With "Lisey's Story," Steven King creates an audacious meditation on the creative process and a remarkable intersection of the different strains of his talent.

William Gay's "Twilight: A Novel" is almost textbook Southern Gothic, with its elements of the grotesque and perverse and its psychological extremes.

Jeremy Treglown says in his intro to "Collected Stories" by Roald Dahl that Dahl tried writing for kids because he'd run out of ideas for the kind of work that first made his name: incisive adult pieces.

Daniel Stashower's "The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe and the Invention of Murder" delves into one of the great unsolved murders in American history to weave a compelling narrative of antebellum New York.

Four works that include: "the ultimate whodunit"; murder and madness within a Mormon temple; intelligence officer intrigue and an Italian-style noir novel.