Halloween Resources for Fun and Research

Creatively spent and politically irrelevant, the American horror film is a mere ghost of its former self--or so goes the old saw from fans and scholars alike. Taking on this undeserved reputation, the contributors to this collection provide a comprehensive look at a decade of cinematic production, covering a wide variety of material from the last ten years with a clear critical eye. Essays deliberate on the marketing of nostalgia and its concomitant aesthetic and on the curiously schizophrenic perspective of fans who happen to be scholars as well. Taken together, the contributors to this collection make a compelling case that American horror cinema is as vital, creative, and thought-provoking as it ever was.

Hanich looks at fear at the movies - its aesthetics, its experience and its pleasures--in this thought-provoking study. Looking at over 150 different films including Seven, Rosemary's Baby, and Silence of the Lambs, Hanich attempts to answer the paradox of why we enjoy films that thrill us, that scare us, that threaten us, that shock us -affects that we otherwise desperately wish to avoid.

An exploration of how educational institutions have been portrayed in horror film, this book examines the way that scary movies have dealt with the issue of school violence, focusing on movies set in high schools, colleges, and summer camps.

A cop begins seeing huge, blinking eyes where the headlights of cars should be that tell him who to pull over. Two freedom riders take a bus ride that leaves them stranded on a lonely road in Alabama where several unsettling somethings await them. A young girl dives into the depths of the Earth in search of the demon that killed her parents. These are just a few of the worlds of Out There Screaming, Jordan Peele's anthology of all-new horror stories by Black writers. Featuring an introduction by Peele and an all-star roster of beloved writers and new voices, Out There Screaming is a master class in horror, and--like his spine-chilling films--its stories prey on everything we think we know about our world . . . and redefine what it means to be afraid.

Beginning in the 1950s, "Euro Horror" movies materialized in astonishing numbers from Italy, Spain, and France and popped up in the US at rural drive-ins and urban grindhouse theaters such as those that once dotted New York's Times Square. Gorier, sexier, and stranger than most American horror films of the time, they were embraced by hardcore fans and denounced by critics as the worst kind of cinematic trash. In this volume, Olney explores some of the most popular genres of Euro Horror cinema--including giallo films, named for the yellow covers of Italian pulp fiction, the S&M horror film, and cannibal and zombie films--and develops a theory that explains their renewed appeal to audiences today.

Horror is unlike any other literary genre. It seeks to provoke uniquely strong reactions, such as fear, shock, dread or disgust, and yet remains very popular. Horror is most readily associated with the film industry, but horrific short stories and novels have been wildly loved by readers for well over two centuries. This book challenges the common misjudgement that horror fiction is necessarily frivolous or dispensable. The topics examined include: horror's roots in the Gothic romance and antebellum American fiction; the penny dreadful and sensation novels of Victorian England; fin-de-siècle ghost stories; decadent fiction and the weird; the familial horrors of the Cold War era; the publishing boom of the 1980s; the establishment of contemporary horror auteurs; and the post-millennial zombie trend.

Horror has an established tradition in both fiction and film. From books such as Frankenstein and Dracula to films such as Seven and The Blair Witch Project, the genre holds an irresistable appeal for modern audiences. But why? Is horror an anti-establishment force and an argument for social revolution? Is it a liberating expose of human nature and a peek at the dark side of the unconscious? Or is it pure evil, solely designed to corrupt and deprave? Starting from such questions about the nature of horror, this book offers an accessible history of the genre. It includes chapters on horror, religion and identity; "mad science," vampires and the undead; madness and psycho-killers; forbidden knowledge and books; narratives of invasion and pestilence; Satanism and demonic possession; ghosts and the ghost-story; and body-horror and metamorphoses.

Providing an indispensable resource for academics as well as readers interested in the evolution of horror fiction in the 20th century, this book provides a readable yet critical guide to global horror fiction and authors.Horror Fiction in the 20th Century encompasses the world of 20th-century horror literature and explores it in a critical but balanced fashion. Readers will be exposed to the world of horror literature, a truly global phenomenon during the 20th century. Beginning with the modern genre's roots in the 19th century, the book proceeds to cover 20th-century horror literature in all of its manifestations, whether in comics, pulps, paperbacks, hardcover novels, or mainstream magazines, and from every country that produced it. The major horror authors of the century receive their due, but the works of many authors who are less well-known or who have been forgotten are also described and analyzed. In addition to providing critical assessments and judgments of individual authors and works, the book describes the evolution of the genre and the major movements within it.

From shambling zombies to Gothic ghosts, horror has entertained thrill-seeking readers for centuries. A versatile literary genre, it offers commentary on societal issues, fresh insight into the everyday and moral tales disguised in haunting tropes and grotesque acts, with many stories worthy of critical appraisal. This collection of new essays takes in a range of topics, focusing on historic works such as Ann Radcliffe's Gaston de Blondeville (1826) and modern novels including Max Brooks' World War Z. Other contributions examine weird fiction, Stephen King, Richard Laymon, Indigenous Australian monster mythology and horror in picture books for young children.

In Horror Noire: A History of Black American Horror Films from 1890's to Present, Robin R. Means Coleman traces the history of notable characterizations of blackness in horror cinema, and examines key levels of black participation on screen and behind the camera. She argues that horror offers anbsp;representational space for black people to challenge the more negative, or racist, images seen in other media outlets, and to portray greater diversity within the concept of blackness itself. Horror Noire presents a unique social history of blacks in America through changing images in horror films. Throughout the text, the reader is encouraged to unpack the genre's racialized imagery, as well as the narratives that make up popular culture's commentary on race.

In "Horror Zone", leading international writers on horror take horror into the world outside cinema screens to explore the interconnections between the films and modern media and entertainment industries, economies and production practices, cultural and political forums, spectators and fans. They critically examine the ways in which the horror genre functions in all its multifarious forms, considering, for example, "The Friday the 13th" films as a contemporary grand guignol, the new series of "Mummy" and "Blade" films as blockbusters, and horror film marketing on the internet. They also examine the relationship between the contemporary horror film and the theme park ride, the horror film as art house cinema, relationships between pornography and the horror film, set and costume design in horror films such as "The Silence of the Lambs", and the place of special effects in this most reputable of film genres.

Take a tour of the house where a microwave killed a gremlin, a typewriter made Jack a dull boy, a sewing machine fashioned Carrie's prom dress, and houseplants might kill you while you sleep. In Household Horror, Olivier highlights the wonder, fear, and terrifying dimension of objects in horror cinema. Inspired by object-oriented ontology and the nonhuman turn in philosophy, Olivier places objects in film on par with humans, arguing, for example, that The Exorcist is about a possessed bed, and that Rosemary's Baby is a conflict between herbal shakes and prenatal vitamins. Household Horror reinvigorates horror film criticism by investigating the unfathomable being of objects as seemingly benign as remotes, radiators, refrigerators, and dining tables. Room by room, Olivier considers the dark side of fourteen household objects to demonstrate how the objects in these films manifest their own power and connect with specific cultural fears and concerns.

The first detailed English-language book on Korean horror introduces the cultural specificity of the genre to an international audience, from the iconic monsters of gothic horror, to the avenging killers of Oldboy and Death Bell. Beginning in the 1960s, it traces a path through the history of Korean horror, offering new interpretations of classic films, demarcating the shifting patterns of production and consumption across the decades, and acquainting readers with films rarely seen and discussed outside of Korea. It explores the importance of folklore and myth on horror film narratives, the impact of political and social change upon the genre, and accounts for the transnational triumph of some of Korea's contemporary horror films.

Horror's longstanding reputation as a popular but culturally denigrated genre has been challenged by a new wave of films mixing arthouse minimalism with established genre conventions. Variously dubbed 'elevated horror' and 'post-horror, ' films such as The Babadook, It Follows, The Witch, It Comes at Night, Get Out, The Invitation, Hereditary, Midsommar, A Ghost Story, and mother! represent an emerging nexus of taste, politics, and style that has often earned outsized acclaim from critics and populist rejection by wider audiences. Post-Horror is the first full-length study of one of the most important and divisive movements in twenty-first-century horror cinema.

Julia Kristeva offers an extensive and profound consideration of the nature of abjection. Drawing on Freud and Lacan, she analyzes the nature of attitudes toward repulsive subjects and examines the function of these topics in the writings of Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and other authors.

In recent years, the representation of alternative sexuality in the horror film and television has 'outed' itself from the shadows from which it once lurked via the embrace of an outrageously queer horror aesthetic where homosexuality is often unequivocally referenced. In this book, Darren Elliott-Smith departs from the analysis of the monster as a symbol of heterosexual anxiety and fear, and moves to focus instead on queer fears and anxieties within gay male subcultures. Furthermore, he examines the works of significant queer horror film and television producers and directors to reveal gay men's anxieties about: acceptance and assimilation into Western culture, the perpetuation of self-loathing and gay shame, and further anxieties surrounding associations shameful femininity. This book focuses mainly on representations of masculinity and gay male spectatorship in queer horror film and television post-2000.

The Evolution of Horror in the Twenty-First Century explores the many aspects of the horror genre across thematics and media in the 2020s. Consisting of 21 chapters by experts in the field, this book examines how horror reveals the anxieties around our current cultural moment and how that might develop in the future,

Edgar Allan Poe is perhaps America's most famous writer. Adapted many times to the stage and screen and an inspiration to countless illustrators, graphic novelists, and musicians, his tales and poems remain a singular presence in popular culture. (His most famous poem inspired the name of the NFL's Baltimore Ravens.) And then there is the matter of Poe's literary influence. "How many things come out of Poe?" Jorge Luis Borges once asked. And yet Poe remains misunderstood, his works easily confused with the legend of a troubled genius. Now, in this annotated edition of selected tales and poems, Kevin J. Hayes debunks the Poe myth, enables a larger appreciation of Poe's career and varied achievements, and investigates his weird afterlives. With color illustrations and photographs throughout, The Annotated Poe contains in-depth notes placed conveniently alongside the tales and poems to elucidate Poe's sources, obscure words and passages, and literary, biographical, and historical allusions.

A spellbinding novel that transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. 

First serialized in the journal "The Dark Blue" and published shortly thereafter in the short story collection In a Glass Darkly, Le Fanu's 1872 vampire tale is in many ways the overlooked older sister of Bram Stoker's more acclaimed Dracula. A thrilling gothic tale, Carmilla tells the story of a young woman lured by the charms of a female vampire. This edition includes a student-oriented introduction, tracing the major critical responses to Carmilla, and four interdisciplinary essays by leading scholars who analyze the story from a variety of theoretical perspectives. Ranging from politics to gender, Gothicism to feminism, and nineteenth-century aestheticism to contemporary film studies, these critical yet accessible articles model the diverse ways that scholars can approach a single text. With a glossary, biography, bibliography, and explanatory notes on the text, this edition is ideal for students of Irish and British nineteenth-century literature.

Considered by many to be the most terrifying writer in English, M. R. James is an unlikely producer of ghost-stories. An eminent scholar who spent his entire adult life in the academic surroundings of Eton and Cambridge, his classic supernatural tales have lost none of their power to unsettleand disturb. They draw on the terrors of the everyday, in which documents and objects unleash terrible forces, often in closed rooms and night-time settings where imagination runs riot. Lonely country houses, remote inns, ancient churches or the manuscript collections of great libraries providesettings for unbearable menace, from creatures seeking retribution and harm. Stories that were first read aloud in James's study late on Christmas Eve have the power to haunt us still.This book presents all of James's published ghost stories, including the unforgettable "Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad" and "Casting the Runes", and an appendix of James's writings on the ghost story. Darryl Jones's introduction and notes provide a fascinating insight into James'sbackground and his mastery of the genre he made his own.

Cross Henry James with M.R. James and you might end up with a writer like Robert Aickman, though his self-described "strange stories" remain confoundingly and uniquely his own. Aickman's superbly written tales terrify not with standard thrills and gore but through a radical overturning of the laws of nature and everyday life. His territory of the strange, of the "void behind the face of order," is a surreal region that grotesquely mimics the quotidian- Is that river the Thames, or is it even a river? What does it mean when a prospective lover removes one dress, and then another-and then another? Do a herd of cows in a peaceful churchyard contain the souls of jilted women preparing to trample a cruel lover to death? Published for the first time under one cover, this collection offers a generous introduction to a sophisticated, psychologically acute modernist whose achievements have too long been hidden under the cloak of genre.

A popular bestseller in Victorian England, Stoker's hypnotic tale of the bloodthirsty Count Dracula, whose nocturnal atrocities are symbolic of an evil ages old yet forever new, endures as the quintessential story of suspense and horror. The unbridled lusts and desires, the diabolical cravings that Stoker dramatized with such mythical force, render Dracula resonant and unsettling a century later.

Fledgling, Octavia Butler's last novel, is the story of an apparently young, amnesiac girl whose alarmingly un-human needs and abilities lead her to a startling conclusion: she is in fact a genetically modified, 53-year-old vampire. Forced to discover what she can about her stolen former life, she must at the same time learn who wanted -- and still wants -- to destroy her and those she cares for, and how she can save herself.

One might not expect a woman of Edith Wharton's literary stature to be a believer of ghost stories, much less be frightened by them, but as she admits in her postscript to this spine-tingling collection, "...till I was twenty-seven or -eight, I could not sleep in the room with a book containing a ghost story." Once her fear was overcome, however, she took to writing tales of the supernatural for publication in the magazines of the day. These eleven finely wrought pieces showcase her mastery of the traditional New England ghost story and her fascination with spirits, hauntings, and other supernatural phenomena. Called "flawlessly eerie" by Ms. magazine, this collection includes "Pomegranate Seed," "The Eyes," "All Souls'," "The Looking Glass," and "The Triumph of Night."

From the American Book Award winner and author of "one of the most talked about debuts in the horror field since the advent of Stephen King" (Publishers Weekly) comes a terrifying story of supernatural suspense, as a woman searches for the inherited power that can save her hometown from evil forces. The house Angela Toussaint's late grandmother owned is so beloved that townspeople in Sacajawea, Washington, call it the Good House. But is it? Angela hoped her grandmother's famous "healing magic" could save her failing marriage while she and her family lived in the old house the summer of 2001. Instead, an unexpected tragedy ripped Angela's family apart. Now, two years later, Angela is moving past her grief and taking control of her life as a talent agent in Los Angeles, and she is finally ready to revisit the rural house she loved so much as a child. Back in Sacajawea, Angela realizes she hasn't been the only one to suffer a shocking loss. Since she left, there have been more senseless tragedies, and Angela wonders if they are related somehow. Could the events be linked to a terrifying entity Angela's grandmother battled in 1929? Did her teenage son, Corey, reawaken something that should have been left sleeping? With the help of Myles Fisher, her high school boyfriend, and clues from beyond the grave, Angela races to solve a deadly puzzle that has followed her family for generations.

During the overthrow of the Mexican government, Beatriz's father was executed and her home destroyed. She flees to Hacienda San Isidro with her secretive fiance Don Rodolfo Solorzano. However, it is not the sanctuary she imagines, and is soon haunted by visions and voices that invade her sleep. Something is wrong with the hacienda. And no one there will help her. Desperate for help, she clings to the young priest, Padre Andres, as an ally. No ordinary priest, Andres will have to rely on his skills as a witch to battle the malevolent presence haunting the hacienda.

Hauntedby Chuck Palahniuk is a novel made up of stories: Twenty-three of them, to be precise. Twenty-three of the most horrifying, hilarious, mind-blowing, stomach-churning tales you’ll ever encounter—sometimes all at once. They are told by people who have answered an ad headlined “Writers’ Retreat: Abandon Your Life for Three Months,” and who are led to believe that here they will leave behind all the distractions of “real life” that are keeping them from creating the masterpiece that is in them. But “here” turns out to be a cavernous and ornate old theater where they are utterly isolated from the outside world—and where heat and power and, most important, food are in increasingly short supply. And the more desperate the circumstances become, the more extreme the stories they tell—and the more devious their machinations become to make themselves the hero of the inevitable play/movie/nonfiction blockbuster that will surely be made from their plight.

This fiendish anthology, complied by the horror genre’s most acclaimed editor, drags you into the twisted minds of modern literary masters at their fiendish best. Visionary storytellers fill this collection of tales lyrical and strange, monstrous and exhilarating, horrific and transformative. *A sweetly vengeful voice on the radio calls a young soldier out to join a phantom patrol. *A hotel maid who threw her newborn child from a fourth-story window lingers in an interminable state. *An intern in a paranormal research facility delves deeply into the unexplained deaths of two staff members. *A serial killer plans his ultimate artistic achievement: the unveiling of an extremely special instrument in a very private concert. At once familiar and shocking, these riveting stories will haunt you long after you put down your book and turn out the light.

In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store's prom dresses. One woman's surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And in the bravura novella "Especially Heinous," Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we naïvely assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgängers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes. Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.

"The #1 book of 2009...Several sleepless nights are guaranteed." — Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly One postwar summer in his home of rural Warwickshire, Dr. Faraday, the son of a maid who has built a life of quiet respectability as a country physician, is called to a patient at lonely Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once impressive and handsome, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine. Its owners—mother, son, and daughter—are struggling to keep pace with a changing society, as well as with conflicts of their own. But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life? Little does Dr. Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become intimately entwined with his.    

An isolated mansion. A chillingly charismatic aristocrat. And a brave socialite drawn to expose their treacherous secrets. . . . From the author of Gods of Jade and Shadow comes "a terrifying twist on classic gothic horror" (Kirkus Reviews) set in glamorous 1950s Mexico. After receiving a frantic letter from her newly-wed cousin begging for someone to save her from a mysterious doom, Noemí Taboada heads to High Place, a distant house in the Mexican countryside. She's not sure what she will find--her cousin's husband, a handsome Englishman, is a stranger, and Noemí knows little about the region. Noemí is also an unlikely rescuer: She's a glamorous debutante, and her chic gowns and perfect red lipstick are more suited for cocktail parties than amateur sleuthing. But she's also tough and smart, with an indomitable will, and she is not afraid: Not of her cousin's new husband, who is both menacing and alluring; not of his father, the ancient patriarch who seems to be fascinated by Noemí; and not even of the house itself, which begins to invade Noemi's dreams with visions of blood and doom.

This assemblage of twenty-nine of the eeriest stories in English features such talents as Henry James, Shirley Jackson, Elizabeth Bowen, A. S. Byatt, and Elizabeth Taylor, accompanied by an introduction that reevaluates the genre.

A novel that is equal parts psychological horror and cutting social commentary on identity politics and the American Indian experience. Fans of Jordan Peele and Tommy Orange will love this story as it follows the lives of four American Indian men and their families, all haunted by a disturbing, deadly event that took place in their youth. Years later, they find themselves tracked by an entity bent on revenge, totally helpless as the culture and traditions they left behind catch up to them in a violent, vengeful way.

This selection of forty-two stories, written between 1829 and 1968, is the first to present the full range and vitality of the ghost fiction tradition by demonstrating its historical development as well as its major themes and characteristics. It includes stories by Walter Scott, M. R. James, Bram Stoker, Rudyard Kipling, Edith Wharton, Somerset Maugham and T. H. White. Elizabeth Bowen suggested that the ghost story works "through a series of happenings whose horror lies in their being just, just, out of time", and the success of a story may be judged by what Edith Wharton called its "thermometrical quality; if it sends a cold shiver down the spine, it has done its job and done it well". The challenge of this most demanding form has been taken up by a host of writers, both 'specialists' like J. S. Le Fanu and Algernon Blackwood, and those, such as Henry James and H. G. Wells, for whom ghost stories were only a part of their literary output. Nor does this collection overlook the important contribution of women writers, with eight stories included from Amelia Edward's The Phantom Ghost (1864) to Elizabeth Bowen's Hand in Glove (1952).

Gathering together deliciously chilling tales from the three highly-acclaimed volumes of Virago ghost stories, this collection features stories by A. S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Charlotte Brontë, Antonia Fraser, Penelope Lively, Ruth Rendell, Edith Wharton, and many more. Here lost loves, past enmities, and unwanted memories mingle with the inexplicable as unquiet souls return to repay kindnesses, settle scores, and haunt the imagination. All of the writers demonstrate a subtle power to delight and chill at the same time as they explore the ghostly margins of the supernatural.

For fans of H.P. Lovecraft and Mary Shelley, female writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century embrace the supernatural, horror, science fiction, fantasy, and the Gothic in Women's Weird. Edited by literary historian Melissa Edmundson, Women's Weird features the best classic Weird short stories that showcase how these authors moved beyond the traditional ghost story and into areas of Weird fiction and dark fantasy. A haunted house, some very haunted gloves, a love that will never die--these are examples of the classic gothic settings reimagined by these turn of the century authors.   Authors include Charlotte Perkins Gilman ("The Giant Wistaria"), Edith Nesbit ("The Shadow"), Edith Wharton ("Kerfol"), May Sinclair ('Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched"), Mary Butts ("With and Without Buttons"), and D K Broster ("Crouching At The Door"). Featuring stories that explore beyond the primarily domestic concerns of earlier supernatural fiction, Women's Weird is sure to thrill new readers and delight these authors' fans.

A pandemic has devastated the planet, sorting humanity into two types: the uninfected and the infected, the living and the living dead. * "One of the best books of the year." --Esquire After the worst of the plague is over, armed forces stationed in Chinatown's Fort Wonton have successfully reclaimed the island south of Canal Street--aka Zone One. Mark Spitz is a member of one of the three-person civilian sweeper units tasked with clearing lower Manhattan of the remaining feral zombies. Zone One unfolds over three surreal days in which Spitz is occupied with the mundane mission of straggler removal, the rigors of Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder (PASD), and the impossible task of coming to terms with a fallen world. And then things start to go terribly wrong... At once a chilling horror story and a literary novel by a contemporary master, Zone One is a dazzling portrait of modern civilization in all its wretched, shambling glory.

Anya could really use a friend. But her new BFF isn't kidding about the "Forever" part . . . Of all the things Anya expected to find at the bottom of an old well, a new friend was not one of them. Especially not a new friend who's been dead for a century. Falling down a well is bad enough, but Anya's normal life might actually be worse. She's embarrassed by her family, self-conscious about her body, and she's pretty much given up on fitting in at school. A new friend--even a ghost--is just what she needs. Or so she thinks. Spooky, sardonic, and secretly sincere, Anya's Ghost is a wonderfully entertaining debut from author/artist Vera Brosgol. This title has Common Core connections. Anya's Ghost is a 2011 Kirkus Best Teen Books of the Year title. One of School Library Journal's Best Fiction Books of 2011. One of Horn Book's Best Fiction Books of 2011. Winner of the 2012 Eisner Award for Best Publication for Young Adults (Ages 12-17)

A masterful collection of tales from the faded border between our day-to-day world and the horrifying unknown on the other side of midnight. An old woman living alone on the edge of a bog gets an unexpected -- and unsettling -- visitor, throwing her quiet life into a long-buried mystery. An isolated backwoods family stumbles into good fortune for a time with a monstrous discovery in the lake behind their house, but that time is running short. And a misfit little girl, struggling to make friends, meets an understanding soul one day at the beach: but why will he only play with her alone at night? All these lonely souls -- and more -- have reached out into the darkness, not knowing what they might find.

Curl up by the fire and enter the sinister, supernatural world of Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936), the master of the English ghost story. Chillingly atmospheric, quietly terrifying, M. R. James's stories explore the darkness just beyond the flicker of the candle, behind the creaking door. Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, Vol. 1 comprises graphic adaptations of four of James's most compelling and unsettling stories, plunging readers into a world of pervasive, creeping disquiet--a world populated by vengeful phantoms, disturbing visions, and spectral works of art.

An unflinching graphic novel about the afterlife of a young man killed by an off-duty police officer, co-illustrated by New York Times bestselling artist John Jennings. Alfonso Jones can't wait to play the role of Hamlet in his school's hip-hop rendition of the classic Shakespearean play. He also wants to let his best friend, Danetta, know how he really feels about her. But as he is buying his first suit, an off-duty police officer mistakes a clothes hanger for a gun, and he shoots Alfonso. When Alfonso wakes up in the afterlife, he's on a ghost train guided by well-known victims of police shootings, who teach him what he needs to know about this subterranean spiritual world. Meanwhile, Alfonso's family and friends struggle with their grief and seek justice for Alfonso in the streets. As they confront their new realities, both Alfonso and those he loves realize the work that lies ahead in the fight for justice. In the first graphic novel for young readers to focus on police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement, as in Hamlet, the dead shall speak-and the living yield even more surprises.

When Leon's camera unexpectedly breaks, he is forced to borrow a used one from his mom's antique store. As he snaps the first picture, the ghost of the camera's former owner is released and the two are inexplicably linked. After taking Leon's body for an accidental joy ride, the ghost introduces himself as Cody, a queer punk rocker who died decades ago. Of course, he doesn't remember how he wound up dead but the two decide investigating might be the only way to end the haunting. Leon has been reeling from a recent break-up with his boyfriend, recovering from his time in the military, and trying to become a photographer who can afford to take pictures of something more than high school proms and weddings. So being the only one able to see and talk to a ghost that died before cellphones, Wikipedia, or iTunes seems like a great way to fill his ample free time. The two get closer as they travel around Chicago showing each other the landmarks of their pasts and trying to unearth the secrets around Cody's mysterious death.

Nadia Shammas and Marie Enger's Where Black Stars Rise is an eldritch horror graphic novel that explores mental illness and diaspora, set in modern-day Brooklyn. Dr. Amal Robardin, a Lebanese immigrant and a therapist in training, finds herself out of her depth when her first client, Yasmin, a schizophrenic, is visited by a nightly malevolent presence that seems all too real. Yasmin becomes obsessed with Robert Chambers' classic horror story collection The King in Yellow. Messages she finds in the book lead Yasmin to disappear, seeking answers she can't find in therapy. Amal attempts to retrace her patient's last steps--and accidentally slips through dimensions, ending up in Carcosa, realm of the King in Yellow. Determined to find her way out, Amal enlists the help of a mysterious guide. Can Amal save Yasmin? Or are they both trapped forever?