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Read more dark fiction from Virgin Books

Enter the mind of a serial killer who believes he is the rightful son and heir to an ancient dynasty of flesh-eaters.

Follow the frantic journey of a mother whose daughter is infected with the stuff of nightmare.

Look through the eyes of Bo Mulvey, who possesses the ancient wisdom a bloodthirsty evil needs to achieve its full and horrifying potential. A man upon whom the fate of the human race depends.

One of the most powerful horror novels of our time, The Unblemished is an epic tale of history and destiny, desperation and desire, atrocity and atonement. It is a savagely beautiful tale of a mother’s determination to rescue her daughter, which plunges you into the monstrous world of serial killers and a cannibalistic apocalypse that rips through modern Britain.

ISBN 9780753513514

No clothes, no shelter, no hope of rescue. How did they survive the dark side of Paradise?

A group of naked and ragged survivors emerges one year after going missing on a field trip to an uninhabited Pacific island. All but one of the women have conceived and three of the party, including the group leader, are missing and presumed dead. In the glare of the world’s media, each survivor sticks to the same unconvincing version of events.

Through one man’s determined investigation the true story emerges of what happened on the island – a Lord of the Flies scenario of regression, tribalism and suspected murder. But are there signs of something more monstrous at work to confirm the group leader’s theory that there is no beast more savage than man?

ISBN 9780753518267

When junior manager Frank Dominio is suddenly demoted and then sacked, it seems there was more than a grain of truth to his persecution fantasies. But as he prepares to even the score with those responsible for his demise, he unwittingly finds an ally in a dark and malevolent force that grants him supernatural powers. Frank takes his revenge in the most ghastly ways imaginable – but there will be a terrible price to pay once his work is done. Destined to be a cult classic, this tale of corporate horror and demonic retribution will strike a chord with anyone who has ever been disgruntled at work.

ISBN 9780753516881

In this peerless collection of dark fictions, Thomas Ligotti follows the literary tradition that began with Edgar Allan Poe: portraying characters that are outside of anything that might be called normal life, depicting strange locales far off the beaten track, and rendering a grim vision of human existence as a perpetual nightmare. Just by entering his unique world where odd little towns and dark sectors are peopled with clowns, manikins and hideous puppets, and where tormented individuals and blackly comical eccentrics play out their doom, is to risk your own vision of the world.

ISBN 9780753513743

Who could have believed that a night’s camping on Thurstaston Common would lead to a haunting of such power and reach. After ten years Charlotte Nolan and her cousins unwittingly disturb something that should never have seen the light, their very dreams are filled with a suffocating darkness and each is pursued by an undefined figure that seems to have slipped straight out of a nightmare. Together, they must investigate an occult mystery stretching back one hundred years and confront the malevolent force that was once a man.

ISBN 9780753518113

Tubby Thackeray’s stage routines were so deranged that members of his audience were said to have died or lost their minds. When Simon Lester is commissioned to write a book about the forgotten music hall clown and his riotous silent comedies, his research plunges him into a nightmarish realm where genius, buffoonery and madness converge. In a search that leads him from a twilight circus in a London park to a hardcore movie studio in Los Angeles, Simon Lester uncovers a terrifying secret about Tubby Thackeray and must finally confront the unspeakable thing he represents.

ISBN 9780753513811

Few believed Professor Coldwell was in touch with an unseen world – that he could commune with spirits. But in Scotland’s oldest university town something has passed from darkness into light. And now the young are being haunted by night terrors. And those who are visited disappear. This is not a place for outsiders, especially at night. So what chance do a rootless musician and burnt-out explorer have of surviving their entanglement with an ageless supernatural evil and the ruthless cult that worships it?

ISBN 9780753513583

A bleak mid-winter. An icy wind blows through the corridors of Foxwood Manor, a boys’ prep-school deep in the woodlands of Dorset. It is the end of the Christmas term and the old house is empty save for the headmaster, Dr Kemp, his wife, and the one boy who has been left behind. Alan Scott, 12, abandoned by his feckless mother, faces the grim prospect of Christmas alone with the Kemps. Until, at dusk the following afternoon, a vision from the outside world arrives at the school: Martin Pryce, a suave, arrogant ex-pupil, and his bewildered girlfriend Sophie. And, 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… and a series of shocking revelations which lead inexorably, horrifically, to a bloody climax on a crisp, lovely Christmas morning.

ISBN 9780753513798