Peter Straub

"In life, not every sin goes unpunished. 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. In a seedy motel in Florida, a young man holds captive a little girl in a soiled pink dress. He is anxious, tormented, introspective. She is calm, passive,...

In Connecticut, a publisher's wife is taken hostage by a suspected killer making a getaway. The man, Dick Dart, was arrested as a suspect in the knifing death of four divorcees in their bedroom. He is intuitive and clever and Nora Chancel, who previously led the life of a bored housewife, can only stay alive by feeding his ego and outwitting him without seeming to do so. Over the next 10 days she grows in stature and courage. By the author of Ghost...

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. They were as different as men could be. Yet all of them were eternally bound by 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...

Tim Underhill comes back to his hometown to investigate the murder of a childhood friend's wife.

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Ghost Story—and 8-time Bram Stoker Award winner—gathers 24 bone-chilling, nail-biting, frightfully imaginative stories that represent the best of contemporary horror writing.

“Revelatory.... A remarkably consistent, frequently unsettling book.” —The Washington Post
“[Straub] collects the best scary short stories out there.”...

Old friends try to come to grips with the darkness of the past--a secret ritual that left behind a gruesomely dismembered body--and find themselves face-to-face with the evil they helped create.

Jack Sawyer, a retired homicide detective living in rural Wisconsin, doesn't remember his boyhood journey into the parallel universe called the Territories. Jack is recruited to help find a brutal serial killer who is stalking the region, but is there an even more malignant force at work?

A near-fatal traffic accident and a resulting obsession with death drive Tom Pasmore to join his neighbor, famous retired detective Lamont von Heilitz, in investigating two very different murders.