John Saul

From the imagination of bestselling author John Saul comes Blackstone Asylum. Dr. Malcolm Metcalf's sadistic legacy. Madhouse. Torture chamber. As the town of Blackstone plans its demolition, a dark stranger is determined to keep the evils of the past alive. Can writer Oliver Metcalf prevent the curse of his father's asylum before it consumes him?

Collected for the first time. from the best selling novelist John Saul, comes "God Project." Eastbury, Mass. Quiet, peaceful, prosperous. Surely the ideal place to raise a family? For the Montgomery family, the death of their baby daughter is a mystery that medicine should be able to answer, but can't. For the Corliss family, the disappearance of their teenage son will bring many eyes to Eastbury, and spark a quite different type of mystery. What has happened to these children? Eastbury happened.

Pinecrest, a rambling lakeside house, has lain empty since its last owner went missing some years ago. But for the Brewster family it will be this year's holiday home, and for the kids, Eric and Marci, it's a perfect place to spend a lazy summer exploring. Which is how Eric and his friends discover a curious collection of discarded objects in a hidden room: bladeless hacksaws, shadeless lamps, tables with missing legs and a headless axe handle - a pile of junk. But someone once took the trouble to list each worthless relic in a cryptic ledger, provoking a mystery that is now whispering to them, coaxing, demanding to be solved. The more time the boys devote to piecing together the puzzle, the more their fascination deepens into obsession, an obsession that consumes their days, while their nights are plagued by ever-more ghastly nightmares. And finally, when a horrifying discovery surfaces, so does the chilling truth of a twisted legacy with a malevolent mind of its own. 'Saul knows how to send shivers up the spines of readers any age' Pubishers Weekly

Teri McIntyre has enrolled her 15-year-old son at St Isaac's Catholic boarding school, hoping this venerable institution will have a calming influence on him. But Ryan arrives to find the school awash with rumours of violent death, mysterious disappearances, and a growing incidence of disturbing behavior within its hallowed halls. Things begin to change after Father Sebastian joins the faculty, bent on an extraordinary mission to prove the power of exorcism. Willing or not, St. Isaac's most troubled students become pawns in Father Sebastian's one-man war against evil -- a war so surprisingly effective that Rome itself starts taking notice. But as Ryan is drawn ever more deeply into Father Sebastian's ministrations, he witnesses with mounting dread the transformations of his fellow pupils, and his certainty grows that it is forces of darkness, not divinity, which are at work here. For evil is not being cast out . . . instead, something unholy is being summoned. Something whose hour has finally come to bring hell unto earth.

Punish the Sinners Something is happening to the young girls of St. Francis Xavier High School - something evil. In bloodlet and terror a suicide contagion has swept the town...while a dark order of its holy men enacts a secret medieval ritual. Is hysteria manipulating these innocent children into violent self-destruction? Or has a supernatural force, a thirteenth-century madness, returned to...Punish the Sinners.When the Wind Blows The children were waiting. Waiting for centuries. Waiting for someone to hear their cries. Now nine-year-old Christie Lyons has come to live in the house on the hill - the house where no children have lived for fifty years. Now little Christie will sleep in the old-fashioned nursery on the third floor. Now Christie's terror will begin...The Unwanted Cassie Winslow is sixteen. She has just lost her mother in a terrible accident. Now, lonely and frightened, she has come to live with the father she barely knows and his new family in tiny False Harbor on Cape Cod. For Cassie, the strange, unsettling dreams that come to her suddenly in the dead of night are merely the beginning. Very soon, Cassie Winslow will come to know the terrifying powers that are her gift. And in the village of False Harbor, nothing will ever be the same.

Fifteen-year-old Alison Shaw may not be beautiful, but she doesn't really care: She'd much rather read a good book than primp in front of a mirror. But Alison's gorgeous mother, Risa, knows that beauty can be a key to success and wishes only the best for her daughter-a wish that may come true after Risa marries widowed plastic surgeon Conrad Dunn. Conrad claims that he can turn Alison into a vision of loveliness, so the teenager reluctantly agrees to undergo the first procedure. Then Alison discovers a picture of Conrad's first wife and notes, to her horror, a resemblance between the image in the photo and the work her stepfather is doing on her. Though, Risa refuses to acknowledge the strange similarities, Alison digs further into her stepfather's murky past, uncovers dark secrets and even darker motives-and realizes that her worst fears are fast becoming reality.

The stories in Call It Tender are devoted to love, hope, nostalgia; to life in its precariousness, absurdities and joys. Told with the author's characteristic wit and sense of atmosphere – set in Mallorca, Berlin, Wiltshire and Suffolk, Mannheim and New Jersey – they tell of lovers meeting, of how a prisoner struggles, a forester grows curious, a patient survives, a girl falls and falls through space. As a wind blows off the North Sea, a house in London burns, or the Eiffel Tower sparkles in the night, the reader will be able to appreciate why John Saul's fiction has been called funny, beguiling, provocative. His work has further appeared in the prestigious New Writing series and anthologies published by Serpent’s Tail.

Summer vacation becomes a season in hell for an ordinary family who unwittingly stir something invisible, insidious, and insatiable from its secret slumber-unleashing a wave of horror only the darkest evil could create, that only a master of spine-tingling terror like John Saul could orchestrate. For deep in the shadows in the dark of the night lurks something as big as life . . . and as real as death. It has waited seven years for someone to come back to the rambling lakeside house called Pinecrest, which has stood empty since its last owner went missing. For upscale Chicago couple Dan and Merrill Brewster, the old midwestern manse is an ideal retreat, and for their kids, Eric and Marci, it's the perfect place to spend a lazy summer exploring. Which is how Eric and his teenage friends discover the curious cache of discarded objects stowed in a hidden room of Pinecrest's carriage house. The bladeless hacksaws, shadeless lamps, tables with missing legs, headless axe handle, and other unremarkable items add up to a pile of junk. Yet someone took the trouble to inventory each worthless relic in a cryptic ledger. It has all the makings of a great mystery-whispering, coaxing, demanding to be solved. But the more the boys devote themselves to restoring the forgotten possessions and piecing together the puzzle behind them, the more their fascination deepens into obsession. Soon their days are consumed with tending the strange, secret collection-while their nights become plagued by ever more ghastly dreams, nightmares that soon seep into reality. And when a horrifying discovery surfaces, so does the chilling truth-about the terrifying events that rocked the town seven years before, the mysterious disappearance of Pinecrest's last resident, and a twisted legacy with a malevolent life of its own . . . and a bottomless hunger for new victims.

If you open your house to strangers, who knows who might come in. And what they might be after. Or whom. Now, ponder the unthinkable and surrender to your darkest dread, as sinister storyteller extraordinaire John Saul weaves a heart-stopping tale of lurking terror and twisted intent. Every parent's nightmare becomes reality for Kara Marshall when her daughter, Lindsay, vanishes from her bedroom during the night. The police suspect that the girl is just another moody teenage runaway, angry over leaving behind her school and friends because her family is moving. But Lindsay's recent eerie claim-that someone invaded her room when the house was opened to prospective buyers-drives Kara to fear the worst: a nameless, faceless stalker has walked the halls of her home in search of more than a place to live. Patrick Shields recognizes Kara's pain-and carries plenty of his own since he lost his wife and two children in a devastating house fire. But more than grief draws Patrick and Kara together. He, too, senses the hand of a malevolent stranger in this tragedy. And as more people go missing from houses up for sale, Patrick's suspicion, like Kara's, blooms into horrified certainty. Someone is trolling this peaceful community-undetected and undeterred-harvesting victims for a purpose no sane mind can fathom. Someone Kara and Patrick, alone and desperate, are determined to unmask. Someone who is even now watching, plotting, keeping a demented diary of unspeakable deeds . . . and waiting until the time is ripe for another fateful visit.

The promising future of New York City college student Jeff Converse has suddenly been shattered by a nightmarish turn of events. Falsely convicted of a brutal crime, Jeff sees his life vanishing before his eyes. But someone has other plans for Jeff, in a far deadlier place than any penitentiary. He finds himself beneath the teeming streets of Manhattan, in a hidden landscape of twisting tunnels and forgotten subterranean chambers. Here, an invisible population of the homeless, the desperate, and the mad has carved out its own shadow society. But they are not alone. The pitch-dark tunnels and abandoned subway stations are haunted by the unmistakable sounds of predators in search of game. Someone has made this forsaken civilization beneath the city a private killing ground...and the hunt is on. Trapped in a treacherous underground maze, cut off at every turn by ragged gangs of sinister "gamekeepers," and stalked relentlessly by unseen hunters, Jeff faces overwhelming odds in the race to reach salvation and elude capture. With no weapon but his wits, and an unimaginable threat lurking around every dark corner, Jeff must somehow move heaven and earth to escape from a living hell.

Fifteen-year-old Matthew Moore seems to have a charmed life . . . until a mysterious fire forces his grandmother to move in with his family. The elderly woman insists on recreating the bedroom of Cynthia, her favored child who died tragically more than a decade ago. Soon Matt's life insidiously begins to change. At night he finds himself haunted by nightmares of unimaginable terror. In the morning the smell of Cynthia's perfume seems to linger in his room. While his grandmother drives a wedge between his once devoted parents, Matt transforms from a gregarious teenager to a hostile loner. Then a shocking tragedy shatters the family beyond repair—as a horrific shadow from the past takes on an implacable life of its own, clawing toward Matt with ferocious hunger. . . .

When the Conways move into their ancestral home in Louisiana after the death of an estranged aunt, it is with the promise of a new beginning. But the house has a life of its own. Abandoned for the last forty years, surrounded by thick trees and a stifling sense of melancholy, the sprawling Victorian house seems to swallow up the sunlight. Deep within the cold cellar and etched into the very walls is a long, dark history of the Conway name--a grim bloodline poisoned by suicide, strange disappearances, voodoo rituals, and rumors of murder. But the family knows nothing of the soul-shattering secrets that snake through generations of their past. They do not know that terror awaits them. For with each generation of the Conways comes a hellish day of reckoning. . . . "[A] WHOPPER OF A NIGHTMARE TALE . . . DAZZLING . . . DIZZYING TWISTS."--Publishers Weekly"[A] TALE OF EVIL THAT IS BOTH EXTREME AND ENTERTAINING."--Chicago Tribune"GRIPPING AND FAST-PACED . . . A slick thriller in which deftly drawn characters must face the demons in their own lives to conquer that which claims the family's souls."--BookPage

A century ago, a gentle blind girl walked the cliffs of Paradise Point. Then the children came -- taunting, teasing -- until she lost her footing and fell, shrieking her rage to the drowning sea... Now Michelle has come from Boston to live in the big house on Paradise Point. She is excited about her new life, ready to make new friends... until a hand reaches out of the swirling mists -- the hand of blind child. She is asking for friendship... seeking revenge... whispering her name...