Through the Pale Door


Book Description

Sarah West takes a temporary job at her father's South Carolina steel mill the summer before college, hoping for relief from the chaos of her psychotic and often institutionalized mother. Soon after moving into her father's home, tragic news about her mother arrives. The haunting funeral coincides with Sarah's first love affair with a fellow mill worker, Edgewood, who shares Sarah's artistic gifts. Confronted with danger and death at the mill, mortality confronts Sarah and Edgewood from every angle and buries deep in their artwork. Edgewood helps Sarah overcome the loss of her mother. In the end, however, Sarah will face a greater challenge: domesticating her own emerging inner demons while tending to her first lover's uncertainty in himself.




Doors


Book Description

Some doors should never be opened... David Druas is a successful psychologist, with a thriving practice. When he encounters Hans Werner, a client who sees imaginary doors, life takes a dark and unexpected turn. After trying to unravel the delusion, David also notices mysterious doors. Scattered throughout the city, they lead to beautiful, terrifying and dangerous new worlds. But are they real? When Hans Werner is murdered, the evidence identifies David as the killer. Forced to become a fugitive, he struggles to escape the deepening nightmare that threatens to overwhelm him. As the police close in, it becomes apparent that the doors are concealing a dark and tangled truth. The question is: can David unlock their secrets before his time and sanity run out?




The Bright & the Pale


Book Description

Debut author Jessica Rubinkowski delivers the thrilling first book in an epic Russian folklore–inspired fantasy duology filled with page-turning romance, tragedy, magic, and monsters. Perfect for fans of Leigh Bardugo and Sara Raasch! Seventeen-year-old Valeria is one of the only survivors of the freeze, a dark magical hold Knnot Mountain unleashed on her village. Everyone, including her family, is trapped in an unbreakable sheet of ice. Ever since, she’s been on the run from the czar, who has set out to imprison anyone who managed to escape. Valeria finds refuge with the Thieves Guild, doing odd jobs with her best friend, Alik, the only piece of home she has left. That is, until he is brutally murdered. A year later, she discovers Alik is alive and being held captive. To buy his freedom, she must lead a group of cutthroats and thieves on a perilous expedition to the very mountain that claimed her family. Only something sinister slumbers in the heart of Knnot. And it has waited years for release.




A Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe


Book Description

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), son of itinerant actors, holds a secure place in the firmament of history as America's first master of suspense. Displaying scant interest in native scenes or materials, Edgar Allan Poe seems the most un-American of American writers during the era of literary nationalism; yet he was at the same time a pragmatic magazinist, fully engaged in popular culture and intensely concerned with the "republic of letters" in the United States. This Historical Guide contains an introduction that considers the tensions between Poe's "otherworldly" settings and his historically marked representations of violence, as well as a capsule biography situating Poe in his historical context. The subsequent essays in this book cover such topics as Poe and the American Publishing Industry, Poe's Sensationalism, his relationships to gender constructions, and Poe and American Privacy. The volume also includes a bibliographic essay, a chronology of Poe's life, a bibliography, illustrations, and an index.




The Pale King


Book Description

The "breathtakingly brilliant" novel by the author of Infinite Jest (New York Times) is a deeply compelling and satisfying story, as hilarious and fearless and original as anything Wallace ever wrote. The agents at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, appear ordinary enough to newly arrived trainee David Foster Wallace. But as he immerses himself in a routine so tedious and repetitive that new employees receive boredom-survival training, he learns of the extraordinary variety of personalities drawn to this strange calling. And he has arrived at a moment when forces within the IRS are plotting to eliminate even what little humanity and dignity the work still has. The Pale King remained unfinished at the time of David Foster Wallace's death, but it is a deeply compelling and satisfying novel, hilarious and fearless and as original as anything Wallace ever undertook. It grapples directly with ultimate questions -- questions of life's meaning and of the value of work and society -- through characters imagined with the interior force and generosity that were Wallace's unique gifts. Along the way it suggests a new idea of heroism and commands infinite respect for one of the most daring writers of our time. "The Pale King is by turns funny, shrewd, suspenseful, piercing, smart, terrifying, and rousing." --Laura Miller, Salon




Great Short Stories by Great American Writers


Book Description

Featuring 30 of the greatest short stories from the most distinguished writers in the American short-story tradition, this new anthology begins with Washington Irving's tale "Rip Van Winkle" and ranges across more than one hundred years of storytelling, concluding with F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic, "Winter Dreams." Other selections include Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," Melville's "Bartleby, The Scrivener," Harte's "The Luck of Roaring Camp," "To Build a Fire," by Jack London, "The Middle Years" by Henry James, plus stories by Mark Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, Ambrose Bierce, Theodore Dreiser, and others. Perfect for classroom use, this outstanding collection of short stories will also prove popular with fiction readers everywhere.




Horror Classics: 560+ Titles in One Edition


Book Description

DigiCat presents to you the biggest collection of supernatural, macabre, horror and gothic classics: H. P. Lovecraft: The Case of Charles Dexter Ward At The Mountains of Madness The Colour out of Space The Whisperer in Darkness The Dunwich Horror The Shunned House... Mary Shelley: Frankenstein The Mortal Immortal The Evil Eye... John William Polidori: The Vampyre Edgar Allan Poe: The Tell-Tale Heart The Cask of Amontillado The Black Cat... Henry James: The Turn of the Screw The Ghostly Rental... Bram Stoker: Dracula The Jewel of Seven Stars The Lair of the White Worm... Algernon Blackwood: The Willows A Haunted Island A Case of Eavesdropping Ancient Sorceries... Gaston Leroux: The Phantom of the Opera Marjorie Bowen: Black Magic Charles Dickens: The Mystery of Edwin Drood Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray Washington Irving: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow Théophile Gautier: Clarimonde The Mummy's Foot Richard Marsh: The Beetle Arthur Conan Doyle: The Hound of the Baskervilles The Silver Hatchet... Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: Carmilla Uncle Silas... M. R. James: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary A Thin Ghost and Others Wilkie Collins: The Woman in White The Haunted Hotel The Devil's Spectacles E. F. Benson: The Room in the Tower The Terror by Night... Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Birth Mark The House of the Seven Gables... Ambrose Bierce: Can Such Things Be? Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories Arthur Machen: The Great God Pan The Terror... William Hope Hodgson: The House on the Borderland The Night Land M. P. Shiel: Shapes in the Fire Ralph Adams Cram: Black Spirits and White Grant Allen: The Reverend John Creedy Dr. Greatrex's Engagement... Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto William Thomas Beckford: Vathek Matthew Gregory Lewis: The Monk Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights Rudyard Kipling: The Phantom Rickshaw Guy de Maupassant: The Horla Jerome K. Jerome: Told After Supper...










His Monkey Wife


Book Description

A schoolmaster in the heart of Africa takes his best and most attentive student, a chimp, to England. The chimp, Emily, has learned to read and obtained a classically trained mind. We listen as her thoughts become a searchlight upon the English culture of the 1920s. A remarkable social satire, and a best seller.