Ab Books: 369 books

"The Nameless City" is a horror story written by H. P. Lovecraft in January 1921 and first published in the November 1921 issue of the amateur press journal The Wolverine. It is often considered the first Cthulhu Mythos story. The Nameless City of the story's title is an ancient ruin located somewhere in the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula and is older than any human civilization

"The Man of the Crowd" is a short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe about a nameless narrator following a man through a crowded London. It was first published in 1840. The story is introduced with the epigraph "Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul" — a quote taken...

The figure of my wife came in... it came straight towards the bed... its wide eyes were open and looked at me with love unspeakable' Edith Nesbit, best known as the author of The Railway Children and other children's classics, was also the mistress of the ghost story and tales of terror. She was able...

When a young pair of newlyweds settle down into a small cottage in a quiet village, they look forward to a pleasant, pastoral life of domestic bliss. The husband, a practical man, dismisses the superstitious maid's tale of an ancient curse about the local church's marble statues who come to life each...

"""Oh! my dear, my dear, how shall I pass the hours till I hold you again?"" No thought, then, of my whole life's completion and consummation being a dream. I staggered up to my room, fell across my bed, and slept heavily and dreamlessly. When I awoke it was high noon. Mildred...

"Shadow" is a short parable by Edgar Allan Poe. It starts like a monologue from someone who has died recently: "YE who read are still among the living; but I who write shall have long since gone my way into the region of shadows. For indeed strange things shall happen, and secret things...

In an isolated town called Vondervotteimittis (wonder-what-time-it-is), the punctilious inhabitants seem to be concerned with nothing but clocks and cabbage. This methodical, boring and quiet little borough is devastated by the arrival of a devilish figure playing a big fiddle who comes straight down...

"""Oh! my dear, my dear, how shall I pass the hours till I hold you again?"" No thought, then, of my whole life's completion and consummation being a dream. I staggered up to my room, fell across my bed, and slept heavily and dreamlessly. When I awoke it was high noon. Mildred...

nice, moody, horror story. Two best friends are bedevilled by a third friend, who haunts them from grade school to adulthood. He seems to intuit things he can't know, and always tells the truth. One friend escapes to India to get away, the other stays in England. When the escapee returns, he finds his friend shattered and half-mad. Why, is the story.

When a young pair of newlyweds settle down into a small cottage in a quiet village, they look forward to a pleasant, pastoral life of domestic bliss. The husband, a practical man, dismisses the superstitious maid's tale of an ancient curse about the local church's marble statues who come to life each...

"The Purloined Letter" is a short story by American author Edgar Allan Poe. It is the third of his three detective stories featuring the fictional C. Auguste Dupin, the other two being "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt". These stories are...

"The Imp of the Perverse" is a short story by 19th-century American author and critic Edgar Allan Poe. Beginning as an essay, it discusses the narrator's self-destructive impulses, embodied as the symbolic metaphor of The Imp of the Perverse. The narrator describes this spirit as the agent...

The Pit and the Pendulum" is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe and first published in 1842. The story is about the torments endured by a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition, though Poe skews historical facts. The narrator of the story is deemed guilty for an unnamed crime and put into...

"William Wilson" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1839, with a setting inspired by Poe's formative years on the outskirts of London. The tale follows the theme of the doppelgänger and is written in a style based on rationality. It also appeared in the 1840 collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, and has been adapted several times.