Penguin Books Australia

'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...

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

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.

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.

However you try to escape it, horror is always there  

Outside the abbey's armoured walls, the common poor are ravaged by a grisly pestilence known as the 'Red Death', while within, safe and untroubled, the happy Prince Prospero hosts lavish entertainments. But, in their immodest comfort, the Prince and his guests are not as safe as they hope from the horrors of the outside world ... 

From the beasts of the pit to the endless terror of the void

A manuscript is found: filled with small, precise writing and smelling of pit-water, it tells the story of an old recluse and his strange home - and its even stranger, jade-green double, seen by the recluse on an otherworldly plain where gigantic gods and monsters roam. 

An ancient evil walks among them.

When Adam Salton arrives at his grand-uncle's Derbyshire estate he quickly senses that a macabre and malevolent force is at work. In his attempts to uncover the grisly mystery he encounters the chilling Lady Arabella and the obsessive Edgar Caswall, each harbouring their own dark and dreadful desires.

To his horror, Adam discovers that something hideous is living in...

Deady forces are about to be awakened . . .

In the degenerate, unliked backwater of Dunwich, Wilber Whatley, a most unusual child, is born. Of unnatural parentage, he grows at an uncanny pace to an unsettling height, but the boy's arrival simply precedes that of a true horror: one of the Old Ones, that forces the people of the town to hole up by night, fearful for their lives, by day able only to trace...

Death awaits them all ...

A man stares into the deep river swirling beneath him - hands tied, noose around his neck - and waits for the order to end his life. Another is trapped for eternity in a room full of corpses. A cowering woman is strangled in the dead of night. 

These are just some of the countless victims for whom all hope is lost in Ambrose Bierce's chilling stories of death, delusion...

M. R. James is the master of the English ghost story, whose tales are inhabited not by ethereal spirits, but by terrifying, palpable forces of evil. In these four stories figures appear in paintings, demonic voices are heard, books awaken ancient horrors – and ordinary objects and situations are transformed into inescapable nightmares.

Horror lies waiting.

A sinister Countess is driven mad by a dark secret. An innocent woman is made the instrument of retribution. A murdered man's fury reaches beyond the grave.

When Countess Narona marries Agnes Lockwood's fiancé and takes him to live in a rundown Venetian palace, strange things start happening, a servant mysteriously vanishes and the husband dies a recluse. But the dead...