After just three years, THE BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES series is already a great success, earning raves from such diverse sources as Joyce Carol Oates, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY, and ELLERY QUEEN’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE. Little wonder, given the power of the Best American brand, the talent of the series editor, Otto Penzler, and the high profile of the guest editors. Now, with the legendary mystery writer Donald E. Westlake as guest editor, the 2000 edition is sure to boost the series’ popularity even more. From Tfty exceptional stories chosen by Penzler, Westlake has selected the twenty best, including stories by Tom Franklin, Jeffery Deaver, Shel Silverstein, and Dennis Lehane, for a collection that will delight mystery buffs and casual readers alike.

No train has run on this railroad since the end of the Civil War-a railroad built by a servitor to perfect evil--and its rusted tracks run right behind the house. Justin Collier expects his respite in Gast, Tennessee, to be relaxing if not a bit dull, but he will find out soon enough that those same train tracks once led to a place worse than Hell. Join master of the macabre Edward Lee on a nightmare excursion of Civil War horror.____________________WELCOME TO THE GAST HOUSE - A historical bed and breakfast or a monument to the obscene? Collier doesn't need to know the building's rich history: women raped to death for sport, slaves beheaded and threshed into the soil, and pregnant teenagers buried alive. Who or what could mitigate such horrors over 150 years ago? And what is the atrocious connection between the old railroad and the house? Each room hides a new, revolting secret. At night, he can smell the mansion's odors and hear its appalling whispers. Little girls giggle where there are no little girls, and out back, when Collier listens closely, he can hear the train's whistle and see the things chained up in its clattering prison cars. Little does he know, the mansion and the railroad aren't haunted by ghosts but an unspeakable carnality and a horror as palpable as excited human flesh. WELCOME TO A PLACE WORSE THAN HELL...

The sickest writer in horror takes on the Cthulhu Mythos! Join splatter king Edward Lee for a private tour of Innswich Point -- a town founded on perversion, torture, and abominations from the sea.

HELL'S BITCH IN HEAT... Seething, slavering, and insane, it cringes, not wanting to slip forth from the noxious, bloated belly of its abyssal mother until the most hideous sexual atrocities beckon it from Hell's hot bowels: the dread monstrosity of unfathomable beauty and the most vile horror--revulsion and desire incarnated into one...PREGNANT TO BURSTING WITH ABOMINATIONS UNTOLD...Atop the moon-drenched hillock sits the leaning manse, surrounded by ancient graves rich with the bones of witches, and amid the dense cricket-choruses of these ghastly twilight deeps, it stalks, thrashes and prowls, its nipples gorged with evil, its loins a frenzy of Luciferic lust... RITES OF REDNECK PASSAGE...Behold Balls and Dicky (of THE BIGHEAD fame) as they embark on their first sociopathic epiphany teeming with down and dirty redneck whores, occult science, corpse-sex, and scatological gross-out the likes of which would make the BTK Killer faint. These boys think they're bad...but are they bad enough to face-- THE MINOTAURESS Edward Lee's latest novel of irredeemable harder-than-hardcore horror...

Through the midnight bowels of New York City, the trolley travels. Admitting only a special sort of passenger, and taking them to a very select destination. The 1852 Club is a bordello unlike any other. Its women are the most beautiful and they will do anything. But there is something else going on at this sex club, monsters are performing vile acts on each other and other dimensions are opening.

When Kevin and his family visit his Aunt Carolyn, unusual things begin to happen. His aunt is just creepy. When he learns more about his aunt and her gloomy mansion in the woods, Kevin is finally left with no choice but to admit the truth: Vampires do exist, and his Aunt isn’t the only bloodsucker in the house! Join Kevin and creepy Aunt as the secret in the basement is finally revealed.