TEENS

This volume, edited and introduced by noted fantasy scholar Douglas A. Anderson, collects Walton's ten completed fantasy short stories, including her 1950 story published in the legendary magazine Weird Tales, and three superb Breton tales which first appeared in anthologies in the early 1980s. Four stories are published here for the first time.

One freezing morning, a lone man wandering across the Arctic ice caps is rescued by a ship's captain. As he is nursed back to health, Victor Frankenstein recounts his story of ambition, murder, and revenge. As a young scientist Frankenstein pushed moral boundaries in order to create life itself. But his creation is a monster stitched together from grave-robbed body parts who has no place in the world, and whose life can only lead to tragedy.

The Children of Húrin is the first complete book by J.R.R.Tolkien since the 1977 publication of The Silmarillion. Six thousand years before the One Ring is destroyed, Middle-earth lies under the shadow of the Dark Lord Morgoth. The greatest warriors among elves and men have perished, and all is in darkness and despair. But a deadly new leader rises, Túrin, son of Húrin, and with his grim band of outlaws begins to turn the tide in the war for Middle-earth -- awaiting the day he confronts his destiny and the deadly curse laid upon him.

Frequently imitated and widely influential, Howard Philips Lovecraft reinvented the horror genre in the 1920s. Discarding ghosts and witches and instead envisioning mankind as a tiny outpost of dwindling sanity in a chaotic and malevolent universe, Lovecraft's stories range from the early tales of nightmares and madness such as "The Outsider" to the overpowering cosmic terror of "The Call of Cthulhu."

In The Gunslinger, King introduces his most enigmatic hero, Roland Deschain of Gilead, the Last Gunslinger. He is a haunting, solitary figure at first, on a mysterious quest through a desolate world that eerily mirrors our own. Pursuing the man in black, an evil being who can bring the dead back to life, Roland is a good man who seems to leave nothing but death in his wake.

A seemingly ordinary man, Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning only to discover that he has been transformed into a gigantic insect and must deal with the depression over his new physical alteration, as well as the rejection of his family.

In PRELUDES & NOCTURNES, an occultist attempting to capture Death to bargain for eternal life traps her younger brother Dream instead. After his 70 year imprisonment and eventual escape, Dream, also known as Morpheus, goes on a quest for his lost objects of power. On his arduous journey Morpheus encounters Lucifer, John Constantine, and an all-powerful madman.