Stephen Gregory

For a young couple, the small cottage tucked away in a quiet village in the mountains of north Wales, a legacy from a distant, estranged uncle, is a dream come true. The one condition of the inheritance is that they keep the uncle's beloved pet cormorant. They soon discover, however, that the cormorant is no mere bird, but a foul and malignant creature that may exact a greater price than they are willing to pay. Produced by the BBC as a TV film starring Ralph Fiennes.

The Cormorant

With the looming shadow of Edgar Allan Poe falling over one family, Gregory takes the reader into a world of uncertainty and fear. Oliver Gooch comes across a tooth, in a velvet box, with a handwritten note from 1888 to say it's a tooth from the boy Edgar Allan Poe. He displays it in his new bookshop, and names the store Poe's Tooth Books. Oliver took the money from his small daughter Chloe's accident insurance and bought a converted church to live in with his altered child and wife. Rosie hopes Chloe will came back to herself but Oliver is secretly relieved to have this new easy-to-manage child, and holds at bay the guilt that the accident was a result of his negligence. On a freezing night he and Chloe come across the crow, a raggedy skeletal wretch of a bird, and it refuses to leave. It infiltrates their lives, it alters Oliver's relationship with Rosie, it changes Chloe. It's a dangerous presence in the firelit, shadowy old vestry, in Poe's Tooth Books. Inexorably the family, the tooth, the crow, the church and their story will draw to a terrifying climax.

Wakening the Crow

The Woodwitch

Plague of Gulls

A dark novel of Possession. The ghosts that haunt us are not always strangers. Lawrence Lundy's military-pilot father is missing, and the boy is doing everything he can to keep his presence alive in the family home. Into this strange house comes Christopher Beale, a man just returned to the country who becomes drawn in to the apparent madness of the Lawrence and his mother. A long, hot summer's dream. A suffocating nightmare. Shattered by a violent awakening! When his elderly father suffers a stroke, Christopher Beale returns to England. He has no home, no other family. Adrift, he answers an advert for a live-in tutor for a teenage boy. The boy is Lawrence Lundy, who possesses the spirit of his father, a military pilot – missing, presumed dead. Unable to accept that his father is gone, Lawrence keeps his presence alive, in the big old house, in the overgrown garden. His mother, Juliet Lundy, a fey, scatty widow living on her nerves, keeps the boy at home, away from other children, away from the world. And in the suffocating heat of a long summer, she too is infected by the madness of her son. Christopher Beale becomes entangled in the strange household... enmeshed in the oddness of the boy and his fragile mother. Only by forcing the boy to release the spirit of his father can there be any escape from the haunting.

The Waking That Kills

Christopher Priest

Gerald Kersh

Michael McDowell

Michael Blumlein

Florence Marryat

Hugh Walpole

Richard Marsh

Bernard Taylor

John Blackburn

Francis King

Mary Cholmondeley

Charles Birkin

John Trevena

M. G. Lewis

Forrest Reid

Hugh Fleetwood

In this volume, you will encounter tales of ghosts, haunted houses, witchcraft, vampirism, lycanthropy, and sea monsters. Stories of cruelty and vengeance, of a body that refuses to be cremated, a deranged performer with one last shocking show, a frozen corpse that may not be dead. With stories ranging from frightening to horrific to weird to darkly funny, by a lineup of authors that includes both masters of horror fiction and award-winning literary greats, this is a horror anthology like no other. Spanning two hundred years of horror, this new collection features seventeen macabre gems, including two original tales and many others that have never or seldom been reprinted, by: Charles Birkin • John Blackburn • Michael Blumlein • Mary Cholmondeley • Hugh Fleetwood • Stephen Gregory • Gerald Kersh • Francis King • M. G. Lewis • Florence Marryat • Richard Marsh • Michael McDowell • Christopher Priest • Forrest Reid • Bernard Taylor • Hugh Walpole 'The things were there and they were hiding in the slime; waiting ... waiting to clutch and claw and savage’ - AUNTY GREEN by John Blackburn ‘The sound that came from her throat, a small, pleading cry of terror, was cut off before she’d hardly had a chance to utter it’ - OUT OF SORTS by Bernard Taylor ‘The words filled her with an indescribable fear, and she turned to run; but her way was blocked by a figure, gigantic in stature​ – and its monstrous shape moved towards her, and she knew it was the incarnation of evil itself ’ - THE TERROR ON TOBIT by Charles Birkin

The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories: Volume One

The Blood of Angels

Answering an ad for a job as live-in tutor to a teenage boy, Christopher Beal arrives at the big, old house deep in the woods with no idea what he's getting into. His pupil is Lawrence Lundy, an odd boy who practices strange rituals by moonlight and is haunted - perhaps literally - by the spirit of his dead father. For mysterious reasons, his mother, Juliet, keeps him at home, isolated from the world. During the suffocating heat of a long summer, Christopher finds himself entangled in the madness of this strange household and must uncover a deadly secret, before it's too late ... The Waking That Kills is a spellbinding novel of psychological horror by one of the genre's finest contemporary practitioners, Stephen Gregory, award-winning author of the modern classic The Cormorant. 'An insidious novel that gets under your skin and itches insatiably from within.' - Tor.com 'Gregory's voice and vision are wholly original.' - Ramsey Campbell

Dr Gregory, Mbchb MD

Tale of Horror

Woodwitch

Andrew Pinkney is a young English lawyer with boyish good looks and a gentle manner, but a dark side emerges when his girlfriend Jennifer laughs at his impotence. He lashes out in a violent rage, knocking her unconscious. At the suggestion of his employer, Andrew heads to an isolated cottage in the dark Welsh countryside to take a break and get a grip on himself. In the woods, he discovers the grotesque stinkhorn mushroom, whose phallic shape seems to rise in obscene mockery of his own shortcomings. But the stinkhorn gives him an idea, a way to win Jennifer back. As the seeds of obsession take root in Andrew's mind, he embarks on a nightmarish quest, with unexpected and horrifying results.

The Woodwitch (Valancourt 20th Century Classics)

The poems in this little book came about in the evening of Thursday 8th September 2022. Buckingham Palace had just announced that Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, had passed away while at Balmoral in Scotland. She was 96 years of age. These poems were completed during the week of National Mourning and finalised on the day of the funeral.

Poems Marking the Death and Funeral of Queen Elizabeth II

Marking the Day

Toward the end of his administration (2010-2015), then Uruguayan President Jose 'Pepe' Mujica made headlines across the world with a couple of unusual speeches at United Nations assemblies in Rio de Janeiro and New York that were heatedly anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist, anti-globalisation and anti-climate change all fuelled by a libertarian socialist concept of freedom. This Sancho Panza-like figure was not only one of the few presidents of developing countries not to have somehow got personally rich while in government, but was known to live modestly as a practicing farmer and gave away two-thirds of his salary to his left-wing political organisation and to social housing projects. Even more bizarre was the fact that he had become president of the country whose government he had tried to overthrow forty years earlier in a revolutionary guerrilla war, an exploit for which he spent over a decade in military jails after being shot, severely wounded and tortured. This book is an introduction to the politics and philosophy of an unrepentant permanent militant whose evolution took him from defeated guerrilla warrior to successful presidential candidate without inconsistencies or betrayals, whatever his adversaries from right and left may claim. The study sets Mujica not only in his Uruguayan and Latin American context but also within an International Left that is coming out of mourning for the loss of so-called existing socialism as they search for solutions to lessen the damage done by rampant neoliberal economics and to find creative alternatives. Stephen Gregory's polemic is essential reading for all those interested in discovering Uruguay's unique position in a Latin America where the political right is in decline and leftist governments are moving to the middle ground.

Warrior Philosopher President

José 'Pepe' Mujica

Oliver Gooch comes across a tooth in a velvet box, with a note from 1888 saying it belonged to a young Edgar Allan Poe. When he converts an old church to a bookshop selling strange and occult titles, he displays the tooth there, calling the store Poe's Tooth Books. But the bookstore has been bought with blood money: Oliver and his wife Rosie received a large cash settlement when their young daughter Chloe was left brain-damaged after a hit-and-run accident. Rosie hopes the child will soon return to normal, but Oliver is secretly relieved by his daughter's condition, dreading that if she recovers she'll reveal a terrible truth about him. Then one freezing night a raggedy, skeletal crow comes into the shop and refuses to leave. The bird infiltrates their lives, altering Oliver and Rosie's relationship and affecting Chloe in strange ways. It becomes a dangerous presence in the firelit, shadowy old church. Inexorably, the family, the tooth, the crow, and their story will draw to a terrifying climax. Wakening the Crow is an unsettling novel of creeping menace by a modern-day master of psychological horror, Stephen Gregory, award-winning author of the contemporary classic The Cormorant.

Oliver Gooch comes across a tooth, in a velvet box, with a handwritten note from 1888 to say it's a tooth from the boy Edgar Allan Poe. He displays it in his new bookshop, and names the store Poe's Tooth Books. Oliver took the money from his small daughter Chloe's accident insurance and bought a converted church to live in with his altered child and wife. Rosie hopes Chloe will came back to herself but Oliver is secretly relieved to have this new easy-to-manage child, and holds at bay the guilt that the accident was a result of his negligence. On a freezing night he and Chloe come across the crow, a raggedy skeletal wretch of a bird, and it refuses to leave. It infiltrates their lives, it alters Oliver's relationship with Rosie, it changes Chloe. It's a dangerous presence in the firelit, shadowy old vestry, in Poe's Tooth Books. Inexorably the family, the tooth, the crow, the church and their story will draw to a terrifying climax.

A bleak mid-winter. An icy wind blows through the corridors of Foxwood Manor, a boys' prep-school deep in the woodlands of Dorset. The boys have gone home at the end of the Christmas term and the old house is left to the headmaster, Dr Kemp, his wife, and Alan Scott, a boy abandoned by his mother. As the snow falls heavily on the house and the surrounding woods, a story of revenge and retribution unfolds: a web of half-truths and innuendoes woven into a bizarre game of hide-and-seek through the corridors and dormitories of the school. The Perils and Dangers of this Night is a compelling story of unfolding horror as a small boy undergoes a rite of passage, seeking redemption from his haunted past.

The Perils and Dangers of this Night

Over the past four decades, few writers have created a body of work as distinctive - or disturbing - as Stephen Gregory's. In his tales of death and madness the menace usually comes not from the supernatural, but from the natural, and particularly birds, which in Gregory's fiction often bring terror on their dark wings. Included in this volume are the ghost stories 'The Late Mr Lewis' and 'The Boys Who Wouldn't Wake Up' as well as the macabre 'The Cormorant', which provided the inspiration for Gregory's classic novel of the same name. But not all of the tales in this book are horror stories. The avian-themed entries also include tales like 'To Catch a Thief', in which a series of inexplicable thefts is revealed to have an unexpected culprit and 'The Blackbird's Song', in which a celebrated flute player whose career was cut short by an accident rediscovers music after a visit from a blackbird. This first-ever collection of the author's short fiction brings together a rich and varied assortment of fourteen tales, including several never before reprinted, four previously unpublished early tales, and two new stories written specially for this volume. Critical Acclaim for Stephen Gregory 'Gregory writes with the hypnotic power of Poe.' - Publishers Weekly (on The Cormorant) 'Gregory's voice and vision are wholly original.' - Ramsey Campbell (on The Woodwitch) 'Feverish tales of madness and nightmare with lush, precise prose . . . A one-of-a-kind horror writer to read and re-read.' - Paul Tremblay (on The Blood of Angels)

Stories

On Dark Wings

After a bruising experience as a teacher in Africa, Harry Clewe has come to the mountains of Snowdonia in Wales for some peace and quiet. One day, he stops to pick up an attractive blonde hitchhiker . . . and his life will never be the same again. A desperate and wild obsession ends in a tragedy that condemns Harry to a solitary existence, a loneliness that bears its own depraved and bitter fruit. In the years that follow, his life is changed by a bizarre and ultimately dangerous succession of women. Driven on from crisis to crisis, from one catastrophe to the next, he knows joy, terror, despair . . . and finally, the horror of his own worst impulses. From the award-winning author of The Cormorant and The Woodwitch comes this disturbing and macabre story of one man's encounter with the savagery of human instincts and the cruelty of fate. 'The Blood of Angels is a compelling, beautifully written, lusty storm of a book that will sweep you up from its first page and take you on a breathless, emotional, invigorating journey.' - Mark Morris, from the Introduction 'Stephen Gregory lures you into his feverish tales of madness and nightmare with lush, precise prose, inexorably building a sense of wonder, awe, and bone-deep dread. He's a one-of-a-kind horror writer to read and re-read.' - Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts 'The Blood of Angels is a bizarre nightmare. Stephen Gregory slowly takes the reader into the depths of strange, insidious happenings and blinding personal phantoms to reveal what lies beneath. Twisted, bitter, uncomfortable in its own skin, The Blood of Angels investigates the damaging repercussions of a childhood encounter as echoes through a deteriorating life. This is a book that seeps into you and leaves an indelible mark. It's affecting, as all great literature should be.' - Simon Strantzas, author of Burnt Black Suns

These poems are based on life's experiences. They are encouragers for all to recognise that life is an experience.

Stephen Gregory

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