Showing results for "Heads" in Occult

Good does not exist. There is only the ever-swirling chaos of evil lurking just beyond the veil of our perception waiting to strike arbitrarily without purpose or reason. When evil throws its wiry tentacles out into our world leaving an inky black sludge of death, sadness, and destruction in their wake it's done not out of maliciousness but at random with no forethought, no agenda.

It’s the mid-'90s. Grunge and flannel are fading as the Spice Girls and Hot Topic conquer the malls. Cherry gloss glistens on the lips of the youth. Modems hiss as America comes online. And in a fog-drenched cove at the edge of New England, something terrible awakens when a fisherman reels in a gruesome catch: the remains of a young woman. Remains still pulsing with furious life.

In the near future, Britain has given up its constitutional monarchy to become a republic. But though the crown is a museum piece and the family no longer bears its ancient titles, Stephen Windsor feels the stirrings of the lives of ancient sacred kings in his bones, which is not surprising, as at key points in Britain's history, he has been reincarnated to perform the supreme kingly act. And though the throne is empty and forgotten, the land remembers and calls once more for a crown upon a royal head - and royal blood upon the ground.

A clergyman is murdered in his bed in the dead of night, triggering a chilling chain of events, each more bizarre and unnerving than the last – brutal killings, corpses vanishing, decomposed bodies digging their way out of graves. These shocking events seem unconnected but, at each scene, people report witnessing swarms of flies – hundreds, thousands, even millions of them.

An award-wining poet, short story writer and novelist, Walter de la Mare is probably best known for his works for children and his perennially popular poem ‘The Listeners’. His ghost stories were much admired by H. P. Lovecraft and inspired subsequent authors of supernatural horror such as Robert Aickman and Ramsey Campbell. In 1921, his novel Memoirs of a Midget won the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction, and this haunting, surrealistic tale is the opening tale in our anthology.