Bestselling author Peter Straub's Koko is a gripping psychological thriller in which horror and paranoia are indistinguishable from reality.Koko. Only four men knew what it meant. Now they must stop it. They were Vietnam vets-a doctor, a lawyer, a working stiff, and a writer. Very different from each other, they are nonetheless linked by a shared history and a single shattering secret. Now, they have been reunited and are about to embark on a quest that will take from Washington, D.C., to the graveyards and fleshpots of the Far East to the human jungle of New York, hunting someone from the past who has risen from the darkness to kill and kill and kill. From the Trade Paperback edition.

A Washington Post Best Book of the Year **Peter Straub—bestselling author and 8-time Bram Stoker Award winner—has gathered here 24 bone-chilling, nail-biting, frightfully imaginative stories that represent the best of contemporary horror writing. Dan Chaon “The Bees” Elizabeth Hand “Cleopatra Brimstone” Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem “The Man on the Ceiling” M. John Harrison “The Great God Plan” Ramsey Campbell “The Voice of the Beach” Brian Evenson “Body” Kelly Link “Louise’s Ghost” Jonathan Carroll “The Sadness of Detail” M. Rickert “Leda” Thomas Tessier “In Praise of Folly” David J. Schow “Plot Twist” Glen Hirshberg “The Two Sams” Thomas Ligotti “Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story” Benjamin Percy “Unearthed” Bradford Morrow "Gardener of Heart” Peter Straub “Little Red’s Tango” Stephen King “The Ballad of a Flexible Bullet” Joe Hill “20th Century Ghost” Ellen Klages “The Green Glass Sea” Tia V. Travis “The Kiss” Graham Joyce “Black Dust” Neil Gaiman “October in the Chair” John Crowley “Missolonghi 1824” Rosalind Palermo Stevenson “Insect Dreams” From the Trade Paperback edition.

A tormented writer, unable to exorcise the demons of his past...an all-American town, plagued by horrific secrets...a beautiful woman, brutally murdered by a twisted killer thought long dead - or by an even more terrifying copycat?

In life, not every sin goes unpunished. GHOST STORY For four aging men in the terror-stricken town of Milburn, New York, an act inadvertently carried out in their youth has come back to haunt them. Now they are about to learn what happens to those who believe they can bury the past -- and get away with murder.

Peter Straub has created a body of short stories and novellas establishes him as one of the best literary voices in the genres of horror and dark suspense. His list of accomplishments and awards is staggering: In addition to the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers Association, Life Achievement World Fantasy Award, Grand Master Award from World Horror, Living Legend Award from the International Horror Guild, he has won the Bram Stoker Award 9 times, the World Fantasy Award 3 times, and 1 British Fantasy Award.He remains a living legend.Volume one features Peter's short stories. Stories included in this collection:The Juniper TreeShe Saw a Young ManIn the Realm of DreamsGoing HomeA Short Guide to the CityInterlude: Bar TalkSomething About a Death, Something About a FireThe Poetry ReadingThe VeteranThen One Day...The Ghost VillageAshputtleHungerIn Transit (with...

Forty years ago, Spenser Mallon led a group of young students to witness a brutal, ritual murder. The survivors never recovered. Now, it seems, he's back... It is the 1960s and the charismatic and cunning Spenser Mallon is a campus guru, attracting the devotion and demanding sexual favours of his young acolytes. After he invites his most fervent followers to attend a secret ritual in a local meadow, the only thing that remains is a gruesomely dismembered body - and the shattered souls of all who were present. Years later, one man attempts to understand what happened to his wife and his friends by writing a book about this horrible night, and it's through this process that they begin to examine the unspeakable events that have bound them in ways they cannot fathom, but that have haunted every one of them throughout their lives. As each of the old friends tries to come to grips with the darkness of the past, they find themselves face to face with the evil triggered so many years earlier...

Two monstrous evils. This quiet suburban town of Hampstead is threatened by two horrors. One is natural. The hideous, unstoppable creation of man's power gone mad. The other is not natural at all. And it makes the first look like a child's play.

From Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. In Black House, Straub and Stephen King wrote of "slippage," whereby the borders between reality and fantasy blur. This entire brilliant novel is an act of slippage. In this sequel to last year's lost boy lost girl, and further chapter in the ongoing adventures of Straub protagonist Tim Underhill (_Koko_, etc.), the most intellectually adventurous of dark fantasy authors takes the apparent slippage of the prequel—in which Underhill's experience of a slain nephew's survival at the hands of a serial killer was indicated to be compensatory imagining by Underhill—several steps into the impressively weird. Underhill, an author, here encounters not the mere survival of a dead relation but the existence of a character he's creating in his journals. Dark fantasy cognescenti will remember that King employed a somewhat similar device in The Dark Half, but Straub's approach is distinctly his own, directed at mining the ambiguous relationship between nature and art, fact and fiction, the real and the ideal. The character Underhill has brought into being is Willy Bryce Patrick, a children's book author soon to be married to coldhearted financier Mitchell Faber, at least until Willy discovers that Faber had her first family murdered. Willy, whom Tim meets during a bookstore reading of his latest novel, lost boy lost girl, believes she is real (as does the reader for the book's first third), and learns otherwise only through Tim's painful, patient revelations. The two fall in deeply in love, but their passion seems doomed—not only is Willy's existence tenuous, but the pair are being pursued with murderous intent by Faber and his goons, as the former is in fact one form of the serial killer of lost boy lost girl, Joseph Kalendar; moreover, a terrible angel is insisting that only when Underhill makes an ultimate sacrifice, righting a wrong he did to Kalendar in lost boy lost girl, will matters resolve. Moving briskly while ranging from high humor to the blackest dread, this is an original, astonishingly smart and expertly entertaining meditation on imagination and its powers; one of the very finest works of Straub's long career, it's a sure bet for future award nominations. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. FromThough most famous for his collaborations with Stephen King, Straub transcends the conventions of horror fiction. In the Night Room provides more than a good scare; it deals with themes like the nature of reality and the consequences of artistic creation. Despite his cerebral bent, Straub never sacrifices the entertainment value of his story—though one reviewer found its twists hard to follow. The novel, a sequel to his acclaimed lost boy lost girl ( Jan/Feb 2004), offers a combination of gripping plot, well-drawn characters, and philosophical depth. Critics hail In the Night Room as a rewarding read for horror junkies and deep thinkers alike.Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

For more than two decades Peter Straub has engrossed, entertained, and terrified us with his dazzling blend of cool artistry and mad, spine-tingling imagination. With Mr. X, the bestselling author of Ghost Story, The Talisman (with Stephen King), and The Hellfire Club takes us into the darkest dimensions of the human psyche and proves once again that he is without peer in the realm of psychological suspense and horror, a master storyteller whose unique and powerful gifts qualify him to be called the Edgar Allan Poe of our times. Mr. X is Straub's original and startling take on the theme of the doppelgänger. Ned Dunstan's birthday is fast approaching, and every year on this date, Ned experiences a paralyzing seizure in which he is forced to witness scenes of ruthless slaughter perpetrated by a mysterious and malevolent figure in black whom Ned calls Mr. X. Ned has been drawn back to his hometown, Edgerton, Illinois, by a premonition that his mother, Star, is dying. Before she loosens her hold on life, she imparts to Ned the name of his father, never before disclosed, and warns him that he is in grave danger. Despite her foreboding, Ned's determination to learn as much as possible about his absent father ignites a series of extraordinary adventures that gradually reveal the heart of both his own identity and that of his entirely fantastic family: He discovers that he is shadowed by an identical twin brother who can pass through doors and otherwise defy the laws of nature; he becomes the lead suspect in three violent deaths; he investigates the secret shadow-world within Edgerton; he learns to "eat time" and remembers the one occasion when he and his sinister brother united into a single being. Finally, at the moment of battle, he must call upon everything he has learned to save his own life. Brimming with the author's trademark wit, understated eloquence, vibrant characters, and brilliant sense of pace, Mr. X displays Peter Straub at the top of his form. From the Hardcover edition.

In a house in London a woman starts a new life, trying to put tragedy behind her. Then a pretty blonde child runs into view, bringing with her an inexplicable suggestion of evil. Once Julia Lofting had a husband and a daughter. But everything has changed since she bolted from her marriage, in flight from the unbearable truth of her daughter's death. For Julia, there is no escape. Another child awaits, another mother suffers, and a circle of the damned gathers around her. The haunting has begun . . .

Peter Straub has created a body of short stories and novellas establishes him as one of the best literary voices in the genres of horror and dark suspense. His list of accomplishments and awards is staggering: In addition to the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers Association, Life Achievement World Fantasy Award, Grand Master Award from World Horror, Living Legend Award from the International Horror Guild, he has won the Bram Stoker Award nine times, the World Fantasy Award three times, and one British Fantasy Award.He remains a living legend.Volume two features Peter's novellas. Included in this collection:Blue RoseThe Buffalo HunterMrs. GodBunny Is Good BreadMr. Clubb and Mr. CuffPork Pie HatA Special Place: the Heart of a Dark MatterThe Process (is a Process All Its Own)

MYSTERY.  Tom Pasmore, ten years old, survives a near fatal accident.  During his long recovery, he becomes obsessed with an unsolved murder and finds he has clues to solving it that he shouldn’t.  Lamont von Heilitz has spent his life solving mysteries, until he wanted to know nothing more of the terror of life and the horror of death.  When a new murder disrupts their world of wealth, power, and pleasure, the two must form an unlikely partnership to confront demons from the past and the dark secrets that still haunt the present.

A MONUMENTAL COLLECTION OF SHORT FICTION FROM ACCLAIMED MASTER OF HORROR AND NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR PETER STRAUB “Peter Straub brilliantly defies and blurs literary genres.” —LORRIE MOORE An American icon renowned for his bestselling novels, Peter Straub displays his full and stunning range in this crowning collection. He has consistently subverted the boundaries of genre for years, transcending horror and suspense to unlock the dark, unsettling, and troubling dissonances that exist on the edges of our perception. Straub’s fiction cracks the foundation of reality and opens our eyes to an unblinking experience of true horror, told in his inimitable and lush style with skill, wit, and impeccable craft.      With uncanny precision, Straub writes of the city and of the Midwest, of the depraved and of the righteous, of the working class and of the wealthy—nothing and no one is safe from the ever-present darkness that he understands so well. “Blue Rose” follows the cycles of violence and power through the most innocent among us, leading to a conclusion that is audacious and devastating. In the darkly satirical masterpiece “Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff,” a stern estate lawyer known as the Deacon hires a pair of “Private Detectives Extraordinaire” to investigate and seek revenge on his unfaithful wife. “The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine” follows a man and his much younger lover as they explore their decadent and increasingly sinister fantasies aboard a luxurious yacht on the remotest stretch of the Amazon River.       Interior Darkness brings together sixteen stories from twenty-five years of dazzling excellence. It is a thrilling, highly entertaining, and terrifying testament to the prodigious talent of Peter Straub. From the Hardcover edition.

Amazon.com ReviewPeter Straub is a fine sorcerer of horror whose bag of tricks includes stories of pure, unadulterated horror ( and ), as well as more subtle tales of psychological suspense ( and ). Now Straub conjures up Magic Terror, a collection of seven deeply disturbing tales that display his entire range."Bunny Is Good Bread" is without a doubt the most haunted tale of all, a harrowing account of a childhood from hell. The scary hero Fee was so traumatized as a 5-year-old by abuse from his father that he disconnects himself from the real world and lives as if in a film. Why? "If you forgot you were in a movie, your own feelings would tear you into bloody rags." Ever since the day Fee watches his mother die a horrible death, he's been tormented: "He was one-half dead himself; half of him belonged to his dead mother." Fee is not the only character to be struck by a dark epiphany, a life-changing moment. In the lyrical "Porkpie Hat," a famous jazz musician recounts the ghoulish Halloween encounter that charted the course of his destiny, and in the twisted fairy tale "Ashputtle," a fantasy-inclined "princess" seeks retribution for a traumatic incident many years before.In Straub's world, horror appears in different disguises--the dark mask of child abuse and the bloodied cloak of war ("The Ghost Village"). Regardless of how it shows itself, the effects will haunt long after lights out. --Naomi GesingerFrom Publishers WeeklyThe war-numbed soldier who asks, "Just suppose...,that you were forced to confront extreme experience directly, without any mediation?" speaks for all of the spiritually traumatized souls who navigate the harrowingly rendered hells of these seven tales of suspense and horror. Straub (Mr. X) effortlessly plumbs the hearts and minds of a range of well-developed charactersAincluding a reflective assassin for hire, a five-year-old victim of domestic violence, an aging black jazz musician and a pompous Wall Street financial adviserAto locate epiphanic moments when their lives careened "out of the ordinary" and into the path of deforming private tragedy. In "Ashputtle," an implied murderess blames her crimes on an emotionally deprived childhood in which she imagines herself a modern Cinderella victimized by her cruel stepsisters. "Bunny Is Good Bread," an unnerving portrait of the psychopath as a young boy, follows young Fee Bandolier as he maladjusts to an unbearably gothic home situation in which his father has beaten his mother into a coma. "Porkpie Hat" is related as an alcoholic saxophonist's confession of a childhood brush with witchcraft, murder and miscegenation that continues to inform his blues-haunted music. In several of the talesAmost notably "The Haunted Village," which links to the novel Koko (1988) and stories from his previous collection, Houses Without Doors (1990)AStraub skillfully evokes the supernatural to suggest the dislocating effect of intense psychological upset. Mixing stark realism with black comedy, and reverberating with echoes of Conrad, Melville and the Brothers Grimm, these excursions to the dark side of life set a high standard for the literature of contemporary magic terror. (July) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This spectacular collection of 13 dark, haunting tales by bestselling author Straub exposes the terrors that hide beneath the surface of the ordinary world, behind the walls of houses without doors. "Straub at his spellbinding best".--Publishers Weekly.