Showing titles in Occult

The past doesn't always stay where it should. It is as though somebody, or something, is forever trying to bring it painfully into the present. Flavian Bennett is trying to leave his past behind when he goes to work in his father's bookshop in Paris. But a curious customer, Reginald Hopper, is desperate to resurrect his own murky origins. Hopper believes that a rare and mysterious book, The Dark Return of Time, may be the key to what happened before he arrived in Paris. In this quiet thriller by R.B. Russell, the futures - and pasts - of these two men will soon cross.

I awoke this morning in what appeared to be a strange house and I lay between unfamiliar sheets trying to remember exactly where I might be. I was not especially worried at first.

Psychic Ryley St. James was a mere five years old when she witnessed her first murder. Twenty years and multiple therapy sessions later, Ryley desires a normal life, a life free from hiding in the shadows, looking over her shoulder each day. When a close friend reveals they're being stalked by a vengeful ghost, Ryley sets out to uncover the truth about the ghost's mysterious death. As the ghost shifts her attention to Ryley, attempting to stop her from discovering the truth, Ryley's identity is thrust back into the limelight, revealed for all to see.

Against a black backdrop strewn with stars the silver figure in a long, floating dress sang and swirled, the little silk-shod feet mirrored in the polished black floor. Her voice trilled and swooped like an upper-class nightingale, with those odd strangulated vowels so alien to us today.

Everybody loves a good ghost story, yet poor dead Vee feels anything but “good” being stuck upstage in the heavens of her own afterlife. She can peek in on Val, who’s “downstage” with the living but haunted by ghosts. Then there’s Julie, stubbornly stage left but longing to be downstage with Val. And finally, poor Peter remains solitary in his stage-rightness with the sneaking suspicion he might be dead wrong. Trapped at center stage lurks the demon Iago, willing to bridge heaven and hell to exit this cursed performance once and for all.

The five stories that made up R.B. Russell's debut collection, Putting the Pieces in Place, were described on first publication as demonstrating 'a subtle mastery of the macabre. Enigmatic and enticing, they combine a pleasing respect for the great tradition of supernatural fiction with a chilling contemporary European resonance.'

The tape came off the first reel, threaded its way through the guides and heads, and flapped uselessly, rhythmically, as the full spool continued to turn.

Shaffer returned home at five, just as it was getting dark. He had to put down his bags to unlock the front door, and picked them up again feeling annoyed that he had set so much homework for his pupils; after all, he was going to have to mark it all.

Immerse yourself in the idyllic world of Blithedale, a utopian community where a group of like-minded individuals strive to create a society based on mutual respect and cooperation. But as the group becomes more entangled in each other's lives, tensions arise and secrets are revealed. Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance is a tale of love, loss, and the pursuit of happiness that will leave you spellbound.

When I look back on my life in Eastbourne in the late 1980s I find it amazing that I could have ever had enough time and energy to accomplish what I did.

If only we would take the time to look a little closer, delve a little deeper, when ordinary life goes awry, we might find the world more strange and unexpected than we ever could have imagined.

Following on from Literary Remains, R.B. Russell's previous collection for PS_Publishing, the twelve stories of Leave Your Sleep concern sex and death, love and loss. Russell allows his characters to disappear, slip into alternate realities, or re-write their own histories. They find they are able to do the most extraordinary things, even though they may not immediately realise it. And who is in control of their actions, or those around them?

For the first time since his arrival in Arkos the Right Honourable David Barrett, M.P., was up early, washed and dressed and standing on the quay.

After striking out on her own as a teen mom, Madi Price is forced to return to her hometown of Brandywine, Virginia, with her seventeen-year-old daughter. With nothing to her name, she scrapes together a living as a palm reader at the local farmers market. It’s there that she connects with old high school flame Henry McCabe, now a reclusive local fisherman whose infant son, Skyler, went missing five years ago. Everyone in town is sure Skyler is dead, but when Madi reads Henry’s palm, she’s haunted by strange and disturbing visions that suggest otherwise.

Welkom in Bird Street, de gelukkigste straat van de Verenigde Staten. De bewoners wonen in kasten van huizen en zijn stuk voor stuk vitale, weldenkende en – de meesten van hen althans – ruimhartige mensen. En hun kinderen? Die zijn perfect. Je zou kunnen zeggen dat het de bewoners van Bird Street iets té goed gaat. Tot het november wordt. Dan breken de Donkerder Dagen aan. Luana en Ralph weten het en hun kinderen ook. Ieder jaar in november slaat hun geluk om en worden ze juist overvallen door ongeluk.

Towards mid-day the three pursuers came abruptly round a bend in the torrent bed upon the sight of a very broad and spacious valley. The difficult and winding trench of pebbles along which they had tracked the fugitives for so long, expanded to a broad slope, and with a common impulse the three men left the trail, and rode to a little eminence set with olive-dun trees, and there halted, the two others, as became them, a little behind the man with the silver-studded bridle.

"The Haunted House" is a story series published in 1859 for the weekly periodical All the Year Round. It was "Conducted by Charles Dickens", with Charles Dickens writing the opening and closing stories, framing stories by Dickens himself and five other authors. The story appeared in the Extra Christmas Number on 13 December 1859. Dickens began a tradition of Christmas publications with A Christmas Carol in 1843 and his Christmas stories soon became a national institution. The Haunted House was his 1859 offering.

"The Tree" is a macabre short story by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft. It was written in 1920, and published in October 1921 in The Tryout. Set in ancient Greece, the story concerns two sculptors who accept a commission with ironic consequences. Lovecraft wrote "The Tree" early in his career. He was dismissive of the story in a 1936 letter. Such stories, he said, "if typed on good stock make excellent shelf-paper, but little else."

"The Tomb" is a fictional short story by American writer H. P. Lovecraft, written in June 1917 and first published in the March 1922 issue of The Vagrant. It tells the story of Jervas Dudley, who becomes obsessed with a mausoleum near his childhood home.

It is a recording of a dream, where the protagonist is a Roman military official in the Vascon country near Pompelo. The countryside is, every year, ravaged by terrible hill people who kidnap citizens and perform cruel rituals at a Sabbath. The narrator wishes to lead a military expedition to crush these hill folk, as a feeling of approaching evil has enveloped the countryside, due to a riot between the citizens and the hill people. These hill folk came to trade, yet some of these are killed and later, no disappearances occur before the time of the Sabbath.