2005

Brett Easton Ellis. Lunar Park

Imagine becoming a bestselling novelist, and almost immediately famous and wealthy, while still in college, and before long seeing your insufferable father reduced to a bag of ashes in a safety-deposit box, while after American Psycho your celebrity drowns in a sea of vilification, booze, and drugs. Then imagine having a second chance ten years later, as the Bret Easton Ellis of this remarkable novel is given, with a wife, children, and suburban sobriety--only to watch this new life shatter beyond recognition in a matter of days.

2004

Ramsey Campbell. The Overnight

2003

Peter Straub. lost boy lost girl

A groundbreaking story of the persistence of evil, told with tantalizing ambiguity and structural audacity.

2002

Dan Simmons. A Winter Haunting

After an intense love affair, Professor Dale Stewart has lost everything--even his confidence as a novelist. To salvage his sanity and pride, he returns to a farmhouse in the small Illinois town of his childhood to work on his manuscript. But peace is the last thing he'll find, for the house is haunted in more ways than one.

2001

Caitlin R. Kiernan. Threshold: A Novel of Deep Time

A new level of fear from the author of "Silk, " this story begins as a young woman delves into the past to discover the secret of a strange fossil that shouldn't even exist.

2000

Tim Powers. Declare

A coded message draws Professor Andrew Hale back into Her Majesty's Secret Service in 1963. Elements from his past are gathering in Beirut, rushing toward a deadly confrontation on Mt. Ararat, where a covert Soviet expedition is closing in on the biblical Ark.

1999

Stewart O'Nan. A Prayer for the Dying

Dark, poetic, and chilling, "A Prayer for the Dying" asks if it's possible to be a good man in a time of madness as members of a town succumb to a fatal epidemic.

1998

Thomas Tessier. Fog Heart

1997

Ramsey Campbell. Nazareth Hill

Oswald Priestley was widowed ten years ago, when his daughter, Amy, was just a child. He's done his best to raise her and give her proper values. But now she's a teenager, convinced she knows everything about life and that her father knows nothing. Amy doesn't remember her mother. She does remember that as a child she was afraid of Nazareth Hill, the abandoned asylum that looms over the town. Now Nazareth Hill has been made into apartments, and she and her father have moved in. Their neighbors are a little eccentric at first, and as time passes, their odd quirks become less amusing and more dangerous.

1996

Marc Laidlaw. The 37th Mandala: A Novel

A horror novel about mandalas and what they mean to people--including Michael Renzler, who is obsessed with them, and Elias Mooney, who believes they are the root of all evil. Netlibrary eBook.

1995

William Browning Spencer. Resume With Monsters

Taking a night-shift job in Austin, Texas, in the hopes of rekindling a relationship, Philip Kenan confronts the surreal phantoms of his past and present employment situations, and seeks help from an unorthodox therapist.

1994

Kim Newman. Anno Dracula

In an alternate history of the nineteenth century, Queen Victoria has married Vlad Tepes, better known as Count Dracula, leading to a reign of terror, while, in Whitechapel, Silver Knife, a murderer of vampire girls, threatens the new regime.