The Descent

The Descent

Jeff Long

Literature & Fiction / Horror / Outdoors & Nature

Hell exists.In Tibet, while guiding trekkers to a holy mountain, Ike Crockett discovers a bottomless cave. When his lover disappears, Ike pursues her into the depths of the earth....In a leper colony bordering the Kalahari Desert, a nun and linguist named Ali von Schade unearths evidence of a proto-human species and a deity called Older-than-Old....In Bosnia, Major Elias Branch crash-lands his gunship near a mass grave and is swarmed by pale cannibals terrified of light....So begins mankind's realization that the underworld is a vast geological labyrinth riddling the continents and seabeds, one inhabited by brutish creatures who resemble the devils and gargoyles of legend. With all of Hell's precious resources and territories to be won, a global race ensues. Nations, armies, religions, and industries rush to colonize and exploit the subterranean frontier.A scientific expedition is launched westward to explore beneath the Pacific Ocean floor, both to...
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The Model

The Model

Robert Aickman

Horror / Literature & Fiction / Outdoors & Nature

After Robert Aickman's death in 1981 the manuscript of The Model, a wintry rococo fable set in Czarist Russia, was located among his papers. Aickman had told a friend he considered this novella to be 'one of the best things I have ever written, if not the very best.' It was duly published for the first time in 1987.The Model tells of Elena, a grave girl inclined to losing herself in dreams of becoming a student ballerina orcoryphée. Her dolour darkens further when she learns she is to be sold into marital slavery by her father so as to settle the family's debts. Refusing an unendurable future she sets out to the city of Smorevsk to pursue her dream. First, however, she must traverse a landscape crowded by highly curious characters and creatures.'A must for Aickman fans... A model of eloquent elegant enchantment.' Robert Bloch (Psycho)
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Deeper

Deeper

Jeff Long

Literature & Fiction / Horror / Outdoors & Nature

Hell exists. It is a real, geological, historical place beneath our very feet. And it is inhabited savagely.In an intense and imaginative tour de force, New York Times bestselling author Jeff Long takes readers into the depths of the earth where a primordial intelligence waits in the darkness. A decade has passed since doomed explorers unveiled a nightmare of tunnels and rivers honeycombing the earth's depths. After millennia of suffering terror and predation, humanity's armies descended to destroy the ancient hordes. Deep beneath the Pacific Ocean, a doomed science expedition killed the subterraneans' fabled leader, and suddenly it seemed that evil was dead and all was right with the world again.Now Deeper arrives to explode that complacency and plunge us back into the sunless abyss. Hell boils up through America's subways and basements to take its revenge and steal our children. Against the backdrop of a looming war with China, a c...
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Black Tor: A Tale of the Reign of James the First

Black Tor: A Tale of the Reign of James the First

George Manville Fenn

Travel / Outdoors & Nature

One Captain Purlrose. About as rugged, fierce-looking a gang of men as a lad could set eyes on, as they struggled up the steep cliff road leading to the castle, which frowned at the summit, where the flashing waters of the Gleame swept round three sides of its foot, half hidden by the beeches and birches, which overhung the limpid stream. The late spring was at its brightest and best, but there had been no rain; and as the men who had waded the river lower down, climbed the steep cliff road, they kicked up the white limestone dust, and caked their wet high boots, which, in several instances, had opened holes in which toes could be seen, looking like curious reptiles deep in gnarled and crumpled shells. “Beggars! What a gang!” said Ralph Darley, a dark, swarthy lad of perhaps seventeen, but looking older, from having an appearance of something downy beginning to come up that spring about his chin, and a couple of streaks, like eyebrows out of place, upon his upper lip. He was well dressed, in the fashion of Solomon King James’s day; and he wore a sword, as he sat half up the rugged slope, on a huge block of limestone, which had fallen perhaps a hundred years before, from the cliff above, and was mossy now, and half hidden by the ivy which covered its side. “Beggars,” he said again; “and what a savage looking lot.” As they came on, it began to dawn upon him that they could not be beggars, for if so, they would have been the most truculent-looking party that ever asked for the contributions of the charitable. One, who seemed to be their leader, was a fierce, grizzled, red-nosed fellow, wearing a rusty morion, in which, for want of a feather, a tuft of heather was stuck; he wore a long cloak, as rusty-looking as his helmet; and that he carried a sword was plain enough, for the well-worn scabbard had found a very convenient hole in the cloak, through which it had thrust itself in the most obtrusive manner, and looked like a tail with a vicious sting, for the cap of the leathern scabbard had been lost, and about three inches of steel blade and point were visible. Ralph Darley was quick at observation, and took in quickly the fact that all the men were armed, and looked shabbier than their leader, though not so stout; for he was rubicund and portly, where he ought not to have been, for activity, though in a barrel a tubby space does indicate strength. Neither were the noses of the other men so red as their leader’s, albeit they were a villainous-looking lot. “Not beggars, but soldiers,” thought Ralph; “and they’ve been in the wars.” He was quite right, but he did not stop to think that there had been no wars for some years. Still, as aforesaid, he was right, but the war the party had been in was with poverty. “What in the world do they want in this out-of-the-way place—on the road to nowhere?” thought Ralph. “If they’re not beggars, they have lost their way.” He pushed back the hilt of his sword, and drew up one leg, covered with its high, buff-leather boot, beneath him, holding it as he waited for the party to come slowly up; and as they did, they halted where he sat, at the side of the road, and the leader, puffing and panting, took off his rusty morion with his left hand, and wiped his pink, bald head, covered with drops of perspiration, with his right, as he rolled his eyes at the lad....
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The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

Richard Flanagan

Literature & Fiction / Nonfiction / Outdoors & Nature

From the author of the Booker Prize-winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North comes a wrenching novel of family, climate change, and the resilience of the human spirit—an elegy to our disappearing world.In a world of perennial fire and growing extinctions, Anna's aged mother is dying—if her three children would just allow it. Condemned by their pity to living, subjected to increasingly desperate medical interventions, she instead turns her focus to her hospital window, through which she escapes into visions of horror and delight. When Anna's finger vanishes and a few months later her knee disappears, Anna too feels the pull of the window. She begins to see that all around her others are similarly vanishing, though no one else notices. All Anna can do is keep her mother alive, stay the course that she and her brothers have set. But the window keeps opening wider, taking Anna and the reader ever deeper into an eerily gorgeous story about hope and love,...
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