Search Results for: terrors

The planet Mercury. Forty million miles from the Sun, following his eccentric orbit, one side of him solid with the frost of untold cycles of time, the other molten whereon metals boiled and sizzled in the incredible heat of the sun. A world utterly dead, a terror-planet, but such is the spirit of adventure in Man that even here he was exploring…

Successful dramatist Victor Dermott rents an isolated ranch-house in the Nevada Desert. For two months all is ideal, then one bright summer morning he wakes to find his dog, his guns, his servant vanished – and the telephone dead.

The terror has begun …

‘Agonising tension sustained throughout a first-rate story’ Evening Standard

‘The mouth was redder than ever, for on the lips were gouts of fresh blood, which trickled from the corners of the mouth and ran over the chin and neck – It seemed as if the whole awful creature were simply gorged with blood; he lay like a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion.’

When Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to help Count Dracula purchase a London house he is disturbed by the horrifying discoveries he makes in his client’s castle. But worse, Harker’s actions introduce Dracula to London. Soon afterwards, the Count embarks on a reign of seduction and terror. And all, it seems, who encounter the charismatic Eastern European aristocrat – a succession of madmen, physicians and beautiful women – are never seen in daylight again…

Bram Stoker’s DRACULA has inspired countless movies, books, and plays since it’s first publication in 1897. Few, if any, have been fully faithful to Stoker’s original, best-selling novel of mystery and horror, love and death, sin and redemption. But in DRACULA, Stoker created a new word for terror, a new myth to feed our nightmares, and a character who will outlive us all.

The Sinners of Erspia are the inhabitants of a bizarre world, ruled and guided by the hands of Ormazd and Ahriman, twin gods of good and evil. Histrina, a child of Ormazd, is taken by the evil hordes to a camp of terror where she meets Laedo, a man stranded far from his home.

Together they start on a hallucinatory journey to understand and escape from the surreal world that holds them prisoner.

Mahlia Ettison thought she had left terror behind. But the quiet community she thinks of as sanctuary hides an ancient evil – voodoo magic that steals lives and souls from the most innocent: children.

The bones rise from their mud-clogged grave, bringing visions of horror and death: Mahlia’s children are to be the next sacrifice.

And all her witchcraft may not be enough to save them.

The anatomy of fear is the unknown. The essence of terror is contained in the phrase “What if?” Suppose the dead should return? Are there invisible phychic entities hovering on the fringe of the physical world? Can the power of evil manifest itself in tangible form and launch world shattering violence against humanity?

The most gripping fear lies within the human mind. Lana Davis was a normal, healthy, sane young woman to all outward appearances but the Unknown was laying siege to her mind. By day her work kept the worst of the Terror at bay, but at night it returned. Time passed and Fear grew greater…Fear was embodied in a mysterious effigy which stood beside her bed . . . Fear lurked in a weird voice on the telephone.

Lana Davis ran screaming into the night – unable to face Fear any longer. The stranger who found her apparently knew more about her problems than she did; Lana found herself involved in a macabre new environment where Fear had expelled reality leaving the stranger as the only link with the world she had once known. Dark supernatural powers contended with insanity for Lana’s very soul, as she hovered on the brink of unreality and annihilation.

Richard, Robin and Nigel are ordinary boys who share a taste for the macabre in films, videos, books and comics. Then they admit a fourth member to their club – Toady, who is not at all an ordinary boy. From the moment he lures the boys to a seance, unimagined horror overtakes their lives.

“A strikingly imaginative mixture of horror and fantasy, with a real sense of supernatural terror and with scenes of horror so strange they border on surrealism.” Ramsey Campbell

In the course of a continuing quest for his legendary birthplace, Earl Dumarest befriends a young man who says his home world was called Nerth.

New Earth, perhaps? Or even the original planet Dumarest seeks? He must find out.

And so Dumarest comes to Nerth – to discover that the Cyclan, his prime enemy in the cosmos, is already there . . . together with mysteries and terror that defy the imagination!




(First published 1975)

The Edge of Running Water deals with the adventures of a young psychologist in a remote Maine farm house; with the death of a woman and the disappearance of an inventor. Against a normal enough background, events take on the shape of terror, with a tinge of the unknown – hints of things beyond the borderland of the natural, including the strange researches into survival after death by a half-mad electro-physicist. Set against these, a tender love story adds an unexpected poignancy and charm.

One moment Kenniston was strolling down the quiet street, lost in pleasant reverie. The next moment the sky split open!

It split wide open, and above them was a burn and a blaze of light – so swift, so violent, that the air itself seemed to have burst into flame. Then there was silence – awful, suffocating silence.

Kenniston felt the chill of premonition – a shapeless terror that grew into a thing too evil to be borne alone.

Three men and a beautiful girl on a cross-country terror spree – a coast to coast rampage of stealing, kidnapping, rape and killing.

Who were they? Where did they come from? Why did they do it?

With chilling detail, John D. MacDonald unwraps the grotesque inner world of these four young psychopaths, and brings into terrifying focus the random, violent lusts that lie hidden between mischief and madness …

‘Maurice Procter’s Chief Inspector Martineau is one of fiction’s best policemen’ New York Times

The Plumber’s men are swift workers, who take murder in their stride. But who is the Plumber himself – the brains behind the highly organized and disciplined gang terrorizing Granchester? And how, in a town where everyone is too scared to open their mouths for fear of being the next target, will Detective Inspector Martineau break up this tightly woven network?

A native woman working in the little cultivated patch just outside the palisade which surrounded the mission was the first to see them. Her scream penetrated to the living room of the little thatched bungalow where the Rev. Sangamon Morton sat before a table. He had heard such screams before. The one thing always uppermost in his mind and the one, great, abiding terror of their lives there in the midst of the savage African jungle was the Wakandas.

Come to Majipoor, the magnificent, exotic planet of LORD VALENTINE’S CASTLE. Come with Hissune, favourite of Lord Valentine, as he probes the deepest secrets of Majipoor’s long past in the depths of the great Labyrinth.

Join Hissune as he becomes one with its many peoples – dukes and generals, thieves and murderers, Ghayrogs and Metamorphs – and discovers wonder, terror, longing and love, and learns the wisdom that will shape his destiny.




(First published 1982)

He knew his name: Kyon. He wore the garb of a gardener, therefore he was a gardener. But that was all he knew. The city of Urb was a maze of wonders and terrors. The people were strangers; condescending and perhaps spiteful. Kyon had to do something, to go somewhere, but none would tell him. And it was important!

Urbs, the ultimate city, was on the scales of history. It would be up to Kyon whether all it represented, the flowering of science, would be…

FOUND WANTING

A vanishing corpse; a mistrustful policeman; a celebrated archaeologist and TV personality involved in the macabre rites of a primitive religious sect – these are just some of the dark ingredients of a novel whose every page is vibrant with menace.

P. M. Hubbard has a disturbing talent for evoking terror in the most unlikely settings: in this case, a sleepy English village is shown to conceal a pit of horror, a terrifying nightmare world that destroys all who would uncover its secrets.

Five hundred miles beneath the surface of the Earth lies another world-a world of eternal day and endless horizons, in which dinosaurs still roam and cavemen hunt and terrors forgotten in the outer world still survive.
Lieutenant von Horst, member of an exploring expedition, was left behind in this lost land of Pellucidar. BACK TO THE STONE AGE is the thrilling story of his perilous adventures, along with the cavegirl he loved, in that primitive unknown world.

Raised, tested, trained and indoctrinated in the Blocks, Molly Zero is being groomed for the governing Elite.

Rebelling against her fate, she flees. An innocent searching for truth, Molly finds the world outside the Blocks alien and frightening. Her flight plunges her first into the heart of a small community. Next, attracted by their eccentric gaiety, she joins the travelling gypsies, roaming the country in Commercial Air Cushion Vehicles. And then Molly gets caught up in urban terrorism…

The Million Cities covered every inch of Earth’s surface with a gleaming metal skin – and penetrated almost to the planet’s core. Billions of people crowded them, using up the last depleted resources of an aging world. There was no hope for mankind but exploring and colonizing new frontiers beyond the sky.

The Chartists were the only people with the ability to build a spaceship -were within reach of success…

And then the government outlawed space travel – and began a vicious reign of terror against the Chartists!

Peter Grant, sailing his boat in unfamiliar waters, is forced ashore on an island connected with the mainland by a causeway uncovered only at low tide. There is a house on the opposite shore lived in by two secretive people.

His involvement in their affairs, begun by his sea-chance, becomes deeper and more dangerous as the tides ebb and flow over the causeway, until he finds himself face-to-face first with love – and then with terror and violent death.

‘A sensitive, absorbing tale’ Sunday Times

On his return to Geneva, Brian Innes must meet Audrey Page and find a way to prevent her from joining the strangely temperamental group of people gathered around film star Eve Eden at the Villa Rosalind. With characteristic stubbornness, if not trusting naivety, she refuses to be detained and is immediately encircled by terror, while the jaws of a murder trap swing closed.

Fortunately, Dr Gideon Fell is on hand, and when the murderer strikes with an invisible weapon, Fell accepts the challenge with brilliance and wit.

Todd Wells is prepared for excitement when he joins his father, captain of the atomic tugboat STORMQUEEN, on a voyage from Antarctica to California. For this is no ordinary journey – they are towing five icebergs, each weighing six thousand million tons, to bring pure water to the drought-stricken areas of the United States.


But when a violent storm erupts and once iceberg threatens to break loose, the excitement turns to terror – as Todd is caught up in the desperate battle to save the iceberg and the lives of the men on the ship.

OUT FROM THE GREEN WORLD: Humans had colonized the planets & lost its birthright. Civilization was a lonely chain of space stations linked by terror. The Empire kept the pioneers enslaved with a weapon that shattered any protest into screaming insanity.
All they had left was the dream of someday returning home. Until their dream exploded in the holocaust that destroyed the Earth. But the embers of their dead planet sparked a brain-blasting revolution that swept the galaxy: a revolution of exiles in an alien universe-with nothing left to lose.

When the Inter-Planetary Corporation’s crack spaceliner Arturus took off on a routine flight to Mars, it turned out to be the beginning of a most unexpected trip to the unexplored moons of distant Jupiter.

For once wreaked on Ganymede, the survivors had first to master that world’s primeval terrors, then reconstruct a new spacecraft, and finally find a way out of the problems presented by the warring intelligence of the Jovian system.

SPACEHOUNDS OF ICP is justly considered to be on of Edward E. Smith’s finest novels – a standalone classic of exciting space adventure.