Dark offers chilling stories, both fictional and real, about the things that scare us most: murder, hauntings, visitations, insanity and our own vulnerability. Examined through the eyes of some of the world's most gifted writers - Edgar Allan Poe, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Frost, W.W. Jacobs, Iain Banks, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Paul Bowles, Will Self, Marjorie Bowen, A.M. Burrage, and Blue Balliett - we feel the malice of serial murderers, the cold evil of the undead, the unreasoning hatred of the insane, and, most of all, the incomprehensible suffering of their victims.