Ever since childhood, Edgar Allan Poe has seen things that are not there, heard voices others cannot and felt utterly at home in the realm of human darkness. In Harold Schechter’s intriguing, suspenseful, and delightfully wicked mystery series, Poe makes the perfect hero to unravel cases of the murderous and the macabre. The Tell-Tale Corpse begins as Poe pays a visit to his old friend P. T. Barnum, who implores the wordsmith to travel to Boston to secure for Poe’s wife an urgent medical cure–and to acquire some particularly garish crime-scene evidence for Barnum’s popular cabinet of curiosities, the so-called American Museum. The crime in question is the recent butchery of a beautiful young shopgirl. Once in Boston, Poe makes an immediate deduction: The sensational murder is only one in a string of inexplicable killings–the center of a single, shadowy pool of deceit and ghoulish depravity. Several deaths later, Poe finds himself leading a frantic investigation, with the assistance of a highly unusual girl named Louisa May Alcott, who has literary ambitions of her own–and whose innocence belies her own fascination with the dark side. As his wife’s health falters and a city panics, Poe pursues a strange circle of suspects. He must now see what others cannot: the invisible bonds that tie together seemingly unrelated cases–and the truth that lies behind a serial murderer’s ghastly disguise. From a cameo by the narcoleptic Henry David Thoreau to a charming portrait of the four Alcott sisters at home in Concord, The Tell-Tale Corpse brings to life nineteenth-century New York and Boston and a world of intellectuals, charlatans, discoverers, dupes, daguerreotypists, and amateur morticians. As Poe comes closer to unraveling the fiendish riddle, the poet must admit at last that he is up against a fellow genius–a genius not of words but of death. From the Hardcover edition.

In Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart", the narrator tries to prove his sanity after murdering an elderly man because of his "vulture eye". His growing guilt leads him to hear the old man's heart beating under the floorboards, which drives him to confess the crime to the police.

Twins Joe and Nancy were raised in a circus but on their eleventh birthday they learn their parents are still alive and need their help, so they set out on an quest filled with many extraordinary beings and adventures. Consists of twenty-seven episodes by nineteen authors and pictures by five illustrators.

Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat" is a short story that explores themes of guilt and perversity. The narrator, haunted by cruelty to his black cat and acts of domestic violence, is consumed by paranoia and madness. His attempt to conceal a crime leads to his own disgrace.

The honeymoon is over—and it’s time for Mike Shayne to prepare for Miami’s killing season For years, Mike Shayne has tangled with the toughest crooks the country has to offer, outsmarting some and outpunching the rest. He was good at his job, but he had no one to come home to—until he met Phyllis. After rescuing his damsel in distress more than once, the hard-boiled PI found himself falling in love, and before he knew it, they were married and on their honeymoon in Cuba. Unfortunately for the lovebirds, their migration home to Miami marks the height of tourist season, when every gangster in America travels south to play. He may be a married man, but Mike Shayne won’t be spending this balmy winter cozied up at home. When a real-estate developer tries to hire Shayne to break into his home as part of an insurance-fraud scam, the scheme quickly turns to murder. With more deaths on the horizon, Shayne will have to be careful if he doesn’t want to celebrate his first wedding anniversary behind bars. The Uncomplaining Corpses is the 3rd book in the Mike Shayne Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

" West Virginia boasts an unusually rich heritage of ghost tales. Originally West Virginians told these hundred stories not for idle amusement but to report supernatural experiences that defied ordinary human explanation. From jealous rivals and ghostly children to murdered kinsmen and omens of death, these tales reflect the inner lives—the hopes, beliefs, and fears—of a people. Like all folklore, these tales reveal much of the history of the region: its isolation and violence, the passions and bloodshed of the Civil War era, the hardships of miners and railroad laborers, and the lingering vitality of Old World traditions.

"The Masque of the Red Death", originally published as "The Mask of the Red Death: A Fantasy", is an 1842 short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe. The story follows Prince Prospero's attempts to avoid a dangerous plague, known as the Red Death, by hiding in his abbey. He, along with many other wealthy nobles, hosts a masquerade ballwithin seven rooms of the abbey, each decorated with a different color. In the midst of their revelry, a mysterious figure disguised as a Red Death victim enters and makes his way through each of the rooms. Prospero dies after confronting this stranger, whose "costume" proves to contain nothing tangible inside it; the guests also die in turn. Poe's story follows many traditions of Gothic fiction and is often analyzed as an allegory about the inevitability of death, though some critics advise against an allegorical reading. Many different interpretations have been presented, as well as attempts to identify the true nature of the titular disease. The story was first published in May 1842 in Graham's Magazineand has since been adapted in many different forms, including a 1964 film starring Vincent Price.

“Rice is our modern messenger of the occult, whose nicely updated dark-side passion plays twist and turn in true Gothic form.”—San Francisco Chronicle In a gripping feat of storytelling, Anne Rice continues the extraordinary Vampire Chronicles that began with the now-classic Interview with the Vampire. For centuries, Lestat—vampire-hero, enchanter, seducer of mortals—has been a courted prince in the dark and flourishing universe of the living dead. Now he is alone. And in his overwhelming need to destroy his doubts and his loneliness, Lestat embarks on the most dangerous enterprise he has undertaken in all the years of his haunted existence. Praise for The Tale of the Body Thief “Tinged with mystery, full of drama . . . The story is involving, the twists surprising.”—People “Fast-paced . . . . mesmerizing . . . silkenly sensuous . . . No one writing today matches her deftness with the [sensual].”—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution “Hypnotic . . . masterful.”—Cosmopolitan

If Grace Cassidy had known she was going to find a naked corpse in her hotel bed, lose every penny she had in the world, and encounter zany characters straight from the Mad Hatter's tea party, she might have kept her usual poise when she spotted husband Charlie's mistress at their business convention in San Francisco. She wouldn't have left in a temper to drive up the northern California coast. She certainly wouldn't have stopped at an obscure bed and breakfast called Wimberly Place-or become the prime suspect in a murder investigation.

"The story of an enigmatic narrator we know only as Oz, a Kansas girl raised by a family of dead people. Oz tells how she survived her childhood only to face new dangers: the terrible risks of having feelings and the discovery that her family were not the only dead people walking around looking as if they were alive"--Publisher's description.