Bestselling Horror Books for March 2010

The Companion

Author: Martin, Nicholas
Format: Trade Paperback
Type: Horror Novella
Page Count: 108pp.
Pub. Date: January 27, 2010
Publisher: Sideshow Press

The Companion by Nicholas Martin — Book Two in the First Cut Series!

From the geniuses at arcadiacorp the companion: The world’s first ‘date in a can’!

Aaron’s life lacks spark. Working as an advertisement designer for ArcadiaCorp, a manufacturing leader in a world infected with commercialism, he finds little joy in his profession, and he longs for a meaningful connection with the opposite sex. When he is asked to test his company’s latest product, The Companion, he is less than enthused.

Just add water and in 12 to 14 hours, you’ll have your very own playmate ready to service your every need.

The Companion is unnervingly realistic and equipped with a computerized brain that allows it to grow and adapt to its owner’s every need and whim. At first, Aaron is repulsed by this stunning, vegetative woman. However, he soon finds that he is developing feelings for this . . . thing . . . feelings he’s never had before. For the first time, his life has purpose, flair . . .

The Companion . . . Let your greatest fantasy be its worst nightmare

Then Aaron attends a Companion enthusiasts meeting where owners share their experiences with the ‘product’ . . . and everything changes.

The Companion: A dystopian vision that explores what happens when male sexuality meet hyper-commercialism.

Beautifully illustrated by Meghan Hakes.

As Fate Would Have It

Author: Calvillo, Michael Louis
Cover Artist: Peter Mihaichuk
Format: Limited Edition Hardcover
Type: Horror Novel
Page Count: 300pp.
Pub. Date: 2009
Publisher: Bad Moon Books

Nominated for the 2009 Black Quill Award for Best Small Press Chill

Montgomery, a gourmet chef on the fast track to fame, has a teensy weensy problem. He’s a murderous cannibal addicted to human flesh.

Guilt and worry eat his brain and beg him to stop, but his headstrong girlfriend Liz won’t let him quit. She blames Montgomery for getting her hooked on the succulent meat and refuses to curb her carnal urges.

Ashley, a twenty-something trying to figure her place in life, desperately wants to kick the nasty heroin habit she acquired with her boyfriend Henry a year and a half ago.

Henry wants to make Ashley happy and quit, but no matter how hard he tries he can’t seem to resist the drug’s consuming pull.

As Montgomery and Ashley struggle with co-dependence, with love, with loss, with sorrow and regret they seek to find salvation in the unlikeliest of places — each other.

Dandelion Wine 50th Anniversary Edition

Author: Bradbury, Ray
Cover Artists: Tomislav Tikulin
Format: Trade Hardcover
Type: Horror Novel
Page Count: 220pp.
Pub. Date: 2007
Publisher: PS Publishing

You do things and you don’t watch . . . then, all of a sudden, you look at what you’re doing and it’s like the very first time. It happens to everyone at least once. And while it lasts, the ordinary business of living becomes a magical series of discoveries and revelations.

It happened to Douglas Spalding the summer he was twelve years old . . . the summer of 1928, when he discovered that he was truly alive and he yelled it a dozen times in celebration.

Ray Bradbury’s wondrous novel of inter-connected stories and vignettes depicts what is truly a vintage summer for a growing boy. A summer of green apple trees, mowed lawns and new sneakers . . . of gathering dandelions, of Grandma’s belly-busting dinners.

A season of sorrows and marvels alike.

With a brand new introduction by Stephen King.

Sloppy Seconds

Editors: White, Wrath James
Format: Trade Paperback
Type: Gross Short Story Collection
Page Count: 38pp.
Pub. Date: 2008
Publisher: Skullvines Press

Who Wants Some of Wrath’s Sloppy Seconds?

Who wouldn’t?

Each year at the World Horror Convention, the most anticipated event is the Gross-Out Contest, where authors stand up in front of everyone and deliver some of the most disturbing, gut-wrenching tales anyone has ever heard.

Wrath James White’s stories are among the best of them. Now, we present his stories for the first time in print — uncut.

Here are his four stories from previous years, as well as his entry for the 2008 WHC.

But there’s more! We have a bonus story that is “one of the most grotesque and horrific murder/rape/revenge stories I have ever written.”

Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror

Editor: Joshi, S. T.
Cover Artist: Jason Van Hollander
Format: Trade Hardcover
Type: Horror Short Story Collection
Page Count: 250pp.
Pub. Date: 2010
Publisher: PS Publishing

The work of H. P. Lovecraft continues to inspire many of the leading contemporary authors of horror and the supernatural.

In this anthology, S. T. Joshi, the world’s leading expert on Lovecraft and the author of the lively treatise The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos, tries his hand at assembling a modern-day Lovecraftian anthology, casting his net on both sides of the Atlantic and producing a volume that radically expands our notions of what constitutes “Lovecraftian” fiction.

Caitlin R. Kiernan, Brian Stableford, and Nicholas Royle produce innovative deconstructions of Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model” and “The Hound.” Michael Shea transfers the Cthulhu Mythos to San Francisco, Laird Barron and Philip Haldeman set their Lovecraftian horrors in the Pacific Northwest, and Donald R. Burleson and William Browning Spencer enliven the parched Southwest with cosmic monsters. Ramsey Campbell, Jonathan Thomas, Jason Van Hollander, and others make Lovecraft himself a character in tales of cosmic menace, while David J. Schow and Michael Cisco ring new changes on the Lovecraftian concept of the forbidden book.

These and other stories by Michael Marshall Smith, Norman Partridge, W. H. Pugmire, Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., Darrell Schweitzer, Donald R. and Mollie L. Burleson, Sam Gafford, and Adam Niswander all reveal how vital and vibrant the Lovecraftian idiom remains . . . and how terrifying.

The Great God Pan and Other Weird Stories by Arthur Machen: Edited, with Introduction and Notes

Author: Machen, Arthur
Editor: S. T. Joshi
Format: Limited Edition Hardcover
Type: Horror Short Story Collection
Page Count: 250pp.
Pub. Date: September 2009
Publisher: Arcane Wisdom

We are proud to announce the first title in our Arcane Wisdom imprint. The Great God Pan and Other Weird Stories by Arthur Machen: Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by S. T. Joshi.

Each one of the Arcane Wisdom titles will be half bound in exotic cloth and French marbled boards, custom end-papers, color frontis piece, sewn in ribbon marker and either signed by the scholar (on classic titles) who contributed to the edition or author that wrote the piece (if living). We plan on producing four titles a year with this imprint.

Here you will find the most significant contribution of Arthur Machen’s classic tales of dark fantasy and horror. With an introduction by S.T. Joshi who also contributes, notes and a complete Machen bibliography. This is a must have for the Machen enthusiast and Weird Tales collector.

The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen was widely criticized by the press as degenerate and horrific due to its profligate style and sexual content, although since his work has since garnered a reputation as a classic of modern horror.

In Supernatural Horror in Literature H. P. Lovecraft praised the novel, saying: “No one could begin to describe the cumulative suspense and ultimate horror with which every paragraph abounds”; he added that “the sensitive reader” reaches the end with “an appreciative shudder.” Lovecraft also noted, however, that “melodrama is undeniably present, and coincidence is stretched to a length which appears absurd upon analysis.”

Table of Contents:

• Introduction by S. T. Joshi
• Forward by Caitlin R. Kiernan
• The Great God Pan
• The Three Impostors
• Prologue
• Adventure of the Gold Tiberius
• The Encounter of the Pavement
• Novel of the Dark Valley
• Adventure of the Missing Brother
• Novel of the Black Seal
• Incident of the Private Bar
• The Decorative Imagination
• Novel of the Iron Maid
• The Recluse of Bayswater
• Novel of the White Powder
• Strange Occurrence in Clerkenwell
• History of the Young Man with Spectacles
• Adventure of the Deserted Residence
• The Shining Pyramid
• The White People
• A Fragment of Life
• The Bowmen
• Appendix 1: Introduction to The Three Impostors (1923)
• Appendix 2: Introduction to The Angels of Mons (1915)
• Notes
• Bibliography

Going Monstering

Author: Lee, Edward
Format: Limited Edition Hardcover
Type: Horror Novel
Page Count: 225pp.
Pub. Date: December 31, 2009
Publisher: Bloodletting Press

Going Monstering is brand new full length novel by the master of twisted dark fiction Edward Lee!

Where are we going tonight?

Behind the facade of the sedate sorority house, unutterable horrors seethe while tumid desires rise. All the while, Ann White must become pervert-fodder if she hopes to pass Pledge Week. All too soon, she finds that no act of lewdness is deemed too demeaning, no manner of sexual degradation too foul . . .

For there is a secret festering in the bowels of Alpha House, an ancient carnal evil whose stygian lust is too hideous to imagine and still stay sane. As Ann literally dips herself into a cesspool of soul-soiling immorality, the black revelation throbs closer and closer . . .

Where are we going tonight?

Poor Ann will be slopped on, spewed in, spat upon, penetrated, humped, poked, humiliated, bitch-slapped, gang-sodomized, plungered like a toilet, filled like a decanter, and debased en masse — indeed, she will willingly go through a wringer of sexual depravity to prove her resolve, but along the way, as she converts herself into this veritable receptacle of sullied lust, will she live long enough to unveil the true secret of Alpha House?

Tonight, we’re going monstering.

An unrelenting and irredeemable novel of gore-house porn and unmitigated black comedic horror.

This is a signed limited edition hardcover, fully illustrated by Tom Moran. Only 300 hand signed and numbered copies will be published of this edition.

Angel Dust Apocalypse

Author: Johnson, Jeremy Robert
Format: Trade Paperback
Type: Horror Novel
Page Count: 177pp.
Pub. Date: 2005
Publisher: Eraserhead Press

Meth-heads, man-made monsters, and murderous Neo-Nazis. Blissed out club kids dying at the speed of sound. The un-dead and the very soon-to-be-dead. They’re all here, trying to claw their way free.

From the radioactive streets of a war-scarred America, where the nuclear bombs have become self-aware, to the fallow fields of Nebraska where the kids are mainlining lightning bugs, this is a world both alien and intensely human.

This is a place where self-discovery involves scalpels and horse tranquilizers; where the doctors are more doped-up than the patients; where obsessive-compulsive acid-freaks have unlocked the gateway to God and can’t close the door.

This is not a safe place. You can turn back now, or you can head straight into the heart of . . .

The Angel Dust Apocalypse.

Rat’s Note: This book is not available at the Horror Mall at this time.

Patchwork

Author: Moore, James A.
Artist: Alex McVey
Format: Signed Limited Softcover Chapbook
Type: Horror Novel
Page Count: 88pp.
Pub. Date: 2008
Publisher: Bloodletting Press

The old saying “the Devil is in the details,” might well be true, but how can you know if what you see is the work of a deity or a demon? That perhaps is a matter of perspective.

There are myriad answers to the questions of fate, synchronicity and destiny. Just as there are there are any number of ways in which a quilt can be made, countless different patterns and shapes that can be put together in the making of the thing and little of it ever seems to be deliberate, unless you take the time to look at the big picture.

Seen as a single unit, the pattern emerges, if the people behind the design have done their part properly.

Seen from a proper perspective a logic and rhythm present themselves that could easily be lost without the added distance.

The same seems to be true, on occasion, with the scheme of how human lives interact. There may be truth in that or merely false perceptions. A lot of it seems to depend on who you speak to, who you ask. The patterns that are seen after all is said and done could be coincidence, or they could in fact be the machinations of some greater force.

A visit then, to see the pieces, placed as they are around the town of Beldam Woods, to watch them as they are chosen and stitched into one another, to make a pattern out of patchwork.

Shifters

Authors: Lee, Edward and John Pelan
Cover Art: Erik Wilson
Format: Trade Paperback
Type: Horror Novel
Page Count: 215pp.
Pub. Date: 2005
Publisher: Necro Publications

SCIFTAN: a proper noun of ultimately unknown origin, taking from the Old Frisian alt. transitive: sciff: to mutate, and tannin: one who.

Modern English translation:

SHIFTER

Richard Locke is a poet. He hasn’t written much since Clare, the woman he was going to propose to, told him she wasn’t in love with him anymore.

Captain Jack Cordesman is investigating a series of murders in which the victims appear to have been partially eaten. So far the only evidence linking these murders are the red, female hairs found at the crime scenes and a bar napkin with one of Locke’s poems scribbled on it.

With a rundown mansion, priceless automobiles, and guest houses filled with brutalities the likes of which you’ll never forget, Shifters is full of fun time gore . . . and monsters.

Rat’s Note: The trade paperback version of this book has been sold out but I’ve linked the book cover and bookstore icon to the hardcover edition for anyone who is interested.