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When Spencer Gill, Jack Turnbull and Angela Denholm were taken by the Castle in Scotland – when they played Sith of the Throne’s monstrous multidimensional game to stay the execution of Earth, and won – they made a deadly, devious enemy of the alien master of The House of Doors.

Now Sith is back, and his game is more deadly yet. In worlds that are known, and others beyond imagining . . . in mad machine worlds, and some that can only be the product of a diseased mind – indeed, in one such that is a diseased mind – Sith’s new game will be played out to the bitter end. For the game is rigged, The House of Doors inscrutable as ever, and its doors all designed to lead Gill and his companions ever deeper into worlds of uttermost terror . . .

Harry Keogh, the Necroscope, the man who can talk to the dead, the Earth’s greatest vampire hunter, has been searching for his wife and infant son, gone missing during Harry’s war against the vampires. This obsession has left him open to subtle influence by an ancient vampire, Radu. Entombed in amber, trapped in undeath, Radu plans for his resurrection and plots the destruction of other vampires who might challenge his supremacy.

Thus, Radu’s enemies are now Harry’s – and Harry cannot properly defend himself. His powers – his deadspeak and his ability to transport himself through the Mobius Continuum – are locked away in the recesses of his vampire-clouded mind.

But Harry is not without allies, living and dead. E-Branch, the psychic spy organisation, is worried about Harry. So is Harry’s long-dead Ma, and the ancient philosopher and prophet Nostradamus, whose centuries-old quatrains make eerie sense in the modern world.

Right now, Harry Keogh doesn’t even know he’s the Necroscope. But Earth’s teeming dead won’t let him forget them for long – and won’t let him forget that Radu and his vampire kind are humanity’s deadliest enemies.

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 . . .

VAMPIRES NEVER REST

And neither does Harry Keogh, the world’s greatest vampire hunter, the Necroscope, the man who can talk to the dead. Right now, he’s desperately searching for his wife and son, who disappeared in the midst of Harry’s war against the undead monsters that plague mankind. Others will have to carry on that fight until the Necroscope has been reunited with his beloved family.

But it’s not that easy to leave the vampire war behind. The bloodsuckers know that the Necroscope is their deadliest enemy and will do anything to destroy him.

Harry struggles to locate his missing family, not realising that he has become a pawn in the battle between two powerful vampires. When one has slain the other, the Necroscope will be the next to die!

The fourth volume of new adventures set in H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands. David Hero has been trapped in the Dreamworld for many years; long enough, he thought, to have battled most of its monsters. But in the service of King Kuranes he sees greater perils than any he has yet encountered.

Malevolent aliens, the Mordri Three decide to become so evil that God himself will have to stop them. They can alter flesh with a simple touch, literally turning people inside out or seeding them with cancer. The Three have already destroyed an entire solar system and most of their own race. Their next targets: mankind and Earth!

On Earth, Scott St. John is mourning his wife when he is struck by a golden arrow of light – a fragment of the soul of Harry Keogh, the original Necroscope – and gains powers he does not understand. A mysterious, beautiful woman appears, desperately trying to warn Scott about something . . . then vanishes midword. Scott dreams of a very unusual Wolf, who begs him – in human speech – for rescue.

A fledgling Necroscope, a telepathic Wolf, a beautiful woman from beyond the stars, the ghost of Harry Keogh, the best of E-Branch’s psychic fighting forces, and a dead girl who is not yet ready to seek her just reward must defeat three impossibly strong, psychically gifted monsters whose touch literally melts flesh from bone.

The moon is inhabited by the amorphous moonbeasts and their servants, the horned-ones of ill-regarded Leng… also by the monstrous lizard-God Mnomquah who came down with mighty Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones out of the stars when the world was young and Chaos ruled. But now the Mad Moon of Dreams is falling – on Earth’s Dreamlands!

In a pit in ruined Sarkomand, Mnomquah’s aeon-destined mate, Oorn The Awful, awaits her lord and master’s coming. Then, to celebrate their mating, the mad moon will disintegrate and rain death on all the lands of Earth’s dreams!

Dreamland needs an army of heroes – and has only a handful. But such a handful! Join David, Hero and Eldin the Wanderer, the Eidolon Lathi, Zura of Zura, Curator, Gytherik the Gauntmaster – and all the rest – in their epic quest to the…
MAD MOON OF DREAMS

The Dreamlands! Created from the dreams of men, haunt of gods and demons, the other side of Death’s portal…

Professor Leonard E. Dingle, lecturer on the subconscious mind of man. Deceased.

David Allenby Hero, fantastic artist of the macabre and supernatural. Also deceased.

Or should we simply say they have undergone…a transition?

A transition indeed – for under the aliases of Eldin the Wanderer and Hero of Dreams, their present occupations include keep-climbing, wizard-slaying, swordmastery and amazing adventuring in the land of Earth’s dreams!

Jake Cutter is reluctantly learning how to be a Necroscope – how to use the Möbius continuum to travel instantaneously from place to place, how to talk to the dead – but the dead don’t like him much. It seems Jake’s got a hitchhiker in his mind, a dead vampire named Korath. But since Korath holds the key to the Möbius equations, Jake can’t just kick him out…

In Australia, Jake helped E-Branch destroy the aerie of the mind-master, Nephran Malinari, one of the trio of Great Vampires who came to Earth from the vampire world. Malinari escaped and went to ground with the hideously beautiful Lady Vavara. Vavara has taken over a holy monastery on a beautiful Greek island and turned the nuns into most unholy creatures of fearsome appetites for all things carnal.

But Jake wants revenge against the Italian mobsters who killed the woman he loved. As far as he’s concerned, E-Branch can search for Malinari, Vavara, and the metamorphic Lord Szwart without him until he’s satisfied his own bloodlust. But it seems vampire-hunting is truly Jake’s job now – the men he’s trying to kill aren’t men at all but vampires hidden for two generations in human guise!

To defeat them, Jake will need every weapon in Necroscope’s arsenal, including the power to call the unsleeping dead out of their mouldering graves…

Harry Keogh, Necroscope, is no more . . .

And the Wamphyri are back – not only in the Vampire World, where the ancient northern ice has melted to release the original, the most evil, most powerful vampires of all time, but in our world, too. Without Necroscope – the one man who could talk to the dead and undead alike – only Ben Trask and the weirdly talented espers of his secret organisation, E- Branch, stand between Mankind’s survival and its domination by terrible invaders from Starside.

Trask: human lie-detector; David Chung: locator of all things evil; Ian Goodfly: precog, whose glimpses of the ever-furtive future have so often saved the lives of his E-Branch colleagues. Three men, their technology and the esoteric talents against shape-changing challengers from a parallel universe. The odds don’t look good, and Harry Keogh is dead and gone, his motes scattered throughout the Universes of Light. But as Harry himself was witness, death isn’t like that . . .

Harry may be dead, but his legacy lives on.

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!

High tide in a sea of blood!
…And for Harry Keogh, Necroscope, the tide has finally turned. Always the champion of the living and the dead alike, now Harry is shunned by all men. Always a hunter of the evil that stalks the night, now he in turn is hunted. Always the hero, now he is the plague-bearer, the menace – the monster!

But yet his greatest battle will be with himself, with the Thing Inside. For the Necroscope is now a vampire.

Forsaken by the teeming dead pursued by the espers of E-Branch, Harry has a choice: to be banished, hounded right out of this world…or to release the plague which he carries within himself upon all humanity!

Richard Garrison was once a corporal in the British Military Police, until a terrorist’s bomb destroyed his eyesight and his career. Repaying Garrison for saving his wife and child from the blast, millionaire industrialist Thomas Schroeder introduced him to the Psychomech, an amazing machine that could either gift its users with astonishing mental powers – or destroy them utterly.


Having successfully harnessed the Psychomech, Garrison discovered the Psychosphere, a strange plane of existence where mental abilities were all. Thought became intent, word became deed, and Garrison became unto a god.


Two decades later, Garrison is utilising his unique powers to explore the universe. On Earth, his son, Richard Stone, is happily in love, until his beloved falls victim to “The Gibbering”, a plague of madness that destroys men and women by destroying their minds. There is no obvious cause. There is no cure. There are no survivors.


When Richard Stone is himself infected by The Gibbering, the mental powers he inherited from his father enable him to defeat the madness, at least for a while. Then, to his horror, Stone discovers that the Psychomech has run amok and that The Gibbering is the result! Even though the insanity it creates batters his struggling mind, Stone realises he is the only man with the knowledge and power capable of destroying the berserker mind-machine.

After Richard Garrison lost his sight in a terrorist explosion, he developed vast mental powers that more than compensated for his blindness. He mastered the Psychomech machine, then used it to conquer his enemies and restore his dead love to full and vibrant life. Psychomech also revealed to Garrison the Psychosphere, a startling reality where mental powers reigned supreme and could influence people and events on Earth.

Once he was nearly godlike – or demonic, if one dared become his enemy – but now Garrison’s mental abilities grow weaker with each use. He tries desperately to conserve his energies, but he has begun to have strange visions of a mind so different from his own as to be other human, and knows he must stay alert and strong.

Charon Gubwa has invaded the Psychosphere. Twisted and evil, sexually and mentally warped, physically corrupt, Gubwa’s desires are simple: More. More drugs. More sex. More power. More of the Earth under his dominion.

Richard Garrison must battle Gubwa in the Psychosphere and on Earth. And he must win, no matter the cost to himself or those he loves, or all mankind will be lost.

Things in the ground, thinking their thoughts . . .

. . . Thoughts they can express only through Harry Keogh, NECROSCOPE. For that’s Harry’s talent, and his burden: he reads the thoughts of the dead in their graves – and the thoughts of the UNdead! Except . . . the undead are thinking thoughts that are totally-unthinkable!

Yulian Bodescue’s mother fainted at the tomb of Thibor Ferenczy, vampire. Corrupt from birth, now Yulian feels a strange compulsion: to discover his real father and spread his works abroad. Only Harry Keogh, prisoner of the metaphysical Mobius Continuum, can stop him. Harry’s other big problem is this:

HE DOESN’T HAVE A BODY!

Richard Garrison, a corporal in the British Military Police, loses his sight while trying to save the wife and child of millionaire industrialist Thomas Schroeder from a terrorist bomb. While Garrison is recovering from his injuries, Schroeder makes him an offer the young man cannot refuse – refuge at Schroefer’s luxurious mountain retreat and rehabilitation from the best doctors who can treat Garrison’s blindness, and, if not cure him, at least teach him a new way of life.

But Thomas Schroeder has a secret. His is dying and determined not to lose his life. The doctors tell him his body cannot be saved. But what about his mind? Garrison’s healthy young body would make an excellent replacement for Schroeder’s failing corpus, if the machines to perform the operation can be perfected in time.

Garrison has secrets of his own. Since the bombing that caused the loss of his sight, Garrison has become aware of new abilities slowly developing in his mind: mental powers he is beginning to master, strengths Schroeder cannot expect.

Richard Garrison and Thomas Schroeder, two strong-willed men locked in battle for the greatest prize – life itself.

DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES…Except to Harry Keogh, Necroscope. And what they tell him is horrifying.

In the Balkan mountains of Rumania, a terrible evil is growing. Long buried in hallowed ground, bound by earth and silver, the master vampire schemes and plots. Trapped in unlife, neither dead nor living, Thibor Ferenczy hungers for freedom and revenge.

The vampire’s human tool is Boris Dragosani, part of a super-secret Soviet spy agency. Dragosani is an avid pupil, eager to plumb the depthless evil of the vampire’s mind. Ferenczy teaches Dragosani the awful skills of the necromancer, gives him the ability to rip secrets from the mind and bodies of the dead.

Dragosani works not for Ferenczy’s freedom but world domination. he will rule the world with knowledge raped from the dead.

His only opponent: Harry Koegh, champion of the dead and the living.

To protect Harry, the dead will do anything – even rise from their graves!

“LAMB HOUSE is in Rye, an ancient town of East Sussex, England. It is very much a real place, even a famous one, yet The Haunting of Lamb House is as elusive to review as it must have been to write. It is safe to say that no one but Joan Aiken could have written it, not only because she was born in Rye and has the town in her bones as it were, but also because she has the power — shown in her other books — of evoking strange, often eerie events of the past and making other times, places and people vividly alive. This book goes further: She has taken the real history of Lamb House and interwoven happenings that are purely imaginary, working so skillfully that even those who have lived there can hardly tell which is which!”

So wrote novelist Rumer Godden, who also lived in Lamb House. She went on:

“For those who do not sense such things, The Haunting of Lamb House is a most skillful and intriguing interweaving of fact and fiction; to those who do, it is a memorable evocation. In either case it is a little masterpiece.”

Lamb House in Joan Aiken’s birth town of Rye in Sussex is said to be haunted. This is her story of what might have happened to cause the haunting: using the imagined diary of an earlier Mayor of Rye, Toby Lamb, whose father built the handsome Georgian house, and later episodes that might have occurred during the occupancy of two of its famous literary tenants – Henry James and E.F. Benson.

Joan Aiken was born in another haunted house owned by her father Conrad Aiken: Jeake’s House, just around the corner in Mermaid Street, Rye, which she also wrote about in Return to Harken House.

“Joan Aiken has written a clever book, kindling a whole world of feeling out of small macabre details, presenting to the senses a series of apprehensions of reality which seem to touch a completeness beyond themselves. An impressive achievement; I shivered as I admired” Robert Nye, The Guardian

“Joan Aiken’s artful web of truth and fancy is divided into three histories of haunting – the first employs Aiken’s considerable skill in a vivid evocative rendering of the old town of Rye when the house was built…followed by the twenty years of Henry James’ residence. The end is worth waiting for…where E.F.Benson encounters hideous apparitions and even an exorcism in the last enthralling twenty pages” Miranda Seymour, T.L.S.

“Aiken has conjured up a deliciously scary ghost story…her mastery of style serves her well in the creation of three separate voices. Those familiar with Henry James’s writing especially The Turn of The Screwwill derive special enjoyment from this novel, but there are shivers enough for any reader willing to acknowledge the possibility of ghosts and the reality of evil” U.S. Library Journal

“In three interlocking ghost stories this veteran British novelist places a fictional haunting within the history of a real house, and displays a masterly way with several contrasting narrative styles, sympathetically evoking some ghostly presences…the wayward spirit of the house and the growing number of literary presences which gradually take possession” Publisher’s Weekly

In this new collection taken from her very first short stories, written while she and her young family were living in a bus, shortly after the end of the second world war, up until her most recent, Joan Aiken draws on the characters of women from folk and fairy tales who may have had to keep their own light under a bushel, but who use their understanding of the ways of the world, and often their sense of humour to help not just themselves, but others who are lonely and unhappy.


Often delightfully tongue in cheek, Joan Aiken presents stories of shop girls who can sell you a pinch of weather, or lonely spinster piano teachers who can confront the devil and his pop group in a dark alley. Old ladies, browbeaten wives, silent mothers, unhappy daughters – all are given a chance to speak their thoughts, and even practise a little magic in Joan Aiken’s modern folk tales, particularly in her last collection, called Mooncake. Stories from her whole writing career are included in this collection.

When vampires stalk among us . . .

Robbed of his supernatural powers, Harry Keogh is back from Starside, the vampire sourceworld. A mere man again – denied access to the metaphysical Möbius Continuum, no longer able to communicate with the dead – now he must rebuild his life in a world made safe only through his efforts. But safe for how long?

E-Branch, Britain’s mindspy organisation, wants Harry back with his invaluable talents intact. Likewise the Great Majority, his countless dead friends across the world, who know that he’s needed as never before. For the old thread has risen anew!

Crumbling in their graves, the teeming dead fear for Harry. If the ex-Necroscope can’t find and destroy the last of the Ferenczys, that nightmare vampire dynasty, they know that the vampire will find him. He must regain his powers – or risk becoming a vampire himself, undead for ever . . .

An invasion from an alien dimension! That would be horror enough in itself: the thought of monstrous beings stalking the Earth. But how much more nightmarish if the invaders were each and every one . . . VAMPIRES!

Searching the infinite parallel time-streams of the metaphysical Mobius Continuum for his long-lost wife and son, the Necroscope Harry Keogh discovers that Soviet scientists have accidentally opened a portal to mankind’s worst nightmares. The lethal terror of Chernobyl is a mere bad dream in comparison.

THE SOURCE of all Dark Legends can now be reached by any who dare pass through the Gate. And by some who do not dare – but who have no choice . . .

They’re on the run! Now that their monstrous vampire ‘gardens’ under London, in Australia, and on the Greek island of Krassos have been razed, two ‘Lords’ and a ‘Lady’ of the Wamphyri Malinari the Mind, Lord Szwart, and the hag Vavara have joined forces, leaving a trail of undead destruction as they flee headlong from Ben Trask’s E-Branch and the dead-waking Necroscope, Jake Cutter.

But headstrong Jake has problems of his own. In the metaphysical Mobius Continuum, it appears that his blue life-thread – the emblem of his humanity – is gradually fading, changing to red. And not only red but blood red, dreaded insignia of the Great Vampire!

Could this be the downside of Harry Keogh’s legacy? And if so, are Necroscope and Trask’s ESP-talented Avengers – his team of precogs, telepaths, and locators – hastening in pursuit of their own hideous doom? Earth’s fate is undecided, mankind’s destiny on hold, the future a page as yet unwritten.

And the future was ever a devious thing…

Nathan is the new Necroscope!

But in the Vampire World the dead won’t talk to him. And in the world of men beyond the Hell-lands Gate, there are even worse terrors than the vampires of Starside. Yet that is Nathan’s lot: to venture into the world of his father, Earth, there to seek the source of Harry Keogh’s awesome talents with which to return to Sunside/Starside, defeat the Wamphyri, and destroy –

THE LAST AERIE!

Nathan is not alone; Ben Trask and the espers of E-Branch will befriend him even as they befriended his father twenty years ago. But against natural and supernatural forces alike, will even their metaphysical skills suffice to send him home again? And if they do, what then? For in Starside a new vampire walks the night: Lord Nestor Lichloathe of the Wamphyri…

Nathan’s brother!

Two monstrous armies stand opposed: Vormulac Unsleep’s undead legions out of Turgosheim, and Wratha the Risen’s Renegades, masters of the last great aerie of the Wamphyri. The spoils of war will be revenge, territory, and human flesh! And blood, of course – the sweet blood of Sunside’s Szgany. For the blood is the life, and when life or land are threatened there’s only one course of action for a vampire: battle to the death!

Trapped in the middle: Nathan Keogh, Necroscope. And the espers of Earth’s E-Branch, Trask and Zek, Goodly and Chung: Guardians of the Gate against a vampire invasion of Earth! The Necroscope holds the keys; he is the only one who can close the Gates to end the crimson carnage of the Bloodwars!

But the past holds many a secret, and the future was ever a devious thing!