterious problem in the power system.  Every appliance in the city is going at full blast and the entire population is struck by blinding headaches.  The pressure builds to an intolerable pitch and then...stops.  Moments later, in morgues and cemeteries across Stockholm, the dead start to rise.

To celebrate the great success of the Vampire Academy series in Australia, we are releasing a limited signature edition hardback of Vampire Academy . This gift edition includes the highly anticipated first chapter of Spirit Bound, due for release in May 2010.

THEY RISE . . .
Out of the flooded streets of Houston, they emerge from plague-ridden waters. Dead. Rotting. Hungry. And as human survivors scramble to their rooftops for safety, the zombie hordes circle like sharks. The ultimate killing machines .

THEY FEED . . .

'STOKER GIVES US THE MOST REMARKABLE SCENES OF HORROR . . . EACH IS UNFORGETTABLE, AND NO MOVIE HAS QUITE DONE JUSTICE TO ANY OF THEM.'
- STEPHEN KING

Count Dracula sleeps in a lordly tomb in the vaults beneath his desolate castle.  His stony eyes are open.  His cheeks have the flush of life beneath their pallor.  On his lips are a mocking, sensuous smile and fresh blood.  He has...

Welcome to Alison Kerby's guesthouse.
Ghost sightings twice daily.
No breakfast is served, but murder is included.

In exchange for help entertaining her guests on 'spooky' vacations, Alison Kerby told her resident gumshoe ghost that she'd help him on the occasional case.  But she didn't think she'd have to go through with it-after all, who goes to a dead private eye?
The answer: other ghosts...

'A bright and lively romp through haunted-house repair!'
- Sarah Graves, author of the Home Repair Is Homicide Mysteries

7 BEDROOMS.  4 BATHS.  2 GHOSTS.

Newly divorced Alison Kerby wants a second chance for herself and her nine-year-old daughter, so she's returned to her hometown on the Jersey Shore to transform a fixer-upper into a charming-and hopefully profitable-guest house.  But...

A definitive collection of stories from the unrivaled master of twentieth-century horror in a Penguin Classics Deluxe edition with cover art by Travis Louie.

'I think it is beyond doubt that H. P. Lovecraft has yet to be surpassed as the twentieth century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.' -Stephen King

'The ghost is the most enduring figure in supernatural fiction. He is absolutely indestructible... He changes with the styles in fiction but he never goes out of fashion. He is the really permanent citizen of the earth, for mortals, at best, are but transients' - Dorothy Scarborough

H.P. Lovecraft was perhaps the greatest twentieth century practitioner of the horror story, introducing to the genre a new evil, monstrous, pervasive and unconquerable. At the heart of these three stories are terrors unthinkable and strange: a crash-landing meteorite, the wretched inhabitant of an ancient castle and a grave-robber's curse.

Robert Coover's imagination blisteringly combines the sinister and the hilarious – in writing both wildly energetic and cruelly vaudevillian. In these three short stories, he conjures macabre scenes of a troubled circus romance, of a brutally comic traffic accident, and of a single night of babysitting where every hope or threat of violence or sex is done and undone.

The creeping unease of lives squandered and the bloody glee of lives lost is chillingly captured in these five tales of casual cruelty by a master of the short story. Portraying insanity, disturbing encounters, troubling children and a sinister lottery, Shirley Jackson's work has an unmatched power to unnerve and unsettle.

Kafka transformed the possibilities of the short story, his unique imagination giving his dark tales a sense of dream-like logic and unreality, in which their horrors are humorous and unease pervades. In these two stories, a traveller is shown the workings of an elaborate machine with a bloody purpose, and a son awakens unimagined resentments in his father.

Rudyard Kipling is best known for his novels and poetry, but his short stories reveal a far more sinister and macabre side to his imagination. In these three chilling and psychologically penetrating tales, Kipling portrays hauntings, loss, madness, terrible secrets and the darkness that lies within the human heart.

Paul Bowles's unforgettable short stories portray people facing hostile environments and the innate savagery of humanity. These three unbearably tense tales from sun-drenched and brutal climes tell of vengeance, abandonment, violence and cruelty enjoyed and suffered, in a surreal realm of horror.

This selection of stories ranges from early tales of nightmares and insanity such as 'The Outsider' and 'Rats in the Walls', through the grotesquely comic 'Herbert West –...

Edited with and introduction and notes by
S.T. Joshi

'His prescience and novelty seem more and more remarkable
Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

Hailed as the 'greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale' by Stephen King, H.P. Lovecraft is acknowledged as a master of the fantastic and the macabre.

Sex, blood and rock'n'roll – from the master of gothic horror

At a club in Missing Mile, just outside New Orleans, the children of the night gather. They dress in black and they're looking for acceptance. There's Ghost, who sees what others do not; Ann, looking for love; and Jason, whose real name is Nothing, seeking the deathless truth about his father – and himself.

'On the morning of April 16, Dr Rieux emerged from his consulting-room and came across a dead rat in the middle of the landing.'

It starts with the rats. Vomiting blood, they die in their hundreds, then in their thousands. When the rats are all gone, the citizens begin to fall sick. Like the rats, they too die in ever greater numbers.

The authorities quarantine the town. Cut off, the terrified townspeople...