The enchanted attic

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Elizabeth Gaskell

Elizabeth Gaskell's chilling Gothic tales blend the real and the supernatural to eerie, compelling effect. 'Disappearances', inspired by local legends of mysterious vanishings, mixes gossip and fact; 'Lois the Witch', a novella based on an account of the Salem witch hunts, shows how sexual desire and jealousy lead to hysteria; while in 'The Old Nurse's Story' a mysterious child roams the freezing Northumberland moors. Whether darkly surreal, such as 'The Poor Clare', where an evil doppelganger is formed by a woman's bitter curse, or mischievous like 'Curious, if True', a playful reworking of fairy tales, all the stories in this volume form a stark contrast to the social realism of Gaskell's novels, revealing a darker and more unsettling style of writing.

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Maureen Bayless

Howard's family has bought a new house -- a new old house, that is. It has 29 rooms full of spiders and creaky noises. It has a dark, spooky basement. And it has a ghost. Howard can live with the rest, but he won't share a house with a ghost. Nuh-uh. No way. He'll do anything -- even enlist the help of Punch McLaredy, the class bully, and his pet snake Chokey -- to get that ghost out!

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Philip Kerr

Billy Shivers doesn t have a lot of excitement in his life. He prefers to spend his days reading alone in the Hitchcock Public Library. So it is a bit out of character when he finds himself drawn to the Haunted House of Books, and a competition daring readers to survive an entire night inside. The Haunted House of Books is a cross between a bookstore and a booby trap. It s a creeky old mansion full of dark hallways and things that go bump in the night, and the store s ill-tempered owner, Mr. Rapscallion, only adds to the mystery. But the frights of the store itself are nothing compared to the stories it holds. These stories are so ghastly, so terrifying, so shocking that once you ve read them, you ll never be the same. Does Billy dare begin? Do you?

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James Herbert

David Ash, un investigador parapsicológico, es invitado a Edbrook, una remota casa de campo en donde está teniendo lugar un presunto hechizo. Ash goza de reputación por rechazar toda clase de fenómenos sobrenaturales dudosos, habiendo descubierto muchos mediums falsos en el pasado y encontrado invariablemente las causas de los denominados fenómenos psiquicos. El posee profundas razones psicológicas para cuestionar tales hechos inexplicables. Pero en Edbrook hay un misterio que no puede ser explicado fácilmente. En tres alucinantes noches de terror, David Ash se ve forzado no sólo a poner en tela de juicio sus convicciones, sino también a enfrentarse con el enigma de su propio pasado.