Cynthia Pelayo

Detective Lauren Medina sees the calling card at a murder scene in Chicago's Humboldt Park neighborhood, she knows the Pied Piper has returned. When another teenager is brutally murdered at the same lagoon where her sister's body was found floating years before, she is certain that the Pied Piper is not just back, he's looking for payment he's owed from her. Lauren's torn between protecting the city she has sworn to keep safe, and keeping a promise...

A haunted woman stalked by a serial killer confronts the horrors of fairy tales and the nightmares of real life in a breathtaking novel of psychological suspense by a Bram Stoker Award–winning author. It started the night journalist Briar Thorne’s mother died in their rambling old mansion on Chicago’s South Side. The nightmares of a woman in white pleading to come home, music switched on in locked rooms, and the panicked fear of being swallowed...

Winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. The horror is closer than you think. From Bram Stoker Award-winning editor Doug Murano and today's biggest names in dark fiction comes a new vision of terror. It's lurking under the surface. It's waiting around every corner. It's hiding under your bed. it's buried in the backyard. It's whispered, implied, unspoken. This is The Hideous Book of Hidden Horrors. Foreword: Josh Ruben The Pelt: Annie Neugebauer Wish...

A city's haunted history and fairy-tale horrors converge for two women in an addictive novel of psychological suspense by a multiple Bram Stoker Award-nominated author. Sisters Anna and Jennie live in a historic bungalow on the Chicago River. They're tethered to a disquieting past, and with nowhere else to go, nothing can part them from their family home. Not the maddening creaks and disembodied voices that rattle the old walls. Not the inexplicable...

Set during and after the events of The Stand, this authorized anthology gathers original stories from acclaimed writers who expand on the novel's apocalyptic world, exploring survival, morality, and human resilience amid civilization's collapse and the uncertain rebuilding that follows. Since its initial publication in 1978, The Stand has been considered Stephen King's seminal masterpiece of apocalyptic fiction, with millions of copies sold and adapted...

A box is an interesting thing. It contains the essence of mystery. What could be in it? Endless possibilities. For one moving company employee, this question takes on a razor-sharp significance, when the box begins to act in a way no box should. Could it be alive? Dead? Something intelligent? Or just some old clothes? Something terrible? Something beyond description? In the Fragile anthology, 20 different authors present 20 brand new stories of horror,...

"Not all monsters are fantasy. Some are very real, and they walk among us. They're our friends, family, neighbors, and co-workers. They're the people we're supposed to trust..and they know it. Contained within this anthology are 35 never-before-published works by supremely talented authors and best-selling novelists. Brace yourself for the unexpected and unimaginable horror of...human monsters" -- Page [4] of cover.