An ancient evil walks among them. When Adam Salton arrives at his grand-uncle's Derbyshire estate he quickly senses that a macabre and malevolent force is at work. In his attempts to uncover the grisly mystery, he encounters the chilling Lady Arabella and the obsessive Edgar Caswall, each harbouring their own dark and dreadful desires.

A macabre human drama is re-enacted in a Gothic dolls' house one night; a whistle awakens a force of unspeakable malevolence; an ancient curse is passed from person to person; a grisly crime is avenged from beyond the grave; the tomb of a Swedish count will not rest quietly.

Of all the writers of ghost and horror stories, Ambrose Bierce is perhaps the most colourful. He was a dark, cynical and pessimistic soul who had a grim vision of fate and the unfairness of life, which he channelled into his fiction. This is a collection of his stories.

In the degenerate, unliked backwater of Dunwich, Wilbur Whately, a most unusual child, is born. Of unnatural parentage, he grows at an uncanny pace to an unsettling height, but the boy's arrival simply precedes that of a true horror: one of the Old Ones, that forces the people of the town to hole up by night.

However you try to escape it, horror is always there Outside the abbey's armoured walls, the common poor are ravaged by a grisly pestilence known as the 'Red Death', while within, safe and untroubled, the happy Prince Prospero hosts lavish entertainments.

A classic quick-witted dictionary.

Horror lies waiting. A sinister Countess is driven mad by a dark secret. An innocent woman is made the instrument of retribution. A murdered man's fury reaches beyond the grave. When Countess Narona marries Agnes Lockwood's fiance and takes him to live in a rundown Venetian palace, strange things start happening.

Fear of Satan becomes murder in the name of God. Newly orphaned, the God-fearing and heart-broken Lois is sent across the Atlantic to live with her uncle's family in Salem, but on her arrival she finds herself the object of cruel hostility, potent jealousy and mad desire.

A sharp-tongued, quick-witted dictionary with a difference from the much-loved, insolent and corageous Ambrose Bierce. An American classic.

It changes its shape at will. It compels others to do its bidding. It inspires terror in all who look on it. Eminent politician Paul Lessingham is the toast of Westminster, but when 'The Beetle' arrives from Egypt to hunt him down, the dark and gruesome secret that haunts him is dragged into the light.

A manuscript is found: filled with small, precise writing and smelling of pit-water, it tells the story of an old recluse and his strange home - and its even stranger, jade-green double, seen by the recluse on an otherworldly plain where gigantic gods and monsters roam.

A man stares into the deep river swirling beneath him - hands tied, noose around his neck - and waits for the order to end his life. Another is trapped for eternity in a room full of corpses. A cowering woman is strangled in the dead of night.

An incomparable satirist, Ambrose Bierce became the 'laughing devil' of the San Francisco news media, for he was about as discreet as a runaway locomotive, according to HL Mencken.

He lusts and kills in equal measure. The brutal Don Juan - an unrepentant sinner - makes a pact with the Virgin of the Seven Daggers. He promises to forever proclaim her supreme beauty and asks that in return she save him from damnation.