Search Results for: out-of-the-night

In the Forest of Dean, Pierre Colet joins an esoteric community preparing its members for the collapse of urban civilisation. The experiment is financed by Simeon Marrin, who allows it to be thought that he has the secrets of alchemy. He is also an accomplished diver, who explores the bed of the Severn at night.

One night Colet joins him – and barely escapes with his life. With the growing suspicion that Marrin is secretly mining a hoard of buried treasure to finance his commune, Colet, whom his adversary believes dead, hides out in the forest and shadows Marrin’s every move.

Remember what it’s like to last an entire night without sleep? That dull but constant headache. The feeling of your brain on edge. How easily irritated you were. How difficult it was to concentrate, even on seemingly menial tasks. It was just a single restless night, but everything felt just a little bit harder to do, and the only real comfort was knowing your head would finally hit the pillow at the end of the day, and when you awoke the next morning everything would return to normal.

But what if sleep didn’t come the next night? Or the night after? What might happen if you, your friends and family, your coworkers, the strangers you pass on the street, all slowly began to realize that rest might not ever come again?

How slowly might the world fall apart? How long would it take for a society without sleep to descend into chaos?

Sleep Over is collection of waking nightmares, a scrapbook of the haunting and poignant stories from those trapped in a world where the pillars of society are crumbling, and madness is slowly descending on a planet without rest.

Online vigilantism turns social media into a deadly gamble.

A freelance journalist grapples with the ethics of turning in footage of mass suicide.

A kidnapped hypnotist is held hostage by those at wit’s end for a cure.

In Sleep Over, these stories are just the beginning. Before the Longest Day, the world record was eleven days without sleep. It turns out most of us can go much longer.

An undead monster hunter must track down a killer, trailer-park-havoc-wreaking were-frog in this outrageous mash-up of Jim Butcher’s urban fantasy and George Romero’s zombie horror.

Before he died, Saelig Zilch was a chef. Now, posthumously recruited by a shadowy agency for reasons still unknown, tasked with keeping the public safe from things that go bump in the night, he hunts monsters.

Zilch scrabbles out of a North Carolina grave in someone else’s body. Someone recently dead. He only has a few days to find his bearings and carry out his latest mission, before the precious few nanobugs in his corpse shell are exhausted and he’s forced to start all over at the beginning. As he trudges down the main thoroughfare, he runs into Galavance. More accurately, she runs into him with her pink Chevy Cavalier.

A case of unfortunate timing? Maybe not. Turns out the critter Zilch has been dispatched to dispatch of-a murderous were-frog-squelches uncomfortably close to the trailer Galavance calls home. And come to think of it, Galavance’s boyfriend Jolby has been spending a lot of nights out lately . . .

WINNER OF THE DRACULA SOCIETY’S CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT AWARD

There’s a deserted house on Roman Road.

They say it has a dreadful secret.

Is that why Andrei can’t stay away from it?

Something stalks his family at night, and the threat looms of the father he has never known. Andrei wants to be ordinary, but he’s living a nightmare.

Writing as Ann Halam, award-winning author Gwyneth Jones delivers a story of the creatures that haunt the darkness, and the monsters that don’t stay there . . .


You can find out more about Gwyneth’s writing as Ann Halam here: http://www.gwynethjones.uk/HALAM.htm

When 14 year old Matt lands a job with his hero – world-famous monster maker, Chancey Balogh – he can’t believe his luck! Chancey has made lifesize mechanical monsters for Hollywood blockbusters and his reputation for scaring the living daylights out of audiences is legendary. But as soon as he starts work, Matt is plagued by bad luck. First some local boys get wind of his new job and his new money and decide to launch a full-on bullying campaign and then one night they break into the studios, determined to sabotage years of skilled craftsmanship. In a terrifying ordeal, where Matt suffers severe hallucinations, he sees the monsters come to life. But when he recovers from his concussion he cannot tell whether this actually happened or not. And neither can we . . .

Things were quiet that night in the space port. Then the ‘Theban’ arrived without warning, bringing with it a surly crew, led by a blustering captain, Larson…

The ‘Theban’ was old, propelled by a totally obsolescent interplanetary drive. The only way Larson could get it off the ground was to kidnap the young engineer, Horn, who he hoped could at least manage to keep the ship in flight until it reached its final rendezvous.

Their destination was the spaceship ‘Danae’ – a ship loaded with millions in space credit notes. If Horn wanted to save the ‘Danae’ from the onslaughts of the Space Invaders, he had his work cut out for him…

In New York’s Long Island, in the unpredictable decade of the 1960s, a young boy laments the approaching close of summer and the advent of sixth grade. Growing up in a household with an overworked father whom he rarely sees, an alcoholic mother who paints wonderful canvases that are never displayed, an older brother who serves as both tormentor and protector, and a younger sister who inhabits her own secret world, the boy takes his amusements where he can find them. Some of his free time is spent in the basement of the family’s modest home, where he and his brother, Jim, have created Botch Town, a detailed cardboard replica of their community, complete with clay figurines representing friends and neighbors. And so the time passes with a not-always-reassuring sameness-until the night a prowler is reported stalking the neighborhood.

Appointing themselves ad hoc investigators, the brothers set out to aid the police-while their little sister, Mary, smokes cigarettes, speaks in other voices, inhabits alternate personas . . . and, unbeknownst to her older siblings, moves around the inanimate residents of Botch Town. But ensuing events add a shadowy cast to the boys’ night games: disappearances, deaths, and spectral sightings capped off by the arrival of a sinister man in a long white car trawling the neighborhood after dark. Strangest of all is the inescapable fact that every one of these troubling occurrences seems to correspond directly to the changes little Mary has made to the miniature town in the basement.

Who will stop the planetary marauders?

For 6000 years the great Carina Empire ruled the galaxy – but slowly, under the remorseless erosion of centuries, the Empire faded as its Imperial bloodline ran out in weaklings who paid tribute to the wild, untamed Barbarians of the Rim. Finally came the day when the Barbarian legions struck at Carina itself, destroying in a single day and night the mightiest empire in galactic history.

In the ages that followed, the rest of the empire decayed, its individual suns and worlds losing contact, isolated Star-Kings fighting to hold their own cultures together . . . and failing. Ironically, only the Barbarians themselves remained the only coordinated power among the Near Stars. Their fleets drifted the star-trails, looting and destroying everything in their way.

One world alone stood against the dark night of savagery that was engulfing the galaxy – Parlion, the planet of the Star Magicians. And at last came the final battle for civilization in the stars.

Diana and Jane had their glamorous European road trip all planned out: shopping in Paris, then down along the Spanish coast for sun and sea.

A strange road takes them through twists and turns until they black out. When they wake, they’re on a strange island, with no way off and no sign of how they got there. This strange bubble out of time has no seasons, no day or night, and is populated by a small collection of people. They are cared for – or ruled over – by the mysterious ‘Master’.

They’re in paradise. But they’re not allowed to leave…

OMINOUS FOLLY is one of Denis Hughes’ works under his many pseudonyms. It has been out of print in the UK for decades and is now available for the first time as an eBook!

‘Suddenly out of the darkness, out of the night, there swooped something with a swish like an aeroplane. The whole group of us were covered for an instant by a canopy of leathery wings, and I had a momentary vision of a long, snake-like neck, a fierce, red, greedy eye, and a great snapping beak, filled, to my amazement, with little, gleaming teeth.’

Desperate for adventure, journalist Ed Malone joins a scientific expedition to the South American jungle led by the larger than life figure of Professor Challenger. But you should be careful what you wish for. After climbing to the summit of a mysterious plateau in the Amazon rainforest the explorers find themselves trapped in a world lost in time, inhabited by carnivorous dinosaurs, giant fish-lizards and murderous ape-men.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s thrilling tale of adventure and crypto-zoology became a template for an industry of creature features that came in its wake.

It starts out as a weird but seemingly understandable assignment, bodyguarding a mad politician whose keepers have decided to let him “escape” as a sort of reality therapy. But to understand the Senator, Florin must enter the Machine, an reality will never be the same. From now on he’s a Knight of Delusions.

When Bill Masen wakes up in his hospital bed, he has reason to be grateful for the bandages that covered his eyes the night before. For he finds a population rendered blind and helpless by the spectacular meteor shower that filled the night sky, the evening before. But his relief is short-lived as he realises that a newly-blinded population is now at the mercy of the Triffids.

Once, the Triffids were farmed for their oil, their uncanny ability to move and their carnivorous habits well controlled by their human keepers. But now, with humans so vulnerable, they are a potent threat to humanity’s survival. It is up to people like Bill, the few who can still see, to carve out a future for the human race . . .

Twenty years ago, the powerful mage Atrix Wolfe unleashed an uncontrollable force that killed his beloved king. Now, the Queen of the Wood has offered him one last chance for redemption. She asks him to find her daughter, who vanished into the human world during the massacre he caused. No one has seen the princess-but deep in the kitchens of the Castle of Pelucir, there is a scullery maid who appeared out of nowhere one night long ago. She cannot speak and her eyes are full of sadness. But there are those who call her beautiful.

They have lived among us for centuries-distant, separate, just out of sight. They fill our myths, our legends, and the stories we tell our children in the dark of night. They come from the air, from water, from earth, and from fire. What are these creatures that enjoin out imagination? Faeries.

Megan is an artist who draws seascapes. Jonah owns a shop devoted to treasures from the deep. Their lives, so strongly touched by the ocean, become forever intertwined when enchanting people of the sea lure them further into the underwater world-and away from each other.

The firebird came at night – a magnificent creature whose magical cry seemed to transform objects at random. Gifted with powers of her own, Meguet tried to reach out to the bird. But at moonrise, the firebird became human, a prince cursed by dark magic. Meguet bowed to help him. But then the mystery carried her away, on alien winds, to a land far from her home…

At the edge of the world, the Luxor Desert awaits – a barren land where a sorcerer’s war rages. Where invisible dragons cast shadows over ruined castles. And where Meguet’s own fate depends upon a secret locked away in a tower for centuries…

‘The Night Walker’ began as an ordinary country legend. No two stories agreed on the details and Paul Donovan’s attempts to sift out the facts seemed doomed to failure. He was on the verge of omitting it from his new series of articles on East Anglian Folklore when a sudden, sinister coincidence brought the old story sharply back into focus. An eccentric old wildfowler was taken to hospital where he babbled incoherently about “the man in the stove-pipe hat” before dying of inexplicable injuries. Donovan restarted his enquiries and found an unexpectedly determined ally in Shelia Morrison, an outcast from her village, who had been befriended by the dead wildfowler. together they hunted for intangible clues across the lonely reed beds and slow mysterious rivers of Broadland – the areas holiday-makers rarely see. Piece by piece the puzzle fitted together to reveal a chain of horror linking the past and present…connecting the mid-1960s with the ghoulish outbreak of body-snatching at the start of the Nineteenth Century. Not all the victims had gone for medical research…

‘The Night Walker’ is abroad again and fear treads beside him.

The sea has always been a symbol of uncontrolled power and infinite movement. Its rhythms are the rhythms of Life itself… for Life began in the primeval oceans…

Roger Adams was a man who dreamt of the untold wealth lying beneath the inscrutable waves of the Atlantic deeps. His mind filled with visions of Lost Continents, sunken galleons and the limitless possibilities of undersea farming. He same his meagre capital into a neck-or-nothing gamble and fought desperately against time and rude to turn his dreams into reality.

The unexpected stowaway added to his problems and then his diving began to pay dividends. The Atlantic Deeps gave up some of their secrets… but each enigma led to greater riddles. Then came the discovery that pointed to world-shaking consequences. Hidden beneath the great rollers lay supernatural forces so immense that the Kraken and other monsters of popular mythology were harmless toys beside it.

The force which had submerged continents was stirring once more…

A deranged killer sends a doctor on a quest for the truth – deep into the recesses of his own mind.

‘Deserves its reputation as one of the greatest mysteries of all time’ PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, starred review

What really happened to Inis St. Erme? What was his fatal mistake? Was it when he and his bride-to-be first set out to elope in Vermont? Or did his deadly error occur later, when they picked up a terrifying hitch-hiker, or when the three stopped at ‘Dead Bridegroom’s Pond’ for a picnic?

Dr Riddle is determined to find out, but he soon uncovers a series of bizarre coincidences that leave him questioning his sanity and his innocence. After all, he too walked those wild, deserted roads the night of the murder, stranded and struggling to get home to New York City. The more he reflects, the more his own memories become increasingly uncertain, as he veers into the irrational territory of pure terror…

A magician turned detective is caught up in the most baffling locked-room murder mystery…

‘One of the all-time greatest impossible murder mysteries’ Publishers Weekly starred review

‘Dazzling’ Saturday Review

‘A cornerstone of detective fiction’ New York Times


Master magician The Great Merlini has hung up his top hat and white gloves, and now spends his days running a magic shop in New York and his nights moonlighting as a consultant for the NYPD. When the crimes seem impossible, it is his magician’s mind they need.

So when two occultists are discovered dead in locked rooms, one spread out on a pentagram, both appearing to have been murdered under similar circumstances, Merlini is immediately called in. The list of suspects includes an escape artist, a professional medium, and a ventriloquist – and it is only too clear that this is a world Merlini knows rather too well…

Agnes receives few compliments, and Henry Preble is not so bad-looking even if he does have a reputation for cornering girls at work. In the eyes of the world, knowing that you’re on the shelf at twenty-four can do strange things to a girl. So strange that you might wake up one morning with almost no recollection of the previous night’s events . . . Published for the first time in the UK, The Gardenia, the basis for Fritz Lang’s 1953 classic Hollywood noir film The Blue Gardenia, is a gripping story of suspense and a brilliant exposé of the press sensationalism of 1950s America.

This volume also contains Out of the Blue, which was made into a comedy film in 1947 starring George Brent and Carole Landis.

Out in the Rolls-Royce, Emmy Arkwright nearly collides with Nat Volck in Beverly Hills. Emmy and Nat are neighbours, yet belong to separate worlds: she is a wealthy, successful fashion designer; he is a doctor who trained during World War Two. But when Nat gets a call one night telling him Emmy has attempted suicide, they become inexorably linked.

Nat – bitter and uncomfortable in his California Cadillac practice – attends Emmy, and watches over her return to memory and to her old life, offering her the stability and security she badly needs.

But was it really attempted suicide – or is someone trying to kill Emmy?

Griselda and Con Satterlee are spending a second honeymoon in a cottage on Long Beach, and it’s not going well. To cap it all, Con picks up a blonde in the Bamboo Bar one night and walks out with her, leaving Griselda on her own.

Con comes back, saying that he took the blonde outside to try to stop her from shooting herself, but the police find her body the next morning and Con is arrested for her murder.

Then Con disappears, and Griselda is alone in their beach house with a door that can’t keep out the Major, who frightens her; Kew, whom Con distrusts; Kathie, who is lovely, and so strange; or Dare, who has caused trouble before . . .

Griselda must work quickly to save Con – and their marriage.

Behind the ominous walls of Jamaica Court, Anthea Vine rules as a provincial Queen Elizabeth, imperious and wealthy, vain and pathetic.

But Anthea holds chained to her in financial dependence five discontented souls, all with a motive for murder. Her tentacles reach beyond her three wards and draw into their clutches her secretary, Sally Morgan, and the sardonically charming local doctor.

Anthea’s charms prove fatal to none but her. For, while people set their watches by the light in her bedroom window, Florence Pye reads death in the cards. Her prophecy comes true, silently, violently in the depths of the night.

What Miss Pye has not foreseen, though, is that she will be first to find the body . . .

Lydia Grey, an American returning to London after many years, is woken by footsteps in the night. There is someone in her room – of that she is sure. But that is also impossible. There is only one door and it is bolted shut. The windows are eight floors up, and are locked against the winter night.

As the noise recedes she switches on her bedside lamp. No one is there. Was it a dream? An illusion of a half-awakened state? Or is someone out to get her?