Gothic!: Ten Original Dark Tales

Drawing on dark fantasy as well as horror and wild humor, ten contemporary authors pay homage to the gothic tale in original stories of the supernatural and the surreal.

A lovesick count and the ghost of his brutalized servant . . . a serial killer who defies death . . . a house with a violent mind of its own and another that holds within its peeling walls a grotesque secret. Here are witches who feast on faces, changeling rites of passage, a venerable vampire contemplating his end, and a fanged brat who drains the patience of a bumbling teenage boy. Here too are a flamboyant young novelist in search of a subject more compelling than his own eerie existence, and the daughter of a sorcerer fighting to free her lover — and her will — from sinister bonds. Enter the world of GOTHIC!, a celebration of the literary form made famous by such writers as Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe.

With scary stories by:
Joan Aiken
M. T. Anderson
Neil Gaiman
Caitlín R. Kiernan
Gregory Maguire
Garth Nix
Celia Rees
Janni Lee Simner
Vivian Vande Velde
Barry Yourgrau