Sixteen-year-old Kate Mansfield and her blind brother Neil live in a manor on the edge of the Brent Prior moors. It is a dreary place populated by the dispirited and the disillusioned, where the young nurture desperate dreams of escape. And Kate is no different. But her plans to run away to the city are crushed one very ordinary morning when the quiet in Brent Prior is shattered by an inexplicable act of violence.
In the wake of the tragedy, Kate's beloved father is stricken by a strange illness, and she and her brother fall under the care of the manor's caretaker and maid.
Then, as if attuned to the melancholy that has stricken Mansfield House, a fog rolls in. Villagers begin to vanish. Lithe fleeting shadows are glimpsed in the mist, and a disfigured man arrives in Brent Prior.
A man who has come back to settle an old score.
A man who calls himself the Master of the Moors.

An omnibus collection of four novellas by Bram Stoker Award-winning author Kealan Patrick Burke (Kin, The Turtle Boy). Featured in this book are: THE TENT The perfect getaway... The perfect place to hide... Hocking Hills, Ohio is an oasis for campers, hikers, nature enthusiasts, and for those who just want to get away and lose themselves in the wild. And as long as you follow your guide's advice and stay within the permitted areas, you can expect to survive the night. Because deep within the dark woods, something insidious awaits, something few have ever seen, something ancient, unknowable, and insatiable. If you go down to these woods today, you won't live to see the sunrise... YOU IN? For years the Wickerwood Inn has stood abandoned, home to nothing but dust and the trapped echo of past celebrations...and tragedy. For a down on his luck ex-gambler, the inn's reputation is a thing of myth, and certainly not reason enough to turn down the first paying job to come his way in months. The inn will soon be renovated in preparation for a new lease on life. So tonight, from midnight till six, Peter Haskins will watch over the machinery. And he will soon discover that there is something else in the hotel with him, something that needs no new lease on life, for it has never died. And never will. SELDOM SEEN IN AUGUST Wade Crawford is not a good guy. He's a bank robber and a ruthless killer, and now three people are dead and Wade is on the run. With the cops hot on his heels, he breaks into a seemingly ordinary house in a seemingly ordinary neighborhood to hide and wait on word from his partner. But this neighborhood is far from ordinary. Indeed it has a very specific purpose, and soon Wade will discover that life in prison would be preferable to the hellish torment Seldom Seen has in store for him. MIDLISTERS Meet Jason Tennant, a writer of violent horror novels whose career is mired firmly in a maddening swamp of frustration somewhere north of nowhere and south of success. He is a midlister, those thankless souls who labor in the shadows of sometimes better, sometimes luckier writers, and it's starting to take its toll. Meet Kent Gray, wildly popular author of a string of so-called "sex-fi" novels. He's wealthy, handsome, and the object of Jason Tennant's professional jealousy. Welcome to Baltimore, Maryland, and the Aurora Science Fiction & Horror Convention, where these two men, midlister and bestseller, will meet for the first time, and the midlister motto "Better Read Than Dead" will be put to the ultimate test.

Welcome to Eddie's Tavern, the only functioning waterhole in a near-dead town. Among the people you'll meet tonight are: Tom, Milestone's haunted lawman, who walks in the shadow of death; Gracie, the barmaid, a wannabe actress, doomed to spend her hours tending bar in a purgatory of her father's making; Flo, the town seductress, who may or may not have murdered her husband; Cobb, a nudist awaiting an apology from the commune who cast him out; Wintry, the mute giant, whose story is told only in cryptic messages scribbled beneath newspaper headlines; Kyle, the kid, who keeps a loaded gun beneath the table; and Cadaver, who looks like a corpse, but smells real nice, and occupies his time counting stacks of pennies.
And then there's Reverend Hill, who will be in at eleven, regular as clockwork, to tell them who's going to die, and who's going to drive.
Welcome to Eddie's, where tonight, for the first time in three years, nothing will go according to plan...and Hell will come to Milestone.

The lonesome sound of a long forgotten train draws an old man to memories of a horrific past... A journalist makes the mistake of visiting a website where real-life executions are the order of the day... At the foot of an old tree, an insidious evil awaits two boys digging for treasure... A browbeaten salesman finds hope and a possible escape from the banality of his world when he returns home to find a fairytale beanstalk sprouting from his garden... A man resists the social pressure to quit smoking and puts himself at an unimaginable risk... A high school student accepts a dare to ask out a disfigured girl and enters a world of pain and violence... A comedian finds himself faced with a most peculiar and deadly audience...The pariah of a village accepts an offer of peace at his mother's funeral, but the olive branch may have hidden thorns...A bunch of barflies doomed to murder sinners get together for one last drink in a dying town...
These are just some of the passengers, headed for a ride through the dark uncharted regions of the heart and mind...on The Number 121 to Pennsylvania.
"In 14 dark fantasies collected here, Burke creates characters whose angst opens them up to uncanny incidents and ghostly encounters that seem an extension of their own spiritual malaise... Burke shows skill at imagining expressive supernatural experiences appropriate for his well-developed characters and their agitated emotions." - PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Don't read it late at night." - BOOKLIST
"Each tale grabs you within the first few sentences and never lets go, resulting in a collection guaranteed to take you on one of the scariest rides of your life." - RUE MORGUE