What will you do when Death comes knocking? Death lurks around every twist in the path, within every dark shadow. The Gods may demand more than humans are willing to give. Spirits from beyond the grave can rise from cursed ground to walk among the living bringing horror and death.Death may come in the most innocuous of guises when one least expects or death may be expected but still fought against to the last breath.Death Songs presents four short stories of people facing death, or something worse. A tribe's medicine man must appease the gods before his village drowns. A woman faces off with vengeful spirits to protect her village from death. A man encounters a woman with a strange profession after a violent disaster. A lone man stands up to the spirit world to protect his wife. Views: 429
From the author of Voice of the Blood comes a terrifyingly funny new tale of Michael Squire, twenty-three, nerdy as hell, and losing his mind in the face of a hilariously hostile world. Fortunately he's got his favorite Eighties music close at hand...Meet Squire. He's your average music-obsessed twenty-three-year-old Portlander, juggling a job as an internet support technician, an indie comics gig, and a long-simmering crush on his best friend, Lise. He smokes too much weed, drinks too many cocktails, and watches too much Star Trek. And when his co-workers, baristas, and friends begin to turn on him one by one, his good-natured paranoia expands into a chilling, terrifying certainty about the end of the world. A darkly comic novel about a young man who slowly but surely loses his grip on reality, but never on his taste in music. Views: 428
After a narrow escape from the trap set for him, Cedric wakes to find he is without a home, without a friend, and without a hope of taking back his castle. He is also weakened by the wound dealt to him at the hands of the treacherous Lord Bane. But Cedric is not discouraged. He sets out across the western lands of the Empire in search of fighting men who can help him, determined to take back his beloved RoseThorn, fight the bandit rebellion, and even defy death itself. But the lands have been ravaged by plague and rebellion. Dangerous men lurk in the shadows of abandoned towns and villages. Death is everywhere. And the wounded Cedric is not the warrior he used to be. Still haunted by ghosts he cannot explain, he must hold tight to the promise of RoseThorn in his heart and find a way to lead others before they are destroyed by fear and hate . Views: 428
The FINAL shocking, heart-wrenching book in the jaw-droppingly stupendous Skulduggery Pleasant series
Valkyrie. Darquesse. Stephanie. The world ain’t big enough for the three of them. The end will come…
The War of the Sanctuaries has been won, but it was not without its casualties. Following the loss of Valkyrie Cain, Skulduggery Pleasant must use any and all means to track down and stop Darquesse before she turns the world into a charred, lifeless cinder.
And so he draws together a team of soldiers, monster hunters, killers, criminals… and Valkyrie’s own murderous reflection.
The war may be over, but the final battle is about to begin. And not everyone gets out of here alive… Views: 428
What is a life well-lived? How should life be lived? What kind of stories will you leave behind?Travel with twenty-three speculative fiction authors through the seasons of life to capture the memories, identities, and moments of stepping through the portal of change, as they cope with their own journeys of growing older.From the moment of birth, through each threshold of our lives, to the moment we take our last breath, we age.Some of us leap into a hopeful future, some cling to the knowns of our former selves, some wander obliviously through the minefields and poppies of change. Something is lost, something is gained in each season. Things forgotten, things remembered.A child redefines identity and belonging in post-Soviet Hungary. A girl blossoming to adult awareness exchanges life for death in rural Canada. A college student chooses between the magic of ancient spirits and the magic of daily happiness in modern Japan. In... Views: 428
A chaplain sex-chats with an Iraqi girl who tells her eerie tale.To overcome the grief of losing her twin brother, the director-husband of a talented but naïve and head-strong young actress persuades her to appear in a one-person show he has written for her, at an old, disused theatre in a small East-coast town. The show bombs on the first night, after she fails to take heed of the advice offered by an unseen, enigmatic member of her audience. As she opts to stick with the direction of her writer-director husband, she puts her sanity and their lives in jeopardy. After her husband suffers a tragic accident, she has only two nights to turn her show into an overnight sensation and avoid further tragedy.As the, now imprisoned, actress recalls her story to a visiting psychologist, the dark and far-reaching consequences of her final night's performance are revealed. Views: 428
Since Night of the Living Dead, zombies have been a frightening fixture on the pop culture landscape, lumbering after hapless humans, slurping up brains and veins and whatever warm, fleshy matter they can clench in their rotting limbs. But what if they were real? What would happen if, tomorrow, corpses across the nation began springing up out of their graves and terrorizing the living?
Employing hard science and solid police work—not to mention jaw-dropping (literally!) humor—Zombie CSU is the only guide you need to make it through alive—not undead. At last you can: Views: 428
Bestselling author Christopher Golden brings his epic, innovative trilogy, the Veil, to an astonishing conclusion as the mythic realm of heroes and monsters becomes the site of humanity’s last—and greatest—showdown.In the world of the legendary, every myth and folktale is real. That is what Oliver Bascombe learned on the other side of the Veil, where humanity\'s legends have hidden away for centuries. But even legends have legends, and Oliver has learned of a prophecy that many believe he and his sister, Collette, have come to the Two Kingdoms to fulfill. Before they can discover the truth, the Bascombe siblings must help to stop an apocalyptic war that threatens to destroy the Two Kingdoms, unravel a conspiracy, and prevent a powerful sorcerer from severing the world of humans from the realm of the legendary forever.But first Oliver will have to plot an escape from an impregnable palace dungeon where he and his allies have been imprisoned . . . for regicide.As old heroes and friends ally themselves for one last battle, even older enemies stand arrayed against them. Is humanity ready to face its legends head-on? For Oliver Bascombe, the price may be dearer than even he could ever imagine. Views: 428
Pike brings readers the terrifying sequel to his most popular novel (nearly 650,000 copies in print). Shari Cooper, victim of a murderous attack, is given a rare offer: to return to Earth, into the body of a depressed teenage girl, to become a Wanderer. Shari gladly accepts, but not everyone on Earth welcomes Wanderers. . . . Views: 427
How well do you know your neighbors? A small town's best & brightest high school students are being eliminated one by one by a goth-inspired wise-cracking clown, forcing their valedictorian to unwittingly link up with a special investigator to help stop the carnage.It all begins one sunny day in Century City High’s School’s girls’ locker room with the gruesome murder of a cheerleader. Soon, the school valedictorian, Laurel, a promising chemist, is being stalked in one of the chemistry labs. She catches a glimpse of the intruder, but gets away by breaking a glass window. Within the next few days, other promising students such as the always comical Bell and the football star Chip are killed by The Clown. As the killer’s net tightens around Laurel, those close to her are also targeted by the ruthless maniac. It is only a matter of time before she, too, comes face to face with the dark evil bent on revealing the Tears of a Clown. Who will survive? Views: 427
A Feast in Exile draws readers back to the time when the Mongol hordes of Timur (known in the West as Tamerlane) swept across fourteenth-century India and Asia. Delhi\'s civilized veneer crumbles along with its walls. Foreigners, which the vampire Saint-Germain-here called Sanat Ji Mani-surely is, lose their positions, homes, wealth, and sometimes their lives, if they cannot escape the falling city. Before he can flee Delhi, Sanat Ji Mani must ensure the safety of Avasa Dani, his beautiful ward, who has been abandoned by her husband. Sanat Ji Mani\'s love has awakened Avasa Dani\'s every sense; even she will become a vampire upon her death, but she finds no terror in this fate. Avasa Dani and Rojire, Sanat Ji Mani\'s servant, successfully make their way out of Delhi, but Sanat Ji Mani himself is trapped. His life is bought by his skills with medicine, but, at Timur\'s command, he must travel-by day, and exposed to the sun-with the conqueror\'s army. Crippled and unable to escape, he knows that his vampire nature will soon be revealed, and then... Avasa Dani, with a worried Rojire at her side, considers her options as a woman without a visible male protector in a land and time ruled by men. While one of Sanat Ji Mani\'s allies searches desperately for the missing vampire, Saint-Germain and a young acrobat, with whom he has escaped from Timur\'s forces, make their slow and painful way to freedom. The journey changes them both forever. Views: 427
This collection of unabridged, spectacular steampunk speculations includes several classics of the genre. These tales will sweep you away with their amazing automata, daring dirigibles, grinding gears, and scintillating steam as days long gone are infused with tech. In “Smoke City,” by Christopher Barzak, a woman comes to terms with the loss of her family to the child labor mills of the city. A doctor tries to cope with a strange plague terrorizing the citizens of London in Jeffrey Ford’s “Dr. Lash Remembers.” In “Machine Maid,” by Margo Lanagan, a sexually repressed wife gets revenge on her husband through a robot maid. Friedrich Engels strives to spread class revolution as a labor organizer for factory cyborg matchstick girls in Arbeitskraft, by Nick Mamatas. In “Ninety Thousand Horses,” by Sean McMullen, an acclaimed mathematician, with a murky past, is forced to spy for an industrialist prior to becoming Britain’s foremost rocket expert during World War II. An orphan boy builds an automaton, in an aging scientist’s laboratory, that becomes more than an idle companion in Cherie Priest’s “Tanglefoot (A Clockwork Century Story).” In “Clockwork Fairies,” by Cat Rambo, an English aristocrat courts a woman who would rather spend her time in a laboratory than at high society balls. At Chicago’s Columbian Exposition, in 1893, an Algerian bodyguard crosses paths with a disoriented naked man in Chris Roberson’s “Edison’s Frankenstein.”. In “A Serpent in the Gears,” by Margaret Ronald, a dirigible journeys to an isolated land and discovers people and animals merged with machine parts. Radio Jones finds a way to listen in on the Naked Brains, who rule the world, while Rudy the Red fights against the oppressors in “Zeppelin City,” by Michael Swanwick & Eileen Gunn. Edited by Allan Kaster. Views: 427
Watching Anna die was horrifying. But Eric can change it.Again and again, he goes back in time to stop her from dying... and yet she keeps dying. It's as if fate wants her dead.But fate has nothing to do with it. The government that oppresses the people know if Anna lives, they can never exist. As they try to kill her, Eric tries to save her, because a world without her is unthinkable.Anna sings like an angel, and it moves Eric in ways he can’t describe. Watching her die is an agony he cannot bear. So he goes back and prevents her death.It isn’t be the first time he changed history to save her, and it won’t be the last. Eric continually goes back through time to alter whatever may harm her, but it’s a full time job. No matter how many times he goes back through time to prevent her death, some new tragedy arises to end her life. Whether a lighting rig that falls on her during a concert or a train that crushes her—it’s as if fate wants her dead.But fate has nothing to do with it. The tyrannical government of Eric’s timeline knows this talented young singer’s very existence is a threat to their power. Something she does changes the awful future that is Eric’s present, and only with her death can their “perfect” society prevail. With access to Eric’s machine, they’ll stop at nothing to end her life for good.Ironically, Eric is running out of time. His machine is breaking down. Soon he won’t be able to undo the damage done by the leaders of his world. His choices narrow, and he knows even if he can save her she may never remember he existed.Eric has to try, for a world without her is unthinkable. Views: 427
THE CLASSIC STORIES THAT INSPIRED THE BLOCKBUSTER FILM
Conan the Barbarian is one of the greatest fictional heroes ever created—a swordsman who cuts a swath across the lands of the Hyborian Age, annihilating powerful sorcerers, deadly creatures, and whole armies of ruthless foes. Today his name is synonymous with the epic battles of ancient times, but Conan originated in the early decades of the twentieth century with one of the founding fathers of fantasy, the visionary Robert E. Howard. The unforgettable stories collected here form a thrilling adventure, following Conan from his mercenary youth to his bloody conquests on the frontier and even the high seas. Bold and enduring, the legend of Conan the Barbarian continues to grow in popularity and influence.
From the Paperback edition. Views: 427
