Truth or Dare & Other Tales (Take Ten Tales Book 2)

Or is Eleanor just disturbed? The uncertainty is part of the scare. Anne Rivers Siddons was best known for writing posh fiction about posh Southern people when she turned out this perfect haunted house novel. Taking one part economic anxiety from Robert Marasco's Burnt Offerings , one part emotional unease from Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House , and adding her own observations about Southern yuppies, she updated the haunted house formula to include this beautiful, modern home that wages unrelenting psychic warfare against its owners.

Everyone has felt, at some point or another, that their house hates them. Siddons' book explains exactly how much. At first, haunted house books were about intrepid investigators unraveling the secrets of a cursed fixer-upper see: The Haunting of Hill House. But Robert Marasco knows what really scares us: Burnt Offerings created the formula of a family getting a fabulous deal on a piece of property they can't possibly afford, then being brutally punished for their sins.

In this novel, Dad tries to drown Junior, Mom becomes an obsessive neat freak and Grandma's health fails, until the only thing they can do is run screaming into the night, losing their entire deposit. Every modern haunted house book about a deal that is too good to be true — from The Amityville Horror to The Shining — has its roots here.

A writer at an empty hotel for the whole winter — and just like that, we're racing down those hallways, throwing balls at the wall, no schedule, a stocked pantry, a typewriter waiting over there and thousands of feet of floor space for us to fill with our imaginations. Danielewski was weird right from the start , as his debut novel House of Leaves amply proves even the footnotes have footnotes, and eventually they take on a life of their own. Partly a haunted house story, partly a love story, partly an account of a fictional film, partly a saga of mental illness — and did we mention that it's written in different colors for different concepts and multiple fonts to designate the multiple narrators?

Proclaimed "the finest writer of paperback originals in America today" by Stephen King, Michael McDowell spent his career slumming in the low-rent paperback trade — but that didn't keep him from becoming one of the great 20th century chroniclers of Southern life. Rooted in Alabama, McDowell's characters explored haunted houses choked by sand dunes, pierced their dead mother's hearts with ceremonial knives and married into families of amphibious river monsters but remained always recognizably human.

Though he is best known for writing the screenplay for Beetlejuice and contributing to the one for The Nightmare Before Christmas , McDowell's books are being rediscovered now by readers who want more humanity with their chills. The heir to M. James' tradition of quiet, chilly ghost stories, leavened with some of Daphne Du Maurier's keen psychological insight, Susan Hill has spent years tending her small corner of the horror garden. Her novel, The Woman in Black , is essentially a slim thesis on the return of the repressed, but it has had an enormous impact, spawning a viewer-scarring BBC adaptation in and a two-person stage play in that has become one of the longest-running plays in West End history.

Reading Susan Hill feels like standing in a dark room and feeling an ice-cold child's hand slip into yours. But our judges felt that Lunar Park was a stronger choice. Shy, awkward museum archivist Kyle Murchison Booth gets tangled up with all sorts of supernatural creepies in Sarah Monette's story collection — sometimes literally, as in the case of the demon lover whose touch leaves scars on his skin.

In her introduction, Monette says she was inspired by H. James, but our judge Ruthanna Emrys says that unlike Lovecraft, "Monette makes these into intense character studies where every ghost and monster provides a window into Booth's anxious, lonely psyche. A British acid-folk band retreats to a remote old country house for the summer to regroup and write music after one of their singers dies.

Or maybe it's not? They are, after all, all completely out of their minds on various substances the whole summer. Maybe there's a reason for all those dead birds in the house, for the doors that are locked and then unlocked, for all those odd little details that add up, day after day, reality fracturing a little more — until it breaks. It's hard to tell what's scarier in this comic series about a Muslim woman and her multiracial neighbors: Or the shadowy, scratchy art by Aaron Campbell, which will give you creeps for days. After Scott Smith's debut with a black-as-night best-selling thriller, A Simple Plan , everyone wanted to know he was going to do next.

And it turned out that he wanted to do next was write about Yankee tourists getting trapped in Mexico by a sentient plant. The Ruins could have become a travelers' advisory on the dangers of Latin American tourism, but instead it's a cautionary tale about the risks of bumbling around foreign countries and assuming their culture and traditions only run as deep as what you see on the manicured grounds of your five-star resort.

Published in , Rebecca wasn't just a massive sales success and it wasn't just the basis for a blockbuster Hitchcock film that won two Oscars — it also inspired a resurgence of gothic romances those unavoidable books with covers featuring women running from houses 20 years later.

A tour de force of first-person narration, Rebecca sweeps readers into the point of view of a woman who feels so little right to exist that we never even learn her name. In , Ace Books editor Jerry Gross relaunched the gothic romance after spotting his mother reading Rebecca. Sulky teenager Connie is tired of being compared to her perfect older sister. She wants to hang around with the older kids; she wants to talk to boys.

What she gets is an encounter with one of horror's great monsters — Arnold Friend and his creepy gold car. Joyce Carol Oates has said this story was inspired by a real-life serial killer, but everything beyond that has been debated endlessly — is it a feminist fable?

An allegory for the changes America was going through in the s? And what do those numbers on the side of Arnold's car mean? Sarah Crowe may be a novelist, a storyteller by nature, but she is the most unreliable of unreliable narrators in Caitlin R. Kiernan's dark tale of love, obsession and suicide. Sarah moves into a spooky old house, where she unearths a manuscript written by a former resident about his fixation on the gigantic red oak near the house.

The tree seems to be connected to a series of murders and accidents Just a magical girl and her dog Seven years after a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union blows America apart, the country is an unrecognizable hellscape, overrun by competing armies, poisoned by toxic rain and sunk in the permanent gloom of a nuclear winter. Young Swan — along with her dog Killer and her pro-wrestler buddy Josh — must face down the entity known as "Friend" to avert further horrors — and with her power over growing things, restore life on Earth.

This short story by Alice Sheldon is still scarily relevant today in its depiction of a world devastated by a disease that causes men to murder women, and the religious movement that helps justify the killings. Notably, Sheldon is better known by her pen name, James Tiptree Jr. And today, the James Tiptree Jr. Award is given for works of sci-fi and fantasy that expand our understanding of gender. Nalo Hopkinson "uses Caribbean mythology to create stories that are as horrific as they are character-driven and fresh," says judge Tananarive Due.

And this story of loss and guilt and grief, of sparkly red shoes and a young woman coming to terms with an accident that cost several lives is both. It'll warm your heart at the same time it sends a chill down your spine. Amanda has it all — a great career as an architect; a happy, tidy marriage And the dreams — at night, she dreams of a woman with sharp teeth, standing beside a bloody sea. Is this the demon Naamah, who has apparently been visiting Amanda since her childhood? Or is she just losing her mind? Amanda herself is pretty certain it's a demon.

Perhaps we should put a content warning here: A gallery of darkly glittering fairy tales, Angela Carter's book takes "Sleeping Beauty," "Little Red Riding Hood" and "Bluebeard" — among others — and mutates them until they're poisonous draughts of sex and death, garnished with baroque curlicues of sadomasochism and cruelty. A decadent, throbbing book in which the Beast licks off Beauty's flesh, the Erl-King is garroted with his own hair, and Little Red Riding Hood is warned about men who are "hairy on the inside" before throwing her clothes in the fire and seducing the wolf, it resulted in Neil Jordan's feverish and ravishing movie, The Company of Wolves.

Don't step foot in the forest — or if you choose to, read cartoonist Emily Carroll's short story collection first, so you get an idea of what you might be up against.

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Carroll's illustrations are shiveringly gorgeous, all bloody washes of red and icy blue shadows, spidery black and faint yellow glows in the darkness, woven through with skittering lines of story. Neil Gaiman's chronicle of Death's little brother Dream isn't strictly horror he is more a mopey goth, annoying and still somehow compelling , but our judges agreed that vast swaths of his realm, the Dreaming, are pretty horrific. And then there is the story "24 Hours," about a villain who steals an artifact from Dream and uses it to trap a group of people in an all-night diner and torture them — forcing them to confess their sickest secrets, worship him as a god and ultimately kill each other in gruesomely beastly ways.

They run the gamut from fairy tale to horror, but all of these stories consider the bodies and experiences of women, the violence visited on them and the ways they respond. Teenage Miranda Silver is tormented by a craving for things that aren't food, like chalk and plastic, and as this early novel by Helen Oyeyemi opens, she is dealing with her mother's death and the malevolent spirits in her house. Lush and incantatory, packed with twins, strange hungers and hauntings, White is for Witching is a cornucopia of creepy scares.

Oh Laura, oh Lizzie — maybe you should just have stayed home.

1. Hansel and Gretel (Illustrated).
2. The Art Of Self Empowerment (The little book of happiness. 3);
3. The Swordsman.

But who can resist the temptations of "Figs to fill your mouth, Citrons from the South, Sweet to tongue and sound to eye? I'll buy, I'll buy. There is a line you can draw between the ghosts and spirits of horror and the silver nitrate ghosts that flicker across the frames of early silent films, and Gemma Files makes the connection clear in Experimental Film. Film critic Lois is at a low point in her life when, one night at an experimental film screening, she sees a few fragments of mysterious silent footage featuring a woman in a shimmering dress, moving through fields and speaking to workers; this is Lady Midday, a spirit fading along with her films, who sees in Lois a chance to regain her powers.

You know this story even if you haven't read it: A seemingly-idyllic New England village gathers for an annual lottery, at which it is gradually revealed that one resident will be stoned to death to ensure a good harvest. Outraged New Yorker readers canceled their subscriptions when "The Lottery" first appeared in , appalled at Shirley Jackson's insinuation that their comfortable lives might be hiding horrors.

But some letter writers wondered whether such rituals were real, and if so, where could they be seen? The horrors in John Fowles' first novel are purely human — it is Fredrick's monstrous desire for and feelings of entitlement toward beautiful art student Miranda Grey that drives the story.

Where before he had been happy collecting and immobilizing butterflies, now it's Miranda he must pin down and keep. And how dare she be so ungrateful, so unwilling? Give this to the Shackleton fan in your life, but then run away quickly. No heartwarming tale of ice-bound persistence here; The Terror takes on Sir John Franklin's ill-fated expedition in search of the Northwest Passage in which he and both his ships were lost.

Click If You Dare: 100 Favorite Horror Stories

Franklin's real fate — frozen and starving, locked in the Arctic ice — is awful enough, but Dan Simmons ratchets up the horror with a mystery and a monster that looks like a giant polar bear. Our readers loved Dean Koontz, and our judges agreed that Intensity , his tale of a woman frantically fleeing a murderer, was their choice for the list and a natural fit in this category. There are no evil spirits here, no Elder Gods under the waves — just a tense duet between "homicidal adventurer" Edgler Vess, addicted to the intensity of experiences, and intended victim Chyna Shepherd, who turns the tables on Vess, risking her life to stop him.

Hopefully not, but if we don't guard against it, maybe so, too. The Girl Next Door is that guard. The big star of the Dell Abyss imprint, Poppy Z.



Brite now Billy Martin spoke in the language of the marginalized, the forgotten and the lost. Brite's first two novels, Lost Souls and Drawing Blood , were inspirational texts for goth kids, gay kids, lost kids, unwanted kids — basically everyone the Happy Shiny '90s didn't have room for — telling them that no matter what anyone said, they belonged.

Exquisite Corpse , on the other hand, was a romance novel about two serial killers so bleak and unforgiving, it almost ended Brite's career. It pulls off that impossible trick of getting us to side with people we have no business siding with, and then it punishes us for our complicity, it punishes us for leering, it leaves us feeling dirty and compromised.

When horror is really working, it works like this. What hath the Internet wrought? To find the most original ghost stories these days, you have to dive into the online world of creepypasta: Like a nest of squirming eels, these stories mutate, procreate and cross-pollinate with alarming speed and slipperiness, occasionally getting mistaken for reality. Penpal — and its close relative John Dies at the End — capture the spirit of online horror and trap it between two covers.

Not strictly a vampire story, despite the license-plate pun of the title — but Joe Hill's tale of a child predator who whisks his quarry away to a place called Christmasland where their souls are imprisoned to the tune of sugary Christmas music is still plenty blood-chilling.

With its biker heroine with supernatural gifts pursuing her classic-car-driving nemesis through roads real and strange, NOS4A2 is a wild ride. The aliens in Octavia Butler's short story are awful-looking insectoids who implant their eggs in human hosts, but that is actually not what is horrible in "Bloodchild. The Tlic see humans affectionately, as big warm convenient animals. And the humans, though troubled, mostly return that affection.

Keep your vampires, werewolves and haunts — few things are as scary as "the darkness of man's heart. Blessed be the fruit This classic feminist dystopia is prominent in the public mind right now, and not just because it has been made into a TV series. Atwood's book mines true horror from what people do to one another poor Offred, suffering through the Ceremony every month — and to themselves. Who really thinks Serena Joy was happy with her accomplishments?

Toni Morrison's towering and beautifully crafted story concentrates the horrors of slavery into one singular horror — the apparition of Beloved, whose mother Sethe has killed her to spare her from being taken by slave catchers. While slavery has been over for a decade when the book opens, it's as much a specter in Sethe's new home as Beloved is and is destined to haunt and scar lives long after her unquiet spirit disappears.

Beloved isn't a horror novel in the strictest sense of the word, but our judges felt it more than deserved a place here. Butler , John Jennings and Damian Duffy. Octavia Butler's story of a young woman yanked backwards in time from the s California to the slave quarters of a Maryland plantation is horrifying enough on the printed page, but John Jennings and Damian Duffy's graphic adaptation means you really can't look away.

Lots of movies, books and stories have been built on the premise of an out-of-control artificial intelligence. But except for maybe HAL , none of them are as scary as AM, the supercomputer created by warring nations in Harlan Ellison's horrifying short story.

AM abruptly gets tired of the war, ends it by triggering a mass genocide and spends the next century or so working out its hatred of humanity by torturing the last five remaining humans — but not letting them die. In , Clive Barker burst onto the scene with one of the most remarkable debuts in horror: It was as if a band you had never heard of released a box set instead of a first album. Never treated with much respect in the United States his American publisher only printed them in paperback , the stories raised the bar for horror, making it sexier, queerer and more poetic.

Ranging from slapstick comedy to gross-out horror to breathtaking surrealism just in the first volume alone, each story is technically perfect and philosophically unnerving. Evil babies, mysterious jars, bodies in a lake, strange inheritances, monstrous families — whatever your favorite flavor of horror is, you're likely to find something to your taste in this collection. Ray Bradbury wrote these 19 stories early in his career, but they read like the work of a mature master, gripping and stylish. If you can, find one of the editions that includes the striking, stark-edged illustrations by Joseph Mugnaini; they'll add an extra frisson for your reading pleasure.

Martin — and some of the weirdest stories ever assembled between two covers. It won a World Fantasy Award in , and it's guaranteed to keep you occupied and thoroughly creeped out for a good long while. Alternatively, you can use it to squash any pesky monsters under your bed. Tough guys are generally no match for the eldritch horrors of Laird Barron's Imago Sequence — which, if you had to sum it up, you could describe in an extremely reductive manner as H.

Lovecraft meets Raymond Chandler. Imago Sequence is a great read if mere noir isn't dark enough for you, and it has a peculiar humor all its own — Lovecraft's Great Old Ones become, in Barron's world, crotchety but plenty scary old people. Modern horror's ultimate stylist, Ramsey Campbell started his career as a Lovecraft imitator before going off in his own direction. Specializing in the horror of cities, dirt, squalor and the general mind-shattering everyday degradations of urban life, Campbell creates a world in which there is no difference between our brutalist, lunatic buildings and their brutal and insane inhabitants.

Strongest in his short stories, a massive selection of which are collected here, he writes from the point of view that our cities are haunted garbage heaps, and we're all just the ghostly, numb cadavers infesting their derelict ruins. Contemporary Argentinian politics provide plenty of horror in Mariana Enriquez' story collection — crime, abandonment, corruption, drugs; Enriquez grew up in Argentina during the country's brutal Dirty War period and draws on it in her writing. But then the horrors begin to creep in from outside the boundaries of our own world — haunted houses, evil rituals, disappearances that seem political but prove Teenagers Tom and Del are miserable at their extremely grim boarding school — tormented by staff and upperclassmen alike — until a tragic fire halfway through Peter Straub's book leads them to retreat to Del's uncle's spooky house in the Vermont woods called, of course, Shadowland.

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Uncle Coleman is a master stage magician and, to put it mildly, not a very nice fellow. And it turns out that the magic he is teaching Tom and Del has much more to it than just stagecraft. Also, at one point the Brothers Grimm appear, making for a truly warped fairy tale of a novel. Old-fashioned and very modern horrors collide, explosively, in Paul Tremblay's novel.

As a teenager, Merry Barrett's older sister Marjorie, begins to display signs of mental illness, leading her parents to consult a priest, who recommends exorcism and who brings in a TV production company to make a reality show about the troubled family, with tragic consequences. Years later, Merry begins to dig up the past, leading to what our reviewer Jason Heller calls a "bloodcurdling revelation The first horror novel to hit the best-seller list since Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca in , Ira Levin's trim, sleek thriller stapled eyeballs to pages with its passionate commitment to "going Throw in what most mothers suspect anyways — that their child is the spawn of Satan — and you've got true horror.

Precise, understated and without a single wasted word, director Roman Polanski cemented its legend with his scrupulously faithful blockbuster film adaptation. William Peter Blatty's novel — and William Friedkin's subsequent movie — became a cultural landmark, helping launch the horror revival of the late '60s and early '70s.

Rewritten, reinvented, deconstructed and just straight up ripped off numerous times over the years, the original story of a single mother and her daughter possessed by a demon can sometimes edge over into melodrama, but mostly it's a "what happens next? But the only thing that ties Stephen King's horror novels, nonfiction, young adult and mysteries together is his name on the cover. True believers became aware of this with 's "The Woman in the Room," a story inspired by his mother's death, but it was "The Body" that told everyone else King had more to say than "Boo!

Spock's Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care reassured nervous parents that their children were going to be just fine and that you couldn't hug them or love them too much. Science fiction writer Jerome Bixby delivered the most economical reminder with his short story "It's a Good Life," since adapted into The Twilight Zone show and movie three times and into one episode of The Simpsons. A young boy gets everything he wants — or else he makes bad things happen with his mind, resulting in a town of helicopter parents who live in mortal terror of denying this little monster anything.

The dark horse among the trinity of books that kicked off the horror revival of the late '60s and early '70s, The Other will never be as well-known as Rosemary's Baby or The Exorcist because it lacks a hit movie version. But just as The Exorcist owned the possession genre and Rosemary spawned a whole brood of satanic pregnancies, The Other gave us a graduating class of homicidal children and evil twins.

The story of identical twins living on an idyllic farm, it slowly descends into madness involving drowned babies and hidden pitchforks. Night Shyamalan-worthy twist and told in dense, poetic language, it's a hammer wrapped in velvet. The Troop brings that old urban legend about tapeworm diet pills to body-horrific life in a story about a group of PEI Scouts whose camping trip on a nearby island is rudely interrupted by an emaciated stranger Trapped on the island after the parasite takes their scoutmaster, the boys must survive however they can.

Written under the pen name Jessica Hamilton, this is a classic tale of a sociopathic young girl with powers far beyond the natural. Elizabeth — perceptive, detached, ruthless — becomes obsessed with an apparition in an antique mirror, a beautiful woman who says she is a distant relative — and after Elizabeth gets through with her murderous agenda, pretty much her only relative. Stylish and nasty, Elizabeth will make you look twice at any mirrors you may pass. Grief and loss are truly, gruesomely haunting in Chesya Burke's short story about a mother unable to let go of her ghostly daughter and a daughter desperate to save her mother from the horrors she has brought on herself.

Burke makes the pain of loss physical and malevolent, and her writing feels like riding in a car at night, watching strange things flicker at the side of the road. The book that named this category — a generation of children were scarred by Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Not so much because of Alvin Schwartz's stories themselves, which are certainly creepy but nothing to look under the bed about.

No, it's Stephen Gammell's "ugh get it off me" illustrations, in all their skin-crawling scribbly watercolor blot glory, that haunt everyone who ever found this in their school library as a kid.

Gammell or get out. If you were a kid in the '90s, chances are you read at least one volume of R. Stine's long-running and immensely popular Goosebumps series. Not, perhaps, the scariest books on this list — Stine has frequently said he avoids real terror — they're still a great way to warp budding young readers into a lifelong love of horror. Also, Slappy the Dummy was extremely creepy, I don't care what you say.

Daniel Kraus' book pays lip service to the hoary old story of a young boy who loses his mother and is sent to live, and bond with, his estranged dad. Only this time out, Dad is a squatter who lives in filth, and he and his son bond over his job: Learning the best ways to yank gold fillings out of corpses and how to remove their rings, the two learn to love and appreciate each other while going facedown into rat nests and cracking open coffins full of liquefying corpse-meat.

Taking every societal norm — cleanliness, honesty, not desecrating the dead — and setting it on fire, this is literally the most anti-social book ever written. Young Corinne La Mer doesn't believe in Jumbies at first Author Tracey Baptiste draws on her own Trinidadian heritage for this darkly fantastical duology that mixes mythology, folklore and the real-world horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Trafficking in the kind of American Gothic perfected by Ray Bradbury, John Bellairs' three books set in the fictional Michigan town of New Zebedee are lonely and charming and shot through with a sense of creeping damp and creeping doom.

Sort of a Harry Potter for less sporty boys, they star chubby Lewis Barnavelt, who has been banished to live with his Uncle Jonathan after his parents die in a car wreck. Uncle Jonathan is a wizard. Living with him means that Lewis will probably die. Simultaneously comforting and creepy, the New Zebedee books, with their scratchy illustrations by Edward Gorey, scarred children throughout the '70s and '80s. After a series of traumatic events, seventh-grader Harper Raine — half-Korean and half-white — moves to a new house her friends say is haunted.

An evil spirit gets its hooks into her younger brother, and Harper has to break through to her repressed memories of the trauma in order to free him — with the help of her grandmother's knowledge of Korean tradition. Spirit Hunters is a genuinely scary read, full of ghosts and gore and family trauma. Neil Gaiman's tale of a young girl who steps through a strange door and finds a magical new family is charming But then Coraline realizes her other mother and father aren't going to let her go home.

When year-old Kit arrives at the Blackwood School for Girls that's not an ominous name at all , she knows right away that there's something dark, something wrong about the strange old house. This collection features some of the hottest writers in the teen genre, including: Homes, Jennifer Hubbard, Heidi R. With remarkably few exceptions, the short stories in this collection exemplify the best of the form, drawing readers immediately into the lives of characters who confront the hard truths of alienation, love, trauma and sex.

Liz Miles is a freelance editor with many years of experience and the author of a number of books for younger readers. She co-founded and is joint director of Wordstone Publishing. She lives in Wivenhoe, England. Would you like to tell us about a lower price? If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support? These edgy short stories are told from the point of view of the quirky, cool, but not necessarily popular teens, who are dealing with all the pressures of growing up--school, friends, music, relationships, parents, and just plain fitting in.

Read more Read less. Running Press April 26, Language: Don't have a Kindle? Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a customer review. Showing of 3 reviews. Top Reviews Most recent Top Reviews. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. Review courtesy of Dark Faerie Tales. I enjoyed most of the stories, but some were a little boring. You know those intriguing warnings you get before the start of a suspect TV show or movie, such as: The stories cover a range of different topics.

Some were really funny and some were filled with disappointment. Growing up can be difficult in life, but it also is a defining part of our life. That is the time where we learn who we want to be, and everything you experience helps to shape you. All the stories being written talk about some of the issues teenagers go through while trying to grow up.

In the first story you learn that not everything is as it appears to you. Sometimes something that seems wonderful and great on the outside is totally different when you start taking away the layers. Another story talks about first love and all the embarrassing moments that come when trying to let someone get to know the real you. In one story a poor girl has to wear headgear to school at the age of 17, and she talks about how it affected her. Another story is about being too shy and not putting yourself out there, and the consequences that can come from it.

Another one talks about rejection and that you need to stay true to yourself no matter what others say. There are many other stories and the topics covered were entertaining as well, but these were a few of my favorites. Overall, I thought that this was a fun easy read. Some of the stories were really entertaining and funny, while others were more serious and heartbreaking.

I like that you can sit down for about 10 minutes and finish one of the stories; it is sometimes nice to not have to commit to a big book. But that is another great thing about an anthology, there is so many different stories that there is bound to be one that you will love. As if he could hear my psychic berating, he started suddenly up the steps. I was leaning too far over the railing. The moment stretched out, as if time itself had slowed to savor my unbelievable humiliation.