'This classy, atmospheric thriller is always one step ahead' Heat A gripping psychological thriller for fans of The Couple Next Door, I Let You In and The Girl Before There's a stranger living in Kimber Hannon's house. He tells the police that he has every right to be there, and he has the paperwork to prove it. But Kimber definitely didn't invite this man to move in. He tells her that he knows something about her, and he wants everyone else to know it too. "I was there. I saw what you did." These words reveal a connection to Kimber's distant past, and dark secrets she'd long ago left buried. This trespasser isn't after anything as simple as her money or her home. He wants to move into her carefully orchestrated life - and destroy it. ************** Readers are LOVING The Stranger Inside 'I was captivated by it from the very first chapter' 'This is the definition of a page turner' 'Full of secrets, lies, twists and turns' 'Oh wow! What a rollercoaster of a book I didn't know what to expect next!' 'Gripping thriller that I just couldn't put down!!' 'Absolutely stunning book! One of my favourites of this year' ************** Praise for The Stranger Inside 'Absorbing, addictive and downright chilling' Alison Gaylin 'Suspenseful and moving, The Stranger Inside gripped me from the first page' Meg Gardiner '[An] elegant scary mystery, where nothing is as it seems and one woman's truth is shattered by the hidden secrets of her past.' J.T. Ellison, New York Times bestselling author of Lie to Me 'Compelling characters, lush settings, complex emotions-all in a clever plot and spiced with a hint of darkness' Carolyn Haines, bestselling author of The House of Memory

There's a stranger in your house. And he knows your biggest secret.

When Kimber Hannon returns home from a work trip, she's ready to kick back and relax on the sofa. But on reaching the front door, she is shocked to discover that her key no longer works and there's a man in the bedroom window. Kimber calls the police, but the intruder tells them he's renting the house. Her neighbour corroborates his story and it is Kimber who is forced to leave. But before she does, the stranger whispers 'I was there. I saw what you did.' These words reveal a connection to Kimber's distant past, and dark secrets she'd long ago left buried.

Her trespasser isn't after anything as simple as her money or her home. He wants to move into her carefully orchestrated life - and destroy it.

There is no bliss to be found in Bliss House. In Old Gate, Virginia, stands a grand house built by Randolph Bliss, a charming New York carpetbagger who, in 1878, shook off dire warnings to build his home elsewhere. For the ground beneath Bliss House is tainted with the kind of tragedy that curses generations, seeping through the foundation and sowing madness in its wake. His first and second wives, and his young Japanese mistress, Kiku, bear witness to Randolph's growing insanity with stories of his cruel manipulations and their desperate struggles to find happiness for themselves and their children. Their desire to live and love and even take revenge also fills the house, triumphing even over death. Spanning half a century, The Abandoned Heart is the prequel to Charlotte's Story and Bliss House, forming a trilogy of southern Gothic novels in which one haunted house begets haunted lives that echo over centuries. A haunting so powerful that even Bliss House's destruction cannot kill it.

There's an unknown mountain in Appalachia called Devil's Oven, a place where extraordinary, dark things have been happening for centuries. Now, the mountain has given Ivy Luttrell, a lonely seamstress, the power to fashion herself the perfect man. But instead of bringing Ivy happiness, her creation terrorizes the nearby town with brutal single-mindedness that even Ivy cannot understand. The madness quickly touches Bud Tucker, the owner of the local strip club, and his seductive wife, Lila, wrenching apart their marriage, and putting their lives at terrible risk. The only person who may be able to save Ivy and everyone around her is Jolene, a young dancer whose roots and power lie deep within the past, and the soil of Devil's Oven itself. Devil's Oven is the third supernatural thriller from Laura Benedict, author of ISABELLA MOON.

"Sublimity, as we choose to define it, is that quality a story possesses when it is, in its entirety, completely unpredictable as well as completely inevitable and authentic.... A story-a real story, of the type that we've gathered here; not the mock-stories, the painless, bloodless vignettes that make up so much of today's "literary" fiction-involves apocalypse. Apocalypse means a revelation (the literal meaning of the word apocalypse is a "lifting of the veil"), and a very specific type of revelation: the destruction of an old order, followed by a time of disorder and chaos, and the replacement of the old order by a new and entirely different order.... Sublimity and apocalypse. Anti-rationality and surreality. The call for the literary artist is nothing less than to reveal and remake everything; and the writers whose work you are about to experience have boldly answered that call. We invite you to abandon to its well-deserved fate the wreckage of the rational, and to enjoy." - from the Introduction, by Laura & Pinckney Benedict

Welcome to the dream world. What you are about to encounter is the unfiltered stuff of the dream, and that is wild, terrifying, provocative, and unsettling material. In this volume, some of the best living Southern writers are offering up a feast of their dreams, wonderful and awful in equal measure, for you to enjoy. These dream stories and poems will tell you what you have always known, but what you are too afraid to say out loud in the full light of day: that we are a race of chimeras, beings made up of the incompatible parts of innumerable mutually antagonistic creatures. Our pieces do not fit together. We are, when were willing to tell the truth about ourselves, surreal at our hearts. Welcome to the Surreal South.