Love, Death, and other Inconveniences: Horror Stories of Love and Loss (Haunted Library) / Wade, Tobias

Short story collection with award-winning authors. 

Thriller, horror, and romantic suspense stories. 

Ever start a relationship with a guy and think he's a little too perfect? That's probably because he's a shape-changing serial killer. Or how about when you got stood up on that tinder date and go home disappointed, only to realize it was all a trick so he'd know where you live? Then there's those letters your dead wife keeps writing you... There can be no light without darkness, pleasure without pain, or love without loss.  17 authors have teamed up to collect all our favorite supernatural and psychological horror stories about love.

Jealous murders, monstrous doppelgangers, heart-rending romances, devils and angels, cannibals and virtual worlds — over 350 pages of your most desperate longings and worst nightmares all rolled into one. Shocking twists and absolute mind-fuckery will thrill and terrify you to the last page!
 
Great way to discover more authors in the horror genre. 

Excerpt: (An account of Hell)

There are two kinds of pain which I had come to expect from the world of the living: the physical, and the emotional. Never had I experienced a physical pain so excruciating as the boils which began to swell across my body, nor a mental burden as debilitating as the taunting echoes which sneered at me from the living tissue beneath my feet. Every good memory of my life was poisoned against me, and each shame and guilt was magnified a thousand times over by the leering specters which narrated my ordeals with intimate knowledge and exaggerated effect.

Worse than either was the spiritual pain I endured however, the gnawing hopeless depression which robbed even my sense of self. I was not a person in Hell; I was Hell. I did not feel pain; I was pain—inseparable and indistinguishable. It was then, in the lowest reduction of my humanity as I crawled across the putrid ground in a trail of my own ruptured boils, that she took pity on me.

Gentle hands shed my skin from me; not as a torment, but a release. My disfigured limbs were cut away by her flashing knife, each slice bringing a pain so pure and clean that I welcomed it without question. Layer by layer she flayed me until at last there was nothing left to cut but my soul. Again it is difficult to describe her without the reliance of my mortal senses now stripped from me, but if you understood me when I told you that I was pain, you will understand again when I tell you she was beauty.

-I'm in Love with the Devil's Wife