Andrew Coburn – The Babysitter

Andrew Coburn – The Babysitter (Sphere, 1981)

 

Blurb:

In the dead of night a child is crying. And for her parents the nightmare has just begun …

Paula Aherne, the Wrights lovely and trusted babysitter, is dead. Upstairs, a child’s darkened bedroom is empty. No ransom note. No clues. And the babysitter is the biggest mystery of all.
Now –  in defiance of the police and the FBI – the child’s frantic parents start their own desperate, dangerous search through derelict factory towns and Boston’s seamy North End. Only after death has struck again and again will they learn the fate of their baby – and the terrifying cruel truth about … the baby-sitter

‘Expertly done … beautifully written’ – New York Times Book Review

‘ A first -rate read … If you have a child in your house, you won’t be able to forget this story’ – Vincent Bugliosi, co-author of Helter Skelter and Till Death Us Do Part

Christopher Fowler – City Jitters

Christopher Fowler  – City Jitters (Sphere 1986)

City Jitters: Cover, Les Edwards

COUNCIL REPORT: Car Parks
Left Hand Drive
COUNCIL REPORT: Night Clubs
Perry in Seraglio
COUNCIL REPORT: Taxi cabs
Any Minute Now
COUNCIL REPORT: Video Arcades
Change for the Sky Master
COUNCIL REPORT: Burglaries
Tigertooth
COUNCIL REPORT: Strip Clubs
Vanishing Acts
COUNCIL REPORT: Slums
Her Finest Hour
COUNCIL REPORT: Hotels
The Cleansing
COUNCIL REPORT: Suburbs
What is wrong with this picture?
COUNCIL REPORT: Total City Breakdown
Loaded Blanks
Epilogue

From the intro:
“Welcome to the scariest place on earth.

A place of back alleys and strip joints, suburbs and slums. A place where the new fears live. The city.

The new fears are not of dungeons and vampires. They are fears of modern living. These days we are more scared of muggers than of monsters.

Within these pages you’ll find no werewolves or zombies, but ordinary events which take unpleasant and surprising turns.

Ten linked together tales of modern malevolence which could happen to you, today. Tales set in the most commonplace, most disturbing place of all.

There is nowhere more jittery than the city!”

Thanks to Nightreader for providing the cover scan and contents list.

Graham Masterton – The Wells Of Hell

Graham Masterton – The Wells Of Hell (Sphere, 1981)

 

An Evocation Of Total Evil

Blurb:

LEGIONS FROM HELL…
New Milford was a peaceful old town where nothing ever happened. Until overnight the water turned a hideously sinister colour. Then Alison and Jimmy Bodine disappeared and the body of a young woman was discovered — the gory remains of an inhuman feast. Rumours of the scaly crab creatures on the outskirts of town had already thrown the citizens into a state of total terror but nothing had prepared them for the unimaginable horror of the evil that had worked its way with young Oliver Bodine’s body:

SOMETHING HAD CHANGED AN INNOCENT CHILD INTO A LOATHSOME, SOULLESS MONSTER, A NIGHTMARE VISION FROM THE BOWELS OF HELL …

Far beneath the town a legacy as old and as evil as Satan, a legacy of supernatural force and destruction, had returned to claim fresh victims to swell the ranks of a race that sprang straight from the WELLS OF HELL

Lisa Tuttle – A Nest of Nightmares

Lisa Tuttle – A Nest of Nightmares (Sphere, 1986)

Cover by Nick Bantock

“13 terrifying tales of terror”

Bug House
Dollburger
Community Property
Flying to Byzantium
Treading the Maze
The Horse Lord
The Other Mother
Need
The Memory of Wood
A Friend in Need
Stranger in the House
Sun City
The Nest

Thanks to Roger Pile for providing the cover and contents.

Lisa Tuttle – Gabriel

Lisa Tuttle – Gabriel (Sphere 1987)

Lisa Tuttle Gabriel

“His name was Gabriel Archer, and he was my husband for eleven months. He died at twenty-three, a few days before my nineteenth birthday. Ten years later, on my twenty-ninth, he came hack to haunt me…
Gabriel swore he would always love her. And then he died. A decade later, when Dinah meets Ben, she is amazed to find Gabriel’s penetrating eyes, his knowing smile, in a ten year old boy. When Ben says he loves her, Dinah is amused – and then frightened. Ben means what he says. He loves her – exactly the way Gabriel once loved her…. “I came back for you.” He smiled. It was not the smile of a ten-year-old child. It was Gabriel’s smile, adult, full of knowing. Dinah wanted to scream”