Space Cowboy's Strange Fiction Favorites

“The Gateway of the Monster” is a story featuring Thomas Carnacki, a detective who investigates cases of an occult or supernatural nature. It is one of five tales of Carnacki's ghost hunting exploits which first appeared serially in “The Idler” magazine in 1910 and were published together with one more as a collection “Carnacki the... Read more »

“The Thing Invisible” is a story featuring Thomas Carnacki, a detective who investigates cases of an occult or supernatural nature. It is one of five tales of Carnacki's ghost hunting exploits which first appeared serially in “The Idler” magazine in 1910 and were published together with one more as a collection “Carnacki the Ghost-Finder” in... Read more »

After botching a suicide attempt, salaryman Hanio Yamada decides to put his life up for sale in the classifieds section of a Tokyo newspaper. Soon interested parties come calling with increasingly bizarre requests and what follows is a madcap comedy of errors, involving a jealous husband, a drug-addled heiress, poisoned carrots—even a vampire.... Read more »

Nominated for the National Book Award, Geek Love is mesmerizing, daring, and unconventional. Award-winning novelist Katherine Dunn fascinates and amazes much the same way tornados, earthquakes, and volcanos do. No one wants to be a victim, but most find the event too hypnotic to ignore. In order to save their traveling carnival from bankruptcy,... Read more »

The name Edgar Allan Poe conjures up thoughts of hearts beating long after their owners are dead, of disease and plague amid wealth, and of love that extends beyond the grave. The richness of Poe's writing, however, includes much more than horror, loss, and death. Poe's stories teem with irony and black humor, in addition to plot twists and... Read more »

More than sixty years ago, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, two novice writers at the dawn of their careers, sat down to write a novel about the summer of 1944, when one of their friends killed another in a moment of brutal and tragic bloodshed. Alternating chapters, they pieced together a hard-boiled tale of bohemian New York during World... Read more »

Naked Lunch is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. Exerting its influence on authors like Thomas Pynchon, J. G. Ballard, and William Gibson; on the relationship between art and obscenity; and on the shape of music, film, and media generally, it is one of the books that redefined not just literature but American... Read more »

The only audio edition of At the Mountains of Madness authorized by the H. P. Lovecraft Estate!

A master of terror and nightmarish visions, H.P. Lovecraft solidified his place at the top of the horror genre with thismacabre supernatural tale.

When a geologist leads an expedition to the Antarcticplateau, his aim is to find rock and plant specimens... Read more »

From the beat generation and counterculture author William S. Burroughs comes the second novel of the Red Night trilogy, available in audio for the first time.This surreal fable, set in America’s Old West, features a cast of notorious characters: the Crying Gun, who breaks into tears at the sight of his opponent; the Priest, who goes into... Read more »

Here is the final novel of Burroughs’ Red Night trilogy, available in audio for the first time.A fascinating mix of autobiographical episodes and extraordinary Egyptian theology, Burroughs’ final novel is poignant and melancholic. Blending war films and pornography, and referencing Kafka and Mailer, The Western Lands confirms Burroughs’ status... Read more »

In The Ticket That Exploded, William S. Burroughs’ grand “cut-up” trilogy that starts with The Soft Machine and continues through Nova Express reaches its climax as inspector Lee and the Nova Police engage the Nova Mob in a decisive battle for the planet. Only Burroughs could make such a nightmare vision of scientists and combat troops, of ad... Read more »

The most ferociously political and prophetic book of the Cut-Up Trilogy, Nova Express fires the reader into a textual outer space, the better to see our burning planet and the operations of the Nova Mob in all their ugliness. As with The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded, Burroughs deploys his cut-up methods both to scramble the scripts... Read more »

The Night Land is a classic horror novel by William Hope Hodgson.

"The Night Land is a tale of the remote future ― billions of years after the death of the sun. It is one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written . . . there is a sense of cosmic alienage, breathless mystery, and terrified expectancy unrivalled in the whole... Read more »

Candide is the story of a gentle man who, though pummeled and slapped in every direction by fate, clings desperately to the belief that he lives in "the best of all possible worlds." On the surface a witty, bantering tale, this eighteenth-century classic is actually a savage, satiric thrust at the philosophical optimism that proclaims that all... Read more »

The explosive J. G. Ballardrenaissance, which began with the 2009 publication of The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard, now continues with his firstnovel to be published in America in a full decade.

Millennium People tells the story ofDavid Markham, a psychologist who is searching for the truth behind a bomb thatexploded on a Heathrow baggage... Read more »

In a frozen, apocalyptic landscape, destruction abounds: great walls of ice overrun the world and secretive governments vie for control. Against this surreal, yet eerily familiar broken world, an unnamed narrator embarks on a hallucinatory quest for a strange and elusive "glass-girl" with silver hair. He crosses icy seas and frozen plains,... Read more »

An underground classic, Crash explores the disturbing potentialities of contemporary society's increasing dependence on technology as intermediary in human relations. In this hallucinatory novel, the car provides the hellish tableau in which Vaughan, a "TV scientist" turned "nightmare angel of the highways," experiments with erotic atrocities... Read more »

"The Cask of Amontillado" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in the November 1846 issue of Godey's Lady's Book. The story, set in an unnamed Italian city at carnival time in an unspecified year, is about a man taking fatal revenge on a friend who, he believes, has insulted him Read more »