Thrills and chills galore await you in Great Thrillers, a connoisseur’s collection of suspenseful stories steeped in mystery and the macabre. Filled with fateful encounters, inescapable intrigues, and hair’s-breadth escapes, these tales defy you not to keep turning their pages to see their final surprises sprung. Selections include:
 
The American’s Tale—Arthur Conan Doyle. Frontiersman Alabama Joe planned his devious revenge against Tom Scott, not realizing how easily biters are themselves bit.
 
Andrew Goes Driving—Will H. Greenfield. Skeptical journalist Andrew discovers just how foolish he was to claim he wasn’t afraid to enter a haunted house at night in order to get a story.
 
“Blow Up with the Brig!”—Wilkie Collins. It might seem peculiar to be haunted by the ghost of a bedroom candlestick, but not after the ordeal the narrator endures at the hands of a band of merciless brigands.
 
The Cone—H. G. Wells. It was not a good idea for Raut to cast adulterous eyes on Horrocks’ wife. It was an even worse idea for him to accompany Horrocks on a precarious walk above the flaming ironworks.
 
A Dream of Red Hands—Bram Stoker. A crime of passion stains Jacob Settle with the stigma of a murderer and the stigmata of blood that he dreams his hands are drenched with.
 
The Hostelry—Guy de Maupassant. Whatever it was that prowled the grounds around the snowbound cabin, it drove the cabin’s occupant to a frenzy of terror with its determined attempts to break in.
 
The Interlopers—Saki. The feud fought for generations between the families of Georg Znaeym and Ulrich von Gradwitz was bound to consume them, but perhaps not as surprisingly as the fate they suffered in the Karpathian forest.
 
The Tell-Tale Heart—Edgar Allan Poe. It was madness that drove the narrator to murder the helpless old man in his sleep. It was something worse than madness that left him haunted by the persistent sound of his victim’s beating heart.