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‘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.

ALLIANCE CENTRAL: the world once called Earth. Nothing breathes upon it but man and the wind, and the wind is tamed beneath great domes. From here humanity rules a vast stellar empire.
FIRSTISM: the belief that the universe is made for humanity. Therefore be fruitful, and multiply, and replace all other creatures with humankind and its domesticated beasts, and replace all other green things with plants useful to human life…
HERMES SECTOR: the remote frontier system where colonists are abruptly wiped out by an alien visitation. As a deadly threat to the countless billions of humans swarming outward from Alliance Central, the aliens must be identified.
One planet alone in Hermes Sector was spared. But that planet is Dinadh, the strangest and most secretive of all populated worlds. Firsters are not welcome on Dinadh, nor Firster technology. The only people from Alliance Central qualified by blood to visit Dinadh are a lone woman and her severely disabled five-year-old son. Their journey to Dinadh marks the beginning of a terrifying ordeal pitching mother and son beyond the shadow cast by human civilization.
Astounding sights, extraordinary aliens and colossal dangers await them…

The Manning Company is a big business, but although it was headed by Claire Manning, the founder’s widow, before her death, her son John had been running the firm for many years and was the undisputed successor. So why did Claire leave almost everything to her third cousin, whom no one associated with the firm has ever heard of?

Enter Jesse Falkenstein, who is launched into an investigation of Claire Manning’s past – and a litany of treachery, fraud, blackmail, abortion, impersonation and sudden death.

‘My favourite American crime-writer’ New York Herald Tribune

Tileman could make our fantasies come true – create reality from your dreams – for a very high fee. Catering to the desires of London’s most powerful – and decadent – figures, Tileman had top-level connections to guarantee him protection and influence.

But he had killed Laird Walker’s best friend – and Walker, the dead man’s sister, and a bizarre nightclub entertainer began a private war on Tileman…a war whose final battle was unimaginable horror.

A man waits for me in the light of the mountaintop.

No, not a man. Antlers rise from his head. A tail, like a lion’s tail, sweeps the ground behind him. He stands on hooves and his legs are as shaggy as the legs of the bison. His hands are tipped with claws like the claws of a cat.

He stares at me and I recognise the look in his eyes. He was the spirit in the young buck. He was the leader of the wolf pack. He was the snake and the mammoth. When he looks at me, my chant dies in my throat. My hands stop tapping on the drum.

Suddenly, I do not feel the strength I once felt, only the ancient terror . . .

In a parallel world, in a Renaissance Italy just a little bit different from that we know, a dashing young man named Romulan met a lovely young lady named Iuletta. But between their romance stood the hatred of their feuding families – and a witchcraft that really worked.

Somewhere, deep in the mighty rainforest, is the Kingdom of the Sun Bear. And there, legend has it, are the seven ancient heads of the Punan – and the secret of untold riches.
To find and possess the heads, a man must brave not only the terrifying creatures of the forest, but must also risk the displeasure of the gods and spirits that inhabit it.
Yet, two groups set off in a ferocious rivalry in pursuit of the legend. They disturb the equilibrium of the forest and risk awful consequences. For, it seems, only one creature can benefit from such a quest – Shadow-hawk, the eater of men’s souls.

When Odin’s curse fell upon him, Harald Swiftaxe, the young Norse warrior, lusty in love and battle, was fully human no longer. He was incensed with the animal rage of the god’s devotees, the Berserkers. The snarling ferocious savagery of the bear possessed him. Immune to fire and steel, frenzied by the smell of blood and the sight of torn human flesh, he was driven to the worst of human deeds . . . The stench of fear was meat and drink to him, and cowering women learned of his cruel, insatiable lust.

The bear screeched its ecstasy – yet at times the man dimly understood the horror. Could the demon god be killed, the spell lifted…? If there was a way, the price of failure would be high, greater than death itself . . .

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.

A quest that takes Kane into forbidden wastelands, and tests his killer skills against the most brutal forces ever summoned against a single man. Kane faces death duels in strange swamps, assassins’ attacks, the heart-freezing terror of the werewolf – and lives to laugh at danger. But he knows that his strength, and perhaps his very soul, is lost when he enters the erotic web of the vampire…

Contents:
“Reflections for the Winter of My Soul”
“Cold Light”
“Mirage”

Darryl Whitesmith was engaged upon a new line of research at the Horological Central Institute. He was familiar with the famous saying of Minkowski: “From henceforth space in itself and time in itself sink to mere shadows and only a kind of union of the two preserves an independent existence.”

But he had no idea to what extent that saying would be borne upon him. It was difficult for Darryl’s mind to make the transition from subjective to objective time, but once that transition had been made there was no turning back. It began as a simple experiment, an experiment which concerned space-time, relativity and the four dimensional continuum.

Whitemith’s first indication that something was wrong was when the clock on the wall raced backwards in a blur of speed to fast to follow. The laboratory faded, day and night blended into a welter of greyness.

He was back in the Jurassic Age – but not for long. The machine was still dragging him back into the remote epochs of the Past…

Put yourself in the place of Kim Rendall, a handsome, idealistic young man living on a distant planet ruled by a super-efficient government. Here is industrialization carried to its illogical conclusion. Kim Rendall lives in the shadow of mechanized terror, for machines have taken over, and the disciplinary circuit keeps the inhabitants in check . . .

The ability to distinguish reality from fantasy is supposedly the root of sanity.

But if a man lives in two worlds, and both are real, what then? Is he mad, or sane? One person, or two? And if one of his worlds should begin to grow dim, a shadow world, could one say he was in danger of going sane?

“How can you drink tea from an empty cup?”

That ancient Zen riddle holds the key to a baffling mystery; a young man found with his throat slashed while locked alone in a virtual reality parlor.

The secret of this enigmatic death lies in an apocalyptic cyberspace shadow-world where nothing is certain, and even one’s own identity can change in an instant.

For six years Kit Fraser has been an honest man, selling burglary insurance for his father-in-law. But no one knows the truth about his history, and why he is so uniquely placed to advise his clients. No one, that is, except Kline, who emerges from the shadows of the past with an offer that Kit may have no choice but to accept – even through it will jeopardise his secure life, and his future.

Legends of the living dead have filled the pages of mythology since time immemorial. If ninety-nine point nine percent of the stories can be explained as hallucinations, tricks of the light, moving shadows or sheer imagination, a hard core of disquieting fact remains.

The vampire lives in the minds of men. When was it born? Perhaps in the dim distance of the remote past when the racial subconscious was being moulded. What keeps the vampire tradition alive in the mind of modern man? The two tiny words of “what if…?”

Leroy Thompson met a girl in a dark country lane. He offered her a lift. He met her again and again, but always by night. Then he looked in the driving mirror and saw only his own reflection… She cast no shadow in the headlights… She screamed and leapt from the car before he reached a bridge that crossed a moonlit stream… What if?

Even in today’s world there are corners where past evils still cast their terror-haunted shadows. When the young man, Christian, came to his inheritance – a once grand mansion in just such a remote corner of France – he knew only that there was some sort of alternate claim to that ancient building and its lands. Even as the villagers acknowledged him as lord of the manor, there came two from the forest to stake out their interest. And with them came fear and desire, terror and love…a combination which could be irresistible – and also fatal.

Mercury is slowly dying. Each year its air grows thinner. Each month thousands of broken Mercurians are ordered to leave their planet.

They have only one hope. Captain Future, the Solar System’s most daring agent, has promised to restore their world – a next to impossible task.

The solution lies beyond the stars…at the very core of the universe where no man has ventured before. There, in the shadow of doom, Captain Future meets the mightiest of all evil beings – creatures he may not live to describe…

The Gliding Wraith: If he was really asleep in his chair why did he glide across the street?

Twilight Ancestor: Her evil power held the tribe in terror … only the stranger dared to oppose her.

The Man Who Never Smiled: The stranger never parted his lips, as though afraid of what he would reveal.

Fangs in the Night: Something evil and dangerous lurked in the shadows below the window.

An Eye for an Eye: He had forgotten about the hare in the trap … until his own life was in danger.

In the slum alleys of Lambeth in 1891 a sinister silk-hatted figure lurks in the shadows – but trade is there for the taking and a girl must make a living. Now, one after another, the girls who work the Waterloo Road wake in the morning to feel the slow agony of the most vicious of poisons . . . victims of the man called Fred.

The police have only a string of ‘catch me if you can’ letters to taunt them, whilea whole mailing list of Victorian worthies find demands for money with menaces in their mail.

Inspector Swain investigates . . .

‘Original story told in a highly individual manner’ Times Literary Supplement

Harry Vaughan’s uncle has just passed away, providing the young man with a colossal fortune. Giving up his job, Harry goes back to his roots – and to Celia, the woman he loves.

But Harry Vaughan has lost part of his memory. He feels himself ten years older, suffers from headaches, meets people who know him but whom he doesn’t remember. When Celia’s husband is killed it becomes clear that someone is following Vaughan’s life. But who is this shadow and what do they want?

‘A real psychiatric shocker’ The Tablet

Curtis had killed a man, and he had paid the price. Now free from prison and moving his way across England searching for a place to begin a new life, Curtis slowly realises he is being shadowed by mysterious pursuers and is entering a very dangerous, stealthy game of hide-and-seek.

Curtis finds himself in a desolate seaside village where a beautiful woman and a deserted house will be crucial in the desperate – and murderous – drama about to be played out on the English Coast.

‘The novel is written with power’ New York Times Book Review

‘A smooth elaboration of mounting horror and danger’ Library Journal

The man the world knew as Lewis Carroll, author of the adventures of Alice, was known to his colleagues in the Christ Church Common Room as the Reverend C. L. Dodgson, a middle-aged Oxford don. His hobby was photography, especially of pubescent girls ‘in their favourite dress of nothing to wear’.

When evidence of the Reverend’s pastime falls into the hands of Charles Augustus Howell, the infamous Victorian blackmailer, and a murder victim is fished out of the Isis, Inspector Swain is called to investigate the case that casts the shadow of doom over Dodgson.

‘One of the most entertaining mysteries of the year’ Julian Symons

‘Catches the authentic whiff of steaming sexuality behind the Victorian whiskers’ Guardian

Ace Lieutenant Dominic Flandry was not a man easily swayed from his duty to the Empire; not, that is, until galactic vice king Leon Ammon offered him a million-credit bribe, a voluptuous woman called Djana, and a chance to explore a dark and treasure-laden moon.

Yet within the desolate peaks and valleys of that strange world of ice and shadows, Flandry found more than he had bargained for. Supposedly barren, the planet swarmed with a hideous race of strange, inhuman creatures, infernally controlled by a deranged and brilliant computer brain. Each, like a piece in a bizarre and vicious chess game, was programmed to kill. And although Flandry did not know it – so was the woman he loved.