It's been said that books have a life of their own, but there's more than literature lurking in the cobwebbed recesses of dusty bookstores and libraries across Canada. Read about some of the most celebrated and eerie bookish haunts, and try to brush off that feeling of someone watching from just over your shoulder...
It's been said that books have a life of their own, but there's more than literature lurking in the cobwebbed recesses of dusty bookstores and libraries across Canada. Read about some of the most celebrated and eerie bookish haunts, and try to brush off that feeling of someone watching from just over your shoulder...
"I had done nothing really bad, but this was Marion, Indiana, where there was very little room for foolish black boys." Unique, uplifting memoir about surviving a lynching and coming of age during Jim Crow. Annotated, with fifty photos, a foreword, introduction, and afterword.
"A tense, creepy story with a touch of Black Mirror."--Scream Magazine A single father's four-month-old is anything but normal. The child never cries, shows emotion... or sleeps. As bizarre paranormal activity ramps up in the apartment, the father seeks help and an answer for what is wrong with his son. Reader Praise ★ "Just amazing."--JT ★ "So good and full of unexpected emotions."--B ★ "I was hooked from the first page."--CS
Journey inside the eerie hospitals, asylums, and sanatoriums that ghostly residents refuse to leave. Mark Leslie and Rhonda Parrish share spooky stories from across Canada, the United States, and the world.
2013 Hamilton Arts Council Literary Award — Shortlisted, Nonfiction Hamilton, Ontario, may seem just like any other city, but a haunted past is hidden beneath it. From the Hermitage ruins to Dundurn Castle, from the Customs House to Stoney Creek Battlefield Park, the city of Hamilton, Ontario, is steeped in a rich history and culture. But beneath the surface of the Steel City there dwells a darker heart — from the shadows of yesteryear arise the unexplainable, the bizarre, and the chilling. Lock the doors and turn on all the lights before you settle down with this book, because once you begin to read about the supernatural elements that lurk within this seemingly normal city in Southern Ontario, strange bumps in the night will take on new, more sinister meanings. Prepare to be thrilled and chilled with this collection of tales compiled from historical documents, first-person accounts, and the files of the paranormal group Haunted Hamilton, which has been investigating and celebrating Hamilton’s historic haunted past since 1999.
The "masterfully chilling" novel that inspired the hit AMC series (Entertainment Weekly). The men on board the HMS Terror — part of the 1845 Franklin Expedition, the first steam-powered vessels ever to search for the legendary Northwest Passage — are entering a second summer in the Arctic Circle without a thaw, stranded in a nightmarish landscape of encroaching ice and darkness. Endlessly cold, they struggle to survive with poisonous rations, a dwindling coal supply, and ships buckling in the grip of crushing ice. But their real enemy is even more terrifying. There is something out there in the frigid darkness: an unseen predator stalking their ship, a monstrous terror clawing to get in. “The best and most unusual historical novel I have read in years.” —Katherine A. Powers, Boston Globe
“[Ballingrud's] evocative and strangely beautiful.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Nathan Ballingrud is one of my favorite contemporary authors and any time he’s got a new book out I run to the front of the line. His work is elegant and troublingly, wonderfully disturbing.”—Victor LaValle, award–winning author of The Changeling “Nathan Ballingrud's brilliant fiction brims with imagination, integrity (I do not use that term lightly), and an authentic world-weary dread that bores directly into your heart. With Wounds you'll gladly follow Nathan to Hell and (maybe) back.”—Paul Tremblay, award-winning author of The Cabin at the End of the World and A Head Full of Ghosts “Nathan Ballingrud is one of my favorite short fiction writers.” —Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times bestselling author of Annihilation and Borne “Stretch[es] the boundaries of the genre by employing these grand, horrific worlds. “The Butcher’s Table” reminds me of the first time I read Clive Barker’s “In the Hills, the Cities.” It’s horrifying, but there’s beauty.” —The New York Times “In only two slender collections, Nathan Ballingrud has emerged as one of the field’s most accomplished short story writers.” —The Washington Post “Ballingrud’s work isn’t like any other.”—Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing “One of the most disquieting and memorable short story collections to come out this year.”—The New York Review of Books “Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell is without a doubt one of the best, most accomplished horror collections in recent memory.”—Hellnotes “Wounds will no doubt be remembered as one of the most disquieting and memorable short story collections to come out this year.”—New York Journal of Books “There’s enough nightmare fuel here to inspire weeks of insomnia — all told with an even hand with a penchant for precise storytelling. How else do you chart the furthest reaches of the uncanny?”—Tobias Carroll, Vol. 1 Brooklyn A gripping collection of six stories of terror—including the novella “The Visible Filth,” the basis for the upcoming major motion picture—by Shirley Jackson Award–winning author Nathan Ballingrud, hailed as a major new voice by Jeff VanderMeer, Paul Tremblay, and Carmen Maria Machado—“one of the most heavyweight horror authors out there” (The Verge). In his first collection, North American Lake Monsters, Nathan Ballingrud carved out a distinctly singular place in American fiction with his “piercing and merciless” (Toronto Globe and Mail) portrayals of the monsters that haunt our lives—both real and imagined: “What Nathan Ballingrud does in North American Lake Monsters is to reinvigorate the horror tradition” (Los Angeles Review of Books). Now, in Wounds, Ballingrud follows up with an even more confounding, strange, and utterly entrancing collection of six stories, including one new novella. From the eerie dread descending upon a New Orleans dive bartender after a cell phone is left behind in a rollicking bar fight in “The Visible Filth” to the search for the map of hell in “The Butcher’s Table,” Ballingrud’s beautifully crafted stories are riveting in their quietly terrifying depictions of the murky line between the known and the unknown.
JO LAROUCHE HAS lived her 13 years in the California desert with her Aunt Lily, ever since she was dropped on Lily’s doorstep with this note: This is Jo. Please take care of her. But beware. This is a dangerous baby. At Lily’s annual Christmas costume party, a variety of strange events take place that lead Jo and Lily out of California forever—and into the mysterious, strange, fantastical world of Eldritch City. There, Jo learns the scandalous truth about who she is, and she and Lily join the Order of Odd-Fish, a collection of knights who research useless information. Glamorous cockroach butlers, pointless quests, obsolete weapons, and bizarre festivals fill their days, but two villains are controlling their fate. Jo is inching closer and closer to the day when her destiny is fulfilled, and no one in Eldritch City will ever be the same.