**“An extraordinary recovery of a lost world.”—Peter Brown, author of The World of Late AntiquityFrom the world-leading expert on the Maya, a monumental history of a flourishing civilization across three millennia**The Four Heavens brings to life the cultural and visual splendor of the ancient Maya, drawing on the oldest indigenous texts of the Americas and the latest archaeological discoveries to present an entirely new history of this spectacular civiliz...

With an Introduction by David Stuart Davies.Father Brown, one of the most quirkily genial and lovable characters to emerge from English detective fiction, first made his appearance in The Innocence of Father Brown in 1911. That first collection of stories established G.K. Chesterton's kindly cleric in the front rank of eccentric sleuths.This complete collection contains all the favourite Father Brown stories, showing a quiet wit and compassion that has ende...

This exciting anthology brings together the work of two much admired Sherlock Holmes writers. In these stories Holmes and Watson are engaged in daring exploits applying their razor-sharp intelligence in new cases. This e-book presents ten separate Sherlock Holmes stories: By David Stuart Davies The Reichenbach Secret The Adventure of the Brewer's Son The Secret of the Dead Murder at Tragere House By Matthew Booth The Dragon of Lea Lane The Fairmont Confession The Mornington Scream The Ridd...

M.R. James is probably the finest ghost-story writer England has ever produced. These tales are not only classics of their genre, but are also superb examples of beautifully-paced understatement, convincing background and chilling terror.As well as the preface, there is a fascinating tail-piece by M.R. James, ‘Stories I Have Tried To Write’, which accompanies these thirty tales. Among them are ‘Casting the Runes’, ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll come to you, My Lad’, ‘The Tractate Middoth’, ...

'Nothing is so improbable as what is true'Of all the writers of ghost and horror stories, Ambrose Bierce is perhaps the most colourful. He was a dark, cynical and pessimistic soul who had a grim vision of fate and the unfairness of life, which he channelled into his fiction. And in his death, or rather his disappearance, he created a mystery as strange and unresolved as any that he penned himself. But more of that later.Ambrose Gwinett Bierce was born in a log cabin on 21st...

Selected and Edited with an Introduction and Notes by David Blair, University of Kent at Canterbury.Late in the eighteenth century authors began to write ‘Gothic’ stories as a way of putting literature back in touch with the irrational, the supernatural and the bizarre, which had been neglected in the ‘Age of Reason’.This superb new collection brings together stories from the earliest decades of Gothic writing with later 19th and early 20th century tales fr...

From the unsurpassed imagination of the creator of Conan, Robert E. Howard, here are twenty-one tales of suspense, high adventure and Lovecraftian horror.Foul sacrifices are made to a reptilian God in Hungary, a werewolf prowls the corridors of a castle in strife-torn Africa, criminal masterminds on both sides of the Atlantic vie for world domination, an enchanted ring exerts a terrible influence upon its wearer......And, as written in the pages of the accursed Necronomicon...

The sixteenth-century Puritan Solomon Kane has a thirst for justice which surpasses common reason. Sombre of mood, clad in black and grey, he 'never sought to analyse his motives and he never wavered once his mind was made up. Though he always acted on impulse, he firmly believed that all his actions were governed by cold and logical reasonings...A hunger in his soul drove him on and on, an urge to right all wrongs, protect all weaker things, and avenge all crimes against right and justice...

‘And behind him, like a misshapen black frog, bounded the Thing, its redtongue lolling out of its gash of a mouth, its diminutive blubbery lipsdrawn back in a murderous snarl…’Let Henry S. Whitehead take you into the mysterious and macabre world ofvoodoo where beasts invade the mind of man and where lives of theliving are racked by the spirits of the dead. In this collection of rareand out of print stories you will encounter the curses of the...

Max Carrados is one of the most unusual detectives in all fiction. He is blind – and yet he has developed his other faculties to such an amazing degree that they more than compensate for his lack of sight.‘Lose one sense and the others, touch, taste, smell, hearing improve…with a little dedicated training.’ Carrados can read a newspaper headline with the touch of his fingers, detect a man wearing a false moustache because ‘he carries a five yard aura of spirit gum’ and shoot a villain by a...

Some six or seven feet above the port bulwarks, framed in fog, and as utterly unsupported as the full moon, hung a Face. It was not human, and it certainly was not animal, for it did not belong to this earth as known to man'Rudyard Kipling, celebrated author of The Jungle Book, the Just So Stories and other entertaining fictions, was also a master of the short story in which he was able to combine the strange and unnerving in order to draw the reader into the world of his own dark ...

Edited and with an Introduction by David Stuart Davies.‘Have you ever heard of the fascination of terror?’This is a unique collection of strange stories from the cunning pen of Wilkie Collins, author of The Woman in White and The Moonstone. The star attraction is the novella The Haunted Hotel, a clever combination of detective and ghost story set in Venice, a city of grim waterways, dark shadows and death. The action takes place i...