While maintaining a horror style, the novel is an excursion into the realm of science fiction for King, as the residents of the Maine town of Haven gradually fall under the influence of a mysterious object buried in the woods.

Welcome, mortal. You have finally discovered that place they told you about where hope crawls off to die. This unclean tome runs the gamut of horror and weird fiction across space and time—from surprising terrors in Chernobyl and India to lethal curses in Japan and Greece. From instructions on how to become a successful zombie to a laughing exorcist who is stranger than the execrable demons he dispatches. From calloused gravediggers of Victorian...

"An elderly man aggressively defends his private domain against all comers--including his daughter;a policeman investigates an impossible horror show of a crime; a father witnesses one of the worst things a parent can imagine; the abuse of one child fuels another's yearning; an Iraqi war veteran seeks a fellow soldier in his hometown but finds more than she bargains for.... The Best Horror of the Year showcases the previous year's best offerings in...

Billy Halleck, good husband, loving father, is both beneficiary and victim of the American Good Life: he has an expensive home, a nice family, and a rewarding career as a lawyer ... but he is also fifty pounds overweight and, as his doctor keeps reminding him, edging into heart attack country.

When a rogue master vampire named Alejandro hits town and claims Anita Blake, an expert on undead creatures of the night, as his human servant, a war of the undead breaks out between the interloper and Jean-Claude, the city's Master Vampire, a situation complicated when Anita falls for Richard Zeeman, a handsome teacher with his own dark secret.

Samantha, the laughingstock of the girls' basketball team, meets someone who can grant her three wishes. But she isn't careful what she wishes for and they come true, turning her life into a living nightmare.

After Hatch Harrison is brought back to life in an ambulance, his second chance turns into a nightmarish quest to squelch the evil he brought back from the afterlife.

"The Best Horror of the Year showcases the previous year's best offerings in horror short fiction. This edition includes award-winning and critically acclaimed authors Nathan Ballingrud, Gemma Files, Stephen Graham Jones, J.A. W. McCarthy, Steve Duffy, Sarah Pinkser, Simon Bestwick, and others. For more than four decades, award-winning editor and anthologist Ellen Datlow has had her finger on the pulse of the latest and most terrifying in horror writing....

Disgusted by his father's collection of tacky lawn decorations, which include pink flamingos and plastic skunks, Joe Burton is further upset when a pair of ugly lawn gnomes are added and a number of strange incidents occur.