Showing results by publisher "W. F. Howes Ltd" in Gothic

It's 1948, and Irene Willard has had five miscarriages. She's desperate to give her beloved husband the child he desperately desires and, now pregnant for the sixth time, checks in to an isolated house-cum-hospital run by a husband-and-wife team of doctors who are pioneering a cure, they say, to 'rectify the maternal environment'.

Killingly, 1897. The female students of Mount Holyoke—an elite university in a sleepy rural town—are famous for their beauty and charm. Except for plain, quiet Agnes and Bertha, who spend their time reading, writing and wandering the dark woods of Killingly, and do not seem interested in ballgowns or young men. One autumn morning, Bertha vanishes—and the peaceful town of Killingly fractures into chaos. While a search team dredges the pond where she might have drowned, a private detective arrives in town and begins an investigation, discovering this quiet girl was keeping a terrible secret.

Five years ago Susannah Harper's son, Joel, went missing without trace. Bereft of her son and then of her husband, Susannah has rebuilt her life around helping others. But then, on the last night of Hull Fair, a fortune-teller makes an eerie prediction. She tells her that this Christmas Eve, Joel will finally come back to her. As her carefully constructed life begins to unravel, Susannah is forced to confront the buried truths of her family's past.

New England, 1890. Doctor John Shepherd arrives at a women's mental hospital to begin work as assistant to the owner. As Shepherd struggles to conceal his secrets, he finds the asylum has plenty of its own. Intrigued by a girl who is fascinated by books but cannot read, Shepherd embarks upon an experiment to help her. In this chilling literary thriller everyone has something to hide and no one is what they seem.

Billy Edgewater is a harbinger of doom. Estranged from his family, discharged from the navy and touched by a rising desperation, he sets out hitchhiking home to East Tennessee, where his father is slowly dying. On the road, separately, are Sudy and Bradshaw, brother and sister, and a one-armed con man named Roosterfish. All, in one way or another, have their pasts and futures embroiled with D. L. Harkness, a predator in all the ways there are.

The Moonstone, a yellow diamond looted from an Indian temple and believed to bring bad luck to its owner, is bequeathed to Rachel Verinder on her eighteenth birthday. That very night the priceless stone is stolen again and when Sergeant Cuff is brought in to investigate the crime, he soon realizes that no one in Rachel's household is above suspicion.

Observatory Mansions was once the Orme family's ancestral home. Now it is a crumbing apartment block, stranded on a traffic island and peopled with eccentrics. Alice Orme never stirs from her bed, her husband lives in his old armchair and Francis, their son, practises his own art of stillness as a human statue in the centre of the decaying city. This careful routine is shaken by the arrival of a new resident, Anna Tap.

The Monk is a violent tale of ambition, murder, and incest. The great struggle between maintaining monastic vows and fulfilling personal ambitions leads the monk Ambrosio, into temptation and the breaking of his vows, then to sexual obsession and rape, and finally to murder in order to conceal his guilt. Written when Matthew Lewis was only 19, The Monk was criticised when first published in 1796 for its lewdness and impiety, but this criticism only added to its popularity.

1996—Luca Saracino is thirteen and has been completely blind for eight months when his parents move to a Southern Italian farmhouse they dream of turning into a hotel. With his brother dropping out of university and the family reeling from Luca's diagnosis, they are chasing dreams of rebirth and reinvention.

Winter 1954, and in a dilapidated apartment in Brooklyn, Sam Cooper realises that she has nothing left. Her mother is dead, she has no prospects and she cannot afford the rent. But as she goes through her mother's things, Sam finds a stack of hidden letters that reveal a family and an inheritance that she never knew she had, three thousand miles away in Yorkshire. Begars Abbey is a crumbling pile, inhabited only by Sam's crippled grandmother, Lady Cooper, a housekeeper and a handful of servants. Sam cannot understand why her mother kept its very existence a secret.

Gothic tales from the mistress of the weird behind frogman-romance Mrs Caliban: After a one-night-stand with the Angel Gabriel, a monk is transformed into a pregnant woman. Lost in the fog, two visitors are lured into a ruined candlelit mansion. A wife confiscates her husband's homemade sex doll, only to demand her own. Great-aunts warn of the deadly skin of the pearlkillers. Rachel Ingalls' incomparable novellas are masterpieces: surrealist, subversive, tragicomic. Prepare to meet what lurks beneath.

Nellie Gardner is looking for a way out of an abusive marriage when she learns that her long-lost grandfather, August Redfern, has willed her his turpentine estate. She throws everything she can think of in a bag and flees to Georgia with her eleven-year-old son, Max, in tow. It turns out that the "estate" is a decrepit farmhouse on a thousand acres of old pine forest, but Nellie is thrilled about the chance for a fresh start for her and Max, and a chance for the happy home she never had. So it takes her a while to notice the strange scratching in the walls.

In the dying days of 1850, the young detective Charles Maddox takes on a new case. His client? The only surviving son of the long-dead poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and his wife Mary, author of Frankenstein. Charles soon finds himself being drawn into the bitter battle being waged over the poet's literary legacy. When a chance discovery raises doubts about the death of Shelley's first wife, Harriet, he starts to question whether she did kill herself—or whether what really happened was far more sinister…

Clara and her younger brother, Stephen, are taken by their father to stay with their aunt and uncle in a remote house in the hills as their mother recovers from an accident. At first, they see it as a summer to explore. There's the train set in the basement, the walled garden with its secret graves and beyond it all, the silent loch, steady and waiting. Auntie has wanted them for so long - real children with hair to brush and arms to slip into the clothes made just for them.