"Gaston Leroux is one of the originators of the detective story, and The Phantom of the Opera""is his tour de force, as well as being the basis for the hit Broadway musical. A superb suspense story and a dark tale of obsession, The Phantom of the Opera has thrilled and entertained audiences in adaptations throughout the century. This new translation--the first completely modern and Americanized translation--unfurls the full impact of this classic...

"Past the rusted gates and untrimmed hedges, Hill House broods and waits. Four seekers have come to the ugly, abandoned old mansion: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of the psychic phenomena called haunting; Theodora, his lovely and lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, a lonely, homeless girl well acquainted with poltergeists; and Luke, the adventurous future heir of Hill House. At first, their stay seems destined to be merely...

A novel of seduction, mystery, and danger set in New York’s Hudson Valley in the nineteenth century, by the author of Foxfire.
 
There was, on the Hudson, a way of life such as this, and there was a house not unlike Dragonwyck . . .
 
In the spring of 1844, the Wells family receives a letter from a distant relative, the wealthy landowner Nicholas Van Ryn. He has invited one...

"1908. Left at an orphanage as a child, Thea Reed vowed to find her mother someday. Now grown, her search takes her to turn-of-the-century Pleasant Valley, Wisconsin. When the clues she finds lead her to a mental asylum, Thea uses her experience as a postmortem photographer to gain access and assist groundskeeper Simeon Coyle in photographing the patients and uncovering the secrets within. However, she never expected her personal quest would reawaken...

Acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Lynne Truss (Eats, Shoots & Leaves) is back with a mesmerizing and hilarious tale of cats and murder

For people who both love and hate cats comes the tale of Alec Charlesworth, a librarian who finds himself suddenly alone: he's lost his job, his beloved wife has just died. Overcome by grief, he searches for clues about her disappearance in a file of interviews between...

"England, 1921. Three years after her husband, Alex, disappeared, shot down over Germany, Jo Manders still mourns his loss. Working as a paid companion to Alex's wealthy, condescending aunt, Dottie Forsyth, Jo travels to the family's estate in the Sussex countryside. But there is much she never knew about her husband's origins...and the revelation of a mysterious death in the Forsyths' past is just the beginning... All is not well at Wych Elm House....

"Rappaccini's Daughter" is a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne first published in the December 1844 issue of The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, and later in the 1846 collection Mosses from an Old Manse. It is about Giacomo Rappaccini, a medical researcher in medieval Padua who grows a garden of poisonous plants. He brings up his daughter to tend the plants, and she becomes resistant to the poisons, but in the process she herself becomes...

Joanne McMullen's fears for her sister's sanity have brought her to remote King's Island, Maine. Mary's grief over the loss of her child is threatening to send her over the edge-and her insistence that she has heard an eerie, childlike wailing in the woods fuels Joanne's anxiety. And now Mary's taken to disappearing at midnight in search of the source of the heartrending moans. But it's not just her sister's encroaching madness that is chilling Joanne's...

Northanger Abbey was among the last of Jane Austen's novels to be published, in 1818, but the first to be written, mostly in 1798-9. Centred on the loves and friendships of Catherine Morland, an endearing young girl extremely fond of novel-reading, it remains the most youthful and optimistic of Jane Austen's novels. During an eventful season in Bath, Catherine meets the sophisticated Henry and Eleanor Tilney who invite her to stay at their father's...

"Like the heroine of the novel she adores, Jane Steele suffers cruelly at the hands of her aunt and schoolmaster. And like Jane Eyre, they call her wicked -- but in her case, she fears the accusation is true. When she flees, she leaves behind the corpses of her tormentors. A fugitive navigating London's underbelly, Jane rights wrongs on behalf of the have-nots whilst avoiding the noose. Until an advertisement catches her eye. Her aunt has died and...