Search Results for: nightmare

It was strictly a duty call and Pat Carroll wasn’t looking forward to it one bit. But she was in Wales and her fiance’s family lived nearby. He was dead now, killed in an accident, and Pat felt that since she was so close to his family’s home she should pay her respects to the woman who would have been her mother-in-law. It would be a bore, but it was the least she could do. And, besides, it was only for a day or two. But the day or two dragged on and Pat found herself the helpless prisoner of a fanatic madwoman. Locked in a hideous room, she was trapped in an infinite eternity of a waking nightmare . . .

‘A great suspense shocker in the icy horror tradition of Psycho‘ Boston Herald

The modern mind usually associates witchcraft with the middle ages. We think of witches as Shakespeare depicted them in Macbeth. We see them as secret, black and midnight hags, doing a deed without a name. We close our eyes and immediately the vision of a cauldron filled with foul ingredients appears before us; here are the fenny snake, adder’s fork, wool of bat, scale of dragon and tooth of wolf.

But this does not go far enough back. There was witchcraft in the world long before medieval times. The Witch of Endor who practiced her strange arts in the reign of King Saul is familiar to all students of the Old Testament. The writings of Homer abound with references to witchcraft and sorcery. The very earliest human societies had witch doctors, medicine men, shamans and priests of the black art.

Perhaps so ancient and widespread a cult has some basis in fact. There are powers beyond science. Ancient occult laws will still hold good. It is not wise to cross the path of a being whose age is measured in centuries and whose dark powers can alter the stars in their courses.

After rescuing Marianne Cadogan from an incoming tide on a lonely and forgotten part of Britain’s coast, ex-con Ryan O’Donnell is cornered into helping her escape a supposedly abusive father to reach the safety of her mother.

Too late, he finds himself compromised, the subject of a trans-European manhunt while he struggles to deliver the child and prove his motives pure/

The deeper in he gets, the more trapped he will become.

Sherwood Forest, home of Oberon, Titania, Puck, Cobweb, Peaseblossom and the rest of the mob, has been whittled away by urban development. It’s time to move on, the fairies decide. Sid, their captive, a kindly if gruff young car mechanic, teaches Titania to drive, and on Midsummer’s Eve the party sets off in a battered and smelly old bus. They’re bound for the New Forest, where they hope to be able to regenerate their magic.
The fairies’ journey is full of excitement. At a village fair, they show the morris dancers how to cut previously undreamt-of capers. Titania falls in love with a human baby and steals her from her pram, starting a nationwide search for the missing infant. The fairies then link up with a group of New Age travellers on their way to Stonehenge, who befriend them almost without question.
Finally, a fight to the death between Titania and the terrifying and sadistic Morgan-le-Fey must take place before everyone can settle down into some form of harmony and peace.

One night Ed Smith thought he was having a waking nightmare when he saw a monstrous face at his window, but in the morning his neighbors were missing. The people who later turned up were not quite right, and gradually Smith realized they not only weren’t his neighbors, but weren’t even human – they were the creatures he had seen . . .

His journey began with the blast of a shotgun aimed at a gleaming nimbus of light. The tightening of his finger on the trigger was almost accidental; his punishment was almost merciful. But his journey has just begun, and when it is over Paul Eyre will no longer be human….

A graveyard, sinister music, a small child’s nightmare…

A children’s tune played on a hurdy-gurdy
A small boy’s nightmare
The same tune played by an old blind beggar outside a foggy graveyard – and heard again by an old, bed-ridden woman
And heard again, at the dead of night on a London street corner

What is the connection – and why is this disturbing melody the prelude to a brutal crime …

The space programme has finally lost its novelty, and a jaded public hardly notices another moon launch. Skilful PR men preserve the illusion that the missions have become routine.

But astronaut Richard Martin can tell a different story. Of panic in deep space, of crewmen pushed beyond breaking point, of official indifference towards his own shattered life.

Martin is effectively put under wraps – until the pilot of a moon capsule, loaded with nuclear weaponry goes beserk and a nightmare develops, threatening to engulf the world – a nightmare that only Martin could end.

For Mary Stevenson Crye, a beautiful young housewife, life had been wonderful. Loving husband, two delightful children, meaningful existence in a small Southern community. Then it all fell apart: with the sudden, unexpected death of her husband, Stevie must struggle to earn a living as a free-lance writer.

When her typewriter – the sole economic support for her surviving family – breaks down, Stevie begins to receive demonic messages through the machine, the prelude to a living nightmare of satanic emissaries, ghouls from beyond the grave, and the revelation of an unrequited curse over the Crye household.

For Mary Stevenson Crye, the nightmare is about to begin . . .

Behind every door waits a living nightmare . . .

Spencer Gill is a man with problems. The fact that he’s dying, slowly, is only one of them. The castle, up on the slopes of a famous Scottish mountain, is another. For one thing, it doesn’t have any doors – at least, not on the outside. And it’s Gill’s nightmare task to find out what it really is.

In fact, this horror-house has many doors. But they’re all on the inside. And sheer bloody terror lives and lurks behind every one of them.

The welcome mat is out for Gill. And for you. So come on in. Just don’t slam the door . . .

It was a sultry summer day in 1981, and the 3 billion or so inhabitants of the world went about their daily routine unaware that, possibly, the fate of the human race lay in the shaking hands of one George Mercer, an insignificant and slightly neurotic employee of the New York City Department of Welfare.

For George had been informed, by an accredited emissary of the Galactic Overlords, that he had 12 hours in which to prove the people of the Earth worthy of admission into the Galactic Federation. George, and George alone, would represent all of mankind. If he failed the entire planet would be destroyed.

Was this all a nightmare of delusions dredged up by his tortured subconscious? Or a very real nightmare that would end in the Day of the Burning . . .

An ancient Power awakes.

A modern evil mushrooms into apocalypse.

Cocooned in a nightmare world, the village of Melfort waits, as The Power feeds on the death and destruction, fuelling its gross appetite.

And the dead rise up.

It’s breaking through…

In a nightclub rest room a man mumbles these words and then puts a shotgun in his mouth and pulls the trigger. The only witness, music journalist Nick Finch, watches in horror as he crumples to the ground beside the similarly slain bodies of a woman and a little girl. Nick exits the room fast, but when someone goes in to check out his story the bodies are no longer there.

Then things get really strange.

Unspeakable nightmares. Hallucinations. Mysterious figures shadowing him. Is Nick losing his mind? Or is someone – or something – planting ideas in his head? And why does that word – GENESIS – keep cropping up?

Nick battles to keep a grip on his sanity. But Nick’s wildest nightmares, his deepest fears, couldn’t begin to prepare him for the horror from the past which is about to engulf him…

Parallel Worlds! Earth, cerated out of universal chaos, and the Dreamlands, spawned of the dreams of men. But where dreams turn to nightmares, Death is the only crossing-point…
Ex-waking worlders David Hero and Eldin the Wanderer are now sellswords in that ephemeral dimension called Deramland. Once a talented artist of the fantastic, now Hero’s art is the wizardry of his swordplay. Once a lecturing professor, now Eldin professes a knowledge of the dark, mysterious Dream Realms second to none. A formidable pair! But face to face with Yibb-Tstll and the Gaunts of Night, the Eidolon Lathi and her brood, and the mad, alien First One who plots to set free dreaming Cthulu from eon-old imprisonment…what can mere men do?
Take up arms with the Heroes of Dreams and laugh in the face of the world’s worst nightmare!

After viewing his partner’s mutilation in a home movie, a horrified private detective pursues leads in the most disgusting case of his career. His investigation plunges him into a nightmare of sexual brutality and supernatural bestiality.

It is a journey he – and you – will never forget.

Miranda Brand was uneasy even before the train left to take her to stay with her army cousin in divided Berlin. Then a story of a missing fortune in war-looted diamonds, told to pass the time on the journey, brings back nightmares of her past. And causes murder.

This is dazzling entertainment from a master of suspense.

The Mannschenn Drive was the gateway to the stars, but it had one unfortunate site effect: Traveling faster than light, mankind reverted to the bestial form of his own legendary nightmare-the lycanthropic horror that the full moon once called forth from the soul’s depths, now no longer howling at the moon but soaring far beyond it…

Twenty-first-century Moscow. Luther and Jake have a mission – to steal the experimental transferral device from under the nose of the Dream Team.
It’s a bold and dangerous plan that goes fatally wrong. The New York they return to is not the one they left: it’s a nightmare world of violence, paranoia and apartheid on the brink of a devastating war.

ZAKYM: World of the night-rulers and the day people. A world teetering on the edge of nightmare.

The Cyclan orders were clear – ‘Find Dumarest. Find him before war erupts on ZAKYM.’ But Zakym could hold the key to Dumarest’s search for his lost home planet – and for that he would risk everything.




(First published 1977)

Nightmare at Stonehenge

When Legion meets a strange old millionaire called ‘Foster’, he doesn’t know that his whole life will never be the same again. For ‘Foster’ has a strange story to tell. Part of his story is contained in his diary, which not only describes things in the very recent past, but goes back for centuries…

Awakened from suspended animation aboard his exploration starship, John Jackson is shocked to discover that the ship never left Earth – and that he has slept a century after a world war. Facing a nightmare wilderness inhabited by neo-barbarians and sentient tanks, Jackson is the only man who can bring the world to its senses.

The Ledom had made a world without war, without fear – a world in which each individual was free to love, to create, to explore . . .

The Ledom, a gentle and kindly new race, made their twentieth-century guest, Charlie Johns, welcome to their paradise.

Charlie thought he was in heaven. But then he found out just where – and when – he was . . . an Eden turned into a nightmare!

Marion is lost on a dark and lonely road; she’s tired and hungry and afraid. She thinks she’s dreaming when she sees a motel sign shining in the darkness: Bates Motel. But for Marion the nightmare is just beginning …

To most people Psycho needs no introduction, but although Alfred Hitchcock’s film was largely faithful to the book, in the novel itself you will find a story more nuanced and – if possible – even darker.

For the beautiful young woman Ash, life has always been arquebuses and artillery, swords and armour and the true horrors of hand-to-hand combat. War is her job. She has fought her way to the command of a mercenary company, and on her unlikely shoulders lies the destiny of a Europe threatened by the depredations of an Infidel army more terrible than any nightmare.

Winner of the BSFA Award for best novel, 2000