Celia Fremlin

In a world where Thinkers control the population and Rules are not meant to be broken, fifteen-year-old Violet Schoenfeld must make a choice to control or be controlled after learning truths about her "dead" sister and "missing" father.

Ben Makepeace, a screenwriter, is recently divorced, with a young son to care for. So when he's invited up to Stoneham Park in Oxfordshire to meet someone who wants to bankroll his latest script, he jumps at the chance. Victor Sheldon is a hedge fund billionaire yet when Ben meets him he's bemused, for Victor is none other than old schoolfriend Daniel, last seen some 25 years ago. Victor is eager to introduce him to the various occupants of his Palladian home and Ben can't quite believe the great stroke of good fortune. But history can cast a long shadow, and soon Ben finds himself caught up in a vicious endgame with roots buried deep in the past of his childhood.

When, after Adrian's divorce, Rita at last moves in with him, she destroys his privacy and threatens his relationship with his 14-year-old daughter. The couple's bickering leads to violent rages, and then to murder. Celia Fremlin's other novels include "Appointment With Yesterday

Rosamund was pleased to discover her temperature was nearly 102 degrees. Surely that would account for her blinding headache and even explain the weird, delirious dream in which she murdered her seductive neighbor, Lindy. Then her husband asked her if she knew what had happened to Lindy; she had disappeared!

Introduction - essay by Lawrence Block Deathbinder - novelette by Alexander Jablokov The Marked Man - short story by David Ely The Ones Who Turn Invisible - short story by F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre Ever After - novelette by Susan Palwick The Living Dead - short story by Robert Bloch (variant of Underground) Report on a Broken Bridge - short story by Dennis O'Neil The Beast from One-Quarter Fathom - short story by George Alec Effinger Was It a Dream? - short story by Guy de Maupassant (trans. of La morte 1887) The Madonna of the Wolves - novella by S. P. Somtow [as by Somtow Sucharitkul] Placebo - short story by Andrew Vachss The Man at the Window - short story by Charles Gordon Yanqui Doodle - novelette by James Tiptree, Jr. An Inhabitant of Carcosa - short story by Ambrose Bierce Real Time - short story by Lawrence Watt-Evans Killer in the House - novelette by Jas. R. Petrin Sometimes They Bite - short story by Lawrence Block Three Men in a Tub - short story by Lemuel Cork The Wedding Gig - short story by Stephen King Flicks - novelette by Bill Crenshaw The Leopard Man's Story - short story by Jack London Something Evil in the House - short story by Celia Fremlin How the Wind Spoke at Madaket - novella by Lucius Shepard The Black Cat - short story by Edgar Allan Poe The Dive People - short story by Avram Davidson Graffiti - short story by Stanley Ellin The Dim Rumble - short story by Isaac Asimov The Leather Funnel - short story by Arthur Conan Doyle Trinity - novella by Nancy Kress Island Man - novelette by Robert Anton Wilson [as by R. A. Wilson]

If you are a student of seemingly minor social niceties and/or barbs you will thoroughly enjoy this tale of a woman who struggles to please her family, friends and neighbors while trying to ignore the signs of something bizarre happening. The play of the petty one-up-man-ship of the characters is superb and eminently believable in this depiction of an ordinary mother and wife living in England in the mid 1900s. The tension mounts slowly and remorselessly, culminating in a nerve-racking conclusion.

When flatmates Bridget and Diane decide to look for another tenant, Norah applies for the room. She says she ia a battered wife and has run away from home. Gradually, however, her lies are revealed. She is not a battered wife but the mother of a mentally ill son and wife of a psychiatrist. Her husband thinks her son is a genius and blames all his problems on Norah's smothering love, saying that she is the one who needs help. Unable to cope any more, Norah has fled, putting them all in mortal danger...

Alice Saunders, striking out on her own following the traumatic break-up of her marriage, rents an attic room in a London boarding house. The house contains a curious assortment of people, including the neurotic Mary, who resents Alice's occupation of the attic, and is trying to conceal a murder.

1 online resource (193 pages) > Meg and Isabel were just girls when "Uncle Paul" married their older half-sister, Mildred, and he soon vanished from their lives upon his exposure as a bigamist and a murderer. Fifteen years later, Uncle Paul is about to be released from prison, and all three sisters are seized with dread at the prospect of his return. Their family holiday at the seaside village where Mildred and Uncle Paul once honeymooned becomes the setting for a tense drama of suspicion, betrayal, and revenge.

A day-dreaming fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, from a very `good' home, becomes pregnant. She has encouraged a boy to seduce her, glories in her pregnant state, and is bitterly resentful when her parents talk her into having an abortion. To try to recapture her lost bliss, she pads herself up to appear pregnant, runs away from home, and finds refuge with a houseful of young squatters, most of whom are thrilled by the prospect of "their" baby. But Miranda has overdone the padding, making it appear that the baby's due any moment now. How can Miranda save face and carry off the situation? The plot contains many twists and surprises, but all of them stem naturally from the characters and dilemmas of very real and troubled people. The novel also provides an incidental and implicit commentary on the present controversy concerning abortion. And, after a remarkable denouement which combines the intensely human with the tensely dramatic, the reader realises that Celia Fremlin has played absolutely fair from the very beginning.