A family's Halloween haunted house becomes a conduit to something ancient and uncanny; a young man's effigy of a movie monster becomes instrumental in his defense against a bully; a family diminishes while visiting a seaside town, leaving only one to remember what changed; a father explores a mysterious tower, and the monster imprisoned within; a man mourning the death of his father travels to his father's hometown, seeking closure, but finds himself beset by dreams of mythic bargains and a primeval, corpse-eating titan.

John Langan, author of the Bram Stoker Award-winning novel The Fisherman, returns with ten new tales of cosmic horror in Corpsemouth and Other Autobiographies. In these stories, he continues to chart the course of 21st century weird fiction, from the unfamiliar to the familial, the unfathomably distant to the intimate.

Includes extensive story notes and an introduction by Sarah Langan.

John Langan has, in the last few years, established himself as one of the leading voices in contemporary horror literature. Gifted with a supple and mellifluous prose style, an imagination that can conjure up clutching terrors with seeming effortlessness, and a thorough knowledge of the rich heritage of weird fiction, Langan has already garnered his share of accolades. This new collection of nine substantial stories includes such masterworks as Technicolor, an ingenious riff on Poe's Masque of the Red Death; How the Day Runs Down, a gripping tale of the undead; and The Shallows, a powerful tale of the Cthulhu Mythos. The capstone to the collection is a previously unpublished novella of supernatural terror, Mother of Stone. With an introduction by Jeffrey Ford and an afterword by Laird Barron.

A professor and a graduate student escort a group of soldiers to a remote Scottish island to find out what's buried there; a man plays an audio tape left by his late father and unearths a family history of monstrous deeds; a student receives intimidating lessons at a surreal learning center; a young couple struggle to hold their own against a group of brutal pursuers in a devastated landscape; an artist discovers and becomes obsessed with a mysterious statue.

From Bram Stoker Award-winning author John Langan comes this new Word Horde edition of his debut collection, Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters, a collection of tales both elegant and macabre, steeped in the tradition of the literary weird.

Includes extensive story notes, an introduction by Elizabeth Hand, and a brand new story exclusive to this edition!

John Langan, author of the Bram Stoker Award-winning novel The Fisherman, returns with a new book of stories.

An aspiring actress goes to an audition with a mysterious director. An editor receives the last manuscript of his murdered friend. A young lawyer learns the terrible connection between her grandfather and an ancient race of creatures. A bodyguard drives her employer across a frozen road toward an immense hole in the earth. In these stories and others, John Langan maps the branches of his literary family tree, tracing his connections to the writers whose dark fictions have inspired his own.

Introduction by Stephen Graham Jones.

2019 THIS IS HORROR AWARDS WINNER: Short Story Collection of the Year

2019 BRAM STOKER AWARD(R) NOMINEE: Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection

This book is a treasure trove for lovers of literary horror fiction.--Publishers Weekly Starred Review

From the award-winning writer of The Fisherman comes a new collection of stories. A pair of disgraced soldiers seek revenge on the man who taught them how to torture. A young lawyer learns the history of the secret that warped her parents' marriage. A writer arrives at a mansion overlooking the Hudson River to write about the strange paper balloons floating through its grounds. A couple walks a path that shows them their past, present, and terrible future. A woman and her husband discover a cooler on the side of the road whose contents are decidedly unearthly. A man driving cross country has a late-night encounter with a figure claiming to be the Devil. And in the short novel that gives the collection its title, a woman chases a monster in a race against time.

Think Henry James and Joyce Carol Oates with just a few paragraphs of Joe Lansdale... --Tor.com

John Langan is a writer of superb literary horror. Both House of Windows and The Fisherman are dark and unsettling contemporary masterpieces. --Peter Straub, New York Times bestselling author

For the last few years, Veronica Croydon has been at the center of scandal, first as the younger woman for whom her famous professor left his wife, and then as his apparent widow. When a writer staying at the same vacation home as Veronica has the chance to hear her story, he jumps at it. What follows takes him to the dark heart of a father's troubled relationship with his only son, in a story that stretches from a college town in the Hudson Valley to the battlefields on Afghanistan, from post-9/11 America to the height of Victorian England. It is a story that leads inexorably to the Belvedere House, the home Veronica shares with her husband, within whose walls a father's terrible words to his son echo and gain in awful force.

House of Windows is a tense, frightening exploration of a marriage under strain from forces both psychological and supernatural, and it is a meditation on the ways loss haunts every one of us.

House of Windows is a haunted house story of the highest order. --Strange Horizons

Reading Group Guide Inside

Unity: Discover a clearly stated point, or topic sentence, and make sure that all other information in the paragraph or essay supports that point.

Support: Support the points with specific evidence, and plenty of it.

Coherence: Organize and connect supporting evidence so that paragraphs and essays transition smoothly from one bit of supporting information to the next.

Sentence skills: Revise and edit so that sentences are error-free for clearer and more effective communication.

These four bases are essential to all effective writing, whether it be a narrative paragraph for a personal journal, a cover letter for a job application, or an essay for an academic assignment.

Many people, often when they become aware of their own mortality, develop a belief system that helps them understand their purpose in the world. In an essay, describe your personal philosophy of life. The essay should detail the key influences and experiences that helped form your own special faith, values, or purpose in life.

The essays are as varied as the twenty-two writers themselves. For some essayists, a traditional belief system--Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist--serves as a starting point for defining meaningful life values. Several others find purposeful living in an elemental humanism akin to a statement made by the poet W.H. Auden: We are here to help others. One writer is playful skeptical about a larger purpose in life, while another unabashedly celebrates atheism. A third finds meaning in pursuing the democratic ideals on which his country was founded.

For all their differences, each writer makes an honest attempt to arrive at an understanding of how best to live life here on this mysterious planet. Each writer declares, Here is a life philosophy, a personal statement of belief, that has shaped and guided me.