This is the story of a sadist, in this case, a grandfather with excessive ego and a thirst for satisfying his sense of strength. The boy’s mother, his aunt, the boy himself become a victim of his madness, and the story gathers momentum until they are forced to flee from an environment that gives him his strength. This is a skillful build-up of atmosphere and tension.

This novel is served with a psychological detective dressing. In reality, this is a mixture of experiences, feelings and thoughts of the protagonist, describing events that in any case should end in tragedy. This is not hidden from the very beginning. Everything that happens is written very atmospheric, gradually thickening events to an inevitable outcome.

„"The Forward Brig"” sailed from Liverpool Port with eighteen crew members on board. But neither during the sailing, nor even for a long time after him, none of them knew the purpose of the voyage, nor even the name of the captain. And only having plunged far into the Arctic waters, the sailors learned that the famous navigator John Hatteras, who set the ambitious task of becoming the first person to reach the North Pole, was leading the expedition.

Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace (1875-1932) was an English crime writer, journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and playwright, who wrote 175 novels, 24 plays, and numerous articles in newspapers and journals. One of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century, Edgar Wallace was an immensely popular author, who created exciting thrillers spiced with tales of treacherous crooks and hard-boiled detectives. He was known for the „The Four Just Men”, the „Ringer”, and for creating the Green Archer character during his lifetime. Over 160 films have been made of his novels, more than any other author. In the 1920s, one of Wallace’s publishers claimed that a quarter of all books read in England were written by him. This volume contains 11 short detective and romance stories with surprises and twists. Courtroom drama from the master of crime and creator of King Kong!

This is a horror book, but prone to human psychology. The book begins: between the kitchen and the pantry there was a certain window, which was a favorite for Hamlet. Thirty years ago – these chronicles of 1894 – the basements of houses in provincial English cities, even large houses owned by wealthy people, were dark, cold, odorous caves sizzling with bad gas and smelling of poorly prepared cabbage. The basement of Coles’ house in Polchester was the same bad, like any other, but this small window between the kitchen and the pantry was higher in the wall than other basement windows.

In the play „The Living Corpse”, the famous Russian writer L.N. Tolstoy appears as a playwright. It is filled with intense psychological collisions, complex images of heroes, ambiguous and with that vitally revealed throughout the whole story. And, as always, the themes of love, kindness and human destiny are in the foreground. The play is based on real events, it was popular at the beginning of the 20th century, when it was translated into foreign languages, put on stages, filmed.

This is a novel with catchy locations and characters. A man in a midlife crisis travels to a remote Kornish village with his wife. The strange happy village, where drunkenness is widespread and people are very open, begins to influence the actions of visitors – up to a change in their character. The very strangeness of history guarantees that it will remain in memory for a long time.

Alcoholism then and now caused endless quarrels, domestic violence, senseless violence, disintegration of families, and a decrease in the life expectancy of men. So, we see that Tolstoy’s message is deeply appropriate, and his strategy to convey this tale of morality for most people was to make it simple, short, with an emphasis on the destructive effect of alcohol. This is truly a moral story – and that’s good because it solves a real problem that destroys the structure of society.

The main character of the story, Dmitry Olenin, is close to the author both in spiritual experience and in moral aspirations. Like Tolstoy, he finds himself in the Caucasus in an attempt to start a new life, „"in which there will be no more mistakes, there will be no remorse, and probably there will be only happiness."” But instead of imagining paintings on the way to the Caucasus in the spirit of Russian romantic literature, the hero of the story had to see real life and feel like a stranger in a world untouched by civilization.

Such was the breadth of Tolstoy’s talents that he was unsurpassed in stories, essays and plays. A play about a demon who was stuck on the theft of the souls of peasants. The story itself is a story about juvenile morality, which seems so heavy that Tolstoy’s footprints should be on every page.

The drama „The Light Shines” reflects the events of Tolstoy’s life in the broadest, most typified generalizations. Therefore, it would be a gross mistake to fully identify the content of the drama with the life of Tolstoy, his family and those around him. Nevertheless, there is a close relationship between them. So, the drama of Nikolai Ivanovich Saryntsev is, of course, the drama of Tolstoy himself. In the person of Maria Ivanovna Saryntseva, some characteristic features of S. A. Tolstoy are outlined. The same should be said of the other characters in the play, which are very reminiscent of either Tolstoy’s family or those who came into close contact with his family. And the „drunk” Alexander Petrovich who appears in the fourth act is taken from real life. This is Tolstoy’s scribe, Alexander Petrovich Ivanov, a former officer who became trampless, an inhabitant of Rzhanov’s house.

The old godless captain Stormfield believed neither in God, nor in hell, nor in paradise, nor in hell. Imagine his surprise when, after his death, flying through the bottomless depths of space, he nevertheless arrived in paradise. He was even more surprised when he became acquainted with the local order – it was too painfully different from the stories about the paradise of priests on Earth...