Search Worlds Without End

A piercingly raw debut story collection from a young writer with an explosive voice; a treacherously surreal, and, at times, heartbreakingly satirical look at what it's like to be young and black in America.

From the start of this extraordinary debut, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's writing will grab you, haunt you, enrage and invigorate you. By placing ordinary characters in extraordinary situations, Adjei-Brenyah reveals the violence, injustice, and painful absurdities that black men and women contend with every day in this country.

These stories tackle urgent instances of racism and cultural unrest, and explore the many ways we fight for humanity in an unforgiving world. In "The Finkelstein Five," Adjei-Brenyah gives us an unforgettable reckoning of the brutal prejudice of our justice system. In "Zimmer Land," we see a far-too-easy-to-believe imagining of racism as sport. And "Friday Black" and "How to Sell a Jacket as Told by Ice King" show the horrors of consumerism and the toll it takes on us all.

Entirely fresh in its style and perspective, and sure to appeal to fans of Colson Whitehead, Marlon James, and George Saunders, Friday Black confronts readers with a complicated, insistent, wrenching chorus of emotions, the final note of which, remarkably, is hope.

Danged Black Thing is an extraordinary collection of stories about love and migration, gender and class, patriarchy and womanhood, from a remarkable and original voice. Traversing the West and Africa, they celebrate the author's own hybridity with breathtaking sensuousness and lyricism.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, June 2011. It is included in the collection Snapshots from a Black Hole & Other Oddities (2012).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This story was originally published in The Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance (2008), edited by Trisha Telep.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

This story originally appeared in the anthology Chicks Kick Butt, edited by Kerrie L. Hughes and Rachel Caine.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

White skin, green eyes, red hair...

Furo Wariboko -- born and bred in Lagos -- wakes up on the morning of his job interview to discover he has turned into a white man. As he hits the city streets running, still reeling from his new-found condition, Furo finds the dead ends of his life open out before him. As a white man in Nigeria, the world is seemingly his oyster -- except for one thing: despite his radical transformation, Furo's ass remains robustly black...

Funny, fierce, inventive and daringly provocative -- this is a very modern satire, with a sting in the tail.

Procession of the Black Sloth was first published in The Imago Sequence and Other Stories (Night Shade Books, 2007). It was the only story original to that collection.

Read this story for free on Baen's site.

A collection of nineteen dark, wildly imaginative short stories from the author of the award-winning TikTok sensation Tender Is the Flesh.

From celebrated author Agustina Bazterrica, this collection of nineteen brutal, darkly funny short stories takes into our deepest fears and through our most disturbing fantasies. Through stories about violence, alienation, and dystopia, Bazterrica's vision of the human experience emerges in complex, unexpected ways--often unsettling, sometimes thrilling, and always profound. In "Roberto," a girl claims to have a rabbit between her legs. A woman's neighbor jumps to his death in "A Light, Swift, and Monstrous Sound," and in "Candy Pink," a woman fails to contend with a difficult breakup in five easy steps.

Written in Bazterrica's signature clever, vivid style, these stories question love, friendship, family relationships, and unspeakable desires.

An exciting new mystery-thriller about an unusual girl who lives secretly in the basement of the grand Biltmore Estate and must solve a dark and dangerous mystery. This Disney Hyperion novel became a New York Times Bestseller in the first week of its release, and has been a smash hit ever since.

"Never go into the forest, for there are many dangers there, and they will ensnare your soul."

Serafina has never had a reason to disobey her pa and venture beyond the grounds of Biltmore Estate. There's plenty to explore in Mr. and Mrs. Vanderbilt's vast and oppulent home, but she must take care to never be seen. None of the rich folk upstairs know that Serafina exists; she and her pa, the estate's maintenance man, have lived in the basement for as long as Serafina can remember. She has learned to prowl through the darkened corridors at night, to sneak and hide, using the mansion's hidden doors and secret passageways.

But when children at the estate start disappearing, only Serafina knows the clues to follow. A terrifying man in a black cloak stalks Biltmore's corridors at night. Following her own harrowing escape, Serafina risks everything by joining forces with Braeden Vanderbilt, the young nephew of Biltmore's owners. Braeden and Serafina must uncover the Man in the Black Cloak's true identity before all of the children vanish one by one.

Serafina's hunt leads her into the very forest that she has been taught to fear, where she discovers a forgotten legacy of magic. In order to save the children of Biltmore, Serafina must not only face her darkest enemy, but delve into the strange mystery of her own identity.

Ruth Black is an English novelist left widowed by the mysterious death of her husband during the Great War. She immigrates to Australia and settles in the sleepy coastal town of Pelican River to repair her broken heart and work on her next novel.

But her quiet life is thrown into disarray when Aunt Julia arrives with an urgent, dreadful message. Ruth's life is in danger and the threat is from a source not entirely of this world. With the assistance of her butler Rutherford, and her good friend the inventor Gordon Duncombe, Ruth finds herself caught up in a hair-raising race to defy her impending doom.

It is a sunny summer Sunday in a remote Swiss village, and a christening is being celebrated at a lovely old farmhouse. One of the guests notes an anomaly in the fabric of the venerable edifice: a blackened post that has been carefully built into a trim new window frame. Thereby hangs a tale, one that, as the wise old grandfather who has lived all his life in the house proceeds to tell it, takes one chilling turn after another, while his audience listens in appalled silence. Featuring a cruelly overbearing lord of the manor and the oppressed villagers who must render him service, an irreverent young woman who will stop at nothing, a mysterious stranger with a red beard and a green hat, and, last but not least, the black spider, the tale is as riveting and appalling today as when Jeremias Gotthelf set it down more than a hundred years ago. The Black Spider can be seen as a parable of evil in the heart or of evil at large in society (Thomas Mann saw it as foretelling the advent of Nazism), or as a vision, anticipating H. P. Lovecraft, of cosmic horror. There's no question, in any case, that it is unforgettably creepy.

The latest winner of the Ampersand Prize is a genre-smashing hostage drama about 14-year-old Tamara, who's faced with an impossible choice when she falls for her kidnappers.

Yet this is no ordinary kidnapping. Tamara has been living on a star freighter in deep space, and her kidnappers are terrifying Crowpeople -- the only aliens humanity has ever encountered. No-one has ever survived a Crowpeople attack, until now -- and Tamara must use everything she has just to stay alive.

But survival always comes at a price, and there's no handbook for this hostage crisis. As Tamara comes to know the Crowpeople's way of life, and the threats they face from humanity's exploration into deep space, she realises she has an impossible choice to make.

Should she stay as the only human among the Crows, knowing she'll never see her family again... or inevitably betray her new community if she wants to escape?

In Charlie Hall's world, shadows can be altered, for entertainment and cosmetic preferences--but also to increase power and influence. You can alter someone's feelings--and memories--but manipulating shadows has a cost, with the potential to take hours or days from your life. Your shadow holds all the parts of you that you want to keep hidden--a second self, standing just to your left, walking behind you into lit rooms. And sometimes, it has a life of its own.

Charlie is a low-level con artist, working as a bartender while trying to distance herself from the powerful and dangerous underground world of shadow trading. She gets by doing odd jobs for her patrons and the naive new money in her town at the edge of the Berkshires. But when a terrible figure from her past returns, Charlie's present life is thrown into chaos, and her future seems at best, unclear--and at worst, non-existent. Determined to survive, Charlie throws herself into a maelstrom of secrets and murder, setting her against a cast of doppelgangers, mercurial billionaires, shadow thieves, and her own sister--all desperate to control the magic of the shadows.

A doll that may be haunted leads three friends on a thrilling adventure in this delightfully creepy novel from the New York Times best-selling cocreator of the Spiderwick Chronicles.

Zach, Poppy, and Alice have been friends forever. And for almost as long, they've been playing one continuous, ever-changing game of pirates and thieves, mermaids and warriors. Ruling over all is the Great Queen, a bone-china doll cursing those who displease her. But they are in middle school now. Zach's father pushes him to give up make-believe, and Zach quits the game. Their friendship might be over, until Poppy declares she's been having dreams about the Queen - and the ghost of a girl who will not rest until the bone-china doll is buried in her empty grave.

Zach and Alice and Poppy set off on one last adventure to lay the Queen's ghost to rest. But nothing goes according to plan, and as their adventure turns into an epic journey, creepy things begin to happen. Is the doll just a doll or something more sinister? And if there really is a ghost, will it let them go now that it has them in its clutches?

Acclaimed authors Holly Black (Ironside) and Cecil Castellucci (Boy Proof) have united in geekdom to edit short stories from some of the best selling and most promising geeks in young adult literature: M.T. Anderson, Libba Bray, Cassandra Clare, John Green, Tracy Lynn, Cynthia and Greg Leitich Smith, David Levithan, Kelly Link, Barry Lyga, Wendy Mass, Garth Nix, Scott Westerfield, Lisa Yee, and Sara Zarr.

With illustrated interstitials from comic book artists Hope Larson and Bryan Lee O'Malley, Geektastic covers all things geeky, from Klingons and Jedi Knights to fan fiction, theater geeks, and cosplayers. Whether you're a former, current, or future geek, or if you just want to get in touch with your inner geek, Geektastic will help you get your geek on!

Table of Contents:

• Once You're a Jedi, You're a Jedi All the Way - shortfiction by Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci
• Comic: Top Five Words or Phrases You Need to Know in Klingon
• One of Us - shortfiction by Liz Braswell [as by Tracy Lynn]
• Comic: How to Tell If Your Dice Are Lucky or Unlucky
• Definitional Chaos - shortfiction by Scott Westerfeld
• Comic: I Totally Shouldn't Post This, But...
• I Never - shortfiction by Cassandra Clare
• Comic: How to Look Cool and Not Drool in Front of Your Favorite Author
• The King of Pelinesse - shortfiction by M. T. Anderson
• Comic: How to Identify... The Living Dead
• The Wrath of Dawn - shortfiction by Cynthia Smith and Greg Leitich Smith
• Comic: How to Cheat Like a Nerd
• Quiz Bowl Antichrist - shortfiction by David Levithan
• Comic: How to Cosplay with Common Household Objects
• The Quiet Knight - shortstory by Garth Nix
• Comic: What Your Instrument Says About You
• Everyone But You - shortfiction by Lisa Yee
• Comic: What to Remember When Going to a Convention
• Secret Identity - novelette by Kelly Link
• Comic: What Your Lunch Table Status Means
• Freak the Geek - shortfiction by John Green
• Comic: How to Hook Up at the Science Fair
• Truth About Dino Girl - shortfiction by Barry Lyga
• Comic: Theater Types
• This Is My Audition Monologue - shortfiction by Sara Zarr
• Comic: The Best Ways to Stay Awake for Gaming
• The Stars at the Finish Line - shortfiction by Wendy Mass
• Comic: What Kind of Geek Are You?
• It's Just a Jump to the Left - shortfiction by Libba Bray

This short story originally appear in the anthology Young Warriors: Stories of Strength (2005) edited by Tamora Pierce and Josepha Sherman, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, September 2012.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This novelette originally appeared almost simultaneously in Lightspeed, September 2014, and the anthology Monstrous Affections: An Anthology of Beastly Tales (2014), edited by Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Nine (2015), edited by Jonathan Strahan and The Year's Best Military SF & Space Opera: First Annual Edition (2015), edited by David Afsharirad.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Full Moon City (2010), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Darrell Schweitzer. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Five (2011), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and Circus: Fantasy Under the Big Top (2012) edited by Ekaterina Sedia.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology So Fey: Queer Fairy Fiction (2007), edited by Steve Berman. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Two (2008), edited by Jonathan Strahan, Bloody Fabulous (2012), edited by Ekaterina Sedia, and Beyond the Woods: Fairy Tales Retold (2016), edited by Paula Guran. The story is included in the collection The Poison Eaters and Other Stories (2010).

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology The Eternal Kiss: 13 Vampire Tales of Blood and Desire (2009), edited by Trisha Telep. It can also be found in the anthologies:

• The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Four (2010), edited by Jonathan Strahan
• The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2010, edited by Paula Guran
• Vampires: The Recent Undead (2011), edited by Paula Guran
• The Urban Fantasy Anthology (2011), edited by Peter S. Beagle and Joe R. Lansdale

The story is included in the collection The Poison Eaters and Other Stories (2010). It was expanded into the full novel The Coldest Girl in Coldtown (2013).

Tana lives in a world where walled cities called Coldtowns exist. In them, quarantined monsters and humans mingle in a decadently bloody mix of predator and prey. It's an eternal party, shown on TV 24 hours a day - gorgeous, glamorous, deadly! Because, once you pass through Coldtown's gates, you can never leave...

A wholly original story of rage and revenge, love and loathing from bestselling author, Holly Black. Fans of TRUE BLOOD will love this dark and sexy tale.

Children can have a cruel, absolute sense of justice. Children can kill a monster and feel quite proud of themselves. A girl can look at her brother and believe they're destined to be a knight and a bard who battle evil. She can believe she's found the thing she's been made for.

Hazel lives with her brother, Ben, in the strange town of Fairfold where humans and fae exist side by side. The faeries' seemingly harmless magic attracts tourists, but Hazel knows how dangerous they can be, and she knows how to stop them. Or she did, once.

At the center of it all, there is a glass coffin in the woods. It rests right on the ground and in it sleeps a boy with horns on his head and ears as pointy as knives. Hazel and Ben were both in love with him as children. The boy has slept there for generations, never waking.

Until one day, he does...

As the world turns upside down and a hero is needed to save them all, Hazel tries to remember her years spent pretending to be a knight. But swept up in new love, shifting loyalties, and the fresh sting of betrayal, will it be enough?

Pick your poison: Vampires, devils, werewolves, faeries, or...? Find them all here in Holly Black's amazing first collection. In her debut collection, "New York Times" best-selling author Holly Black returns to the world of Tithe in two darkly exquisite new tales. Then Black takes readers on a tour of a faerie market and introduces a girl poisonous to the touch and another who challenges the devil to a competitive eating match. Some of these stories have been published in anthologies such as "21 Proms, The Faery Reel, " and "The Restless Dead," and many have been reprinted in many "Best of " anthologies. "The Poison Eaters" is Holly Black's much-anticipated first collection, and her ability to stare into the void--and to find humanity and humor there--will speak to young adult and adult readers alike.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Magic in the Mirrorstone: Tales of Fantasy (2008), edited by Steve Berman. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Three (2009), edited by Jonathan Strahan. The story is included in the collection The Poison Eaters and Other Stories (2010).

It's the epic battle of brains against manes. Which side are you on?

It's a question as old as time itself: which is better, the zombie or the unicorn? This all-original anthology edited by Holly Black (Team Unicorn) and Justine Larbalestier (Team Zombie) makes strong arguments for both sides in the form of spectacular short stories. Half of the stories portray the strengths--for good and evil--of unicorns, and half show the good (and really, really badass) side of zombies. Contributors include many bestselling authors, including Cassandra Clare, Libba Bray, Maureen Johnson, Meg Cabot, Scott Westerfeld, and Margo Lanagan.

This anthology will have everyone asking: Team Zombie or Team Unicorn?

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Holly Black and Justine Larbalestier
• The Highest Justice - short story by Garth Nix
• Love Will Tear Us Apart - novelette by Alaya Dawn Johnson
• The Purity Test - short story by Naomi Novik
• Bougainvillea - novelette by Carrie Ryan
• A Thousand Flowers - novelette by Margo Lanagan
• The Children of the Revolution - novelette by Maureen Johnson
• The Care and Feeding of Your Baby Killer Unicorn - novelette by Diana Peterfreund
• Inoculata - novelette by Scott Westerfeld
• Princess Prettypants - novelette by Meg Cabot
• Cold Hands - short story by Cassandra Clare
• The Third Virgin - novelette by Kathleen Duey
• Prom Night - novelette by Libba Bray

We never saw them coming.

Entire cities disappeared in the blink of an eye, leaving nothing but dust and rubble. When an alien race came to make Earth theirs, they brought with them a weapon we had no way to fight, a universe-altering force known as thelemity. It seemed nothing could stop it -- until we discovered we could wield the power too.

Five hundred years later, the Earth is locked in a grinding war of attrition. The talented few capable of bending thelemity to their will are trained in elite military academies, destined for the front lines. Those who refused to support the war have been exiled to the wilds of a ruined Earth.

But the enemy's tactics are changing, and Earth's defenders are about to discover this centuries-old war has only just begun. As a terrible new onslaught looms, heroes will rise from unlikely quarters, and fight back.

Bill Easter is a petty criminal with a little problem of a £2000 overdraft that he has no means of covering. Fortunately, the bank manager has a problem of his own and needs Bill's help: the corpse of Henry Oliver, a very hairy 350 lb. mass murderer known as the "Mad Vicar," is decomposing in his basement and he wants it removed. Among Oliver's papers, Bill finds a tantalizing reference to treasure that leads him to the Scottish isle of Rhona, where he meets the intrepid General Charles Kirk of British Foreign Intelligence and the arrogant adventurer J. Moldon Mott. Kirk has uncovered a bizarre plot involving the KGB, ex-Nazi mad scientists, and the "mad monk" Rasputin, while Mott is hot on the trail of a stolen gold treasure. And when they discover the island is being overrun by werewolves, their trip to the remote island will become a very beastly business indeed!

When nine-year-old Billy Fenwick goes missing on a train journey through East Germany, British authorities suspect a kidnapping for ransom, or, worse, a Communist conspiracy. But after Billy returns home safely, it appears his parents' fears were unfounded... until a 107-degree fever sets in and the buboes begin to appear on his body. Famed bacteriologist Sir Marcus Levin immediately recognizes the signs of bubonic plague, the first outbreak in England since the Black Death of the fourteenth century. But is it a freak occurrence caused by a natural mutation, or Soviet germ warfare, or something far more sinister? The trail leads Sir Marcus and General Kirk of British Intelligence to an ancient German crypt, where a macabre relic from 600 years ago will provide the crucial clue in unravelling the diabolical plot of a madman hellbent on wiping out the human race!

With a plot featuring Cold War intrigue, Nazi mad scientists, and a pandemic that threatens to destroy humanity by mutating people into fungoid monsters, it is not hard to see why A Scent of New-Mown Hay (1958) became a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic and an instant science-fiction classic.

After a British ship's crew and a remote Russian village are wiped out in mysterious and horrible fashion, General Charles Kirk of British Foreign Intelligence sets out to investigate. As the plague spreads to England, Kirk's frantic search leads him from the desolate tundra of Russia to the ruins of a Nazi camp, the site of unthinkable wartime atrocities. But who is responsible? Is it a Soviet experiment gone horribly wrong, the work of a depraved madman, or something else entirely? And can it be stopped?

The year is 1969, and in the British city of Randelwyck, racial tensions are simmering, the situation made worse by an acute housing shortage. Legendary architect Sir George Strand has a solution: two new state-of-the-art high-rise apartment towers linked by walkway bridges, symbolizing the bridging of differences and a closer link between the divided citizenry. But when a professor hints there may be a dangerous flaw in the blueprints, he quickly winds up dead. What is Sir George's real agenda, and how is it connected to the centuries-old legend of the Skulda?

John Blackburn (1923-1993) was regarded as one of the great British mystery and thriller writers of his time. This first-ever reprint of Blow the House Down (1970), one of his scarcest books, includes a new introduction by Adrian Schober.

When a dead prostitute is found floating in the river, the local police assume it's just another routine murder. But when it turns out the woman may have been a notorious East German spy, General Charles Kirk and his assistants, Michael Howard and Penny Wise, are called in from the Foreign Intelligence Office to investigate. Kirk is baffled: the evidence of numerous impeccable witnesses proves the murder could not possibly have happened, and yet there's a dead body in the morgue to show that it did. The only clue is a wooden idol in the form of a hideous, misshapen boy, found in the dead woman's room. Soon Kirk realizes that this is no case of espionage: what he is up against is an evil centuries old and long thought vanished from the earth. And when Kirk and his colleagues get close to the truth, can they unravel the mystery before they become the next victims?

For two centuries, the body of Sir Martin Railstone, poet, artist, and libertine, has lain undisturbed in its crypt, amidst rumours that important artistic works of genius are buried with him. The Church of England has refused to allow the opening of the tomb, believing that Railstone was a murderer and dabbler in the black arts and that anything buried with him must be diabolical in nature. But now plans are in the works for a dam, which will leave Railstone's tomb under 100 feet of water, and a small group of fanatics obsessed with Railstone will stop at nothing to discover the crypt's contents before they are lost forever. One of them, George Banks, opens the tomb and releases something ancient and evil. He dies a horrible death, raving mad, and whatever he has unleashed is not done killing. Four unlikely allies - a clergyman, an ex-Nazi scientist, a journalist, and a historian - must come together and find a way to stop it before it destroys all of humanity....

For centuries, the small English village of Dunstonholme has been the scene of mysterious tragedies. Local lore traces these strange events back to the year 1300, when a sect of Christian heretics known as the Children of Paul were involved in a bloody massacre. Since that time, there have been railway disasters, mining accidents, shipwrecks, and other terrible happenings. Now a wave of suspicious deaths has the locals on edge and looking for explanations. Dr. Tom Allen and adventurer J. Moldon Mott think they know what is behind the killings: an ancient evil, dating back seven hundred years, lies hidden underground... and it is preparing to emerge to the surface...

Teenager Elsie Kerr is hospitalized with a high fever after being found raped and beaten. When eminent bacteriologist Sir Marcus Levin is asked to consult on the case, Elsie accuses him of the crime, pointing at him and screaming "Devil Daddy!"

Then things really start to get weird: Elsie ages eighty years in a matter of hours, and Sir Marcus finds himself racing to stop whatever killed her from spreading while at the same time trying to clear his name. But the trail will take some unexpected and sinister turns: a grisly corpse half-eaten by pigs, a coven of madmen with a diabolical plot, a grotesque and sacrilegious ritual, and an enigmatic old man who may be unable to die!

'We daren't go a-hunting for fear of little men' - words from an old children's song, but to the residents of one Welsh village it's more than just a nursery rhyme. A legend has been handed down through the ages, telling of an ancient mountain people, dedicated to evil, who were massacred by the villagers' ancestors three thousand years ago. No animals ever graze on the northern slope of the mountain where the bloodshed took place and strange incidents befall anyone who wanders there.

What does this folktale have to do with a man's recurring nightmares, the murder of a High Court judge, an outbreak of food poisoning, a strange road accident, and the death of a rock climber? Sir Marcus Levin is determined to find out, but he may not be prepared for the truth that will be revealed in a horrifying ceremony at the heart of the mountain.

Three directors of the Van Traylen Fellowship have died in gruesome ways, and now a bus carrying children to the Fellowship's orphanage has crashed, killing the driver and injuring seven-year-old Mary Valley. While in hospital, Mary, the daughter of triple murderess Anna Harb, suffers horrifying nightmares, and psychiatrist Peter Haynes believes she is mentally ill. Is it schizophrenia, or is there another explanation for the strange and vivid images she sees: memories of a past life, psychic possession, or psychological trauma from her lunatic mother's attempts to give her occult powers?

When Anna Harb goes on a murderous rampage at the hospital, trying to kill Mary and exclaiming that she is a 'soul that should never have been born', the mystery deepens. General Charles Kirk of Foreign Intelligence and his friend Marcus Levin, an esteemed scientist, believe Harb is connected with the Van Traylen deaths and are determined to solve the case. They will follow the madwoman to a remote Scottish island, where against the backdrop of a blazing Guy Fawkes night bonfire, a sinister and unthinkable truth will be revealed!

A centuries-old Eastern European legend of a deadly curse. Three hardened criminals who die horribly after being driven mad by terror. A washed-up actress hellbent on revenge against her critics. A sadistic doctor who takes pleasure in mutilating his patients. What is the connection between them? Reporter Harry Clay will risk his life and sanity to find out. Because he knows that when the curtain goes up on the opening night performance of the new play 'Our Lady of Pain', based on the life of the murderous Countess Elizabeth Bathory, something horrific is going to happen and a bloodbath will ensue...

An inexplicable wave of murders has the country gripped with terror. Ordinary men and women are suddenly going mad, committing brutal and horrific killings before slaying themselves in equally gruesome ways. General Charles Kirk of British Foreign Intelligence thinks the case has something to do with the most evil man he has ever encountered: Tommy Ryde, a British spy who defected to the Nazis during the Second World War and who seemed to possess a strange hypnotic power. But Ryde has been dead for forty years - or has he? Kirk and his colleague Bill Easter are determined to find out. The trail takes them first to Berlin to seek answers from a notorious Nazi war criminal, then to an underwater search of a sunken U-boat off the Scottish coast, and finally to the torture chambers beneath a madman's Gothic castle in Dartmoor, where they will come face to face with the living incarnation of evil...

Bill Easter and his common law wife Peggy Tey, two small-time crooks down on their luck, have been hired to help steal the legendary treasure of Renaissance goldsmith Guido Calamai. Calamai's masterpiece, the Cyclops Goblet, rumoured to possess the power to kill whoever drinks from it, is under lock and key at the Danemere Museum, the gift of the rich and eccentric millionaire Sir Thomas Moscow. But when the goblet is discovered to be a fake, Bill and Peggy must locate the real treasure, and to find it, they'll need to break Sir Thomas's daughter, a murderous madwoman, out of an asylum. From there, the trail leads to a remote Scottish island contaminated with anthrax, where the treasure - and the shocking truth behind its deadly power - is hidden. Unprepared for the horror they will uncover, will Bill and Peggy survive to enjoy their big payday, or will they become the next victims of the Cyclops Goblet?

A remote area of the Scottish Highlands has been cordoned off and is being guarded by an army of I.R.A. mercenaries and ex-Nazi thugs. Local rumour has it that eccentric laird James Fraser Clyde is looking for buried treasure, but the British government fears he might be building an atomic bomb in an attempt to win Scottish independence. Yet the truth may be something far worse: a mysterious contagion is turning the locals into deformed, grunting creatures, with a single-minded urge to kill and spread their infection. Sir Marcus Levin, the Nobel Prize-winning bacteriologist, must find a way to halt the epidemic before it gets out of hand and destroys the world. But what is causing it? Who started it, and why? And can it be stopped?

First published in 1976, John Blackburn's horror thriller The Face of the Lion capitalized on the popularity of apocalyptic zombie tales in the wake of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968). This edition includes a new introduction by Greg Gbur, which situates Blackburn's novel within the tradition of zombie literature.

'Come back Paddy Reilly to me' - the words of an old Irish ballad provide a sinister theme for John Blackburn's novel, The Household Traitors (1971).

No one has seen or heard from Patricia Reilly in more than thirty years, so why are a ruthless industrial tycoon, a Soviet defector, and a deranged serial killer all so anxious to find her? The trail of mystery leads from a town terrorized by murder to a remote railway station in North Wales, where the action reaches a climax aboard a runaway steam train. Along the way, a hijacked aircraft, a corpse in a safe, and a number of strangled women with something strange in common provide some of the clues, but the final secret is reserved for the last pages of this ingenious thriller.

Simon and Laura Armstrong's marriage is on the rocks. His drinking and abuse of prescription drugs are getting worse and blackouts and violence are occurring with greater frequency. Laura believes things are going to get better: Simon has just been appointed to an important post in the university's English department, the couple are adopting a daughter, and Simon has almost finished work on an important new book, The Cult of the Vampire. Knowing of Simon's vampire fixation, his friend Dr Charles Abbott introduces him to a patient of his, a beautiful and bewitching young woman named Stella Johnson, who is convinced she has been bitten by a vampire and can no longer see her reflection in a mirror. But Abbott cannot foresee the ultimate consequences of bringing Simon and Stella together, or the violence and tragedy that will ensue....

A black shape detached itself from the dark sun - some wound had opened in the solar flesh.

The bird's eyes were red evil - its feathers were ancient night, its wings great black sails from the cauldrons of hell...

It landed, and the ship rocked, taking in water under its weight.

The beak darted, stabbed a man through the chest. The bird lifted the corpse by its head, rose, flung its meat into the sea.

"The Mace! Use it!" shouted Hooud.

"I don't have the power." the witch answered...

Sunday's a thug, an enforcer, a leg-breaker for hire. When his boss sends him to kill a mysterious new business partner, his target strikes back in ways Sunday could never have imagined. Murdered, brought back to a twisted half-life, Sunday finds himself stuck in the middle of a race to find an ancient stone with the power to grant immortality. With it, he might live forever. Without it, he's just another rotting extra in a George Romero flick.

Everyone's got a stake, from a psycho Nazi wizard and a razor-toothed midget, to a nympho-demon bartender, a too-powerful witch who just wants to help her homeless vampires, and the one woman who might have all the answers -- if only Sunday can figure out what her angle is.

Before the week is out he's going to find out just what lengths people will go to for immortality. And just how long somebody can hold a grudge.

In the 2040s, a dangerous new ideology has captured the imagination of young people around the world.

Su lit a fire. Rayen showed her friends how to kill. Julia's ex unleashed an epidemic. But the Crosses are greater than the sum of their parts.

Told through the writings of several first-hand witnesses, Crossed offers a chilling glimpse into a fervently brutal future.

By turns bizarre, unsettling, spooky, and sublime, Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories showcases nine incomparable stories from master conjuror Algernon Blackwood. Evoking the uncanny spiritual forces of Nature, Blackwood's writings all tread the nebulous borderland between fantasy, awe, wonder, and horror. Here Blackwood displays his best and most disturbing work-including "The Willows," which Lovecraft singled out as "the single finest weird tale in literature"; "The Wendigo"; "The Insanity of Jones"; and "Sand."

"If a ghost is seen, what is it interests me less than than what sees it?" Thus Algernon Blackwood describes his fascination with human beings' ability to sense invisible powers and stirrings in the universe, a fascination he developed most famously in his stories about mystical, ineffable encounters with nature. This collection, selected by renowned scholar of the supernatural, E. F. Bleiler, is an excellent sample of Blackwood's work, including 12 of his best ghost stories and a crime story as well. Blackwood is acknowledged today as the author who made the ghost story into a respectable literary form.

Contents:

• v - Introduction (The Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood) - (1973) - essay by Everett F. Bleiler [as by E. F. Bleiler]
• xii - Introduction (The Tales of Algernon Blackwood) - (1938) - essay by Algernon Blackwood
• 1 - The Willows - (1907) - novella by Algernon Blackwood
• 53 - Secret Worship - [John Silence] - (1908) - novelette by Algernon Blackwood
• 88 - Ancient Sorceries - [John Silence] - (1908) - novelette by Algernon Blackwood
• 137 - The Glamour of the Snow - (1911) - novelette by Algernon Blackwood
• 158 - The Wendigo - (1910) - novella by Algernon Blackwood
• 208 - The Other Wing - (1915) - shortstory by Algernon Blackwood
• 228 - The Transfer - (1911) - shortstory by Algernon Blackwood
• 240 - Ancient Lights - (1914) - shortstory by Algernon Blackwood
• 247 - The Listener - (1907) - novelette by Algernon Blackwood
• 276 - The Empty House - [Jim Shorthouse] - (1906) - shortstory by Algernon Blackwood
• 293 - Accessory Before the Fact - (1914) - shortstory by Algernon Blackwood
• 300 - Keeping His Promise - (1906) - shortstory by Algernon Blackwood
• 316 - Max Hensig - (1945) - shortfiction by Algernon Blackwood (variant of Max Hensig -- Bacteriologist and Murderer 1907)

Jimbo follows the interesting tale of a young boy who suffers a serious accident, and is transported into the astral world between worlds, where he experiences a frightful out of body experience that forces him to literally fight for his life against the personification of his own fear.

From one of the greatest and most prolific authors of 20th century weird fiction come four of the very best strange stories ever told.

In "The Willows," two men become stranded on an island in the Danube delta, only to find that they might be in the domain of some greater power from beyond the limits of human experience.

"The Wendigo" features a hunting party in Ontario who begin to fear that they are being stalked by an entity thought to be confined to legend.

In "The Man Whom the Trees Loved," a couple is driven apart as the husband is enthralled by the possessive and jealous spirits dwelling in the nearby forest.

And lastly, in conversation with the occult detective and physician Dr. John Silence, a traveler relates his nightmarish visit to a strange town in Northern France, and the maddening secret from his past revealed by its inhabitants, in "Ancient Stories."

Contents:

• v - Introduction (The Complete John Silence Stories) - essay by S. T. Joshi
• 1 - A Psychical Invasion - [John Silence] - (1908) - novella
• 44 - Ancient Sorceries - [John Silence] - (1908) - novelette
• 84 - The Nemesis of Fire - [John Silence] - (1908) - novella
• 144 - Secret Worship - [John Silence] - (1908) - novelette
• 172 - The Camp of the Dog - [John Silence] - (1908) - novella
• 230 - A Victim of Higher Space - [John Silence] - (1914) - novelette

Contents:

• 3 - The Doll - novelette by Algernon Blackwood
• 75 - The Trod - novelette by Algernon Blackwood

The Willows is a novella by Algernon Blackwood. It originally appeared in the collection The Listener and Other Stories (1907).

In 1776, the rebellion of the American colonies against British rule was crushed. Now, in 1777-the year of the hangman-George Washington is awaiting execution, Benjamin Franklin's banned rebel newspaper, Liberty Tree, has gone underground, and young ne'er-do-well Creighton Brown, a fifteen-year-old Brit, has just arrived in the colonies. Having been shipped off against his will, with nothing but a distance for English authorities, Creighton befriends Franklin, and lands a job with his print shop. But the English general expects the spoiled yet loyal Creighton to spy on Franklin. As battles unfold and falsehoods are exposed, Creighton must decide where his loyalties lie... a choice that could determine the fate of a nation.

Set on the open road of long-distance truckers, the novel opens as Lucas and Sophie hear a cry for help over their CB radio. A trucker is cursed - doomed to drive forever or be consumed by fire. Their failure to save him means the curse falls upon them.

In Speculative Blackness, André M. Carrington analyzes the highly racialized genre of speculative fiction -- including science fiction, fantasy, and utopian works, along with their fan cultures -- to illustrate the relationship between genre conventions in media and the meanings ascribed to blackness in the popular imagination.

Carrington's argument about authorship, fandom, and race in a genre that has been both marginalized and celebrated offers a black perspective on iconic works of science fiction. He examines the career of actor Nichelle Nichols, who portrayed the character Uhura in the original Star Trek television series and later became a recruiter for NASA, and the spin-off series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, set on a space station commanded by a black captain. He recovers a pivotal but overlooked moment in 1950s science fiction fandom in which readers and writers of fanzines confronted issues of race by dealing with a fictitious black fan writer and questioning the relevance of race to his ostensible contributions to the 'zines. Carrington mines the productions of Marvel Comics and the black-owned comics publisher Milestone Media, particularly the representations of black sexuality in its flagship title, Icon. He also interrogates online fan fiction about black British women in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Harry Potter series.

Throughout this nuanced analysis, Carrington theorizes the relationship between race and genre in cultural production, revealing new understandings of the significance of blackness in twentieth-century American literature and culture.

WFA nominated novella.

More like a novella, this work follows Ingram York who has a friend, Michael Billa. Michael is the sort of friend whose funny tales and charm can pull you out of the lowest depths and make life good once more. Along comes Clinton Deix, a friend of Michael's, who tells Ingram that most of those stories are lies. It isn't long before Ingram doesn't know who to believe, and what most confuses and upsets him is that both say they are old school chums. But Michael is in his late thirties while Clinton is still fifteen...

It was rarer and more beautiful and more precious than any piece of mineral, and its dark glory outshone the lights of the heavens. The Gods had wrought it in the Country of the Immortals, and no other thing like it had ever been upon the earth.

No emperor could hold the Throne without the Black Star. And now it was missing.

The evil Green-Robed One who had usurped the Throne would use his darkest powers to reclaim it--and the young warrior fleeing across the embattled land with his beautiful lady to save this treasure of all the world would know the torments of the damned...

A pivotal time in the career of John Grimes. A fateful journey in the vessel Discovery, bearing an uncanny kinship to the legendary vessel the Bounty. The big black mark on his service record.

A tongue-in-cheek horror fantasy. Uncle Albert is laid out in his coffin, dead as a doornail, and things are reasonably normal. But then Uncle Albert sits up and claims he has been robbed of his gold. It takes considerable effort to push him back again and get the lid fastened down.

Her Grandmother may be dead, but she's not done with life... yet.

As Jessamyn packs for Malaysia, it's not a good time to start hearing a bossy voice in her head. Broke, jobless and just graduated, she's abandoning America to return 'home'. But she last saw Malaysia as a toddler - and is completely unprepared for its ghosts, gods and her eccentric family's shenanigans.

Jess soon learns her 'voice' belongs to Ah Ma, her late grandmother. She worshipped the Black Water Sister, a local deity. And when a business magnate dared to offend her goddess, Ah Ma swore revenge. Now she's decided Jess will help, whether she wants to or not.

As Ah Ma blackmails Jess into compliance, Jess fights to retain control. But her irrepressible relative isn't going to let a little thing like death stop her, when she can simply borrow Jess's body to make mischief. As Jess is drawn ever deeper into a world of peril and family secrets, getting a job becomes the least of her worries.

Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award-nominated Novella

In an alternate New Orleans caught in the tangle of the American Civil War, the wall-scaling girl named Creeper yearns to escape the streets for the air - in particular, by earning a spot on-board the airship Midnight Robber. Creeper plans to earn Captain Ann-Marie's trust with information she discovers about a Haitian scientist and a mysterious weapon he calls The Black God's Drums.

But Creeper also has a secret herself: Oya, the African orisha of the wind and storms, speaks inside her head, and may have her own ulterior motivations.

Soon, Creeper, Oya, and the crew of the Midnight Robber are pulled into a perilous mission aimed to stop the Black God's Drums from being unleashed and wiping out the entirety of New Orleans.

As the daughter of spiritualists, Mara's childhood was filled with séances and scam mediums. Now she's ready to start over with her fiancé, Neil, far away from the superstitions she's learned to loathe...but her past isn't willing to let her go so easily.

And neither is Blackwood House.

When Mara and Neil purchased the derelict property, they were warned that ever since the murder of its original owner, things have changed. Strange shadows stalk the halls. Doors creak open by themselves. Voices whisper in the night. And watchful eyes follow her every move. But Mara's convinced she can't possibly be in danger. She doesn't believe in ghost stories, and she didn't buy a haunted house--it's just not possible.

Because ghosts aren't real... are they?

Inspired by the gothic classic Wuthering Heights, this stunning new fantasy from the author of the Books of Pellinor is a fiercely romantic tale of betrayal and vengeance.

In a savage land sustained by wizardry and ruled by vendetta, Lina is the enchanting but willful daughter of a village lord. She and her childhood companion, Damek, have grown up privileged and spoiled, and they're devoted to each other to the point of obsession. But Lina's violet eyes betray her for a witch, and witches are not tolerated in a brutally patriarchal society. Her rank protects her from persecution, but it cannot protect her from tragedy and heartbreak.

An innocent visitor stands witness to the devastation that ensues as destructive longing unleashes Lina's wrath, and with it her forbidden power. Whether drawn by the romantic, the magical, or the gothic, readers will be irresistibly compelled by the passion of this tragic tale.

Spain, 1496 The Inquisition. The darkness that is Europe is let by the human bonfires of the Inquisition. Even those cold and courtly agents of the Dark one are sickened by the sound of cracking bones. Even they are moved to try and stop this human horror that beggars hell. Even they - who soar on leather wings, who fill their bowls with blood - even they can feel fear and know failure.

Stoker, Shirley Jackson, and Locus Award-nominated Anthology

Birds are usually loved for their beauty and their song. They symbolize freedom, eternal life, the soul.

There's definitely a dark side to the avian. Birds of prey sometimes kill other birds (the shrike), destroy other birds' eggs (blue jays), and even have been known to kill small animals (the kea sometimes eats live lambs). And who isn't disgusted by birds that eat the dead--vultures awaiting their next meal as the life blood flows from the dying. One of our greatest fears is of being eaten by vultures before we're quite dead.

Is it any wonder that with so many interpretations of the avian, that the contributors herein are eager to be transformed or influenced by them? Included in Black Feathers are those obsessed by birds of one type or another. Do they want to become birds or just take on some of the "power" of birds? The presence or absence of birds portends the future. A grieving widow takes comfort in her majestic winged neighbors, who enable her to cope with a predatory relative. An isolated society of women relies on a bird to tell their fortunes. A silent young girl and her pet bird might be the only hope a detective has of tracking down a serial killer in a tourist town. A chatty parrot makes illegal deals with the dying. A troubled man lives in isolation with only one friend for company--a jackdaw.

In each of these fictions, you will encounter the dark resonance between the human and avian. You see in yourself the savagery of a predator, the shrewd stalking of a hunter, and you are lured by birds that speak human language, that make beautiful music, that cypher numbers, and seem to have a moral center. You wade into this feathered nightmare, and brave the horror of death, trading your safety and sanity for that which we all seek--the promise of flight.

Blackburn is a serial killer. But, like the rest of us, he confronts the same hypocrisies and frustrations of the world and, unable to help himself, or at the mercy of circumstance, he crosses a dangerous threshold--and he kills. In this novel, we meet many of his twenty-one victims: law enforcers, writers, adulterers, auto mechanics, and other liars. And each crime reveals another side of his psyche . . . and his disturbing rationale for murder.

A new collection of stories from A. S. Byatt is always a winner, and this one takes an unexpected turn, bringing shivers as well as delights. Leaves rustle underfoot in a dark wood: two middle-aged women walk into a forest, as they did when they were girls, confronting their fears and memories and the strange thing they saw in their childhood - or thought they saw - so long ago. A distinguished obstetrician and young woman artist find they have sharply contrasting ideas about body parts, birth and death; an innocent member of an evening class harbours unexpected view on 'raw material'. The stories in this marvellous collection are by turns funny, spooky, sparkling and haunting. The Little Black Book of Stories holds its secrets, adding a dark quality to Byatt's famous skill in mixing folk and fairy tale with everyday life.

Table of Contents:

• The Thing in the Forest - (2002)
• Body Art - (2003)
• A Stone Woman - (2003)
• Raw Material - (2002)
• The Pink Ribbon - (2003)

This short story originally appeared in The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard (2012), and was reprinted in Lightspeed, June 2015.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Cutting a terrifying path from a Pennsylvania farm to the Europe of the 1930s, Banning Jainlight becomes the private pornographer of the world's most evil man. In a Vienna window, he glimpses the face of a lost erotic dream, and from there travels to the Twentieth Century's darkest corner to confront its shocked and secret conscience. One of Steve Erickson's most acclaimed novels, Tours of the Black Clock crosses the intersections of passion and power and gazes into a clock with no face, where memory is the gravity of time and all the numbers fall like rain.

Celebrating a new generation of bestselling and acclaimed Black writers, The Black Girl Survives in This One makes space for Black girls in horror. Fifteen chilling and thought-provoking stories place Black girls front and center as heroes and survivors who slay monsters, battle spirits, and face down death. Prepare to be terrified and left breathless by the pieces in this anthology.

Contents:

• Down in the Black Gang (1969)
• The Shadow of Space (1967)
• A Bowl Bigger Than Earth (1967)
• Riverworld (1966)
• A Few Miles (1960)
• Prometheus (1961)
• The Blasphemers (1964)
• How Deep the Grooves (1963)

Nearing the end of a long mission exploring deep space, the spacecraft USS Palomino is returning to Earth.

The Palomino crew discover a black hole in space with a spaceship nearby, somehow defying the hole's massive gravitational pull. The ship is identified as the long-lost USS Cygnus.

The Palomino crew cautiously boards the Cygnus and soon encounter the ship's commander, Dr. Hans Reinhardt, a brilliant scientist. Aided by a crew of faceless, black-robed android drones and his sinister-looking robot Maximilian, Reinhardt explains that he has lived all alone on the Cygnus for years.

The rest of the Palomino crew grow suspicious of the faceless drones' human-like behaviour: the crew had been lobotomized and "reprogrammed" by Reinhardt to serve him. When this is discovered, Reinhardt takes Kate prisoner, ordering his sentry robots to take her to the ship's hospital bay to be lobotomized.

Just as the process begins, Holland rescues Kate. Fearing the situation is escalating dangerously, Booth attempts to escape alone in the Palomino. Reinhardt orders the craft shot down. A meteor storm then destroys the starboard generator. Without its null-gravity bubble, the Cygnus starts to break apart under the black hole's huge gravitational forces.

Reinhardt and the Palomino survivors separately plan their escape aboard a small probe ship. The crew of the Palamino reach the probe ship, only to discover the controls locked onto a flightpath that takes them into the black hole, which takes them through a surreal hell back to Earth.

Nebula Award winning and Hugo and BSFA nominated short story.

In a far future society, people change their identities, their societal roles, even their personalities based upon the masks they must don each day. But not every citizen is content to play their mandated part, longing instead to discover who they are beneath their masks: sinner, gentleman, or beast.

The story originally appeared in Interzone, #220 February 2009, follewed a few months later by a publication in Apex Magazine, July 2009. It can also be found the Nebula Awards Showcase 2011, edited by Kevin J. Anderson.

Read the full story for free at Apex.

Nebula Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology Full Spectrum 3 (1991), edited by Lou Aronica, Amy Stout and Betsy Mitchell. The sotry is included in the collection Black Glass (1998).

Carry Nation is on the loose again, breaking up discos, smashing topless bars, preaching clean living to men more intent on booze and babes. And what of Tonto, ever-faithful companion of the Lone Ranger, turning 40 without so much as a birthday call from the masked man? In these and 13 other short fictions, Fowler once again demonstrates the imaginative virtuosity that is fast winning her critical acclaim.

Table of Contents:

• Black Glass - (1991) - novelette
• Contention - (1986) - shortstory
• Shimabara - (1995) - shortstory
• The Elizabeth Complex - (1996) - shortstory
• Go Back - (1998) - shortstory
• The Travails - shortstory
• Lieserl - (1990) - shortstory
• Letters From Home - (1987) - shortstory
• Duplicity - (1989) - shortstory
• The Faithful Companion at Forty - (1987) - shortstory
• The Brew - (1995) - shortstory
• Lily Red - (1988) - shortstory
• The Black Fairy's Curse - (1997) - shortstory
• The View from Venus - (1986) - novelette
• Game Night at the Fox and Goose - (1989) - shortstory

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Black Swan, White Raven (1997), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, November 2015. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Eleventh Annual Collection (1998), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and Happily Ever After (2011), edited by John Klima. The story is included in the collection Black Glass (1998).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

In post-World War I England, a young woman inherits a mysterious library and must untangle its powerful secrets...

With the stroke of a pen, twenty-three-year-old Ivy Radcliffe becomes Lady Hayworth, owner of a sprawling estate on the Yorkshire moors. Ivy has never heard of Blackwood Abbey, or of the ancient bloodline from which she's descended. With nothing to keep her in London since losing her brother in the Great War, she warily makes her way to her new home.

The abbey is foreboding, the servants reserved and suspicious. But there is a treasure waiting behind locked doors: a magnificent library. Despite cryptic warnings from the staff, Ivy feels irresistibly drawn to its dusty shelves, where familiar works mingle with strange, esoteric texts. And she senses something else in the library too, a presence that seems to have a will of its own.

Rumors swirl in the village about the abbey's previous owners, about ghosts and curses, and an enigmatic manuscript at the center of it all. And as events grow more sinister, it will be up to Ivy to uncover the library's mysteries in order to reclaim her own story - before it vanishes forever.

You ask me if I can forgive myself? I can forgive myself for many things. For where I left him. For what I did.

The text of The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains was first published in the collection anthology Stories: All New Tales edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio (2010). This gorgeous full-color illustrated book version was born of a unique collaboration between writer Neil Gaiman and artist Eddie Campbell, who brought to vivid life the characters and landscape of Gaiman's story.

Naples, the 19th Century.

In the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, holy music has power. Under the auspices of the Church, the Sung Mass can bring about actual miracles like healing the sick or raising the dead. But some believe that the musicodramma of grand opera can also work magic by channeling powerful emotions into something sublime. Now the Prince's Men, a secret society, hope to stage their own black opera to the empower the Devil himself–and change Creation for the better.

Conrad Scalese is a struggling librettist whose latest opera has landed him in trouble with the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Rescued by King Ferdinand II, Conrad finds himself recruited to write and stage a counteropera that will, hopefully, cancel out the apocalyptic threat of the black opera, provided the Prince's Men, and their spies and saboteurs, don't get to him first.

And he only has six weeks to do it.

From dark felines crossing your path to shattered looking glasses, Black Cats and Broken Mirrors dares to ask the question: "What if some of those long-treasured superstitions are actually true?" Join Jane Yolen, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, Michelle West, Charles de Lint, Nancy Springer, Peter Crowther, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Esther Friesner, and more as they explore the lighter and darker sides of our fears in this original anthology featuring stories ranging from urban fantasy and magical realism to horror!

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - (1998) - essay by John Helfers
• How It All Began - (1998) - novelette by Esther M. Friesner
• Thirteen Ways to Water - (1998) - shortstory by Bruce Holland Rogers
• Whirlwinds - (1998) - shortstory by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
• Dead Tired - (1998) - shortstory by Russell Davis
• Shards of Glass - (1998) - novelette by Kristin Schwengel
• The Cat Who Wasn't Black - (1998) - shortstory by Josepha Sherman
• Something Blue - (1998) - shortstory by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
• Crossroads - (1998) - shortstory by Genevieve Gorman
• The Song of a Gift Horse - (1998) - shortstory by Dean Wesley Smith
• Caretaking - (1998) - shortstory by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
• Soul Cages - (1998) - shortstory by Carol Rondou
• Auspicious Stars - (1998) - novelette by Jane Lindskold
• Frogged - (1998) - shortstory by Nancy Springer
• Step on the Crack - (1998) - shortstory by Michelle West
• Front-Page McGuffin and the Greatest Story Never Told - (1998) - novelette by Peter Crowther
• To the Edge of the World - (1998) - shortstory by Zane Stillings
• The Pennymen - (1998) - shortstory by Charles de Lint

The privileged daughter of famous television actors, Charlotte, "Lit," Moylan is ready to enjoy one last wild fling before college and adulthood. In fact, the whole idyllic hamlet of Kamensic, New York, is ready to party, for legendary avant-garde film director--and Lit's godfather--Alex Kern is coming back to reopen his fabulous mansion, Bolerium. But it won't be just any party. It'll be the event of all time.

The whole town is invited, young and old, famous and obscure. But other, more disturbing guests are arriving, too--seen at the edges of the forest, at the margins of the night. Kern's connections extend far beyond Hollywood, beyond even the modern age... and in Bolerium's echoing halls a fearsome confrontation is gathering, between ancient powers of the darkness and those sworn to stop them at any cost, no matter what--or who--the sacrifice... even an innocent girl.

Nobody has a "normal" family, but Vesper Wright's is truly... something else. Vesper left home at eighteen and never looked back--mostly because she was told that leaving the staunchly religious community she grew up in meant she couldn't return. But then an envelope arrives on her doorstep.

Inside is an invitation to the wedding of Vesper's beloved cousin Rosie. It's to be hosted at the family farm. Have they made an exception to the rule? It wouldn't be the first time Vesper's been given special treatment. Is the invite a sweet gesture? An olive branch? A trap? Doesn't matter. Something inside her insists she go to the wedding. Even if it means returning to the toxic environment she escaped. Even if it means reuniting with her mother, Constance, a former horror film star and forever ice queen.

When Vesper's homecoming exhumes a terrifying secret, she's forced to reckon with her family's beliefs and her own crisis of faith in this deliciously sinister novel that explores the way family ties can bind us as we struggle to find our place in the world.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology The Djinn Falls in Love & Other Stories (2017), edited by Jared Shurin and Mahvesh Murad. It can also be found in the anthology The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018, edited by N.K. Jemisin and John Joseph Adams.

A demon lurks at the heart of the Church in this classic fantasy of black magic set in Victorian England.

Canon Throcton is a brilliant scholar, but the men of the Church can't bring themselves to trust him. His devoted study of Hebrew and Arabic has drawn him far from their intellectual center, and his interest in the obscure writings of the Middle East verges on heresy. Canon knows his brothers in the cathedral don't take him seriously, but he doesn't care. A great and terrible power hides within him, and he'll unleash it even if it destroys the Church, the town, and everyone he holds dear.

When a junior colleague is elevated above him, Canon reaches into his darkest volume of forbidden lore and tries his hand at black magic. It works better than he ever could have dreamed. His enemy is destroyed and Canon feels the tug of unimaginable power. He's taken the first step along the road to damnation--and soon he'll burn.

The Black Fox is English gothic at its best, a story of weird fiction steeped in author H. F. Heard's unparalleled knowledge of world religion. Never before had black magic been written about with such deep understanding, and never since has it been more terrifying.

Haunted by stories he hears while on jury duty, a documentary filmmaker finds himself in an abandoned mall at the dead of night.

Read the full story for free at Tor Reactor

With 'incantatory prose' that 'sweeps over the reader like a dream,' (Philadelphia Inquirer), Hoffman follows her celebrated bestseller The Probable Future, with an evocative work that traces the lives of the various occupants of an old Massachusetts house over a span of two hundred years.

In a rare and gorgeous departure, beloved novelist Alice Hoffman weaves a web of tales, all set in Blackbird House. This small farm on the outer reaches of Cape Cod is a place that is as bewitching and alive as the characters we meet: Violet, a brilliant girl who is in love with books and with a man destined to betray her; Lysander Wynn, attacked by a halibut as big as a horse, certain that his life is ruined until a boarder wearing red boots arrives to change everything; Maya Cooper, who does not understand the true meaning of the love between her mother and father until it is nearly too late. From the time of the British occupation of Massachusetts to our own modern world, family after family's lives are inexorably changed, not only by the people they love but by the lives they lead inside Blackbird House.

These interconnected narratives are as intelligent as they are haunting, as luminous as they are unusual. Inside Blackbird House more than a dozen men and women learn how love transforms us and how it is the one lasting element in our lives. The past both dissipates and remains contained inside the rooms of Blackbird House, where there are terrible secrets, inspired beauty, and, above all else, a spirit of coming home.

From the writer Time has said tells "truths powerful enough to break a reader's heart' comes a glorious travelogue through time and fate, through loss and love and survival. Welcome to Blackbird House.

KYNING

Kyning was a dreamer and he dreamed often of winning. But his role in the play was always the black knight and the black knight always lost.

Now a "perfect" planet was in danger of conquest by a man Kyning had taught to be a winner. Suddenly Kyning had to shake free of his dreams and face a reality that contained his death--and that of a planet!

Jack Chatwin has visions, which leave tangible evidence - sounds and smells, which linger afterwards. What he sees are two primitive figures, with painted faces - Greyface and Greenface, a brother and sister. He calls them bullrunners.

John Garth is a city dowser, searching for the mythical pre-Roman city of Glanum. He hopes to find an entryway to the elusive city beneath Exburgh, Jack's home town. And he thinks Jack's bullrunners may be connected to Glanum...

Years later, Jack, now grown up, agrees to take part in experiments to investigate his bullrunners - until Greyface, the male, breaks free of Jack and takes corporeal form. The bullrunner kidnaps Jack's young daughter so Jack will force Greenface to follow her brother-husband, even against her own wishes. Though Greyface returns the daughter, he keeps a shadow of her, which takes on a life of its own. If Jack refuses to co-operate, the shadow will drain his daughter's vitality and personality - and her very future.

The story of Jack's search for Greenface is interwoven with the connections between the bullrunners and the mystical city of Glanum in this resonant tale of ancient mythic wonder.

"Earthwind" tells the story of two people trapped on the planet Aeran. What has happened to the colonists of this world to obliterate their memories of who and what they were, and to have rebuilt in their place a precise and accurate copy of a stone age culture that had flourished in Ireland during the fourth millennium BC?

Elspeth Mueller, fighting against time as her memory decayed, tried to find out; deformed and embittered by the barbaric rituals of her 'civilised' home world, she struggled against her own fear to accept the cruel customs of Aerani society, knowing that the answers she sought lay in those same rituals.

Peter Ashka, his life inextricably interwoven with the I Ching, tried to find out as well - but his quest brought him into conflict with the two authorities that guided his life.

The Fear--mysterious, unstoppable, this deadly plague is slowly wiping out humanity. And only one world seems to offer hope of sanctuary--Ree'hdworld, home of the only other intelligent beings in the universe. But Ree'hdworld is not as safe as it seems. For something has been happening to the natives--both the friendly Ree'hd and their more primitive kinsmen, the Rundil.

And only three people stand any chance of discovering and surviving the danger that the humans of Ree'hdworld will soon face: Kristina, an Earthwoman who is slowly "going Ree'hd"; Maguire, a blind man who should have died centuries ago and who, living, has seen all the secrets of the universe; and Zeitman, a brilliant scientist who holds the key to salvation of Ree'hdworld in his mind--in only he can discover it in time...

From the landscapes of prehistory to the 40th millennium AD, from post-war England to the full canvas of the inhabited galaxy, Robert Holdstock's haunting mythic imagination weaves eight stories of arresting power and ingenuity.

Table fo Contents:

• 9 - Earth and Stone - (1980) - novelette
• 43 - A Small Event - (1977) - novelette
• 65 - In the Valley of the Statues - (1979) - novelette
• 87 - Ashes - (1974) - novelette (variant of Ash, Ash)
• 109 - Travellers - (1976) - novelette
• 147 - The Touch of a Vanished Hand - (1975) - short story
• 157 - The Graveyard Cross - (1976) - short story
• 177 - Mythago Wood - (1981) - novelette

BSFA winning and WFA nominated noveltte. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 1981. It was later expanded to the full novel Mythago Wood (1984). The story can also be found in the anthologies The Best Fantasy Stories from the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (1985), edited by Edward L. Ferman and The Secret History of Fantasy (2010), edited by Peter S. Beagle. The story included in the collection In the Valley of the Statues (1982).

CRUACHOS

AN ANCIENT EVIL FROM THE DAWN OF TIME

In a quiet town west of London stand the ruins of a burned-out church. Within th eruins is a stone font. Legends surround it, dark stories of blood, suicide and madness.

To a tortured yound mother it is a prison--holding in its cold grasp the sould of her young son.

To an ambitious Berkeley historian, it is a journey into the occult, a challenge for his questing mind.

Ti a beautiful French psychic, it is a key to the deep past, a a memory stone bearing the secrets of an anciet people.

For all of them it is a deadly danger.

Wondrous beings inhabit these woods - creatures born of mythic fable and the mortal subconscious: a snow woman beckons; a scientist succumbs to an age-old madness, tale-tellers weave extraordinary yarns of terrifying primal power. Explore a dark and secret place where daemons roam, where conjurers work their awesome pagan magic in eight stunning short stories of exhilarating imagination by the acclaimed author of Lavondyss and the World Fantasy Award-winning classic Mythago Wood.

Table of Contents

• The Bone Forest - novella
• Thorn - (1984) - short story
• The Shapechanger - (1989) - novelette
• The Boy Who Jumped the Rapids - (1984) - novelette
• Time of the Tree - (1988) - short story
• Magic Man - (1976) - short story
• Scarrowfell - (1987) - novelette
• The Time Beyond Age - (1976) - novelette

There is a landscape between reality and dreams, a strange and primitive country that exists upon the edge of our waking world. Michael Whitlock knows that country well. His best friend lives there...

It beings with a scatter of earth, thrown over the infant by unseen hands, a haunting attack that is repeated day after day, culminating with an explosive fall of mud that nearly kills the boy. And found in those tons of raw, wet earth: flints, chalk artefacts, and remains of a primitive shrine and the dismembered carcase of a hunting dog.

The Whitlocks' house, in the Kentish Weald, stands near a chalk-pit, and it is here that their son, Michael creates his preculiar imaginary world, making his camp by the pile of grave-earth from that early attack. Unaware of what is happening to him, the boy touches and uses the strange force that now ebbs and flows in the pit, And when the haunting returns, this time it is more subtle, almost wonderful in its secutive nature.

Torn between a fear of the supernatural and greed for the results of Michael's power, his adoptive parents are helpless. It is left to Françoise Jeury, a psyhic investigator, to piece together the bizarre truth of th epit and the shrine and the oddly silent boy.

WFA and BSFA winning novellette. It originally appeared in the anthology A Whisper of Blood (1991), edited by Ellen Datlow. The story can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Fifth Annual Collection (1992), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. It is included in the collection The Ragthorn (2015).

On the shores of time are ferocious, mind-tearing winds... when they take you... you die.....

Kris Dojaan, seeking a brother swept into Othertime, volunteers for the suicide mission from which no man has returned--on a planet ravaged by mysterious Winds that whine and scream, then explode, booming into the atmosphere--a planet where men die into the future and vanish beneath a blackening sky....

Leo Faulcon must find the terrible secret of the Winds, a secret guarded by horrible mutants, the Manchanged, genetically and surgically adapted to the harsh planet...to rescue Kris and Faulcon's lover, Lena...before they disappear forever!

The magical island of Chynchin is facing conquerors from abroad and something sinister from within...

Veycosi, in training as a griot (an historian and musician), hopes to sail off to examine the rare Alamat Book of Light and thus secure a spot for himself on Chynchin's Colloquium of scholars. However, unexpected events prevent that from happening. Fifteen Ymisen galleons arrive in the harbor to force a trade agreement on Chynchin. Veycosi tries to help, hoping to prove himself with a bold move, but quickly finds himself in way over his head.

Bad turns to worse when malign forces start stirring. Children are disappearing and an ancient invading army, long frozen into piche statues by island witches is stirring to life - led by the fearsome demon known as the Blackheart Man.

Veycosi has problems in his polyamorous personal life, too. How much trouble can a poor student take? Or cause all by himself.

Cornell Woolrich's Black Alibi is a memorable trip into the heart of darkness. Woolrich transports us to Ciudad Real, a dimly-lit South American town terrorized by a string of grisly murders. Police and townsfolk believe the culprit is an escaped jaguar. But is the killer animal or human? Is it really a big cat? Might it be Kiki Walker, a slinky nightclub chanteuse? Could it be Kiki's ambitious press agent Jerry Manning, anxious to boost his own notoriety in any way he can? Or is it Clo-Clo, the town's sexy, gold-digging trollop? Woolrich keeps us guessing.

Earth was dying...

One fourth of its population was dead. The rest had little time to live.

A mass of interstellar matter had invaded the solar system, fling planets out of orbit and blocking off the sun. In that titanic disaster, Man had one small chance to survive: Appeal to an alien intelligence that might exist and that might - or might not - care enough to help!

London 1975. The World War is grinding to a halt. A force more sinister than Hitler's Nazi regime has seized control of Europe and is systematically destroying every adversary. Ordered by his superiors to return to British Headquarters, located in a vast underground fortress, "the Lieutenant" is torn between abiding by military codes and doing what he knows is right for his country.

In a dark future America where consumerism and gun culture are unchecked, a young family teams up to celebrate the first shopping day of the Christmas season in the most patriotic way possible... in Alex Irvine's Tor.com Original short story, Black Friday.

The full story can be read for free at Tor.com.

Though sometimes overshadowed by his contemporaries like H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard, Carl Jacobi (1908-1997) was one of the finest American writers of pulp horror tales of the first half of the 20th century. Revelations in Black, originally published by the legendary Arkham House as a limited edition in 1947 and long out of print, contains 21 of his best stories, originally published in pulp magazines like Weird Tales.

As a bonus, this new edition features an additional seldom-seen Jacobi tale, "Rails of the Yellow Skull", and a new introduction by Luigi Musolino.

Contents:

• 3 - Revelations in Black - (1933) - novelette
• 24 - Phantom Brass - (1934) - short story
• 32 - The Cane - (1934) - short story
• 46 - The Coach on the Ring - (1931) - short story (variant of The Haunted Ring)
• 56 - The Kite - (1937) - short story
• 66 - Canal - (1944) - short story
• 81 - The Satanic Piano - (1934) - novelette
• 103 - The Last Drive - (1933) - short story
• 108 - The Spectral Pistol - short story (variant of The Phantom Pistol 1941)
• 122 - Sagasta's Last - (1939) - short story
• 131 - The Tomb from Beyond - (1932) - short story
• 149 - The Digging at Pistol Key - (1947) - short story
• 164 - Moss Island - (1930) - short story
• 173 - Carnaby's Fish - (1945) - short story
• 185 - The King and the Knave - (1938) - short story
• 193 - Cosmic Teletype - (1938) - short story
• 208 - A Pair of Swords - (1933) - short story
• 212 - A Study in Darkness - (1939) - short story
• 228 - Mive - (1928) - short story
• 234 - Writing on the Wall - (1944) - short story
• 250 - The Face in the Wind - (1936) - novelette

In this magic shop the magic is real. And the trick is on you.

Citrus Glade is a dying town that needs new businesses, but the one that just opened is doing much more harm than good. Stranger Lyle Miller's magic shop seems to only stock what its select customers desire. When four outcast boys buy common party tricks, only Lyle knows what those tricks can really do. As subtle changes occur around town, a few residents realize that something is amiss...and getting worse. But it may already be too late. Lyle's black magic has empowered more townspeople to help him execute his Grand Adventure, a plan that will reduce the town, and half the state, to rubble.

Three-time Hugo Award winner N. K. Jemisin's first collection of short fiction challenges and enchants with breathtaking stories of destruction, rebirth, and redemption.

N. K. Jemisin is one of the most powerful and acclaimed speculative fiction authors of our time. In the first collection of her evocative short fiction, Jemisin equally challenges and delights readers with thought-provoking narratives of destruction, rebirth, and redemption.

Dragons and hateful spirits haunt the flooded streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a parallel universe, a utopian society watches our world, trying to learn from our mistakes. A black mother in the Jim Crow South must save her daughter from a fey offering impossible promises. And in the Hugo award-nominated short story "The City Born Great," a young street kid fights to give birth to an old metropolis's soul.

On the surface, Aunt Maria seems like a cuddly old lady, all chit-chat and lace doilies and unadulterated NICEness!

When Mig and her family go for a short visit, they soon learn that Aunt Maria rules the place with a rod of sweetness that's tougher than iron and deadlier than poison. Life revolves around tea parties, while the men are all grey-suited zombies who fade into the background, and the other children seem like clones.

The short visit becomes a long stay, and when all talk of going home ceases, Mig despairs! Things go from bad to worse when Mig's brother Chris tries to rebel, but is changed into a wolf .

Mig is convinced that Aunt Maria must be a witch – but who will believe her? It's up to Mig to figure out what's going on. Maybe the ghost who haunts the downstairs bedroom holds the key?

A BRAM STOKER AWARD FINALIST!

It was just another day at the beach. Then the world ended.

Mike and Beth were strangers before the night of the meteor shower. Chance made them neighbors, a bottle of champagne brought them together, and a shared need for human connection sparked something more.

Following their drunken and desperate one-night stand, the two discover the astronomical event has left widespread destruction in its wake. But the cosmic lightshow was only part of something much bigger, and far more terrifying.

When a lost car key leaves them stranded on an empty stretch of Oregon coast and inhuman screams echo from the dunes, when the rising tide reaches for their car and unspeakable horrors close in around them, these two self-destructive souls must fight to survive a nightmare of apocalyptic scale.

A Heian-era mansion stands abandoned, its foundations resting on the bones of a bride and its walls packed with the remains of the girls sacrificed to keep her company. It's the perfect venue for a group of thrill-seeking friends, brought back together to celebrate a wedding. A night of food, drinks, and games quickly spirals into a nightmare as secrets get dragged out and relationships are tested.

But the house has secrets too. Lurking in the shadows is the ghost bride with a black smile and a hungry heart. And she gets lonely down there in the dirt.

What color is the fire of your soul? It's been seven years since the life shattering event that Eddie Farris thinks of as The Showdown, the night he killed his father in self-defense. Seven years since his world was almost completely destroyed. Seven years of trying to put his life back together and trying to put the past behind him. But sometimes the past doesn't want to stay dead. And sometimes the dead come back to haunt you... In Eddie Farris's case, the dead are coming back with a vengeance. Who is the strange, mysterious figure who seems to be following Eddie, taunting him, threatening him? He can't be the person Eddie thinks he is. That man's been dead for seven years. Ever since the night of The Showdown, when Eddie killed him... Nothing in Eddie's world is quite what it seems to be, and he will soon discover that you never really escape your destiny; it burns within the fire of your soul...

WFA-nominated Novella

This story originally appeared as a companion to the limited-edition collection The Ape's Wife and Other Stories (2013). The story is also included in the collection Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume Two) (2015). It was later expanded to a short novel of the same name.

World Fantasy Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in The New Yorker, October 31 1994. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Eighth Annual Collection (1995), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, Sympathy for the Devil (2010), edited by Tim Pratt, and The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (2011), edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. The story is included in the collection Everything's Eventual: 14 Dark Tales (2002).

This short story originally appeared in the anthology New Voices in Science Fiction (2003), edited by Mike Resnick, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, October 2012. It can also be found in the anthology The Dragon Done It (2008) edited by Eric Flint and Mike Resnick.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

In the year 2022 and in pursuit of her beautiful and not-quite-human father, Carme Risk enters "narrative therapy." Propelled by her memories and her father's journal, which take her from the Edenic island of her childhood to arevolutionary Latin American nation to life in northern California, Risk moves through worlds of romantic intrigue, machete murders, occult freedom fighters, and surrealist bacchanals. A roiling and wildly entertaining ride, Black Oxen is a hyperinventive novel of political revolution, black magic, sexual predation, and a therapist's couch.

REBUILD A LIFE, SAVE A CITY

Silas Decker had his world destroyed when he was attacked by vampires outside of New Amsterdam. He has rebuilt his life a dozen times in the last three hundred years--each time less and less successfully. Now he lives alone, buried under a hoarding habit, struggling to find some reason to wake up with the setting of the sun.

Eloise is a Virtue, pledged to hunting evil. What she doesn't know is how to live alone in a city full of strangers who know nothing about monsters.

Seth is the sixteen-year old Prince of Boston, ward of the Wolf King. Now he is left in a city that desperately needs his protection with enemies gathering all around.

Joshua believes he is a normal, college-bound high school senior. His life is shattered when he wakes up in a field, covered with blood, and the prom committee scattered in pieces about him like broken dolls.

These four must now come together to unravel a plot by Wickers, witches who gain power from human sacrifices and have the power to turn any human into their puppet. Four people who lost everything struggle to save Boston by saving each other.

This short story originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, #18 March 2008. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection (2009), edited by Gardner Dozoiz, and Realms 2: The Second Year of Clarkesworld Magazine (2010), edited by Nick Mamatas and Sean Wallace. It is included in the collection The Sky That Wraps (2010).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

This work features short stories, no translation rights, no Australian rights, US (and first world) hardback published this month. Sometimes writing is so extraordinary that you just have to publish it. Even if it breaks all the rules. "Black Juice" is such a collection. However few copies we sell of this book, Margo Lanagan is the sort of writer that every list has to publish if that list cares about good writing. These are stories of immense confidence, the faith they have in the believability of the worlds they describe is such that they explain nothing, concede nothing but still leave you entranced because of the beauty of the writing and the intense clarity of the characters. Whether a family singing their daughter to her death, a young boy braving pestilential angels to give his grandmother the death she deserves and himself the freedom he deserves, or clowns on a sniper spree at a clown convention these are people you believe in, peopling stories of quite extraordinary power.

Contents:

• Singing My Sister Down
• My Lord's Man
• Red Nose Day
• Sweet Pippit
• House of the Many
• Wooden Bride
• Earthly Uses
• Perpetual Light
• Yowlinin
• Rite of Spring

Sturgeon and Hugo Award nominated novella.

People move to New York looking for magic and nothing will convince them it isn't there.

Charles Thomas Tester hustles to put food on the table, keep the roof over his father's head, from Harlem to Flushing Meadows to Red Hook. He knows what magic a suit can cast, the invisibility a guitar case can provide, and the curse written on his skin that attracts the eye of wealthy white folks and their cops. But when he delivers an occult tome to a reclusive sorceress in the heart of Queens, Tom opens a door to a deeper realm of magic, and earns the attention of things best left sleeping.

A storm that might swallow the world is building in Brooklyn. Will Black Tom live to see it break?

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, January 2011. It can also be found in the anthology Lightspeed: Year One (2011), edited by John Joseph Adams. The story is included in the collection Space Is Just a Starry Night (2013).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in Century, Number 3, September-October 1995, and waa reprinted in Lightspeed, October 2014. It is included in the collection Stranger Things Happen (2001).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

even ingeniously reinvented fairy tales that play out with astonishing consequences in the modern world

Finding seeds of inspiration in the Brothers Grimm, seventeenth-century French lore, and Scottish ballads, Kelly Link spins classic fairy tales into utterly original stories of seekers--characters on the hunt for love, connection, revenge, or their own sense of purpose.

In "The White Cat's Divorce," an aging billionaire sends his three sons on a series of absurd goose chases to decide which will become his heir. In "The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear," a professor with a delicate health condition becomes stranded for days in an airport hotel after a conference, desperate to get home to her wife and young daughter, and in acute danger of being late for an appointment that cannot be missed. In "Skinder's Veil," a young man agrees to take over a remote house-sitting gig for a friend. But what should be a chance to focus on his long-avoided dissertation instead becomes a wildly unexpected journey, as the house seems to be a portal for otherworldly travelers--or perhaps a door into his own mysterious psyche.

Twisting and winding in astonishing ways, expertly blending realism and the speculative, witty, empathetic, and never predictable--these stories remind us once again of why Kelly Link is incomparable in the art of short fiction.

Table of Contents:

• The White Cat's Divorce - (2019) - novelette
• Prince Hat Underground - novelette
• The White Road - novelette
• The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear - (2019) - short story
• The Game of Smash and Recovery - (2015) - short story
• The Lady and the Fox - (2014) - novelette
• Skinder's Veil - (2021) - novelette

Road trips can be hell.

Siblings Jonah and Nell Talbot used to be inseparable, but ever since Jonah suddenly blew town twelve years ago, they couldn't be more distant. Now, in the wake of Jonah's divorce, they embark on a cross-country road trip back to their hometown of Albuquerque, hoping to mend their broken relationship along the way.

But when a strange accident befalls Nell at an abandoned industrial site somewhere in the Nevada desert, she begins experiencing ghastly visions and exhibiting terrifying, otherworldly symptoms. As their journey through the desolate American Southwest reveals the grotesque change happening within his sister, one thing becomes clear to Jonah: It's not only Nell in there anymore.

Pursued by a mysterious stranger who knows far more about Nell's worsening condition than they let on, the siblings race to find a way to help Nell and escape the desert before they're met with a violent, bloody end. But there are far worse things lurking in the desert ahead... some of them just beneath the skin.

The Danes--the band known as the "Darlings of Detroit"--are washed up and desperate for inspiration, eager to once again have a number one hit. That is, until an agent from the US Army approaches them. Will they travel to an African desert and track down the source of a mysterious and malevolent sound? Under the guidance of their front man, Philip Tonka, the Danes embark on a harrowing journey through the scorching desert--a trip that takes Tonka into the heart of an ominous and twisted conspiracy.

Meanwhile, in a nondescript Midwestern hospital, a nurse named Ellen tends to a patient recovering from a near-fatal accident. The circumstances that led to his injuries are mysterious--and his body heals at a remarkable rate. Ellen will do the impossible for this enigmatic patient, who reveals more about his accident with each passing day.

Part Heart of Darkness, part Lost, Josh Malerman's breathtaking new novel plunges us into the depths of psychological horror, where you can't always believe everything you hear.

Five harrowing novellas of horror and speculative fiction from the singular mind of the New York Times bestselling author of Bird Box

A sister insists to her little brother that "Half the House Is Haunted" by a strange presence. But is it the house that's haunted--or their childhoods?

In "Argyle," a dying man confesses to homicides he never committed, and he reveals long-kept secrets far more sinister than murder.

A tourist takes the ultimate trip to outer space in "The Jupiter Drop," but the real journey is into his own dark past.

In "Doug and Judy Buy the House Washer™," a trendy married couple buys the latest home gadget only to find themselves trapped by their possessions, their history... and each other.

And in "Egorov," a wealthy old cretin murders a young man, not knowing the victim was a triplet. The two surviving brothers stage a savage faux-haunting--playing the ghost of their slain brother--with the aim of driving the old murderer mad.

For nearly two decades, Jamie Warren has been running from darkness. He's haunted by a traumatic childhood and the guilt at having disappeared from his disabled brother's life. But then a series of unusual events reunites him with his estranged brother and their childhood friends, and none of them can deny the sense of fate that has seemingly drawn them back together.

Nor can they deny the memories of that summer, so long ago--the strange magic taught to them by an even stranger man, and the terrible act that has followed them all into adulthood. In the light of new danger, they must confront their past by facing their futures, and hunting down a man who may very well be a monster.

Leslie Bruin is assigned to the backwoods township of Spar Creek by the Frontier Nursing Service, under its usual mandate: vaccinate the flock, birth babies, and weather the judgements of churchy locals who look at him and see a failed woman. Forged in the fires of the Western Front and reborn in the cafes of Paris, Leslie believes he can handle whatever is thrown at him?but Spar Creek holds a darkness beyond his nightmares.

Something ugly festers within the local congregation, and its malice has focused on a young person they insist is an unruly tomboy who must be brought to heel. Violence is bubbling when Leslie arrives, ready to spill over, and he'll have to act fast if he intends to be of use. But the hills enfolding Spar Creek have a mind of their own, and the woods are haunted in ways Leslie does not understand.

Colette and Alison are unlikely cohorts: one a shy, drab beanpole of an assistant, the other a charismatic, corpulent psychic whose connection to the spiritual world torments her. When they meet at a fair, Alison invites Colette at once to join her on the road as her personal assistant and companion. Troubles spiral out of control when the pair moves to a suburban wasteland in what was once the English countryside. It is not long before the place beyond black threatens to uproot their lives forever. This is Hilary Mantel at her finest--insightful, darkly comic, unorthodox, and thrilling to read.

Contents:

• 5 - Secret of the Black Planet - [John Hastings] - (1952) - novella by Milton Lesser
• 81 - Son of the Black Chalice - [John Hastings] - (1952) - novella by Milton Lesser

In an apparently abandoned house, time and space work in a peculiar way. Those inside can't remember why they are there and memories of the time before are beginning to fade. That strange old lady, can she help them or is she a threat? A small sheet of paper in their pocket reminding them who they are and where the danger comes from may be their only hope, but can they use it to escape the house or will they die in the attempt?

A special wine allows dreams to come true. But what happens when a loser like William Fiorucci - divorced, broke, and little more than a drunken hack -- gets a sip of it?

Giuseppe is only eleven but he's a smart kid. He knows that he can avoid the Janara if he just remains still and makes no noise. If he can manage that, she won't find him hiding in his bed. There are rules she must follow after all. But can he use those rules against her? Can he free himself from the witch's curse by killing the witch herself?

Three short stories, three dark visions of Milan and Italy from Samuel Marolla, the Master of Italian Horror.

Melissa Marr returns to faery in a dramatic story of the precarious space between two worlds--and the people who must thrive there. The combination of ethereal fae powers, tumultuous romance, and a bloodthirsty faery queen will have longtime fans and new readers alike at the edge of their seats.

Lilywhite Abernathy is a criminal--she's half human, half fae, and since the time before she was born her very blood has been illegal. A war has been raging between humans and faeries, and the Queen of Blood and Rage, ruler of the fae courts, wants to avenge the tragic death of her heir due to the actions of reckless humans.

Lily's father has always shielded her from the truth, but when she's sent to the prestigious St. Columba's school, she's delivered straight into the arms of a fae Sleeper cell--the Black Diamonds. The Diamonds are planted in the human world as the sons and daughters of the most influential families, and tasked with destroying it from within. Against her will, Lilywhite's been chosen to join them... and even the romantic attention of the fae rock singer Creed Morrison isn't enough to keep Lily from wanting to run back to the familiar world she knows.

2015 Reddit Stabby Award Winner for Best Anthology / Collection / Periodical

Whether by coin or by blood... YOU WILL PAY.

This is a fantasy anthology featuring the deadly, the worldly, and the sneaky. Blackguards consists mainly of stories in established series, and the authors range from wildly successful indie authors to New York Times bestsellers. If you enjoy roguish tales of scoundrels and ne'er-do-wells, many of them set in established worlds, Blackguards is for you!

Table of Contents:

• Foreword, short story by Glen Cook [Tales of the Black Company]
• Seeds [Sanctuary], short story by Carol Berg
• Troll Trouble, short story by Richard Lee Byers
• Take You Home [Dezrel], short story by David Dalglish
• Thieves at the Gate, short story by James Enge
• Better to Live than to Die, short story by John Gwynne
• His Kikuta Hands [Tales of the Otori], short story by Lian Hearn
• A Kingdom and a Horse, short story by Snorri Kristjansson
• Seeking the Shadow, short story by Joseph Lallo
• The Secret [The Broken Empire], short story by Mark Lawrence
• A Taste of Agony, short story by Tim Marquitz
• A Length of Cherrywood [Vault of Heaven], short story by Peter Orullian
• The Subtler Art, short story by Cat Rambo
• Friendship [Silerian Trilogy], short story by Laura Resnick
• Manhunt [Sword and Barrow], short story by Mark Smylie
• Jancy's Justice [GnomeSaga], short story by Kenny Soward
• The White Rose Thief [Chronicles of Annwn], short story by Shawn Speakman
• Sun and Steel, short story by Jon Sprunk
• Scream, short story by Anton Strout
• Professional Integrity [Riyria], short story by Michael J. Sullivan
• The First Kill [Shadow Campaigns], short story by Django Wexler
• The Lord Collector [Raven's Shadow], short story by Anthony Ryan
• A Better Man [Tales of Egil and Nix], short story by Paul S. Kemp
• What Gods Demand [Seven Forges], short story by James A. Moore
• Mainon, short story by Jean Rabe
• Irindai [The Song of Shattered Sands], short story by Bradley P. Beaulieu
• The Magus and the Betyar, short story by S.R. Cambridge
• The Long Kiss, short story by Clay Sanger

The eBook edition of Blackguards also includes the anthology companion entitled The Blackguards Blacklist, with an additional eleven cutting-edge stories:

Table of Contents:

• To the End, short story by Rob J. Hayes
• To Steal the Moon, short story by Rebecca Lovatt
• The Muttwhelp, short story by Edward M. Erdelac
• The Lonesome Dark, short story by Anthony Lowe
• Comeuppance, short story by Linda Robertson
• The Assassination of Poppy Smithswife, short story by Sam Knight
• Telhinsol's Shadow, short story by S.M. White
• The Laughing Wind, short story by Noah Heinrich
• Bloody Gratitude, short story by Mike Theodorsson
• Gret, short story by Brenda Carre
• Angel of Tears, short story by Erik Scott De Bie

Also known as Master of Lies.

A ritual killer--nicknamed 'Satan' on account of his exceptional cruelty--stalks the city, killing in terrible ways with no apparent motive. Enter Lieutenant Foggia who, assisted by a spiritualist medium, must discover the reason for the slayings. But the truth he unearths is beyond anything he's encountered in the real world--for the killings are paving the way for a force so powerful that the lives of a few innocents will appear unimportant in comparison...

Lord Artos is on a historic quest - to search out the finest black horses ever known to man. He has vowed to drive the invading Saxons out of Britain, and he needs big, strong, powerful horses to carry his army into battle.

Galwyn, a young Roman-Celt, leaps at the chance to accompany the group, little guessing the adventure ahead of him - or the price he will have to pay for his loyalty...

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, December 2012. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2013, edited by Rich Horton.

"Let's get one thing straight--I'm a fixer. You need someone murdered? Then hire an assassin. You need something stolen? Call a thief. But if there's something no one else can do, or a job that no one else wants, then you talk to me."

Nathaniel specializes in the strange, the weird, and the dangerous. But no matter how far he runs, he can't leave behind his bloody past, nor the ghosts that chase him.

His latest job was supposed to be simple--recover the sword Black Swan. Except there's no such thing as a simple job. When the operation goes bad, the Crucifiers, the Crooked Hand, assassins, and Crusaders are all hot on Nathaniel's trail... for a sword he doesn't even have. All he has to do to get it back and set his world right is to find the woman of his dreams... and kill her.

The discoverers of a 200-year-old ship are strangely influenced by the dead crew.

After the climate wars, a floating city was constructed in the Arctic Circle. Once a remarkable feat of mechanical and social engineering, it has started to crumble under the weight of its own decay - crime and corruption have set in, a terrible new disease is coursing untreated through the population, and the contradictions of incredible wealth alongside deepest poverty are spawning unrest.

Into this turmoil comes a strange new visitor - a woman accompanied by an orca and a chained polar bear. She disappears into the crowds looking for someone she lost thirty years ago, followed by whispers of a vanished people who could bond with animals. Her arrival draws together four people and sparks a chain of events that will lead to unprecedented acts of resistance.

The world is sick. The forces of chaos have energized the planet. Leaders, fuhrers, duces, prophets, visionaries, gurus, and politicians are all at each other's throats. And chaos leers over the broken body or order. So Ryan freezes his family into suspended animation and sets off for the planet Munich 15040, five years distant. There he will re-establish order in a new world—and create a happier, healthier, saner and more decent society with the ones he loves. But they are suspended. And they cannot talk. And he is alone in space. And he has been travelling for three years. And he will still be travelling two years hence, and he cannot see his destination, and he is alone and lost and cracking up.

Jirel of Joiry, the first of the great female warriors, the beautiful commander of the strongest fortress in the kingdom, would face any danger to defend her beloved country. She wielded her bright sword against mighty armies, the sinister magic of evil sorcerers and fearsome castles guarded by the dead, even daring to descend into Hell itself...

Northwest Smith, the scarred and weathered outlaw, the legendary hero of the spaceways, forced to confront the terrible mysteries, the terrifying, mythic monsters of the universe...

Jirel of Joiry and Northwest Smith are C.L. Moore's greatest creations and she used them not only to spin spellbinding tales but also to explore the mysteries of the human psyche.

This is the omnibus edition of the collections Jirel of Joiry (aka Black Gods) and Scarlet Dream (aka Northwest Smith).

Published in the US as Thirteen

One hundred years from now, and against all the odds, Earth has found a new stability; the political order has reached some sort of balance, and the new colony on Mars is growing. But the fraught years of the 21st century have left an uneasy legacy... Genetically engineered alpha males, designed to fight the century's wars have no wars to fight and are surplus to requirements. And a man bred and designed to fight is a dangerous man to have around in peacetime. Many of them have left for Mars but now one has come back and killed everyone else on the shuttle he returned in.

Only one man, a genengineered ex-soldier himself, can hunt him down and so begins a frenetic man-hunt and a battle survival. And a search for the truth about what was really done with the world's last soldiers.

BLACK MAN is an unstoppable SF thriller but it is also a novel about predjudice, about the ramifications of playing with our genetic blue-print. It is about our capacity for violence but more worrying, our capacity for deceit and corruption. This is another landmark of modern SF from one of its most exciting and commercial authors.

Kate Nolan is a successful magazine editor with a loving husband, James, and a five-year-old son, Max. Her life couldn't be more perfect - but one day she receives a phone call from James, which changes everything.

Clearly distressed, James tells Kate to meet him at midnight outside the beach café once owned by her long-dead grandmother in the seaside town of Seahaven, where they both grew up. A strange request, made even more sinister by the fact that in recent weeks Seahaven has become prey to a serial killer who is targeting the local children.

Kate keeps the midnight appointment, but instead of finding her husband and son, she finds herself drawn into an ever-tightening web of past misdeeds and long-buried secrets. As hopes for her missing family fade, Kate becomes involved in a desperate race against time. Where are her husband and son? Have they become the latest victims of the serial killer, who calls himself Dominic and seems to know her intimately? And what has all this to do with Kate's childhood terror of the impenetrable darkness known as "the black"?

Tally and Grace are teenage sisters living on the outskirts of society, dragged from one no-hope town to the next by their fugitive father. When an explosion rips their lives apart, they flee separately to the city. The girls had always imagined that beyond the remote regions lay another, brighter world: glamorous, promising, full of luck. But, as each soon discovers, if one arrives broke, homeless, and alone, the city is a dangerous place--a place where commerce and surveillance rule, and undocumented people like themselves are confined to life's shady margins. Now Tally and Grace must struggle to find each other and survive.

Eric Pope awakens from a twelve-year coma to discover the world destroyed by war and his own mind and body rebuilt into something inhuman, a creature who, unlike the others, can survive in the deadly black snow outside their shelter.

A standalone darkly humorous thriller set in modern America's age of anxiety, by New York Times bestselling author Jason Pargin.

Outside Los Angeles, a driver pulls up to find a young woman sitting on a large black box. She offers him $200,000 cash to transport her and that box across the country, to Washington, DC.

But there are rules:

He cannot look inside the box.
He cannot ask questions.
He cannot tell anyone.
They must leave immediately.
He must leave all trackable devices behind.

As these eccentric misfits hit the road, rumors spread on social media that the box is part of a carefully orchestrated terror attack intended to plunge the USA into civil war.

The truth promises to be even stranger, and may change how you see the world.

HERE BE DRAGONS...

Beware! A shadow will cover you, larger than that cast by any other dragon of this world. Black as the lightless chasm from whence it was born at the beginning of time.

In the coastal city Skargakar, residents make a living from hunting dragons and use them for everything from clothing to food, while airborne ships hunt them in the white expanse of a cloud sea, the Cloudmere.

Lian does his part carving the kyrillian crystals that power the ships through the Cloudmere, but when he makes an enemy of a dangerous man, Lian ships out on the next vessel available as a drachenjager, or dragon hunter.

He chooses the wrong ship. A fanatic captain, hunts more than just any dragon. His goal is the Firstborn Gargantuan?and Adaron is prepared to sacrifice everything for revenge.

Imperium is the most expensive structure ever created. Once an orbiting laboratory, it is now a space hotel for the fantastically wealthy. But as the station preps for its first group of space tourists, Dr. Chloe Bonilla, Imperium's resident biophysicist, finds herself questioning whether babysitting a passel of space glampers is worth the distraction from her research.

A private rocket delivers a rogues' gallery of the world's elite to Imperium: eccentric billionaires, callow tech bros, a sponsored Instagram influencer, and a seemingly saintly philanthropist. However, posing among the staff are members of a global terrorist group who call themselves the Reckoners, hell bent on upending the economic inequality of twenty-first-century Earth--and they have a bone to pick with these scions of the 1 percent.

As the Reckoners take control of Imperium and demand an $8 billion ransom from their wealthy hostages, it's up to Dr. Bonilla to save them, and fast. Or the captives will be forced to exit the station--and there's only one way out.

When a mysterious alien spacecraft approaches the Earth and demands to speak with the President of the United States, then destroys a large Pacific island to demonstrate its strength and seriousness, you'd expect the President to talk. Problem is, there is no President - not even a United States. China rules the Americas, and to most people "US" and "USSR" are just quaint abbreviations in historical dictionaries. But the aliens prove unreasonable about accepting substitutes. . .

Table of Contents:

• Preface - essay by Jerry Pournelle
• Black Holes and Cosmic Censors - essay by Jerry Pournelle
• He Fell Into a Dark Hole - (1973) - novelette by Jerry Pournelle
• The Hole Man - (1974) - shortstory by Larry Niven
• Fuzzy Black Holes Have No Hair - (1975) - essay by Jerry Pournelle
• Kyrie - (1968) - shortstory by Poul Anderson
• Killing Vector - (1978) - shortstory by Charles Sheffield
• The Borderland of Sol - (1975) - novelette by Larry Niven
• Pluto Is Black! - (1962) - essay by Robert L. Forward
• Fountain of Force - (1972) - shortstory by George Zebrowski and Grant Carrington
• Papa Schimmelhorn's Yang - novelette by Reginald Bretnor
• Gloria - shortstory by Gail Kimberly
• Singularity - (1978) - novella by Mildred Downey Broxon
• Cygnus X-1 - poem by Peter Dillingham
• The Salesman Who Fell From Grace With the Universe - poem by Peter Dillingham
• The Nothing Spot - (1978) - shortstory by Dian Girard
• For the Lady of a Physicist - poem by Michael Bishop
• The Venging - (1975) - novelette by Greg Bear
• In the Beginning... - essay by Jerry Pournelle

An abortive attempt to create a new race of creatures unites the mysterious genetic scientist Dr. Florida with five genetically tailored children in a poignant story that explores the repercussions of humanity's search for perfection.

Hugo and Nebula Award nominated novelette. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 1983. Anthologized in Gardner Dozois' The Year's Best Science Fiction: First Annual Collection (1984) and collected in The Planet on the Table (1986), Remaking History and Other Stories (1994), Vinland the Dream and Other Stories (2002) and The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson (2010). It was also published as a chapbook by Pulphouse Publishing in 1991.

Read the full story for free at the Baen website.

Rembrandt and his uncles seek a champion to beat the devil, save their aunts souls (and their own) while only allowed to stay in one place for twelve days at a stretch.

Brandon Castle is full of mysteries and terrors!

Lonely candles give feeble light to the eerie chill of the castle's endless hallways. Winding staircases descend into damp crypts of discarded skeletons while rat-infested secret passages lead to satanic altars. Towering over the castle's dank moat is the mysterious Grey Turret. Filled with legends of shadowy ghosts and terrifying demons, its only door has been locked for centuries.

Until now.

Someone has discovered the key and wants the terrifying power locked away in the Grey Turret.

Who dares to defy the legend of the Grey Turret?

Agatha? Hungry for power, nothing can stand in her way!
Eldred? Her nervous brother, the perfect foil for a murderous plan?
Sir Rupert? The brave knight suffering from a heartbreaking loss?
Nemoni? The mysterious wild-man of the woods?
The Black Monk? Aided by Satan's black magic, can he be stopped?

Serialized in British newspapers throughout 1844, The Black Monk is an excellent example of the Victorian penny dreadful. Each week, eager readers would await the next penny's installment and The Black Monk delivered so many thrills and terrors that it became the mid-century's publishing phenomenon.

This edition includes the unabridged text of the 1844 edition along with all 54 original illustrations and features a new introduction by Curt Herr, Ph.D.

As children they met and built sand castles on a beach out of space and time: Edgar Perry, Little Annie, and Edgar Allan Poe.... Fifteen years later, Perry meets Annie again, all grown up and beautiful - and in the real world. She warns him of his mortal peril, then flees for Europe on a mysterious black ship.

Perry is recruited by a fabulously wealthy man to follow that ship to Europe where he meets the famed detective Auguste Dupin, has an encounter with a Maelstrom and a black raven, has a run in with a Pit and a Pendulum, and lives many more of the stories his alter ego, Edgar Allan Poe, wrote. He and Poe have exchanged places: Perry will thrive in the dark, romantic world where lead can be transmuted to gold, ravens can speak, orangutans can commit murder, and beautiful women are easy to come by; while Poe is now doomed to live out his life a misfit, and end as a pauper, a drunk, and a genius....

For five years Seattle journalist Anne Jeffers has pursued the horrifying story of a sadistic serial killer's bloody reign, capture, trial, and appeal - crusading to keep the wheels of justice churning toward the electric chair. Now the day of execution has come. A convicted killer will meet his end. Anne believes her long nightmare is over. But she's dead wrong.... Within days, a similar murder stuns the city. As the butcher stalks his next victims, creeping ever closer to her, Anne is seized by an icy unease, a haunting sense of connection to these unspeakable crimes. And, relentlessly, she hears the eerie echo of the dead man's last words to her: "Today won't end it. How will you feel, Anne? When I'm dead, and it all starts again, how will you feel?"

A woman visiting Las Vegas for a fun weekend encounters her ne'er-do-well ex-husband, who begs her for a favor that gambles with life and death...

Read the full story for free at Tor Reactor.

David J. Schow's short stories have been regularly selected for over twenty-five volumes of "Year's Best" anthologies across three decades and have won the World Fantasy Award, the ultra-rare Dimension Award from Twilight Zone magazine, plus a 2002 International Horror Guild Award for his collection of Fangoria columns, Wild Hairs. Black Leather Required collects thirteen of Schow's short stories and includes an intro by John Farris. The stories included in this collection are:

• Introduction by John Farris
• The Shaft
• Sedalia
• A Week in the Unlife
• Scoop Makes a Swirly
• Kamikaze Butterflies
• Beggar's Banquet, with Summer Sausage
• Pitt Night at the Lewistone Boneyard
• Jerry's Kids Meet Wormboy
• Life Partner
• Last Call for the Sons of Shock
• Where the Heart Was
• Sand Sculpture
• Bad Guy Hats

ONE MOMENT IN TIME CAN HAUNT YOU FOREVER.

Caught up in a moment of boyhood competition, William Bellman recklessly aims his slingshot at a rook resting on a branch, killing the bird instantly. It is a small but cruel act, and is soon forgotten. By the time he is grown, with a wife and children of his own, William seems to have put the whole incident behind him. It was as if he never killed the thing at all. But rooks don't forget...

Years later, when a stranger mysteriously enters William's life, his fortunes begin to turn--and the terrible and unforeseen consequences of his past indiscretion take root. In a desperate bid to save the only precious thing he has left, he enters into a rather strange bargain, with an even stranger partner. Together, they found a decidedly macabre business.

And Bellman & Black is born.

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Universe 14 (1984), edited by Terry Carr. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Second Annual Collection (1985), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection The Jaguar Hunter (1987).

Enter an all too conceivable future when the Religious Right has taken over our country and basically made everything fun illegal. Where AIDS has become even more letal, and those found to be HIV positive are shipped off to concentration camps that are so over-crowded and under-staffed that the dead often lay in their beds for days before being carted off the be burned.

The Freedom Coalition is fighting in the West to free the country from the grip of the Right Party's fanatical leader, Heilinger, and his so-called "Good Law," and the rebel forces are drawing nearer. Lorn Zany has seen too much death and injustice at the hands of the Right Party for one life time. New it looks like he might just live to see the Right America crumble. That is, of course, if he doesn't die of AIDS first.

This collection of gritty and intense short stories compares the horrors of the real world to those of the supernatural. Winner of the Bram Stoker Award, the International Horror Guild Award, and a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year.

Table of Contents:

• Foreword - (1998) - essay by Paula Guran
• Barbara - (1995) - short story
• War and Peace - (1995) - short story
• You Hear What Buddy and Ray Did? - (1995) - short story
• Answering Machine - (1998) - short story
• The Rubber Smile - (1993) - short story
• The Footlite - (1998) - short story
• Cram - (1997) - short story
• What Would You Do for Love? - (1997) - short fiction
• Delia and the Dinner Party - (1990) - short story
• Pearldoll - (1991) - short story
• Woodgrains - (1991) - short story
• The Exquisitely Bleeding Heads of Doktur Palmer Vreedeez - (1998) - short story
• Flaming Telepaths - (1992) - short story
• How Deep the Taste of Love - (1993) - short story
• Aftertaste - (1996) - novelette
• Black Hole Sun, Won't You Come? - (1998) - short story

Paha Sapa, 'Black Hills', is an American Indian shaman who, as a young boy at the Battle of Little Bighorn, believes that he has taken the ghost of the dying General Custer into his body.

Sixty years later, while working as a dynamiter on Mount Rushmore, Paha Sapa plots to blow up the monument. Meanwhile, Custer finds himself trapped in a strange, dark place and begins to write sensuous, heartbreaking missives to his beloved wife.

Thus begins an intricate, visionary story that sweeps across some of the most tumultuous and violent periods of American history, from the old West to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and into our own time and beyond.

The town of Red Bluff, Mississippi, has seen better days, though those who've held on have little memory of when that was. Myer, the county's aged, sardonic lawman, still thinks it can prove itself - when confronted by a strange family of drifters, the sheriff believes that the people of Red Bluff can be accepting, rational, even good.

The opposite is true: this is a landscape of fear and ghosts - of regret and violence - transformed by the kudzu vines that have enveloped the hills around it, swallowing homes, cars, rivers, and hiding a terrible secret deeper still.

Colburn, a junkyard sculptor who's returned to Red Bluff, knows this pain all too well, though he too is willing to hope for more when he meets and falls in love with Celia, the local bar owner. The Deep South gives these noble, broken, and driven folks the gift of human connection while bestowing upon them the crippling weight of generations. With broken histories and vagabond hearts, the townsfolk wrestle with the evil in the woods -- and the wickedness that lurks in each and every one of us.

Lucy Snyder's stories are the sort that carry you away to unusual places, usually dark ones, and this collection is a perfect example. As the follow-up to the Bram Stoker Award winning collection Soft Apocalypses, it contains plenty of darkly imaginative tales. Many of these stories, including the title piece, are heavily influenced by the work of H.P. Lovecraft and The King in Yellow mythos. They whisper madly among each other creating weird echoes. Like the black stars of theoretical astronomy they are dense entities born from polarization so strong that instead of collapsing into nothingness, a black hole, they instead form dark constellations burning dimly with spectral light.

Table of Contents:

• 7 - Mostly Monsters
• 10 - Spinwebs
• 19 - The Strange Architecture of the Heart
• 28 - Approaching Lavender
• 41 - Dura Mater
• 49 - The Still-Life Drama of Passing Cars
• 54 - Through Thy Bounty
• 65 - Cthylla
• 83 - While the Black Stars Burn
• 92 - The Abomination of Fensmere
• 110 - The Girl with the Star-Stained Soul
• 122 - Jessie Shimmer Goes to Hell
• 135 - Fable Fusion

Sidewise Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Interzone, #221 March-April 2009. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Four (2010), edited by Jonathan Strahan, Year's Best SF 15 (2010), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, and The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection (2010), edited by Gardner Dozois. It is included in the collection Gothic High-Tech (2012).

AS THE WORLD SHUDDERS, JAMSHID HURTLES TOWARD THE FINAL, SHIVERING CLIMAX.

He grasps you in his wicked, loving embrace, a dark, seductive beauty. His ecstacy transports you beyond the moon, beyond the stars.

As earth shudders toward its end, as it throbs with the power of his mind -- he is the ultimate weapon, the final, terrifying angel of death.

No one can hide from him. No one can escape his evil. No man, no woman can resist his... BLACK MAGIC.

The portals are everywhere, now. Scanning for weapons, for drugs.... No getting out of line. The people had forgotten how to fight back. There was no one to show them how. Or was there... ? When she first saw him he was silhouetted against the moon, a black stallion rearing up to claim all he surveyed. Her heart slowed in her chest, then. There was a strange keening in her ears that she knew was not of this time or place, but of the other world. It was a vision she was having, a waking dream that would haunt her, drive her in ways unexplained. In the dark of the city's night, wherever the weak or oppressed cry out in pain or fear, a quiet footfall can be heard on the roof, the owlshadow passeth before the moon, the quiet gasp of feathered death... The Black Arrow lives.

>Mixing new-age mysticism with computer technology, BLACK ICE is a 21st-century, 'haunted house' story for young adults where access to the spirit world is only a modem away. When the Attard family buy an ultra modern house of glass, aluminium and concrete overlooking the sea, they get more than they bargained for. For tough-cookie Syb Attard, who is going through a Goth phase, making contact with the "night side" is all a bit of a lark until Hille, the psychic housekeeper, arrives with warnings about the presence of 'black ice'. For all the virtual reality of this suburban fantasy, real blood gets spilt when psychic meets psycho. And Syb discovers that she is not the cynic she thought she was.

Desperate to quell her addiction to drugs, disastrous romance, and nineties San Francisco, Michelle heads south for LA. But soon it's officially announced that the world will end in one year, and life in the sprawling metropolis becomes increasingly weird.

While living in an abandoned bookstore, dating Matt Dillon, and keeping an eye on the encroaching apocalypse, Michelle begins a new novel, a sprawling and meta-textual exploration to complement her promises of maturity and responsibility. But as she tries to make queer love and art without succumbing to self-destructive vice, the boundaries between storytelling and everyday living begin to blur, and Michelle wonders how much she'll have to compromise her artistic process if she's going to properly ride out doomsday.

For Renata Burgess--wife, mother, social worker and writer--Friday, March 18, 1988 is just the start of a busy weekend. Her daughter's going to a birthday party sleepover. Her elder son will be over for Sunday dinner, her nine-year-old boy clamouring to have a friend over. Just a normal Friday. Until 8:20 pm--when one of her children is found dead.

Wrenched by shock and grief into currents of reality of which she's never previously been aware, Renata struggles to come to terms with her loss. As she learns to live day to day and moment to moment with the pain, she embarks on an eerie journey through an underworld inhabited by monstrous and seductive creatures that threaten both her sanity and her physical survival. She travels not only downwards but also backwards in time. Finding herself thrown into the lives of other mothers at the moment of their bereavement, Renata takes her first step towards healing--recognizing the fact that she is simply part of an infinite process...

Voyager 1 was a message in a bottle. Our way of letting the galaxy know we existed. That we were out here if anyone wanted to find us. Over the next forty years, the probe flew past Jupiter and Saturn before it drifted into the void, swallowed up by a silent universe. Or so we thought...

Truth is, our message didn't go unheard.

Discovered by Dr. Dahlia Black, the mysterious Pulse was sent by a highly intelligent intergalactic species that called themselves the Ascendants. It soon becomes clear this alien race isn't just interested in communication--they are capable of rewriting human DNA, in an astonishing process they call the Elevation.

Five years after the Pulse, acclaimed journalist Keith Thomas sets out to make sense of the event that altered the world. Thomas travels across the country to interview members of the task force who grappled to decode the Pulse and later disseminated its exact nature to worried citizens. He interviews the astronomers who initially doubted Black's discovery of the Pulse--an error that critics say led to the world's quick demise. Thomas also hears from witnesses of the Elevation and people whose loved ones vanished in the Finality, an event that, to this day, continues to puzzle Pulse researchers, even though theories abound about the Ascendants' motivation.

Including never-before-published transcripts from task force meetings, diary entries from Black, and candid interviews with Ballard, Thomas also shows in Dahlia Black how a select few led their country in its darkest hours, toward a new level of humanity.

In a demilitarized zone on the border of human space, long range spy satellites are mysteriously going quiet, and no one knows why. Captain Susan Kamala and her crew are dispatched to figure out what's going on and solve the problem.

That problem, however, is a mysterious, bleeding edge alien ship that no human vessel could hope to match in open conflict. But, it's not spoiling for a fight.

Now, the Captain and her Crew must figure out how to navigate a complicated game of diplomacy, balancing the needs of their corporate overlords, and the honest desire for a lasting peace between the two races, all without letting a long standing cold war turn hot.

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology New Dimensions Science Fiction Number 7 (1977), edited by Robert Silverberg. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Finest Fantasy (1978), edited by Terry Carr, Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year: Seventh Annual Collection (1978), edited by Gardner Dozois, Lovecraft's Monsters (2014), edited by Ellen Datlow. The story is included in the collection Custer's Last Jump and Other Collaborations (Waldrop, 2003).

Do you love the sound of a peg leg stomping across a quarterdeck? Or maybe you prefer a parrot on your arm, a strong wind at your back? Adventure, treasure, intrigue, humor, romance, danger -- and, yes, plunder! Oh, the Devil does love a pirate -- and so do readers everywhere!

Swashbuckling from the past into the future and space itself, Fast Ships, Black Sails, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, presents an incredibly entertaining volume of original stories guaranteed to make you walk and talk like a pirate.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: A Fascination with Pirates - essay by Jeff VanderMeer and Ann VanderMeer
• Boojum - short story by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette
• Castor on Troubled Waters - short story by Rhys Hughes
• I Begyn as I Mean To Go On - short story by Kage Baker
• Avast, Abaft! - short story by Howard Waldrop
• Elegy to Gabrielle, Patron Saint of Healers, Whores, and Righteous Thieves - short story by Kelly Barnhill
• Skillet and Saber - short story by Justin Howe
• The Nymph's Child - short story by Carrie Vaughn
• 68° 07′ 15″ N, 31° 36′ 44″ W - short story by Conrad Williams
• Ironface - short story by Michael Moorcock
• Pirate Solutions - short story by Katherine Sparrow
• We Sleep on a Thousand Waves Beneath the Stars - short story by Brendan Connell
• Voyage of the Iguana - short story by Steve Aylett
• Pirates of the Suara Sea - short story by Eric Flint and Dave Freer
• A Cold Day in Hell - short story by Paul Batteiger
• The Adventures of Captain Black Heart Wentworth: A Nautical Tail - short story by Rachel Swirsky
• Araminta, or, The Wreck of the Amphidrake - short story by Naomi Novik
• The Whale Below - short story by Jayme Lynn Blaschke
• Beyond the Sea Gate of the Scholar-Pirates of Sarsköe - short story by Garth Nix
• Author Notes - essay by uncredited

Attila Veres, Hungary's leading horror writer, makes his English debut at last in this groundbreaking new collection featuring ten of his finest tales. The volume opens with 'To Bite a Dog', in which a man's budding relationship is jeopardized by his girlfriend's bizarre and macabre habit involving dogs. 'Fogtown' tells of a legendary '90s rock band whose music nobody has ever actually heard but which might nonetheless spell doom for a man obsessed with finding their recordings. 'Multiplied by Zero' is a wry travelogue in which a man recounts his hellish experiences on a holiday tour exploring Lovecraftian landscapes. And in the title story 'The Black Maybe', which Steve Rasnic Tem calls 'one of the weirdest tales I've read in years', a girl and her family escape the city bustle to experience farm life, only to discover with unimaginable horror the truth of what is really being harvested there.

These tales showcase a range of genres and styles, from weird fiction to folk horror to cosmic horror, and reveal a dazzlingly original new writer whose stories are thrilling, frightening, often blackly humorous, and totally unlike anything you have read before.

Wrongly imprisoned, Frederick Whithers is desperate to commit the crime he's already being punished for: defrauding the bank out of a vast inheritance. He fakes his death to escape, but when he's seen climbing out of a coffin everyone assumes he's a vampire; when he shows none of the traditional vampire weaknesses, they decide he must be the most powerful vampire in the history of the world.

Half horror and half farce, Frederick's tale is an ever-growing avalanche of bankers, constables, graverobbers, poets, ghouls, morticians, vampires, vampire hunters, not to mention some very unfortunate rabbits. With a string of allies even more unlikely than his enemies, can Frederick stay alive long enough to claim his (well, somebody's) money? And if he can't, which of his innumerable enemies will get to him first?

It's autumn in the town of Harrow, but something besides the season is changing there.

Because in that town there is an orchard, and in that orchard, seven most unusual trees. And from those trees grows a new sort of apple: strange, beautiful, with skin so red it's nearly black.

Take a bite of one of these apples, and you will desire only to devour another. And another. You will become stronger. More vital. More yourself, you will believe. But then your appetite for the apples and their peculiar gifts will keep growing--and become darker.

This is what happens when the townsfolk discover the secret of the orchard. Soon it seems that everyone is consumed by an obsession with the magic of the apples... and what's the harm, if it is making them all happier, more confident, more powerful?

Even if something else is buried in the orchard besides the seeds of these extraordinary trees: a bloody history whose roots reach back to the very origins of the town.

But now the leaves are falling. The days grow darker. It's harvest time, and the town will soon reap what it has sown.

As the final ship of Project Starseed makes its landing on the dead star, the colonists venture out to search the area, only to discover something shocking hidden in the ice, something that will change the world forever.

To win the right to a name, he fought without weapons in the deadly arena of Nggongga - only to be cheated of his prize. Branded a criminal, he sought refuge with the Benefactors, a mysterious interplanetary fellowship, and from them he at last learned the truth about his heritage.

As Blacklantern he was born again - and the galaxy itself became the arena for his vengeance. A gladiator still, his purpose took him to the ends of the cosmos, to seek out and finally face a terrifying and relentless evil that threatened countless worlds...

F. Paul Wilson's powerful World War II novel is an unforgettable saga of passion and terror, the ravages of war, the pain of betrayal, and the glory of love.

At the heart of the story are four people torn between love and honor: Matsuo Okumo, born in Japan, raised in America, and hated in both lands; Hiroki Okumo, his brother, a modern samurai sworn to serve a secret cult and the almighty Emperor; Meiko Satsuma, the woman they both love; and Frank Slater, the American who turned away when Matsuo needed him, and who now struggles to repay his debt of honor.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed: People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction! Special Issue, June 2016.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Contents:

• ii - Black Pockets (frontispiece) - (2005) - interior artwork by Bob Eggleton
• xi - Foreword (Black Pockets and Other Dark Thoughts) - essay by Howard Waldrop
• 5 - Jumper - (1988) - shortstory
• 15 - The Wish in the Fear - (1995) - shortstory
• 30 - Hell Just Over the Hill - (1996) - shortstory
• 38 - The Alternate - (2006) - shortstory
• 45 - Earth Around His Bones - (2006) - shortstory
• 48 - Fire of Spring - (1981) - shortstory
• 55 - First Love, First Fear - (1972) - shortstory
• 64 - Passing Nights - (1994) - shortstory
• 67 - Takes You Back - (2003) - shortstory
• 85 - I Walked With Fidel - (1992) - shortstory
• 96 - General Jaruzelski at the Zoo - (1987) - shortstory
• 102 - The Soft Terrible Music - (1996) - shortstory
• 114 - My First World - (2004) - novelette
• 153 - Interpose - (1973) - shortstory
• 160 - The Coming of Christ the Joker - (2003) - novelette
• 178 - Nappy - (2004) - shortstory
• 191 - A Piano Full of Dead Spiders - (2005) - shortstory
• 206 - Black Pockets - (2006) - novella
• 261 - Lords of Imagination - (2006) - shortstory
• 267 - Afterword (Black Pockets) - (2006) - essay

The novel is set in Victorian England and concerns John Carter, an architect who leaves London to become a junior partner in a prosperous building firm in Thornton Bassett, a village in Dartmoor. His hopes for a new life fade as he discovers a sinister mystery.

An old woman hangs in a cage; a young woman slaves on a rich lord's estate. How does a woman discover and assert her identity in a primeval, barbaric world? From slave dens to merchant cities to isolated mountains, Candas Jane Dorsey's first novel is a powerful exploration of gender, identity, and freedom.

Sam Church is a trained killer, a member of the infamous Red Roadmen organization. In the bizarre world of this future America, the Roadmen's word is law; to incur their displeasure is death. But Sam Church refuses to kill and is imprisoned and tortured by his peers for his nonconformity. He escapes and, in a terrifying race across the continent, clashes with the Roadmen in a running duel that can only end in death--his own or that of the system of tyranny that reigns on the Black Roads.

Table of Contents:

• Foreword - essay
• Smoke Ghost - (1941) - shortstory
• The Automatic Pistol - (1940) - shortstory
• The Inheritance - (1942) - shortstory
• The Hill and the Hole - (1942) - shortstory
• The Dreams of Albert Moreland - (1945) - novelette
• The Hound - (1942) - shortstory
• Diary in the Snow - novelette
• The Man Who Never Grew Young - shortstory
• The Sunken Land - (1942) - shortstory
• Adept's Gambit - novella

In the large room of a house in a certain quiet city in Flanders, a man was gilding a devil. The chamber looked on to the quadrangle round which the house was built; and the sun, just overhead, blazed on the vine leaves clinging to the brick and sent a reflected glow into the sombre spaces of the room. The devil, rudely cut out of wood, rested by his three tails and his curled-back horns against the wall, and the man sat before him on a low stool....

Blackman's Burden

Africa blazes in tomorrow's world!

Border, Breed Nor Birth

Is this the destiny of the dark continent?

Prepare for a full dive!

As the showdown with the White Legion, Oscillatory Universe, looms in the distance the Red and Black Legion schedule yet another meeting the only way they know how--with a battle! Haruyuki is dumbstruck when faced by the full might of of a Legion that triples his own in size, but the biggest surprise is yet to come...

Once an inexperienced Level 3 Adventurer, Duan Surk's skill and expertise have only increased since joining up with formidable fighter, Olba October, and beautiful sorceress, Princess Agnis R. Link. The trio currently quests to find Agnis' friend, Prince Orland, but the royal Black Knights capture Olba and Duan and our heroes suddenly find themselves accused of a crime they did not commit!

Based on the hit role-playing game Fortune Quest.

For aeons, the forces of darkness had tampered from afar with the earth and its inhabitants, until, in the ominously near future, Theron Ware, Doctor of Theology and Black Sorcerer of fiendish powers, conjures the fallen angels into the world of the flesh to deal more directly with those who would enlist the aid of the Evil One.

Retained by shadowy megalomaniac industrialist Baines to assassinate the Governor of California, Theron finds the means to unleash the demons of the underworld for one night of apocalyptic horror - to reign unopposed over heaven and earth, or to fall before the magic of the Monk of Monte Albano.

The land of Ascarlia, a fabled realm of bloodied steel and epic sagas, has been ruled by the Sister Queens for centuries. No one has dared question their rule.

Until now.

Whispers speak of longships of mysterious tattooed warriors, sailing under the banners of a murderous cult of oath-breakers long thought extinct. A tide of black steel that threatens to vanquish all in its path.

Thera of the Blackspear, favored servant of the Sister Queens, is ordered to uncover the truth. As Thera sails north, her reviled brother, Felnir, sets out on his own adventure. He hopes to find the Vault of the Altvar -- the treasure room of the gods -- and win the Sister Queens' favor at his sister's expense.

Both siblings -- along with a brilliant young scribe and a prisoner with a terrifying, primal power -- will play a part in the coming storm.

The Age of Wrath has begun.

Deborah Harkness first introduced the world to Diana Bishop, an Oxford scholar and witch, and vampire geneticist Matthew de Clermont in A Discovery of Witches. Drawn to each other despite long-standing taboos, these two otherworldly beings found themselves at the center of a battle for a lost, enchanted manuscript known as Ashmole 782. Since then, they have fallen in love, traveled to Elizabethan England, dissolved the Covenant between the three species, and awoken the dark powers within Diana's family line.

Now, Diana and Matthew receive a formal demand from the Congregation: They must test the magic of their seven-year-old twins, Pip and Rebecca. Concerned with their safety and desperate to avoid the same fate that led her parents to spellbind her, Diana decides to forge a different path for her family's future and answers a message from a great-aunt she never knew existed, Gwyneth Proctor, whose invitation simply reads: It's time you came home, Diana.

On the hallowed ground of Ravenswood, the Proctor family home, and under the tutelage of Gwyneth, a talented witch grounded in higher magic, a new era begins for Diana: a confrontation with her family's dark past and a reckoning for her own desire for even greater power - if she can let go, finally, of her fear of wielding it.

'It followed me home,' he said, conversationally.

In a rural northern village, legend tells of a ghostly black dog that appears from the darkness before you die.

Shadow Moon has been on the road a while now but he can't walk any further tonight, not with the rain lashing down. Gratefully, he heads home with a nice English couple, who offer a box room, hot whisky and local tales.

But when the man collapses en route, Shadow realises that something about this place has been left untold.

Something ancient, something within the very walls of the village.

Something shadowing them all.

Black Dog originally appeared in the collection Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances (2015). It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Ten (2016), edited by Jonathan Strahan, The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Eight (2016), edited by Ellen Datlow, Best New Horror #27 (2017), edited by Stephen Jones, and The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2016, edited by Paula Guran.

Marca Nbaro had always dreamed of serving aboard the Greatships, with their vast cargo holds and a crew that could fill a city.

They are the lifeblood of human-occupied space, transporting an unimaginable volume - and value - of goods from City, the greatest human orbital, all the way to Tradepoint at the other, to trade for xenoglas with an unknowable alien species.

And now, out in the darkness of space, something is targeting them.

Nbaro and her friends are close to locating their enemy, in this gripping sequel to the award-nominated Artifact Space, but they are running out of time - and their allies are running out of patience ...

Boro Harkless has devoted his life to the service of the Archonite Bureau of Security, the force tasked with keeping the peace among and within the city-states of Old Earth. An idealist driven by the memory of his heroic father, he comes to the city of Sherit, seeking the notorious Luff Imbry.

Luff Imbry has devoted his life to the enjoyment of wealth. A gourmet, a charmer, and an ever-so-stylish fop, he has come to the city of Sherit to pursue a new fortune. Not, mind you, his own, for Luff is also a mountebank, swindler, and forger of the first water.

Tossed together by circumstance, they form an uneasy truce when they discover a common goal: capturing the grandest con-man of them all, Horselan Gebbling. Gebbling, who made off with Imbry's previous fortune, is posing as Father Olwyn, Sacerdotal Eminence of the Assembly of Tangible Unity, and has chosen as his prey the victims of the first new disease in millennia, the invariably fatal ailment known as the lassitude.

Dangled in front of the victims is the fabled relic of past glories, the gemstone called black brillion. About black brillion, learned men agree on only two things: it can do anything, and it doesn't exist. But Gebbling boasts of having it, and its effects on the lassitude are nothing short of magical.

Riding a landship across the unnatural prairie known as the Swept, Boro and Luff get caught up in an ever-growing tangle of mysteries. Nonsense chants lead to miracle cures. Guests end up crushed beneath the ship's giant wheels. The crew have secrets of their own.

The dangers are not merely physical. On the ship is a noönaut, an explorer of the Commons, the dream realm which contains the memories and emotions of hundreds of thousands of years of human existence. Something in the Commons is calling to Boro to claim him for its own.

What lurks beneath the Swept? What hides within the Commons, eager to come out? And exactly what game is Gebbing playing?

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, March 2015.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

THREE AGAINST THE STARS!

A sky pirate armed with superior weapons of his own invention...

First contact with an alien race dangerous enough to threaten the safety of two planets...

The arrival of an unseen dark sun whose attendant marauders aimed at the very end of civilization in this Solar System...

These were the three challenges that tested the skill and minds of the brilliant team of scientist-astronauts Arcot, Wade, and Morey. Their initial adventures are a classic of science fiction which first brought the name of their author, John W. Campbell, Jr., into prominence as a master of the inventive imagination -- long before he became the editor of Astounding/Analog and changed the field of science fiction forever!

Collection of three Arcot, Wade and Morley stories originally published in 1930: "Piracy Preferred", "Solarite", and "The Black Star Passes." With an introduction by Campbell.

Life as a knight is not what Vedren Chel imagined. Bound by oath to a dead-end job in the service of a lazy step-uncle, Chel no longer dreams of glory - he dreams of going home.

When invaders throw the kingdom into turmoil, Chel finds opportunity in the chaos: if he escorts a stranded prince to safety, Chel will be released from his oath.

All he has to do is drag the brat from one side of the country to the other, through war and wilderness, chased all the way by ruthless assassins.

With killers on your trail, you need killers watching your back. You need the Black Hawk Company - mercenaries, fighters without equal, a squabbling, scrapping pack of rogues.

Table of Contents:

• Foreword (Asimov's Choice: Black Holes & Bug-Eyed-Monsters) - essay by Isaac Asimov
• Good-Bye, Robinson Crusoe - [Eight Worlds] - (1977) - novelette by John Varley
• Good-Bye, Robinson Crusoe - (1977) - interior artwork by Rick Sternbach
• Machismo on Byronia - [SF Puzzles] - (1977) - shortstory by Martin Gardner
• Low Grade Ore - (1977) - novelette by Kevin O'Donnell, Jr.
• Low Grade Ore - (1977) - interior artwork by Frank Kelly Freas
• Low Grade Ore [2] - (1977) - interior artwork by Frank Kelly Freas
• Low Grade Ore [3] - (1977) - interior artwork by Frank Kelly Freas
• Backspace - (1977) - shortstory by F. M. Busby
• Perchance to Dream - (1977) - shortstory by Sally A. Sellers
• On the Martian Problem - (1977) - shortstory by Randall Garrett
• On the Martian Problem - (1977) - interior artwork by Roy G. Krenkel
• On the Martian Problem [2] - (1977) - interior artwork by Roy G. Krenkel
• The Missing Item - [Black Widowers] - (1977) - shortstory by Isaac Asimov
• The Missing Item - (1977) - interior artwork by Donald R. Bensen [as by Don R. Bensen ]
• Home Team Advantage - (1977) - shortstory by Jack C. Haldeman, II
• Home Team Advantage - interior artwork by Rick Sternbach
• Air Raid - (1977) - shortstory by John Varley [as by Herb Boehm ]
• A Simple Outside Job - (1977) - shortstory by Robert Lee Hawkins
• Time and Hagakure - (1977) - shortstory by Steven Utley
• Time and Hagakure - (1977) - interior artwork by Freff
• Coming of Age in Henson's Tube - (1977) - shortstory by William John Watkins [as by William Jon Watkins ]
• To Sin Against Systems - (1977) - novelette by Garry R. Osgood
• To Sin Against Systems - (1977) - interior artwork by Vincent Di Fate
• To Sin Against Systems [2] - (1977) - interior artwork by Vincent Di Fate
• To Sin Against Systems [3] - (1977) - interior artwork by Vincent Di Fate

The Muungano empire strived and struggled to form a utopia when they split away from old earth. Freeing themselves from the endless wars and oppression of their home planet in order to shape their own futures and create a far-reaching coalition of city-states that stretched from Earth and Mars to Titan.

With the wisdom of their ancestors, the leadership of their elders, the power and vision of their scientists and warriors they charted a course to a better future. But the old powers could not allow them to thrive and have now set in motion new plots to destroy all that they've built.

In the fire to come they will face down their greatest struggle yet.

Amachi Adisa and other young leaders will contend with each other for the power to galvanize their people and chart the next course for the empire.

Fela Buhari and her elite unit will take the fight to regions not seen by human eyes, but no training will be enough to bring them all home.

Stacia Chikeke, captain of the starship Cypher, will face down enemies across the stars, and within her own vessel, as she searches for the answers that could save them all.

Beyond the Orun Gate, Epyc Ro and her elite soldiers are stranded. Capturing an alien ship and searching for a way home, they discover a stowaway who may be the key to overcoming the alien forces swarming all around them.

On board the Cypher, Captain Stacia Chikeke is struggling to keep her ship and its fractured crew together. But the discovery of an interstellar phenomenon and the opportunity to explore unites them in a singular purpose, for now.

In the slums of Indianapolis, Wachiru Adisa works to free the children of the diaspora detained in Old Earth facilities, only to be captured and sent to a nightmarish criminal justice facility, the Panopticon.

On Old Earth, Ishant Sangsuwangul is the newly assigned liaison to the corporate entity running the government there. He feels like a prisoner, but must find a way to stem the tide of conflict as animosity toward his people grows.

In the Badlands of Mars, Amachi Adisa and her new teacher Nehanda begin her training to learn from her past, chart her future, and unlock the power that is her birthright.

In the Dreaming City, the lunar heart of Muungano power, Maulana Buhari struggles with how to lead his people. Is now the time for isolation or aggression?

Together they, and all of Muungano, will guide the empire forward by any means necessary, as enemies of old and new extraterrestrial threats mount.

A MAGICAL MANIAC IS LOOSE IN ALANDA!

A magical murderer is loose in Alanda. The victims are always women, always lower-class, and the weapon is always a three-sided stiletto, most often found among Church regalia. But the killers are never churchmen, and they always commit suicide immediately after the bloody deed.

Tal Rufen is just a simple constable. But he really cares about his job, and when one of these murder/suicides happens on his beat he becomes obsessed. His superiors don't care—the victims will never be missed, and their murderers are already justly dead. But every instinct Tal Rufen has cries out that he has seen only one small piece of a bigger and much nastier puzzle....

A deadly mercenary force named Camacho's Caballeros and their ace operative, Cassie Suthorn, attempts to unveil the tratorous Black Dragon secret society before they can succeed in sending the entire Inner Sphere off its course.

Nightstruck: the start of a spooky yet romantic dark paranormal horror series from Glimmerglass author Jenna Black.

The night is the enemy, and the city of Philadelphia is its deadliest weapon.

Becket is an ordinary teenage girl, wrestling with the upheaval of her parents' divorce. A studious high school senior, her biggest problems to date have been choosing which colleges to apply to, living up to her parents' ambitious expectations for her, and fighting her secret crush on her best friend's boyfriend. But that all changes on the night she tries to save an innocent life and everything goes horribly wrong.

Unbeknownst to her, Becket has been tricked into opening a door between worlds, allowing a dark magic into the mortal world. As the magic trickles in, the city begins to change at night. Strange creatures roam the streets, and inanimate objects come to life, all of them bloodthirsty and terrifying. The city returns to normal when the sun rises in the morning, and no one can capture the strange changes--such as potholes turning into toothy mouths and wires turning into strangling vines--on film, which prompts the government to declare that the city has been infected with some kind of madness and must be quarantined. Meanwhile, venturing out of one's house at night has become a dangerous proposition, and the moment the sun sets, most of the citizens of the city shut themselves up in their houses and stay there even in the case of dire emergencies.

The magic is openly hostile to most mortals, but there are some individuals it seems to covet, trying to lure them out into the night. While Becket struggles to protect her friends and family from predatory creatures of the night, she is constantly tempted to shrug off all her responsibilities and join them. Joining the night world means being free of not just responsibility, but conscience, and it means no longer caring about the fate of others.

Jenna Black returns to the quarantined city of Philadelphia, where an unsuspecting seventeen-year-old has unknowingly unleashed a dark power that transforms the city into a monstrous hellscape in Night Magic.

Philadelphia is locked in the grip of an evil magic that transforms its streets into a nightmare landscape the minute the sun sets each night. While most of the city hunkers down and hopes to survive the long winter nights, Becket Walker is roaming the darkened streets having the time of her life.

Once, the guilt of having inadvertently let the night magic into the city - and of having killed her onetime best friend - had threatened to destroy her. But now she's been Nightstruck, and all her grief and guilt and terror have been swept away - along with her conscience. So what if she's lost her friends, her family, and her home? And so what if her hot new boyfriend is super-controlling and downright malevolent?

Mesmerized by the power and freedom of not having to care about anyone but herself, Becket is sinking ever deeper into the night magic's grasp. But those who love her refuse to give up on her - even if she's given up on them. If they can't find a way to help Becket break the night magic's hold, the entire city might soon find itself shrouded in perpetual night. But the last thing Becket wants is to be "rescued" from her brand new life, and she will fight tooth and claw to stay exactly where she is.

A god will return
When the earth and sky converge
Under the black sun

In the holy city of Tova, the winter solstice is usually a time for celebration and renewal, but this year it coincides with a solar eclipse, a rare celestial event proscribed by the Sun Priest as an unbalancing of the world.

Meanwhile, a ship launches from a distant city bound for Tova and set to arrive on the solstice. The captain of the ship, Xiala, is a disgraced Teek whose song can calm the waters around her as easily as it can warp a man's mind. Her ship carries one passenger. Described as harmless, the passenger, Serapio, is a young man, blind, scarred, and cloaked in destiny. As Xiala well knows, when a man is described as harmless, he usually ends up being a villain.

Forget everything you know about Halloween. The stories are distortions. They were created to keep the Church of Midnight hidden from the world. Every October 31st a gateway opens to a hostile land of sacrificial magic and chaos. Since the beginning of civilization the Church of Midnight has attempted to open the gateway and unite with its other half, the Church of Morning. Each year they've come closer, waiting for the ideal sacrifice to open the gateway permanently.

This year that sacrifice has come. And only two can protect it. Martin and Teresa are the nomads, battle-hardened people who lack identity and are forever road-bound on an endless mission to guard the sacrifice. Their only direction is from notes left from a mysterious person called the Messenger. Endowed with a strange telekinetic power, the nomads will use everything at their disposal to make it through the night alive. But matters have become even more complicated this year. Teresa has quickly lost ground battling cancer, while Martin has spiraled into a panic over being left alone. His mind may no longer be on the fight when it matters most... because ever on their heels is the insidious physical representation of a united church: Chaplain Cloth.

A decade has passed since the events of BLACK & ORANGE and the Church of Midnight has almost been singlehandedly decimated by the Nomad named Patty Middleton.

After a series of mass executions, she demands answers from the mysterious Messenger, despite the protests of her partner. While Patty seems closer to discovering the identity of the Messenger, she has also developed a dangerous condition with her power to create the invisible fields known as Mantles. This condition could kill her or people around her, just when she needs to focus on her enemies, who now include a government group known as the Office of Arcane Phenomenon.

Meanwhile, Chaplain Cloth, disappointed and impatient with years of failing, seeks a rumored pair of columns that will hold the gateway open forever. Patty Middleton is more than a match for him though, and with half of his Church gone, if he doesn't make his move now he might not get another chance for thousands of years. There's no room for error. He has to get those columns and sacrifice the Heart of the Harvest.

But this year the Heart isn't in our world.

This time around, the Nomads and Chaplain Cloth are spending Halloween in the Old Domain.

There Be Monsters Here...

It's not as great as you'd think, living in a tourist town that's known as "the most magical place in America." Same boring high school, just twice as many monsters under the bridges and rival Families killing each other for power.

I try to keep out of it. I've got my mom's bloodiron sword and my slightly illegal home in the basement of the municipal library. And a couple of Talents I try to keep quiet, including very light fingers and a way with a lock pick.

But then some nasty characters bring their Family feud into my friend's pawn shop, and I have to make a call--get involved, or watch a cute guy die because I didn't. I guess I made the wrong choice, because now I'm stuck putting everything on the line for Devon Sinclair. My mom was murdered because of the Families, and it looks like I'm going to end up just like her...

Something Wicked This Way Comes...

As a thief, I stick to the shadows as much as possible. But when the head of the Sinclair Family picks me to compete in the Tournament of Blades, there's no escaping the spotlight--or the danger.

Even though he's my competition, Devon Sinclair thinks I have the best shot at winning what's supposed to be a friendly contest. But when the competitors start having mysterious "accidents," it looks like someone will do anything to win--no matter who they hurt.

As if I didn't have enough to worry about, mobster Victor Draconi is plotting against Devon and the rest of my friends, and someone's going around Cloudburst Falls murdering monsters. One thing's for sure. Sometimes, humans can be more monstrous than anything else...

Bad Things Always Come In Threes...

As a thief, I'm good at three things: hiding in the shadows, getting in and out unseen, and uncovering secrets. I put these skills to work for the Sinclair Family, one of the magical mobs that run the tourist town of Cloudburst Falls.

Everyone knows Victor Draconi wants to take over all the other Families--and kill every last Sinclair. What they don't know is that I'm on to him, and no way will I let the man who murdered my mom get away with hurting all the other people I care about. Especially when I've got places to break into, stuff to steal, and Devon Sinclair fighting right by my side...

The World Has Already Ended.

The future--where a terrible battle against a parasitic virus called "Gastrea" has been fought... and lost. Humanity is cornered and lives in despair. Rentaro and Enju face constant danger in their work as a team of anti-Gastrea specialists known as "civil security officers." As if the daily fight against oblivion weren't enough, they'll soon face a threat that could destroy all of Tokyo...

The World Has Already Ended.

Following Rentaro Satomi's defeat of the Stage Five Gastrea, Tokyo Area returns to uneasy normalcy. When the ambitious leader of Osaka Area, Sougen Saitake, demands a visit with Lady Seitenshi, she needs a new bodyguard--and who should she pick but the city's new hero, Rentaro. However, dark forces are conspiring against Lady Seitenshi, and their origin is closer to home than anyone dares to imagine. Rentaro and Enju will have to confront a new kind of threat in order to protect the tenuous peace they've won--but how do you fight an enemy you can't even see?

The World has Already Ended.

Rentaro, Enju, Kisara, and the fearsome sniper Tina--just when they thought the future was looking slightly less uncertain, they're confronted with a terrible discovery: One of the giant monoliths that protects Tokyo Area from invasion by the monstrous Gastrea is on the verge of collapse, putting the lives of every single human within the city at risk! Is there any way to save Tokyo Area? And even if there is, what will become of Rentaro, Enju, Kisara, and Tina?

The World has Already Ended.

One of the giant Monoliths that protects Tokyo Area from the virally superpowered Gastrea creatures has been destroyed. And right on schedule, the Stage Four Gastrea Aldebaran leads an invading army of the monsters into the city. The elite self-defense forces are sent to face them, and the terrible sounds of war echo across a newly christened battlefield--but soon a tense silence falls. What is it that appears before the eyes of Rentaro and his friends? The near-future thriller of post-apocalyptic survival continues!

The World has Already Ended.

With the chaos of the Third Kanto Battle subsiding, peace is finally returning to the Tendo Civil Security Agency, and Rentaro, Kisara, Enju, and Tina are taking full advantage of the quiet. But when an old friend from Rentaro's childhood reappears, their bright days turn suddenly dark--and Rentaro finds himself imprisoned for a senseless murder. He plans a desperate escape, but his enemies keep coming, and they are like nothing he's ever fought before...

The World has Already Ended.

Rentaro is still a fugitive, running from the law for a murder he didn't commit. He and Hotaru are bruised, bleeding, and barely on speaking terms, but they're equally desperate to uncover the identity of Suibara's killer. However, Police Superintendent Hitsuma hasn't given up on pursuing Rentaro! With Hitsuma's impending marriage to heartbroken Kisara advancing closer and closer, will Rentaro clear his name and rescue her in time? And what does saving Kisara mean for their future?

The World has Already Ended.

The Akasaka Palace reception hall is playing host to a summit welcoming the leaders of Japan's five governmental Areas. The Seitenshi, host and head of Tokyo Area, greets her equivalents from Osaka, Sendai, Hakata, and Hokkaido, and few are willing to lend a sympathetic ear to her attempts at brokering peace.

The conference falls into chaos, the Seitenshi shocked that someone leaked out a state secret. The fallout soon brings the two Areas down the path to all-out war with each other--just as the Seitenshi vanishes from the palace!

The first novel in a brand-new alternate history series where Teddy Roosevelt is president for a second time right before WWI breaks out, and on his side is the Black Chamber, a secret spy network watching America's back.

1916. The Great War rages overseas, and the whole of Europe, Africa, and western Asia is falling to the Central Powers. To win a war that must be won, Teddy Roosevelt, once again the American president, turns to his top secret Black Chamber organization--and its cunning and deadly spy, Luz O'Malley Aróstegui.

On a transatlantic airship voyage, Luz poses as an anti-American Mexican revolutionary to get close--very close--to a German agent code-named Imperial Sword. She'll need every skill at her disposal to get him to trust her and lead her deep into enemy territory. In the mountains of Saxony, concealed from allied eyes, the German Reich's plans for keeping the U.S. from entering the conflict are revealed: the deployment of a new diabolical weapon upon the shores of America...

The second novel in an alternate history series where Teddy Roosevelt is president once more right before WWI breaks out, and on his side is the Black Chamber, a secret spy network watching America's back.

After foiling a German plot to devastate America's coastal cities from Boston to Galveston, crack Black Chamber agent Luz O'Malley and budding technical genius Ciara Whelan go to California to recuperate. But their well-deserved rest is cut short by the discovery of a diabolical new weapon that could give the German Imperial Navy command of the North Sea.

Luz and Ciara must go deep undercover and travel across a world at war, and live under false identities in Berlin itself to ferret out the project's secrets. Close on their trail is the dangerous German agent codenamed Imperial Sword, who is determined to get his revenge, and a band of assault-rifle equipped stormtroopers, led by the murderously efficient killer Ernst Röhm. From knife-and-pistol duels on airships to the horrors of the poison-gas factories to harrowing marine battles in the North Sea, the fight continues--with a world as the prize.

The third novel in a World War I alternate history series where America's greatest weapon against Germany is Black Chamber secret agent Luz O'Malley and technical genius Ciara Whelan. Only they can protect America's best hope of winning the war.

The Great War is at a stalemate, and the only thing stopping Germany from striking America is the threat of the United States using their own Annihilation Gas against them. But America's supply is quickly decaying and the Central Powers know it.

A plant is under construction in the remote highlands of Mexico so that America can make their own supply. President Teddy Roosevelt assigns crack agent Luz O'Malley and her technical genius Ciara Whelan to watch over the plant operating under cover identities.

But German agent Horst von Duckler has escaped from the POW camp in El Paso, and he's heading in the same direction--bent on revenge against Luz, and sabotage that will deprive America of its deterrent and kill tens of thousands.

This collection of nine proto-science fiction tales, translated and edited by renowned science fiction writer and scholar Brian Stableford, ranges from Louis-Sébastien Mercier's 1768 opening tale, in which the hero communicates with the dead through a beam that anticipates a modern-day laser, to an 1887 story by Guy de Maupassant that speculates on Martian life. In between, we have tales of a heart transplant, a device that can see through time and an alien dragon. The book also includes Albert Robida's classic novella "The Monkey King" in which Saturnin Farandoul, shipwrecked as a baby and raised by apes on a Pacific Island, visits the Mysterious Island and joins forces with Captain Nemo to battle the savage pirate hordes of Bora-Bora. The stories gathered here exemplify the manifest intention of writers from the 18th and early 19th centuries to create a new genre of modern, imaginative fiction, distinctively different from the Utopias and occult romances typical of the times. This edition includes a historical introduction and notes by Stableford.

Table of Contents:

• News from the Moon - short story by Louis-Sébastien Mercier (trans. of Nouvelles de la Lune 1788)
• The Embalmed Hand - short story by Adrien Robert (trans. of La main embaumée 1867)
• The Future Phenomenon - (1992) - short story by Stéphane Mallarmé (trans. of Le phénomène futur 1876)
• The Metaphysical Machine - short story by Jean Richepin (trans. of La machine à métaphysique 1876)
• The Monkey King - short story by Albert Robida (trans. of Le roi des singes 1882)
• The Historioscope - short story by Eugène Mouton (trans. of L'historioscope 1883)
• Tony Wandel's Heart - short story by Georges Eekhoud (trans. of Le cœur de Tony Wandel 1884)
• Martian Mankind - (2004) - short story by Guy de Maupassant (trans. of L'homme de Mars 1887)
• The Red Triangle - short story by Fernand Noat (trans. of Le triangle rouge 1902)

This is a new collection of 13 proto-science fiction tales and other scientific romances, penned between 1796 and 1921, translated and annotated by renowned science fiction writer and scholar Brian Stableford. From cosmic journeys exploring Mars and Jupiter, examining the nature, languages and reproductive methods of various alien species, to the tale of a man who awakens 10,000 years in the future when the Moon has broken apart and rained debris upon the Earth and suspension bridges link the planets of the Solar System; from future war stories, the discovery of automata and telepathy, to speculations about the extraterrestrial origins of Life on Earth, the tales gathered here exemplify the manifest intention of writers from the 18th and 19th centuries to create a new genre of imaginative fiction. The title piece, written in 1913, was the first-ever published item in a series of propagandistic works of fiction by rocket enthusiasts. It is remarkable for its description of space travel, and its attempt to design a hypothetical biosphere for another planet.

Table of Contents:

• Posthumous Correspondence - short fiction by Restif de La Bretonne (trans. of Les posthumes, lettres reçues après la mort du mari par sa femme qui le croit à Florence (excerpt) 1802)
• Perfectibility - short fiction by Charles Nodier (trans. of Hurlubleu grand Manifafa d'Hurlubière ou la perfectibilité: Histoire progressive 1833)
• he Story of a Naiad - short fiction by Louis Ulbach (trans. of Histoire d'une naïade 1858)
• Astronomical Journeys - short fiction by X. B. Saintine (trans. of Courses astronomiques 1864)
• War in 1894 - short fiction by Adrien Robert (trans. of La guerre en 1894 1867)
• The Origin of Life - short fiction by Eugène Mouton (trans. of L'origine de la vie 1877)
• Quiet House - (1885) - short fiction by Jules Lermina
• The Automaton - short fiction by Remy de Gourmont (trans. of L'automate 1889)
• The Future Terror - short fiction by Marcel Schwob (trans. of La terreur future 1891)
• A Rival of Edison - short fiction by Louis Mullem (trans. of Un rival d'Edison 1909)
• Erebium - (1904) - short fiction by Alphonse Allais
• The Germans on Venus - short fiction by André Mas (trans. of Les Allemands sur Vénus 1914)
• Telepathy - (1921) - short fiction by Théo Varlet

This collection of 18 proto-science fiction tales, translated and edited by renowned science fiction writer and scholar Brian Stableford, includes such ground-breaking tales as Charles Cros' An Interastral Drama (1872), about an unlawful love between an Earthman and a Venusian woman, Victorien Sardou's The Black Pearl (1862), the first romance of forensic science, Eugène Mouton's The End of the World (1872), depicting an ecocatastrophe precipitated by global warming generated by human industrial activity, and Louis Mullem's The Supreme Progress (1890), an imaginative tour de force of unprecedented scope predicting ideas that were later to be popularized by writers such as Olaf Stapledon. All the stories included in this volume predate the first translation into French of H.G. Wells. They are representative of a distinct tradition of romans scientifiques whose cardinal influences included astronomer Camille Flammarion and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam.

Table of Contensts

• Introduction (The Supreme Progress) - essay by Brian Stableford
• An Interastral Drama - (2010) - short story by Charles Cros (trans. of Un drame interastral 1872)
• The End of the World - short story by Eugène Mouton (trans. of La fin du monde 1872)
• The Supreme Progress - short fiction by Louis Mullem (trans. of Le progrès suprême 1894)
• The Paradise of Flowers - short fiction by X. B. Saintine (trans. of Le paradis des fleurs 1864)
• The Great Discovery of Animules - short fiction by X. B. Saintine (trans. of Grande découverte des animules 1864)
• The Science of Love - short fiction by Charles Cros (trans. of La science de l'amour 1874)
• A Newspaper of the Future - short fiction by Charles Cros (trans. of Le journal de l'avenir 1880)
• The Pebble That Died of Love - (1886) - short fiction by Charles Cros (trans. of Le caillou mort d'amour 1887)
• The Mirosaurus - (1885) - short fiction by Charles Epheyre (trans. of Le Mirosaurus 1893)
• Professor Bakermann's Microbe - (1890) - short story by Charles Epheyre (trans. of Le microbe du Professeur Bakermann, récit des temps futurs 1892)
• A Tale of the Future - short fiction by Paul Adam (1862-1920) (trans. of Le conte futur 1893)
• The End of a Monopoly - short fiction by Louis Mullem
• The New Year - short fiction by Louis Mullem (trans. of Fin d'année 1890)
• The Invisibility of Monsieur Gridaine - short fiction by Louis Mullem
• Club Conversation - short fiction by Louis Mullem (trans. of Causeries de cercle 1909)
• The Shadow and His Man - short fiction by Louis Mullem (trans. of L'ombre et son homme 1904)
• Chemical Eternity - short fiction by Louis Mullem (trans. of L'éternité chimique 1909)
• The Black Pearl - novelette by Victorien Sardou (trans. of La Perle Noire 1862)

A balloon ascent to the Heavens... A man with X-ray vision... A utopian metal city built on giant pylons above Paris... A sexless world in which women reproduce parthenogenetically and man is unknown... Is science insane? Unholy? See nine French authors of the 19th century grapple in a ground-breaking fashion with the future themes of science fiction. All the stories included in this volume predate the first translation into French of H.G. Wells. They are representative of a distinct tradition of romans scientifiques whose cardinal influences included astronomer Camille Flammarion and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - (2011) - essay by Brian Stableford
• A Heavenward Voyage - (1840) - short story by Samuel-Henry Berthoud (trans. of Voyage au Ciel)
• The Second Sun - short fiction by Samuel-Henry Berthoud (trans. of Le Second Soleil 1862)
• Mimer's Head - short fiction by René de Pont-Jest (trans. of La Tête de Mimer 1863)
• Wood'stown - short fiction by Alphonse Daudet (trans. of Wood'stown 1874)
• Love Among the Stars - short fiction by Camille Flammarion (trans. of Un amour des astres 1896)
• The X-Ray - short fiction by Charles Recolin (trans. of Le Rayon X 1896)
• The Mysterious Dajan-Phinn - short fiction by Michel Corday (trans. of Le Mystérieux Dajan-Phinn 1908)
• A World Above the World - short fiction by Jules Perrin and H. Lanos (trans. of Un Monde sur le monde 1911)
• Drymea, World of Virgins - short fiction by André Mas (trans. of Drymea, monde de vierges 1923)

This is a new collection of 12 French proto-science fiction tales penned between 1757 and 1924, translated and annotated by renowned science fiction writer and scholar Brian Stableford. From a pioneering venture on the exploration of "inner space" by renowned Swiss philosopher Emerich de Vattel to visions of Paris in ruins being explored by future antiquarians; from interplanetary communication with the planet Mars to the discovery of a spaceship from Mercury, which crashed in the Antarctic, and the moving saga of the Earthmen who tried to save its alien pilot, this fifth collection provides an unparalleled view of the evolution of French scientific romances. In the title piece, Quebec helped to make up for France's lack of female genre writers with Emma-Adèle Lacerte's 1917 sequel to Jules Verne's classic tale, Twenty Thousands Leagues Under the Sea.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction (Nemoville) - (2011) - essay by Brian Stableford
• Voyages in the Microcosm - short fiction by Emerich de Vattel (trans. of Voyages dans le microcosme, par un disciple moderne de Pythagore 1757)
• Archeopolis - short fiction by Alfred Bonnardot (trans. of Archéopolis 1859)
• All the Way! The Commune in 1873 - short fiction by René de Maricourt (trans. of Au bout du fossé ! ! : la commune en l'an 2073 1874)
• The Tell-Tale Insects - short fiction by Alphonse Brown (trans. of Les insectes révélateurs 1889)
• A Professional Scruple - (1896) - short fiction by G. Bethuys
• Cataclysm - short fiction by G. Bethuys (trans. of Cataclysme 1896)
• A Message from Mars - short fiction by Paul Combes (trans. of Un message de la planète mars 1897)
• The Blue Laboratory - short fiction by Paul Combes (trans. of Le laboratoire bleu 1898)
• Nemoville - short fiction by Madame A. B. Lacerte (trans. of Némoville 1917)
• Three Hundred Years Hence - short fiction by Pierre Mille (trans. of Dans trois cents ans 1922)
• The Eternal Voyage; or The Prospectors of Space - short fiction by José Moselli (trans. of Le voyage éternel ou Les prospecteurs de l'infini 1923)
• The Planetary Messenger - (2011) - short fiction by José Moselli (trans. of Le messager de la planète 1924)

This is a new collection of seven French proto-science fiction stories devoted to explorations of the future, as imagined in the 1850s and early 1900s, translated and annotated by renowned science fiction writer and scholar Brian Stableford. This collection includes fantastic explorations of Future Paris by Théophile Gautier, Arsène Houssaye, Victor Fournel as well as Alfred Franklin's visionary The Ruins of Paris in 4875 (1875), Maurice Spronck's devastating criticism of socialist utopianism, Year 330 of the Republic (1894), and Jean Jullien's An Investigation of the World of the Future (1909), in which a reporter interviews scientists whose discoveries are in the process of laying the foundations for the transformation of human society.

Table of Contents:

• Future Paris - short fiction by Théophile Gautier (trans. of Paris futur 1851)
• Future Paris - short fiction by Arsène Houssaye (trans. of Le Paris futur 1856)
• Future Paris - short fiction by Victor Fournel (trans. of Paris nouveau et Paris futur 1865)
• The Ruins of Paris in 4875 - short fiction by Alfred Franklin (trans. of Les Ruines de Paris en 4908, documents officiels et inédits 1875)
• Year 330 of the Republic - short fiction by Maurice Spronck (trans. of L'an 330 de la République : XXIIe siècle de l'ère chrétienne 1894)
• An Investigation of the World of the Future - short fiction by Jean Jullien (trans. of Enquête sur le monde futur 1909)
• Hebal's Vision - short fiction by Pierre-Simon Ballanche (trans. of Vision d'Hebal, chef d'un clan écossais 1831)

In the 1890s, a generation before Hugo Gernsback, Louis Figuier, editor of the French popular science magazine La Science Illustrée, made a concerted effort to define and delimit the genre of roman scientifique, using that term to head a series of feuilletons that ran in his magazine from 1888 to 1905. This is a new collection of eight French proto-science fiction stories taken from the pages of La Science Illustrée, translated and annotated by renowned science fiction writer and scholar Brian Stableford. Included here are Vernian romances, tall tales featuring the dramatic extrapolation of natural phenomena, stories highlighting the scientific obsessions of geniuses with its social and psychological costs, and stories of everyday life in which scientific knowledge comes to play a significant role.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction (The Conqueror of Death) - (2013) - essay by Brian Stableford
• The Tribulations of an Angler - short fiction by Alphonse Brown (trans. of Les tribulations d'un pêcheur à la ligne 1891)
• The Story of an Earthquake - short fiction by Camille Debans (trans. of Histoire d'un tremblement de terre 1892)
• Le Désiré - short fiction by Émile Gautier (trans. of Le Désiré, première traversée d'un bateau sous-marin 1893)
• Fire Island - short fiction by Camille Debans (trans. of L'île en feu 1893)
• Springfield's Doubloons - short fiction by Georges Price (trans. of Les 800 doublons de Springfield 1895)
• A Steam Duel - short fiction by Camille Debans (trans. of Un duel à vapeur 1895)
• The Conqueror of Death - short story by Camille Debans (trans. of Le vainqueur de la mort. Chronique des siècles à venir 1895)
• The Gold-Mines of Bas-Meudon - (1898) - short fiction by Paul Combes (trans. of Les mines d'or du Bas Meudon)

The Revolt of the Machines translated and annotated by renowned science fiction writer and scholar Brian Stableford, features eight stories written between 1865 and 1918, providing a cross-section of the early development of what the editor of the 19th century magazine La Science Ilustrée, Louis Figuier, called roman scientifique [scientific fiction]. Expanding upon the scientific speculations of the day, the stories in this volume often adopt philosophical or moral tones when conceptualizing the consequences of the discovery of anti-gravity; the breakthrough finding that life is possible after death; the mass suicide of technology; a cautionary tale of the dangers of telepathy; humans being dominated by a sub-species; a man who gets lost in history; and the exploration of Earth's newest moon, the wandering planetoid Anthea. In every case, these scientific romances use scientific conjecture to tackle the eternal theme of what it means to be human.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Brian Stableford
• A Prodigious Discovery - short fiction by X. Nagrien (trans. of Prodigieuse découverte 1866)
• Dr. Z***'s Autopsy - short fiction by Edouard Rod (trans. of L'Autopsie du Dr. Z*** 1884)
• The Revolt of the Machines - short story by Emile Goudeau (trans. of La révolte des machines 1891)
• The Rival Colleagues - short fiction by Louis Valona (trans. of Confrères ennemis 1896)
• Monsieur Forbe's Hallucination - short fiction by Jules Perrin (trans. of L'Hallucination de Monsieur Forbe 1908)
• The Race That Will Be Victorious - short fiction by Jules Sageret (trans. of La Race qui vaincra 1908)
• The Veridical Ascension Through History of James Stout Brighton - short fiction by Gaston de Pawlowski (trans. of La véridique ascension dans l'histoire de James Stout Brighton 1909)
• Anthea; or, The Strange Planet - short fiction by Michel Épuy (trans. of Anthéa ou l'étrange planète 1918)

"Let me tell you who I am, on the chance that these scribblings do survive.... I am Murgen, Standard bearer of the Black Company, though I bear the shame of having lost that standard in battle. I am keeping these Annals because Croaker is dead. One-Eye won't, and hardly anyone else can read or write. I will be your guide for however long it takes the Shadowlanders to force our present predicament to its inevitable end..."

So writes Murgen, seasoned veteran of the Black Company. The Company has taken the fortress of Stormgard from the evil Shadowlanders, lords of darkness from the far reaches of the earth. Now the waiting begins.

Exhausted from the siege, beset by sorcery, and vastly outnumbered, the Company have risked their souls as well as their lives to hold their prize. But this is the end of an age, and great forces are at work. The ancient race known as the Nyueng Bao swear that ancient gods are stirring. the Company's commander has gone mad and flirts with the forces of darkness. Only Murgen, touched by a spell that has set his soul adrift in time, begins at last to comprehend the dark design that has made pawns of men and god alike.

The wind whines and howls with bitter breath. Lightning snarls and barks. Rage is an animate force upon the plain of glittering stone. Even shadows are afraid. At the heart of the plain stands a vast grey stronghold, unknown, older than any written memory. One ancient tower has collapsed across the fissure. From the heart of the vastness comes a great, deep, slow breath like that of a slumbering world-heart, cracking the olden silence.

Death is eternity. Eternity is stone. Stone is silence. Stone cannot speak, but stone remembers.

So begins the next movement of Glittering Stone.... The tale again comes to us from the pen of Murgen, Annalist and Standard Bearer of the Black Company, whose developing powers of travel through space and time give him a perspective like no other.

Led by the wily commander, Croaker, and the Lady, the Company is working for the Taglian government, but neither the Company nor the Taglians are overflowing with trust for each other. Arrayed against both is a similarly tenuous alliance of sorcerers, including the diabolical Soulcatcher, the psychotic Howler, and a four-year-old child who may be the most powerful of all.

For years, Glen Cook's Black Company series has built a major audience among fantasy fans. Told from the "worm's-eye" view of the soldiers and functionaries who fight in the trenches of vast sorceress wars, this epic has riveted a generation of readers. If the Joseph Heller of Catch-22 were to tell the story of The Lord of the Rings, it might read like the Black Company books. There is nothing else in fantasy like them. Now Cook brings the latest cycle of the Black Company saga to a major climax, as the survivors of the disaster at the end of She is Darkness regroup in Taglios.

Determined to free their fellow warriors held in stasis beneath the glittering plain, they journey there under terrible conditions, arriving just in time for a magical conflagration in which the bones of the world will be revealed, the history of the Company unveiled, and new worlds gained and lost...all at a major price. Wry, tough-minded, brilliantly imagined, and told with enormous flair, Water Sleeps is Glen Cook at the top of his game.

When sorcerers and demigods go to war, those wars are fought by mercenaries, "dog soldiers," grunts in the trenches. And the stories of those soldiers are the stories of Glen Cook's hugely popular "Black Company" novels. If the Joseph Heller of Catch-22 were to tell the story of The Lord of the Rings, it might read like the Black Company books. There is nothing else in fantasy like them.

Now, at last, Cook brings the "Glittering Stone" cycle within the Black Company series to an end... but an end with many other tales left to tell. As Soldiers Live opens, Croaker is military dictator of all the Taglias, and no Black Company member has died in battle for four years. Croaker figures it can't last. He's right.

For, of course, many of the Company's old adversaries are still around. Narayan Singh and his adopted daughter--actually the offspring of Croaker and the Lady--hope to bring about the apocalyptic Year of the Skulls. Other old enemies like Shadowcatcher, Longshadow, and Howler are also ready to do the Company harm. And much of the Company is still recovering from the fifteen years many of them spent in a stasis field.

Then a report arrives of an evil spirit, a forvalaka, that has taken over one of their old enemies. It attacks them at a shadowgate--setting off a chain of events that will bring the Company to the edge of apocalypse and, as usual, several steps beyond.

Glen Cook is the leading modern writer of epic fantasy noir, and Soldiers Live is Cook at his best. None of his legion of fans will want to miss it.

Darkness wars with darkness as the hard-bitten men of the Black Company take their pay and do what they must. They bury their doubts with their dead.

Then comes the prophecy: The White Rose has been reborn, somewhere, to embody good once more....

This omnibus edition comprises The Black Company, Shadows Linger, and The White Rose.

Marching south after the ghastly battle at the Tower of Charm, the Black Company is hounded by shadowy figures every inch of the way.

The game is on: the Company versus the Shadowmasters, deadly creatures that deal in darkness and sorrow.

When hope dies, there's still survival. And there's still the Black Company.

This omnibus edition collects Shadow Games, Dreams of Steel, and The Silver Spike.

"Let me tell you who I am, on the chance that these scribblings do survive...."

"I am Murgen, Standardbearer of the Black Company, though I bear the shame of having lost that standard in battle. I am keeping these Annals because Croaker is dead, One–Eye won't, and hardly anyone else can read or write. I will be your guide for however long it takes the Shadowlanders to force our present predicament to its inevitable end...."

This omnibus volume comprises the novels Bleak Seasons and She is the Darkness.

"Let me tell you who I am, on the chance that these scribblings do survive...."

"I am Murgen, Standardbearer of the Black Company, though I bear the shame of having lost that standard in battle. I am keeping these Annals because Croaker is dead, One–Eye won't, and hardly anyone else can read or write. I will be your guide for however long it takes the Shadowlanders to force our present predicament to its inevitable end...."

This omnibus volume comprises the novels Water Sleeps and Soldiers Live.

The soldiers of the Black Company don't ask questions, they get paid. But being "The Lady's favored" is attracting the wrong kind of attention and has put a target on their backs--and the Company's historian, Croaker, has the biggest target of all.

The one person who was taken into The Lady's Tower and returned unchanged has earned the special interest of the court of sorcerers known as The Ten Who Were Taken. Now, he and the company are being asked to seek the aid of their newest member, Mischievous Rain, to break a rebel army. However, Croaker doesn't trust any of the Taken, especially not ones that look so much like The Lady and her sister...

Some feel the Lady, newly risen from centuries in thrall, stands between humankind and evil. Some feel she is evil itself. The hardbitten men of the Black Company take their pay and do what they must, burying their doubts with their dead.

Until the prophesy: The White Rose has been reborn, somewhere, to embody good once more.

There must be a way for The Black Company to find her...

Mercenary soldiers in the service of the Lady, the Black Company stands against the rebels of the White Rose. They are tough men, proud of honoring their contracts. The Lady is evil, but so, too, are those who falsely profess to follow the White Rose, reincarnation of a centuries-dead heroine. Yet now some of the Company have discovered that the mute girl they rescued and sheltered is truly the White Rose reborn. Now there may be a path to the light, even for such as they. If they can survive it.

She is the last hope of good in the war against the evil sorceress known as the Lady. From a secret base on the Plains of Fear, where even the Lady hesitates to go, the Black Company, once in service to the Lady, now fights to bring victory to the White Rose. But now an even greater evil threatens the world. All the great battles that have gone before will seem a skirmishes when the Dominator rises from the grave.

After the devastating battle at the Tower of Charm, Croaker leads the greatly diminished Black Company south, in search of the lost Annals. The Annals will be returned to Khatovar, eight thousand miles away, a city that may exist only in legend... the origin of the first Free Companies.

Every step of the way the Company is hounded by shadowy figured and carrion-eating crows. As they march every southward, through bug infested jungle, rivers dense with bloodthirsty pirates, and cities, dead and living, haunted by the passage of the Company north, their numbers grow until they are thousands strong.

But always they are watched--by the Shadowmasters--a deadly new enemy: twisted creature that deal in darkness and death: powerful, shadowy creatures bent on smothering the world in their foul embrace. This is the first round in a deadly game, a game that the Black Company cannot ea hope to win.

....embedded in the trunk of the scion of the godtree, it contains the essence of the maddest of the Ten Who Were Taken...The Dominator.

Defeated by the Lady and cast from this world, all that was left of him was a foul trace of lingering evil. But the graveyard that was once the Barrowland contains more secrets than dead. All who would possess the power of the Dominator are drawn to the spike. A foolhardy band of thieves is the first to reach it, and a rapacious and malign spirit is unleashed on an unwary world. The forces gather, sides are drawn, and mortal men can only die as the Dark Lords battle for domination.

Croaker has fallen and, following the Company's disastrous defeat at Dejagore, Lady is one of the few survivors--determined to avenge the Company and herself against the Shadowmasters, no matter what the cost.

But in assembling a new fighting force from the dregs and rabble of Taglios, she finds herself offered help by a mysterious, ancient cult of murder--competent, reliable, and apparently committed to her goals.

Meanwhile, far away, Shadowmasters conspire against one another and the world, weaving dark spells that reach into the heart of Taglios. And in a hidden grove, a familiar figure slowly awakens to find himself the captive of an animated, headless corpse.

Mercilessly cutting through Taglian intrigues, Lady appears to be growing stronger every day. All that disturbs her are the dreams which afflict her by night--dreams of carnage, of destruction, of universal death, unceasing...

Yaleen always wanted to join the boating guild and become a riverwoman. It was the most important role for a woman in her world. The boats sailed up and down the eastern shore, from Tambimatu in the south (where the river emerged from the base of the unclimbable Far Precipices) to the sea in the north. Only women could travel the river. A man was allowed on trip, with his wife-to-be, but if he dared set foot on a boat again the black current would call him to his death. It was the black current, too, which made the river impossible to cross. It ran the whole length of the waterway - gelatinous, mysterious, and alive. On the western bank lived other people who could sometimes be seen through telescopes, but they appeared to be male-dominated savages. When she was accepted in the Guild, Yaleen little suspected that she was embarking upon a course which before long would take her across to the western shore, and into the heart of the black current itself.

Ian Watson's novel is perhaps the most colourful and enjoyable he has written. Set on a strange distant planet, it offers a feast of mystery and dramatic incident.

Trapped by the evil Edrick in a locked room, Yaleen is cold-bloodedly murdered. But it is not the end of Yaleen's story, for she is given a second life - a reincarnation on Earth as a 'cherub'.

Soon she encounters Godmind, the megalomaniac artificial deity which controls life on Earth - and maintains a brutal labour colony on the Moon for any who dare to rebel. Bit by bit, Yaleen comes to understand the horrifying project of the Godmind...

Yaleen the Riverwoman tries to use the power of the Black Current to convince her people that the Godmind plans to destroy their world

-or-

The megalomaniac Godmind is still planning to use all the minds in creation to make a vast 'lens', and if necessary it will burn out all life in the process.

Back beside the river and literally born again, Yaleen represents to the guild of riverwomen the perfect proof of salvation, of life after death. In fact, she is desperately searching for a way to save the whole universe from imminent destruction.

Grievers is the story of a city so plagued by grief that it can no longer function.

Dune's mother is patient zero of a mysterious illness that stops people in their tracks--in mid-sentence, mid-action, mid-life--casting them into a nonresponsive state from which no one recovers. Dune must navigate poverty and the loss of her mother as Detroit's hospitals, morgues, and graveyards begin to overflow. As the quarantined city slowly empties of life, she investigates what caused the plague, and what might end it, following in the footsteps of her late researcher father, who has a physical model of Detroit's history and losses set up in their basement. She dusts it off and begins tracking the sick and dying, discovering patterns, finding comrades in curiosity, conspiracies for the fertile ground of the city, and the unexpected magic that emerges when the debt of grief is cleared.

A tale of survival, of moving beyond seemingly insurmountable devastation toward, if not hope itself, then the road to hope...

The pandemic of Syndrome H-8 continues to ravage the city of Detroit and everyone in Dune's life. In Maroons, she must learn what community and connection mean in the lonely wake of a fatal virus. Emerging from grief to follow a subtle path of small pleasures through an abandoned urban landscape, she begins finding other unlikely survivors with little in common but the will to live. Together they begin to piece together the puzzle of their survival, and that of the city itself.

Martha Macnamara knows that her daughter Elizabeth is in trouble, she just doesn't know what kind. Mysterious phone calls from San Francisco at odd hours of the night are the only contact she has had with Elizabeth for years. Now, Elizabeth has sent her a plane ticket and reserved a room for her at San Francisco's most luxurious hotel. Yet she has not tried to contact Martha since she arrived, leaving her lonely, confused and a little bit worried.

Into the story steps Mayland Long, a distinguished-looking and wealthy Chinese man who lives at the hotel and is drawn to Martha's good nature and ability to pinpoint the truth of a matter. Mayland and Martha become close in a short period of time and he promises to help her find Elizabeth, making small inroads in the mystery before Martha herself disappears. Now Mayland is struck by the realization, too late, that he is in love with Martha, and now he fears for her life. Determined to find her, he sets his prodigious philosopher's mind to work on the problem, embarking on a potentially dangerous adventure.

R. A. MacAvoy is a truly gifted author who has no need to rely on the conventions of the science fiction genre in order to hold the reader's attention. Her highly original debut novel, Tea With the Black Dragon, combined elements of mystery and fantasy along with a fascination with computer technology, and was highly praised by critics, while her Lens of the World trilogy appeared on many "best of the year" lists in the national news media. In this sequel to Tea With the Black Dragon, Mayland Long is once again thrust into a maelstrom of mysterious happenings. The peaceful relationship he has established with Martha Macnamara is being threatened. A wild psychic force is loose in the world, while Martha's granddaughter has been kidnapped and one of her Celtic musician friends has been found dead, hanging by a rope of twisted grass. Now the Black Dragon must use his wits to hunt for the killer... even if it brings him to a horrifying realization.

The Dark Kingdom is preparing itself for the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy the arrival of a new Queen, a Witch who will wield more power than even the High Lord of Hell himself. But this new ruler is young, and very susceptible to influence and corruption; whoever controls her controls the Darkness. And now, three sworn enemies begin a ruthless game of politics and intrigue, magic and betrayal...and the destiny of an entire world is at stake....

Ambitions unfurl as the realm's dreams of a liberator have finally been made flesh: Jaenelle, singled out by prophecy as the living embodiment of magic, is haunted by the cruel battles the Blood have fought over her - for not all of them await her as their Savior.

Jaenelle Angelline now reigns as Queen-protector of the Shadow Realm. No longer will the corrupt Blood slaughter her people and defile her lands. But where one chapter ends, a final, unseen battle remains to be written, and Jaenelle must unleash the terrible power that is Witch to destroy her enemies once and for all.Even so, she cannot stand alone. Somewhere, long lost in madness, is Daemon, her promised Consort.

Jared is a Red-Jeweled Warlord bound as a pleasure slave by the Ring of Obedience. After suffering nine years of torment as a slave, he murdered his owner and escaped - only to be caught and sold into slavery once again. The notorious queen who has purchased him, known as the Gray Lady, may not be what she seems. Soon, Jared faces a difficult choice: his freedom, or his honor.

The national bestselling Black Jewels trilogy established award-winning Anne Bishop as an author whose "sublime skill... blends the darkly macabre with spine-tingling emotional intensity, mesmerizing magic, lush sensuality, and exciting action."* Now the saga continues-with four all-new adventures of Jaenelle and her kindred.

Table of Contents:

• Weaver of Dreams - shortstory
• The Prince of Ebon Rih - novel
• Zuulaman - novelette
• Kaeleer's Heart - novel

The invitation is signed "Jaenelle Angelline," and it summons her family to a special soirée. But when her guests enter the house, they find themselves trapped in a living nightmare created by the Black Widow witches - and if they try to use Craft as protection, they risk being sealed in the house forever. But Jaenelle did not send the invitation. And now she and the rest of her family must rescue the others inside - and then find out who has created such a place, and why....

Now, only 100 Warlord Princes stand - without a leader and without hope. Theran Grayhaven is the last of his line, desperate to find the key that reveals a treasure great enough to restore Dena Nehele. But first he needs to find a Queen who remembers the Blood's code of honor and lives by the Old Ways. The woman chosen to rule Dena Nehele, Lady Cassidy, is not beautiful and believes she is not strong. But she may be the only one able to convince bitter men to serve once again.

For years, the Shalador people suffered the cruelties of the corrupt queens who ruled them, forbidding their traditions, punishing those who dared show defiance, and forcing many more into hiding. Now that their land has been cleansed of tainted blood, the Rose-Jeweled Queen, Lady Cassidy, makes it her duty to restore it and prove her ability to rule. But even if Lady Cassidy succeeds, other dangers await.

Anne Bishop returns to the Blood realm with four all-new captivating novellas.

POWER HAS A PRICE. SO DOES LOVE.

Return to the dark, sensual, and powerful world of the Black Jewels...

After a youthful mistake, Lord Dillon's reputation is in tatters, leaving him vulnerable to aristo girls looking for a bit of fun. To restore his reputation and honor, he needs a handfast--a one-year contract of marriage. He sets his sights on Jillian, a young Eyrien witch from Ebon Rih, who he believes has only a flimsy connection to the noble society that spurned him. Unfortunately for Dillon, he is unaware of Jillian's true connections until he finds himself facing Lucivar Yaslana, the volatile Warlord Prince of Ebon Rih.

Meanwhile, Surreal SaDiablo's marriage is crumbling. Daemon Sadi, the Warlord Prince of Dhemlan, recognizes there is something wrong between him and Surreal, but he doesn't realize that his attempt to suppress his own nature in order to spare his wife is causing his mind to splinter. To save Daemon, and the Realm of Kaeleer if he breaks, help must be sought from someone who no longer exists in any of the Realms--the only Queen powerful enough to control Daemon Sadi. The Queen known as Witch.

As Jillian rides the winds of first love with Dillon, Daemon and Surreal struggle to survive the wounds of a marriage turned stormy--and Lucivar has to find a way to keep everyone in his family safe... even from each other.

They are Warlord Princes, men born to serve and protect. They are the Queen's Weapons, men born to destroy the Queen's enemies - no matter what face that enemy wears.

Daemonar Yaslana knows how to be bossy yet supportive - traits he shares with his father, the Demon Prince, and his uncle, the High Lord of Hell. Within his generation of the family, he assumes the role of protector, supporting his sister Titian's artistic efforts and curbing his cousin Jaenelle Saetien's more adventurous ideas. But when a young Eyrien Queen, someone Titian thought was a friend, inflicts an emotional wound, Daemonar's counterattack brings him under the tutelage of Witch, the Queen whose continued existence is known only to a select few.

As Daemonar is confronted by troubling changes within and around the family, he sees warnings that a taint in the Blood might be reappearing. Daemonar, along with his father and uncle, must uncover the source of a familiar evil--and Daemon Sadi, the High Lord of Hell, may be forced into making a terrible choice.

The Queen's price is to stand against what you know is wrong. To stand and fight, no matter the cost to your court or to yourself. Especially to yourself.

Zoey, a young Queen-in-training at SaDiablo Hall, is wounded... and vulnerable to taunts and criticism. When an opportunity arises to befriend a stranger seeking sanctuary at the Hall, she puts herself and others in danger by ignoring Daemonar Yaslana's warning to back off.

Meanwhile, the witch Jillian's family prepares for her Virgin Night, the rite of passage that assures a woman will retain her power and her Jewels. The trouble is Jillian secretly went through the ceremony already. Now she has to explain the omission of that detail to her powerful and lethal family. And the High Lord of Hell's daughter, Saetien, travels to Scelt to find out about Jaenelle Angelline's sister--and perhaps to discover truths about herself.

With some guidance from Witch, these three young women will learn when to yield because it is right--and when to take a stand, even if they must pay the Queen's price.

Children are missing.

The police are stumped.

Halloween is coming, with an ancient evil on the horizon.

The vampires are the good guys.

This is not your ordinary fall weekend in Charlotte, North Carolina. Vampire private detectives Jimmy Black and Greg Knightwood have been hired to save a client from being cursed for all eternity, but end up in a bigger mess than they ever imagined.

Suddenly trapped in the middle of a serial kidnapping case, Jimmy and Greg uncover a plot to bring forth an ancient evil. Soon, they've enlisted the help of a police detective, a priest, a witch, a fallen angel and a strip club proprietor to save the world. This unlikely band of heroes battles zombies, witches, neuroses and sunburn while cracking jokes and looking for the perfect bag of O-negative.

Vampire detectives Jimmy Black and Greg Knightwood investigate a series of assaults plaguing the alleys of Charlotte, North Carolina. The string of hate crimes becomes personal when Jimmy's just-maybe-main-squeeze Detective Sabrina Law's cousin is attacked.

Helping a lady out could get the boys killed when they end up in Faerie. Before long, they're up to their butts in trolls, dark fae and a grand battle royale. The odds are against them, but to the boys, this is just another day on the night shift-if the night shift included a steel cage match of supernaturals.

Et tu, Vampire?

In the third installment of The Black Knight Chronicles, vampire private investigators Jimmy Black and Greg Knightwood discover they may be tied to a string of serial killings at the college and that they suddenly aren't the only vampire game in town.

The vampire count in Charlotte is at least three. Or more. As far as the unhappy boys are concerned, anything more than two is a crowd not to be tolerated.

While tracking down the killer and the competition, they encounter coeds, booby traps (not related to the coeds), and a hirsute bounty hunter with a moon fetish and a bad attitude. To catch the killer, Jimmy will have to survive a dive headfirst into the great unwashed horde of Dorkdom (game night at the local comic shop).

What's a red-blood drinking vampire to do? His job. Again.

Goblins and Witches and Trolls... oh crap!

In the fourth installment of The Black Knight Chronicles, Jimmy Black is having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day and a darned fine pity party, serving the finest alcohol, when a call from his not-quite-girlfriend-cop forces him to sober up and stare at jawbones.

"Cold case" takes on a whole new meaning when vampire detectives risk life and limbs (literally) to connect a series of decades-old kidnappings in Charlotte with current missing persons cases. All clues lead through the veil of Faerieland to the legendary Goblin's Market, a magical bazaar where anything is available-for a price.

The boys can barely stay out of trouble in Charlotte. As fresh meat at The Market, they'll be lucky to survive the day.

The bodies are piling up!

Murders are happening outside Charlotte's hottest nightspots. A new vampire society has set up shop in the sewers. And Jimmy Black's about to run afoul of the Master of the City. If Jimmy weren't already a vampire, the week ahead would be the death of him.

Between murder, monsters, pesky vampire ethics, and territorial disputes, Jimmy is about to discover how far he's willing to go to save the world and one friend's soul.

There are no easy choices, even for vampire geeks.

The boys are back with all-new monsters to battle, puzzles to unravel, and asses to kick in this fifth volume of the award-winning The Black Knight Chronicles series.

The latest book in the award-winning Black Knight Chronicles is a raucous ride through the city of Charlotte's seedy underbelly with the most unlikely crime lord ever.

Jimmy Black's knack for stumbling into the right place at the wrong time has landed him his dream job or worst nightmare-Master Vampire of the City.

Almost everyone that works for him wants him dead.

His best friend isn't speaking to him.

His girlfriend is now his ex-girlfriend.

And the Vampire Council has appointed a watchdog who'll decide if he lives past Thursday.

He has a kidnapping to solve, monsters and demons to fight, and a whole new crime empire to figure out.

Then there's Lilith....

Join Jimmy as he tries to put his (un)life back together and stay alive long enough to save the world. Again.

Detective Jimmy Black's life as an accidental crime lord and Vampire Master of Charlotte has him longing for the days when the bad guys had neon signs above their heads and a couple of well-placed bullets won the day. Now he spends more time balancing books than kicking butts, and that doesn't make for a happy vampire

When a missing person case lands in the lap of Black Knight Investigations, Jimmy and his partner, Greg Knightwood, jump happily back into action--until their missing person rises as an uncontrollable vampire and all signs point to a supernatural coup orchestrated by an unknown vampire of immense power. With the case going sideways, more missing girls, and a new cop in town way too curious about Jimmy's perennial youth, life in Charlotte is about to get interesting again.

Vigilante... check.
Killer vamp... check.
Undead serial murderer... check.
Enough alcohol to get Jimmy through this sh*tstorm? Doubtful.

Fists, fangs, and fury. It's all a matter of balance when Jimmy Black, Charlotte's Vampire Master of the City, is tasked with discovering why a mostly bloodless, decapitated body shows up in a dumpster. After a little sniffing around, Jimmy uncovers problems he didn't even know he had. Like a murderous vampire running loose in the city.

To keep the whole supernatural world a secret, Jimmy has to find the vigilante and stop them before the mundane world figures out that the monsters-under-the-bed are really living right next door. But the people the vigilante is killing are people who probably deserve it. So now Jimmy has to balance the safety of the city against the secrecy of the supernatural world. To maintain his leadership of that supernatural world, Jimmy is going to have to step up his game before it's "game over."

The Black Land is a myth: Centuries have passed since that Great Enemy was slain. Yet old fears linger, and on the longest night of the year, people in the South still light ritual bonfires to banish the dark.

In her village, this duty falls to Solveig, a girl favored by the gods with powerful fire magic. But when her brother kills a Northern lord's son during the ritual, it is Sol who faces punishment, by being weregild - part hostage, part guest - in the North for a year and a day.

As she journeys to her captivity, Sol starts to realize that the Black Land is no myth. The forests teem with foul beasts. Her travel companions are not what they seem, and their plans for her magic are shrouded in secrecy.

With only her loyal shieldmaiden and her own wits to rely upon, Sol must learn to master her powers and wrest control of her fate. For the Black Land's army stirs, ready to cover the world in darkness - unless Sol can find the courage to stop it.

Solveig and her shieldmaid have finally reached the fabled Elder sanctuary of Waterstone--a city of healing, restful beauty hidden from the Enemy's gaze. Yet whispers race through the palace halls, and those they have come to tentatively trust have hidden intentions. For not only is the city a refuge for an elementalist, her protector, and a mortal prince, it also holds a great weapon, one that only Solveig's kind may wield.

Yet Sol's faith in her own magic is perilously fractured. She can rely only her wits and skills of negotiation to be heard, or she will become a pawn in a dark game played by Elder and Enemy alike. The lord of the Black Land is mighty; treachery slithers amid Waterstone's many wonders, and time is growing short.

Before the darkness finds a way in, Sol must decide who to trust, where to turn for aid, and if she will take up a power she cannot hope to control. Even the right choice may doom not just the home she has left behind, but the entire world...

Her name is Pete Caldecott. She was just sixteen when she met Jack Winter, a gorgeous, larger-than-life mage who thrilled her with his witchcraft. Then a spirit Jack summoned killed him before Pete's eyes--or so she thought.

Now a detective, Pete is investigating the case of a young girl kidnapped from the streets of London. A tipster's chilling prediction has led police directly to the child... but when Pete meets the informant, she's shocked to learn he is none other than Jack.

Strung out on heroin, Jack is a shadow of his former self. But he's able to tell Pete exactly where Bridget's kidnappers are hiding: in the supernatural shadow-world of the fey. Even though she's spent years disavowing the supernatural, Pete follows Jack into the invisible fey underworld, where she hopes to discover the truth about what happened to Bridget--and what happened to Jack on that dark day so long ago...

Thirteen years ago, Jack Winter lay dying in a graveyard. Jack called upon a demon and traded his soul for his life... and now the demon is back to collect its due. But Jack has finally found something to live for. Her name is Pete Caldecott, and because of her, Jack's not going to Hell without a fight.

Pete doesn't know about Jack's bargain, but she does know that something bigger and far more dangerous than Jack's demon is growing in the Black. Old gods are stirring and spirits are rising--and Jack doesn't stand a chance of stopping them without Pete's help.

Witch hunts are on the rise and supernatural turf wars are reaching a boiling point. Then, just when it seems life couldn't get any worse for Pete, Jack reappears--but he's no longer the man she's always known. Hell has changed him forever. And he's brought back with him a whole world of trouble...

A cabal of necromancers are using ancient, unspeakable magic to turn the tide of war in their favor. Then, as the city is about to sink into chaos, Pete receives a chilling directive: To end the war, you must kill the crow-mage. Beset from all sides, Pete finds herself turning to an unholy source for help... even if doing so could destroy Black London--and life as she knew it--once and for all.

Pete Caldecott did everything she could to save Jack from Hell, even reigning in the dark machinations of the Morrigan to help bring him home. Still, Black London has not welcomed Jack back with open arms... So when a friend in Los Angeles asks for help tracking a sorcerous serial killer, Pete and Jack decide a change of scenery couldn't hurt...

But the shadow side of the City of Angels turns out to be more treacherous than they ever imagined. Together, Pete and Jack must navigate a landscape teeming with hostile magic-users-- and fight an unknown enemy. When their investigation leads to a confrontation with the demon Belial, Jack learns that he wasn't the only thing to escape from Hell. Now it's up to him and Pete to track and eliminate an evil older than the Black itself--before it turns L.A. into Hell on Earth. And destroys life as they know it back at home...

The crow-mage Jack Winter returns --to crash a secret gathering of ghost hunters, soul stealers, and other uninvited guests, both dead and alive...

Normally, Pete Caldecott stays far away from magical secret societies. But ever since her partner and boyfriend Jack Winter stopped a primordial demon from ripping into our world, every ghost, demon, and mage in London has been wide awake--and hungry. And the magical society in question needs their help putting things right.

SOUL TRADE
It all begins with an invitation. Five pale figures surround Pete in the cemetery to "cordially" invite her to a gathering of the Prometheus Club. Pete's never heard of them, but Jack has--and he's not thrilled about it. Especially the part that says, "Attend or die." The Prometheans wouldn't come to London unless something big's about to go down. So Pete and Jack decide to play it safe and make nice with the club--even if that means facing down an army of demons in the process. But now that they've joined the group, they're about to discover that membership comes at a cost...and has apocalyptic consequences.

Jack Winter and his girlfriend Pete Caldecott have encountered a lot of strange creatures in the Black--primordial demons, hungry ghosts, witch hunters, and the Prince of Hell himself, Belial. When Belial asks Jack for one last favor to help him keep his throne, Jack may have finally met his match because Belial's rival is something that no one--human or demon--has ever seen before...

There's a revolution brewing in Hell, and Jack might be the only one who can stop Belial's rival from ripping a hole between the Black and the mortal world--a catastrophe that could be worse than Armageddon. But to win, Jack will have to do the one thing he swore he never would: become a servant to the Morrigan, and risk losing everything he knows and loves... including Pete.

One night in Lagos, two former friends reunite. Obinna is a dutiful and unsophisticated stay-at-home husband and father married to a powerful businesswoman. Eze is single, a cautious rebel from his university days whose arrival soon upsets the balance in Obinna's life. In a world where men are constantly under surveillance and subject to the whims of powerful women, more than Obinna's ordered and accustomed routine might be on the line.

Issaka has returned home to Timbouctou and a devastating al-Qaeda raid. His only hope for survival is Faro, a stunning, blue-beaded supernatural entity who rises free from the flames of her imprisoning book as it burns. Compelled to follow Faro, Issaka is opening his eyes to their shared history and the ancestral wisdom of his own past.

Five miles off the South Carolina coast, Darden and Catherina are getting their promised forty acres, all of it undersea. Like every Black "mer," they've been experimentally modified to adapt to their new subaquatic home - and have met with extreme resistance from white supremacists. Darden has an inspired plan for resolution. For both those on land and the webbed bottom-dwellers below, Darden is hoping to change the wave of the future.

Copilots Msizi and Tariro are testing a newly constructed wormhole jump that presumably leads to unsettled habitable worlds. Then an explosion sends them off course, far from where they started and with little chance of ever making it back. Now they're stranded on their new home for the diaspora. It's called Malcolm X-b. But they're beginning to wonder how many light-years from civilization they really are.

Burri is a fashion designer and icon with a biochemistry background. Her latest pieces are African inspired and crafted to touch the heart. They enable wearers to absorb nanorobotic memories and recount the stories of Black lives and forgiveness. Wenda doesn't buy it. A protest performance artist, Wenda knows exploitation when she sees it. What she's going to do with Burri's breakthrough technology could, in the right hands, change race relations forever.

Grimace is a homeless man on a holy mission to free Black Americans from emotional slavery. His empty soda cans told him as much. Then he meets Kim, a transgender runaway who joins Grimace on his heroic quest. Is Grimace receiving aluminum missives from the gods, or is he a madman? Kim will find out soon enough on a strange journey they've been destined to share.

Waking up in a strange new place with no memory of his past life, Kelvin learns that he's bartered away those very memories in exchange for powerful new abilities during his recent transmigration. Heading out into a whole new world as a Summoner--with his first Follower being the very goddess who brought him over!--Kelvin begins his new life as an adventurer, and it isn't long before he discovers his hidden disposition as a battle junkie. From the Black Knight of the Ancient Castle of Evil Spirits to the demon within the Hidden Cave of the Sage, he revels in the fight against one formidable foe after another. Join this OP adventurer in an exhilarating and epic saga as he and his allies carve their way into the annals of history!

Following his transmigration, during which he bartered away his memories in exchange for rare and powerful skills, Kelvin is fully enjoying his new life as an adventurer. After making a name for himself in Parth, becoming the city's most famous and respected adventurer along with his close-knit motley crew, he next sets his sights on Toraj, the Country of Water. But what should have been a peaceful visit to satiate his heartfelt cry of "I haven't had a grain of rice since arriving in this world--I want some rice!!" was, of course, never fated to go smoothly. The unfortunate (or fortunate?) souls who just happened to catch the attention of this sarcastic, adventurous battle junkie are... none other than the Heroes of Deramis?! Join this black-clad warrior and his allies as they continue to make a name for themselves in the second volume of this epic journey!

In a world where magic walks and demons ride, you can't always play by the rules.

Jayné Heller thinks of herself as a realist, until she discovers reality isn't quite what she thought it was. When her uncle Eric is murdered, Jayné travels to Denver to settle his estate, only to learn that it's all hers -- and vaster than she ever imagined. And along with properties across the world and an inexhaustible fortune, Eric left her a legacy of a different kind: his unfinished business with a cabal of wizards known as the Invisible College.

Led by the ruthless Randolph Coin, the Invisible College harnesses demon spirits for their own ends of power and domination. Jayné finds it difficult to believe magic and demons can even exist, let alone be responsible for the death of her uncle. But Coin sees Eric's heir as a threat to be eliminated by any means -- magical or mundane -- so Jayné had better start believing in something to save her own life.

Aided in her mission by a group of unlikely companions -- Aubrey, Eric's devastatingly attractive assistant; Ex, a former Jesuit with a lethal agenda; Midian, a two-hundred-year-old man who claims to be under a curse from Randolph Coin himself; and Chogyi Jake, a self-styled Buddhist with mystical abilities -- Jayné finds that her new reality is not only unexpected, but often unexplainable. And if she hopes to survive, she'll have to learn the new rules fast -- or break them completely....

In the battle between good and evil, there's no such thing as a fair fight.

When Jayné Heller's uncle Eric died, she inherited a fortune beyond all her expectations -- and a dangerous mission in a world she never knew existed. Reining in demons and supernatural foes is a formidable task, but thankfully Jayné has vast resources and loyal allies to rely on. She'll need both to tackle a bodyswitching serial killer who's taken up residence in New Orleans, a city rich in voodoo lore and dark magic.

Working alongside Karen Black, a highly confident and enigmatic ex-FBI agent, Jayné races to track down the demon's next intended host. But the closer she gets, the more convinced she becomes that nothing in this beautiful, wounded city is exactly as it seems. When shocking secrets come to light, and jealousy and betrayal turn trusted friends into adversaries, Jayné will soon come face-to-face with an enemy that knows her all too well, and won't rest until it has destroyed everything she loves most....

When you're staring evil in the eye, don't forget to watch your back...

For the first time in forever, Jayné Heller's life is making sense. Even if she routinely risks her life to destroy demonic parasites that prey on mortals, she now has friends, colleagues, a trusted lover, and newfound confidence in the mission she inherited from her wealthy, mysterious uncle. Her next job might just rob her of all of them. At Grace Memorial Hospital in Chicago, something is stirring. Patients are going AWOL and research subjects share the same sinister dreams. Half a century ago, something was buried under Grace in a terrible ritual, and it's straining to be free. Jayné is primed to take on whatever's about to be let loose. Yet the greatest danger now may not be the huge, unseen force lurking below, but the evil that has been hiding in plain sight all along--taking her ever closer to losing her body, her mind, and her soul....

Jayné Heller has discovered the source of her uncanny powers: something else is living inside her body. She's possessed. Of all her companions, she can only bring herself to confide in Ex, the former priest. They seek help from his old teacher, hoping to cleanse Jayné before the parasite in her becomes too powerful. Ex's history and a new enemy combine to leave Jayné alone and on the run. Her friends try to hunt her down, unaware of the danger they're putting her in. Jayné must defeat the past, and her only allies are a rogue vampire she once helped free--and the nameless thing hiding inside her skin.

After years on her own, Jayné Heller is going home to find some answers. How did the powerful spirit calling itself the Black Sun get into her body? Who was her uncle Eric, and what was the grand plan that he devoted his life to? Who did her mother have an affair with, and why? What happened to her on her sixteenth birthday? And the tattoo--seriously--what was that about?

Jayné arrives amid preparations for her older brother's shotgun wedding, but she's not the only unexpected guest. The Invisible College has come to town to stop the ceremony. And the more she learns, the more she uncovers a darkness that runs deeper than generations and stronger than blood. A missing bride and wizards bent on vengeance may be the least of her problems.

Because in the shadows of Jayné's childhood home, a greater threat awaits that didn't die with her uncle. It calls itself the Graveyard Child.

Zombies are real. And we made them. Are you prepared for the zombie apocalypse? The Smith family is, with the help of a few marines.

When an airborne "zombie" plague is released, bringing civilization to a grinding halt, the Smith family, Steven, Stacey, Sophia and Faith, take to the Atlantic to avoid the chaos. The plan is to find a safe haven from the anarchy of infected humanity. What they discover, instead, is a sea composed of the tears of survivors and a passion for bringing hope.

For it is up to the Smiths and a small band of Marines to somehow create the refuge that survivors seek in a world of darkness and terror. Now with every continent a holocaust and every ship an abattoir, life is lived under a graveyard sky.

A World Cloaked in Darkness

With human civilization annihilated by a biological zombie plague, a rag-tag fleet of yachts and freighters known as Wolf Squadron scours the Atlantic, searching for survivors. Within every abandoned liner and carrier lurks a potential horde, safety can never be taken for granted, and death and turning into one of the enemy is only a moment away.

The Candle Flickers

Yet every ship and town holds the flickering hope of survivors. One and two from lifeboats, a dozen from a fishing village, a few hundred wrenched by fury and fire from a ship that once housed thousands...

Light a Flame

Now Wolf Squadron must take on another massive challenge: clear the assault carrier USS Iwo Jima of infected before the trapped Marines and sailors succumb to starvation. If Wolf Squadron can accomplish that task, an even tougher trial awaits: an apocalyptic battle to win a new dawn for humanity. The war for civilization begins as the boats of the Wolf Squadron become a beacon of hope on a Darkling Sea.

With the world consumed by a devastating plague that drives humans violently insane, what was once a band of desperate survivors bobbing on a dark Atlantic ocean has now become Wolf Squadron, the only hope for the salvation of the human race. Banding together with what remains of the U.S. Navy, Wolf Squadron, and its leader Steve Smith, not only plans to survive--he plans to retake the mainland from the infected, starting with North America.

The next step: produce a vaccine. But for do that, Wolf Squadron forces led by Smith's terrifyingly precocious daughters Sophia and Faith must venture into a sea of the infected to obtain and secure the needed materials. And if some of the rescued survivors turn out to be more than they seem, Smith just might be able to pull off his plan.

Once more, exhausted and redlining Wolf Squadron forces must throw themselves into battle, scouring the islands of the Atlantic for civilization's last hope.

With the world consumed by a devastating plague that drives humans violently insane, what was once a band of desperate survivors bobbing on a dark Atlantic ocean has now become Wolf Squadron, the only hope for the salvation of the human race. Banding together with what remains of the U.S. Navy, Wolf Squadron, and its leader Steve Smith, not only plans to survive--he plans to retake the mainland from the infected, starting with North America.

Smith's teenage daughters have become zombie hunters of unparalleled skill, both at land and on the sea, and they may hold the key to the rebirth of civilization on a devastated planet.

From his corner office on the forty-fourth floor of the Bank of the Americas tower on Wall Street, Tom Smith, global managing director for security, could see the Statue of Liberty, Battery Park--and a ravening zombie horde.

Officially, Smith was paid to preserve the lives and fortunes of employees, billionaires, and other clients. And with an implacable virus that turned the infected into ravenous zombies tearing through the city, the country, and the world, his job just got a lot harder.

Good thing Smith, late of the Australian special forces, isn't a man to give up easily. But saving civilization is going to take more than the traditional banking toolbox of lawyers, guns, and money. Smith needs infected human spinal tissue to formulate a vaccine--and he needs it by the truckload. To get it, he will have to forge a shady alliance with both the politicians of the City of New York and some of its less savory entrepreneurs.

But all of his back-alley dealing may amount to nothing if he can't stave off the fast-moving disease as it sweeps across the planet, leaving billions dead in its wake. And if he fails, his only fallback is an incomplete plan to move enough personnel to safe havens and prepare to restart civilization.

What's more, there are others who have similar plans--and believe it or not, they're even less charitable than a Wall Street investment banker. Sooner or later Smith will have to deal with them.

But first he has to survive the Fall.

THROUGH THE RAGING PLAGUE

At Tom Smith's previous gig, he was the global managing director for security of an international bank. Then the zombies emerged. And New York burned. His plan to save the city long enough to find a cure for the zombie virus didn't survive a bloody scrimmage between angry cops, cunning gangsters, and rapacious officials.

Tom and a few trusted allies were able to stay one step ahead and barely escape. Now they seek refuge in the bank's prepared evacuation retreat in the Cumberland Valley of Tennessee. But between Tom's people and relative safety are hundreds of miles of clogged roads, burnt-out towns and howling mobs of infected humans who know only hunger. Plus there are gangs of the non-infected who would like nothing more than to defeat and enslave any weary travelers who happen their way.

And finally, if Tom does pull off the journey, no one is sure how they are going to restart civilization. But even for that, Tom Smith has the spark of an idea. And, as always, the beginnings of a plan. Which he is certain will change completely when the enemy strikes.

CASTAWAYS IN A ZOMBIE PLAGUE

Six kids ranging from suburban geeks to street-smart pariahs. A British captain who rarely talks and never smiles. All on the 70-foot pilot house ketch Crosscurrent Voyager, bound on a senior summer cruise to adventure and serious fun.

Except most of the kids don't get along. And they'll be gone all summer. And none of them have sailed before. And worst of all--because they booked at the last minute--they got the destination nobody else wanted: the frigid and remote South Georgia Islands.

But there's one other hitch: they'll never see their families or friends again. Just days after they leave, a plague starts spreading like wildfire, turning most of its survivors into shrieking, cannibalistic rage-monsters. So with their past dying as fast as the world that shaped it, the kids' hated destination becomes their one hope for survival.

But it's an uncertain hope. Not only are other hostile survivors headed there, but South Georgia Island is unable to support permanent habitation. So if the strange crew of the Voyager doesn't come up with a further plan, they are--in every sense--heading straight toward the end of the world.

It was supposed to be fun. Six teenagers and their British captain aboard the ketch Crosscurrent Voyager, headed on a senior year summer cruise to excitement and adventure. Then the world as they knew it ended.

A plague spread throughout the globe, killing millions and turning the survivors into cannibalistic rage monsters--zombies, in so many words. Only by putting aside their differences were the young crew able to survive.

Now, they seek others like them, those fortunate souls who have made it through the zombie apocalypse. After all, maybe it's not the end of the world so long as GPS can help survivors navigate deadly terrain, to link up, and maybe--just maybe--ensure the continuation of the human race.

But the Earth's GPS systems are failing. It falls to those aboard the Crosscurrent Voyager to keep the unthinkable from happening. In order to do so, they must traverse dangerous seas to a European Space Agency complex in French Guiana.

And thousands of infected stand in the way.

If they succeed, humankind has a chance of rebuiling. If they fail, humanity may well be at the end of its journey.

TOP NAME WRITERS ENTER THE REALM OF JOHN RINGO'S BLACK TIDE RISING ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE SERIES!

A collection of all-original stories set in the Black Tide Rising series of novels created by multiple New York Times best-selling author John Ringo Stories by John Ringo, Eric Flint, John Scalzi & Dave Klecha, Sarah A. Hoyt, Jody Lynn Nye, Michael Z. Williamson and more.

The news that humanity had been dreading for ages had come true. Zombies are real. Worst of all, we created them. The apocalypse was upon us, and every man, woman and child had to answer a simple question of themselves: "What do we do now?" For a group of neighbors in the Chicago suburbs of Northern Indiana, it was "work together or die" ...and figure out how to live on top of oil storage tanks to keep the zombies at bay. For the Biological Emergency Response Teams in New York City, it was "how long can we fight off the infected before it's too late" ...as well as having to fight other groups all out to claim a dwindling stock of supplies and safety. And for a group of cheerleaders, it was about the end of their world. And about what happens when you get a group of physically fit young women really, really angry.

Contents:

• ix - Foreword (Black Tide Rising) - essay by Gary Poole
• 1 - Never Been Kissed - short story by John Ringo
• 5 - Up on the Roof - novella by Eric Flint
• 57 - Staying Human - short story by Jody Lynn Nye
• 71 - On the Wall - short story by David Klecha and John Scalzi
• 89 - Do No Harm - short fiction by Sarah A. Hoyt
• 109 - Not in Vain - novelette by Kacey Ezell
• 135 - How Do You Solve a Problem Like Grandpa? - novelette by Michael Z. Williamson
• 159 - Battle of the BERTs - novelette by Mike Massa
• 199 - The Road to Good Intentions - novelette by Tedd Roberts
• 227 - 200 Miles to Nashville - novelette by Christopher L. Smith
• 253 - Best Laid Plans - novelette by Eric S. Brown and Jason Cordova
• 267 - The Meaning of Freedom - short story by John Ringo
• 281 - Afterword (Black Tide Rising) - essay by John Ringo

Contents:

• ix - Foreword (Voices of the Fall) - essay by Gary Poole
• 1 - Starry, Starry Night - short story by John Ringo
• 11 - Spectrum - novelette by Mike Massa
• 37 - Storming the Tower of Babel - short story by Sarah A. Hoyt
• 61 - Return to Mayberry - novelette by Rob Hampson
• 93 - It Just Might Matter in the End - novelette by Travis S. Taylor
• 121 - Inhale to the King, Baby! - short story by Michael Z. Williamson
• 137 - Ham Sandwich - novelette by Jody Lynn Nye
• 163 - The Downeasters - novelette by Brendan DuBois
• 197 - The Species As Big As the Ritz - novelette by Robert Buettner
• 225 - The Cat Hunters - novelette by Dave Freer
• 255 - Alpha Gamers - short story by Griffin Barber
• 269 - True Faith and Allegiance - novelette by Michael Gants
• 299 - The Killer Awoke - short story by John Birmingham
• 317 - About the Authors (Voices of the Fall) - essay by uncredited

Contents:

• ix - Foreword (We Shall Rise) - essay by Gary Poole
• 1 - Social Distance - novelette by Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta
• 37 - Liberation Day - short story by Brendan DuBois
• 53 - Appalachia Rex - short story by Jason Cordova
• 79 - Maligator Country - novelette by Lydia Sherrer
• 117 - Fire in the Sky - short story by Stephanie Osborn and Michael Z. Williamson
• 139 - Just Like Home - short story by Jody Lynn Nye
• 163 - Chase the Sunset - short story by Jamie Ibson
• 187 - Descent into the Underworld - short story by Brian Trent
• 215 - A Thing or Two - short story by Kacey Ezell
• 233 - Ex Fide Absurdo - short story by Brent Roeder and Christopher L. Smith
• 261 - The Best Part of Waking Up - short story by Mike Massa
• 288 - About the Editors and Authors - essay by uncredited

The world was brought to its knees by the zombie virus. But humanity has risen from the ashes and has begun to rebuild. Courageous men and women have kindled a fire of hope in the darkness. But mere survival is not enough.

The real challenge is how to keep that future alive. How to not just survive, not just rebuild, but actually thrive. To tell the universe that mankind can take whatever nature throws against us and not back down.

To stand united.

Stories by John Birmingham, Jody Lynn Nye, Jamie Ibson, Sarah A. Hoyt, Brian Trent, Dave Freer, Griffin Barber, Lydia Sherrer, Mel Todd, Christopher L. Smith, and Mike Massa.

This huge anthology offers a kaleidoscope of brilliant writing from the Magi of the imagination. Alberto Manguel has selected 72 fantastic tales from life on the edge of the twilight zone, with stories from Marguerite Yourcenar, Herman Hesse, Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov, and many, many more. This is a collection of irresistible masterpieces, many of which have never before appeared in the English language.

Table of Contents:

• Foreword - Alberto Manguel
• House Taken Over - Julio Cortázar - 1967
• How Love Came to Professor Guildea - Robert S. Hichens - 1897
• Climax for a Ghost Story - I. A. Ireland - 1919
• The Mysteries of the Joy Rio - Tennessee Williams - 1954
• Pomegranate Seed - Edith Wharton - 1931
• Venetian Masks - Adolfo Bioy Casares
• The Wish House - Rudyard Kipling - 1924
• The Playground - Ray Bradbury - 1953
• Importance - Manuel Mujica Lainez - 1978
• Enoch Soames - Max Beerbohm - 1916
• A Visitor from Down Under - L. P. Hartley - 1926
• Laura - Saki - 1914
• An Injustice Revealed - Anon.
• A Little Place Off the Edgware Road - Graham Greene - 1947
• From "A School Story" - M. R. James - 1911
• The Signalman - Charles Dickens - 1866
• The Tall Woman - Pedro Antonio de Alarcón
• A Scent of Mimosa - Francis King - 1975
• Death and the Gardener - Jean Cocteau - 1923
• Lord Mountdrago - W. Somerset Maugham - 1939
• The Sick Gentleman's Last Visit - Giovanni Papini - 1907
• Insomnia - Virgilio Pinera
• The Storm - Jules Verne - 1884
• A Dream (from The Arabian Nights Entertainments) - Anon.
• The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar - Edgar Allan Poe - 1845
• Split Second - Daphne du Maurier - 1952
• August 25, 1983 - Jorge Luís Borges - 1982
• How Wang-Fo Was Saved - Marguerite Yourcenar - 1963
• From "Peter and Rosa" - Isak Dinesen - 1942
• Tattoo - Junichiro Tanizaki - 1910
• John Duffy's Brother - Flann O'Brien - 1941
• Lady into Fox - David Garnett - 1923
• Father's Last Escape - Bruno Schulz - 1937
• A Man by the Name of Ziegler - Hermann Hesse - 1954
• The Argentine Ant - Italo Calvino - 1957
• The Lady on the Grey - John Collier - 1951
• The Queen of Spades - Alexander Sergeievitch Pushkin- 1834
• Of a Promise Kept - Lafcadio Hearn - 1901
• The Wizard Postponed - Juan Manuel - 1973
• The Monkey's Paw - W. W. Jacobs - 1902
• The Bottle Imp - Robert Louis Stevenson - 1891
• The Rocking-Horse Winner - D. H. Lawrence - 1926
• Certain Distant Suns - Joanne Greenburg - 1979
• The Third Bank of the River - João Guimarães Rosa - 1967
• Home - Hilaire Belloc
• The Door in the Wall - H. G. Wells - 1906
• The Friends - Silvina Ocampo - 1982
• Et in Sempiternum Pereant - Charles Williams - 1935
• The Captives of Longjumeau - Léon Bloy - 1967
• The Visit to the Museum - Vladimir Nabokov - 1958
• "Autumn Mountain" - Ryunosuke Akutagawa
• The Sight - Brian Moore - 1977
• Clorinda - André Pieyre de Mandiargues - 1979
• The Pagan Rabbi - Cynthia Ozick - 1966
• The Fisherman and His Soul - Oscar Wilde - 1891
• The Bureau d'Echange de Maux - Lord Dunsany - 1915
• The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas - Ursula K. Le Guin - 1973
• In the Penal Colony - Franz Kafka - 1919.
• A Dog in Durer's Etching "The Knight, Death and The Devil" - Marco Denevi - 1968
• The Large Ant - Howard Fast - 1960
• The Lemmings - Alex Comfort
• The Grey Ones - J. B. Priestley - 1953
• The Feather Pillow - Horacio Quiroga - 1907
• Seaton's Aunt - Walter de la Mare - 1922
• The Friends of the Friends - Henry James - 1896
• The Travelling Companion - Hans Christian Andersen - 1835
• The Curfew Tolls - Stephen Vincent Benét - 1935
• The State of Grace - Marcel Aymé - 1959
• The Story of a Panic - E. M. Forster - 1904
• An Invitation to the Hunt - George Hitchcock - 1960
• From the "American Notebooks" - Nathaniel Hawthorne - 1868
• The Dream - O. Henry - 1910

The original Black Water was hailed by the Washington Post as "a celebration of nightmarish imagination." Now master anthologist Alberto Manguel assembles 70 more hypnotic tales from such writers as Julian Barnes, Joseph Conrad, V.S. Naipaul, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.B. White, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Elizabeth Bowen.

Table of Contents:

• Foreword - Alberto Manguel
• The Child Who Believed - Grace Amundson - 1950
• It's a Good Life - Jerome Bixby - 1953
• The Door - E. B. White - 1939
• Mysterious Kôr - Elizabeth Bowen - 1945
• Nights at Serampore - Mircea Eliade - 1970
• The Dead Fiddler - Isaac Bashevis Singer - 1966
• The Phoenix - Sylvia Townsend Warner - 1940
• The Spider - Hanns Heinz Ewers - 1915
• Changeling - Dorothy K. Haynes - 1978
• The July Ghost - Antonia S. Byatt - 1982
• Poor Girl - Elizabeth Taylor - 1955
• Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched - 1922
• The Complete Gentleman - Amos Tutuola - 1952
• The Professor and the Mermaid - Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa - 1962
• The Sausage - Friedrich Dürrenmatt - 1989
• A Woman Seldom Found - William Sansom - 1956
• Mummy to the Rescue - Angus Wilson - 1950
• Aghwee the Sky Monster - Kenzaburõ Õe - 1977
• Berkeley or Mariana of the Universe - Liliana Heker - 1986
• The Saint - Antonia White - 1931
• The Ghost of Firozsha Baag - Rohinton Mistry - 1986
• The Miracle of Ash Wednesday - Yevgeny Zamyatin - 1968
• Heartburn - Hortense Calisher - 1951
• The Accident - Ann Bridge - 1936
• The Old Woman - Joyce Marshall - 1960
• A Short Trip Home - F. Scott Fitzgerald - 1927
• The Brute - Joseph Conrad - 1906
• Mr. Sleepwalker - Ethel Wilson - 1961
• A Self-Possessed Woman - Julian Barnes - 1975
• The Woman Who Talked to Horses - Leon Rooke - 1984
• The White Rooster - William Goyen - 1947
• The Labrenas - Tommaso Landolfi - 1986
• The Dead Fish - Boris Vian - 1965
• Major Aranda's Hand - Alfonso Reyes - 1973
• Giving Birth - Margaret Atwood - 1977
• The Jewbird - Bernard Malamud - 1963
• The Misanthrope - John D. Beresford - 1918
• Bartleby - Herman Melville - 1853
• Private--Keep Out! - Philip MacDonald - 1949
• Dreams - Timothy Findley - 1988
• Mr. Dombey, the Zombie - Geoffrey Drayton - 1951
• Why I Changed into a Nightingale - Wolfgang Hildesheimer - 1986
• The Troll - T. H. White - 1935
• Two Words - Isabel Allende - 1991
• Ch'ien-niang - Chen Xuanyou - 1990
• The Visiting Star - Robert Aickman - 1966
• Ratanbabu and the Man - Satyajit Ray - 1987
• How It Happened - Arthur Conan Doyle - 1913
• Same Time, Same Place - Mervyn Peake - 1963
• The Enigma of Arrival - V. S. Naipaul - 1986
• Faithful Peter - Lion Feuchtwanger - 1945
• The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship - Gabriel García Márquez - 1972
• The House-Hunters - Peter Green - 1963
• The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman - 1892
• Eckhardt at a Window - Eric McCormack - 1987
• The Lefthanders - Günter Grass - 1989
• Mr. Arcularis - Conrad Aiken - 1922
• The Times My Father Died - Yehuda Amichai - 1984
• The Haunted House - Luigi Pirandello - 1939
• The Finder - Elizabeth Spencer - 1971
• Desire - James Stephens - 1920
• The Miraculous Revenge - George Bernard Shaw - 1951
• Room of Blood - Brett Balon - 1984
• The Shadow - Ben Hecht - 1926
• The Nine Billion Names of God - Arthur C. Clarke - 1953

Contents:

• Introduction - (2010) - essay by S. T. Joshi
• Pickman's Other Model (1929) - (2008) - novelette by Caitlín R. Kiernan
• Desert Dreams - (2010) - shortstory by Donald R. Burleson
• Engravings - (2010) - shortstory by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.
• Copping Squid - (2009) - novelette by Michael Shea
• Passing Spirits - (2010) - shortstory by Sam Gafford
• The Broadsword - (2010) - novella by Laird Barron
• Usurped - (2010) - novelette by William Browning Spencer
• Denker's Book - (2010) - shortstory by David J. Schow
• Inhabitants of Wraithwood - (2010) - novelette by W. H. Pugmire
• The Dome - (2010) - shortstory by Mollie L. Burleson
• Rotterdam - (2010) - shortstory by Nicholas Royle
• Tempting Providence - (2010) - novelette by Jonathan Thomas
• Howling in the Dark - (2010) - shortstory by Darrell Schweitzer
• The Truth About Pickman - (2010) - shortstory by Brian Stableford
• Tunnels - (2010) - shortstory by Philip Haldeman
• The Correspondence of Cameron Thaddeus Nash - (2010) - novelette by Ramsey Campbell
• Violence, Child of Trust - (2010) - shortstory by Michael Cisco
• Lesser Demons - (2010) - novelette by Norman Partridge
• An Eldritch Matter - (2010) - shortstory by Adam Niswander
• Substitutions - (2010) - novelette by Michael Marshall Smith
• Susie - (2010) - shortstory by Jason Van Hollander

Contents:

• 7 - Introduction: "Black Wings of Cthulhu 2" - (2012) - essay by S. T. Joshi
• 11 - When Death Wakes Me to Myself - (2012) - shortfiction by John Shirley
• 45 - View - (2012) - shortfiction by Tom Fletcher
• 61 - Houndwife - (2012) - shortstory by Caitlín R. Kiernan
• 85 - King of Cat Swamp - (2012) - shortfiction by Jonathan Thomas
• 107 - Dead Media - (2012) - shortfiction by Nick Mamatas
• 125 - The Abject - (2012) - shortfiction by Richard Gavin
• 149 - Dahlias - (2012) - shortfiction by Melanie Tem
• 159 - Bloom - (2012) - shortfiction by John Langan
• 195 - And the Sea Gave Up the Dead - (2012) - shortfiction by Jason C. Eckhardt
• 213 - Casting Call - (2012) - shortfiction by Don Webb
• 231 - The Clockwork King, the Queen of Glass, and the Man with the Hundred Knives - (2012) - shortfiction by Darrell Schweitzer
• 251 - The Other Man - (2012) - shortfiction by Nicholas Royle
• 263 - Waiting at the Crossroads Motel - (2012) - shortfiction by Steve Rasnic Tem
• 275 - The Wilcox Remainder - (2012) - shortfiction by Brian Evenson
• 291 - Correlated Discontents - (2012) - shortfiction by Rick Dakan
• 317 - The Skinless Face - (2012) - shortfiction by Donald Tyson
• 353 - The History of a Letter - (2012) - shortstory by Jason V Brock
• 369 - Appointed - (2012) - shortfiction by Chet Williamson

Contents:

• China Holiday - (2014) - novelette by Peter Cannon
• Dimply Dolly Doofy - (2014) - shortstory by Donald R. Burleson
• Down Black Staircases - (2014) - novelette by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.
• Further Beyond - (2014) - novella by Brian Stableford
• Hotel del Lago - (2014) - shortstory by Mollie L. Burleson
• Houdini Fish - (2014) - novelette by Jonathan Thomas
• Introduction (Black Wings of Cthulhu 3) - (2014) - essay by S. T. Joshi
• Necrotic Cove - (2014) - shortstory by Lois H. Gresh [as by Lois Gresh ]
• One Tree Hill (The World as Cataclysm) - (2013) - shortstory by Caitlín R. Kiernan
• Spiderwebs in the Dark - (2014) - novelette by Darrell Schweitzer
• The Hag Stone - (2014) - novelette by Richard Gavin
• The Man with the Horn - (2014) - shortstory by Jason V Brock
• The Megalith Plague - (2014) - shortstory by Don Webb
• The Turn of the Tide - (2014) - shortstory by Mark Howard Jones
• Thistle's Find - (2014) - shortstory by Simon Strantzas
• Underneath an Arkham Moon - (2014) - shortstory by Jessica Amanda Salmonson and W. H. Pugmire
• Waller - (2014) - novella by Donald Tyson
• Weltschmerz - (2014) - novelette by Sam Gafford

Contents:

• A Prism of Darkness - (2015) - shortfiction by Darrell Schweitzer
• Black Ships Seen South of Heaven - (2015) - shortfiction by Caitlín R. Kiernan
• Broken Sleep - (2015) - shortfiction by Cody Goodfellow
• Contact - (2015) - shortfiction by John Pelan and Stephen Mark Rainey
• Cult of the Dead - (2015) - shortfiction by Lois H. Gresh
• Dark Redeemer - (2015) - shortfiction by Will Murray
• Fear Lurks Atop Tempest Mount - (2015) - shortfiction by Charles Lovecraft
• Half Lost in Shadow - (2015) - shortstory by W. H. Pugmire
• In the Event of Death - (2015) - shortfiction by Simon Strantzas
• Night of the Piper - (2015) - shortfiction by Ann K. Schwader
• Revival - (2015) - shortfiction by Stephen Woodworth
• Sealed by the Moon - (2015) - shortfiction by Gary Fry
• The Dark Sea Within - (2015) - shortfiction by Jason V Brock
• The Rasping Absence - (2015) - shortfiction by Richard Gavin
• The Wall of Asshur-sin - (2015) - shortfiction by Donald Tyson
• Trophy - (2015) - shortfiction by Melanie Tem
• We Are Made of Stars - (2015) - shortfiction by Jonathan Thomas

This fifth instalment of S. T. Joshi's critically acclaimed Black Wings series features twenty stories that use H. P. Lovecraft's mythos as the basis for imaginative ventures into the weird and terrifying. One of the central themes in Lovecraft's work is the problematical nature of science in human affairs, and in this volume we find stories by Caitlín R. Kiernan, Lynne Jamneck, and Donald R. Burleson where scientists come face to face with the appalling implications of their discoveries.

Lovecraft was a master of the "sense of place," inventing imaginary towns in New England with a rich and sinister history stretching back centuries. In this book, Jonathan Thomas, W. H. Pugmire, and Sunni K Brock bring Lovecraft's towns of Arkham, Kingsport, and Innsmouth to life. Sam Gafford, Darrell Schweitzer,
and Stephen Woodworth evoke terror in other corners of the American continent, while British writers David Hambling and John Reppion find Lovecraftian horror in little-known towns in England. The world-building that led Lovecraft to fashion an entire universe set in the realm of dreams is duplicated in tales by Cody Goodfellow, Mark Howard Jones, and Donald Tyson.

Madness is always an occupational hazard of the "searchers after horror" who populate Lovecraft's tales. In this volume, stories by Robert H. Waugh, Nicole Cushing, and Nancy Kilpatrick searingly display the psychological aberrations of characters as they encounter the bizarre. Lovecraft himself has become an iconic character, and his gaunt, lantern-jawed figure stalks the tales by Jason C. Eckhardt and Mollie L. Burleson. This volume concludes, as did its predecessor, with a long poem by Wade German, one of the most dynamic figures in a remarkable renaissance of weird poetry inspired by the work of Lovecraft and his colleagues.

Black Wings V can take its place as a pioneering anthology that shows how the work of H. P. Lovecraft is inexhaustibly rich in the inspiration it can provide to contemporary writers of weird fiction.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by S. T. Joshi
• Plenty of Irem - short story by Jonathan Thomas
• Diary of a Sane Man - short story by Nicole Cushing
• The Woman in the Attic - short story by Robert H. Waugh
• Far from Any Shore - short story by Caitlín R. Kiernan
• In Blackness Etched, My Name - short story by W. H. Pugmire
• Snakeladder - novelette by Cody Goodfellow
• The Walker in the Night - short story by Jason C. Eckhardt
• In Bloom - short story by Lynne Jamneck
• The Black Abbess - novelette by John Reppion
• The Quest - short story by Mollie L. Burleson
• A Question of Blood - novelette by David Hambling
• Red Walls - short story by Mark Howard Jones
• The Organ of Chaos - novelette by Donald Tyson
• Seed of the Gods - short story by Donald R. Burleson
• Fire Breeders - short story by Sunni K Brock
• Casting Fractals - short story by Sam Gafford
• The Red Witch of Chorazin - short story by Darrell Schweitzer
• The Oldies - short story by Nancy Kilpatrick
• Voodoo - short story by Stephen Woodworth
• Lore - poem by Wade German

Volume 6 in the successful and critically acclaimed series of Lovecraftian horror anthologies by the most prominent acolytes of the horror master.

From claustrophobic fear in isolated New England towns to terrifying threats that span the infinite cosmos, the tales herein are fuelled by H. P. Lovecraft's creations. While his horrors originate in a vast cosmos outside of space and time, the terrors they bring strike ordinary humans caught up in conflicts far beyond their control.

Contents:

• Introduction - essay by S. T. Joshi (2017)
• Pothunters - (2017) - novelette by Ann K. Schwader
• The Girl in the Attic - (2017) - short story by Darrell Schweitzer
• The Once and Future Waite - (2017) - novelette by Jonathan Thomas
• Oude Goden - (2017) - short story by Lynne Jamneck
• Carnivorous - (2017) - short story by William F. Nolan
• On a Dreamland's Moon - (2017) - poem by Ashley Dioses
• Teshtigo Creek - (2017) - short story by Aaron Bittner
• Ex Libris - (2012) - novelette by Caitlín R. Kiernan
• You Shadows That in Darkness Dwell - (2017) - short story by Mark Howard Jones
• The Ballad of Asenath Waite - (2017) - poem by Adam Bolivar
• The Visitor - (2017) - short story by Nancy Kilpatrick
• The Gaunt - (2017) - short story by Tom Lynch
• Missing at the Morgue - (2017) - short story by Donald Tyson
• The Shard - (2017) - short story by Don Webb
• The Mystery of the Cursed Cottage - (2017) - short story by David Hambling
• To Court the Night - (2017) - poem by K. A. Opperman
• To Move Beneath Autumnal Oaks - (2017) - short story by W. H. Pugmire
• Mister Ainsley - (2017) - short story by Steve Rasnic Tem
• Satiety - (2017) - short story by Jason V Brock
• Provenance Unknown - (2017) - novelette by Stephen Woodworth
• The Well - (2017) - poem by D. L. Myers

This seventh volume of S. T. Joshi's acclaimed Black Wings series features an international cast of contributors who use the work of H. P. Lovecraft as a springboard for powerful and thought-provoking tales that probe the terrors and uncertainties of life in the twenty-first century.

Lovecraft was a devotee of science, but he recognised that science's role in human life is ambiguous. In this volume, Katherine Kerestman, Steve Rasnic Tem, and Donald Tyson probe the sense of human insignificance that science brings in its wake. Lovecraft knew that realism of setting fostered his signature contribution of cosmicism. Stories by Donald R. Burleson, Nancy Kilpatrick, Geoffrey Reiter, and Aditya Dwarkesh take us from the frozen realm of Antarctica to the sweltering heat of Calcutta; from ancient New England to the remote stretches of Pennsylvania. Tales by David Hambling and Mark Howard Jones tease out weirdness even in the familiar locales of Great Britain.

Contents:

• Introduction -- S. T. Joshi
• The Resonances -- Ramsey Campbell
• Er Lasst Sich Nicht Lesen -- Steven Woodworth
• How Curwen Got His Hundred Years -- Jonathan Thomas
• The Pit of G'narrh -- Donald R. Burleson
• Open Adoption -- Ann K. Schwader
• The Lime Kiln -- Geoffrey Reiter
• Father Thames -- David Hambling
• Who Killed Augustus Bourbaki? -- Aditya Dwarkesh
• Can We Keep Him? -- Darrell Schweitzer
• The Things We Do Not See -- Steve Rasnic Tem
• Global Warming -- Katherine Kerestman
• A Very Old Song Mark -- Howard Jones
• Deception Island -- Nancy Kilpatrick
• And The Devil Hath Power -- John Shirley
• The Amber Toad -- Donald Tyson
• An Elemental Infestation -- Mark Samuels
• With Eyes Opened -- Ngo Binh Anh Khoa

Clare remembers the cold. She remembers abandoned cars and children's toys littered across the road. She remembers dark shapes in the snow and a terror she can't explain. And then... nothing.

When she wakes, aching and afraid in a stranger's gothic home, he tells her she was in an accident. He claims he saved her. Clare wants to leave, but a vicious snowstorm has blanketed the world in white, trapping them together, and there's nothing she can do but wait.

At least the stranger seems kind... but Clare doesn't know if she can trust him. He promised they were alone here, but she sees and hears things that convince her something else is creeping about the surrounding woods, watching. Waiting. Between the claustrophobic storm and the inescapable sense of being hunted, Clare is on edge... and increasingly certain of one thing:

Her car crash wasn't an accident. Something is waiting for her to step outside the fragile safety of the house... something monstrous, something unfeeling.

Something desperately hungry.

Nowhere is safe. Clare and Dorran scramble to secure their temporary sanctuary from the hungry things outside. The hollow ones, ravenous beings unaffected by the violent winter storms, patiently lie in wait. It's not a matter of if Clare and Dorran are attacked, but when. And Clare knows she'll have to venture out into the night soon...

Somewhere far away, Clare's sister Beth is trapped, with only hours to live. Hundreds of miles separate the sisters and the land between them is infested with monstrosities. There's a bitter deadline to this rescue mission, but Clare won't lose Beth without a fight.

She knows she can't survive the trip by herself. But even with Dorran at her side, can she truly hope to face the ruthless predators and make it to her desperate sister before it's too late? They all may be lost to the dark winter.

The mist is full of evil things - dark, twisted beings that think only of their own hunger - but Clare has clawed her way through. She and Dorran are alive against all odds, though relief is only temporary. Dorran is sick, and declining fast. The only way to save him lies in the mysterious Evandale Research Station, supposedly one of the few remaining places safe from the predators that lurk in the shadows. But the station is a three days' journey away, and it's unlikely their small group can endure that long out in the dark.

Because the danger they're facing comes not only from the ravenous hollow ones... but from each other.

This terrible new world has left scars, and the people left behind in it are nearly unrecognizable. As Clare fights to protect her ragtag family, she begins to realize a horrible truth: not everyone can be saved. And sometimes the worst monsters wear a human smile.

The stark world continues to change. Each passing day twists it further, pushing the survivors closer to the brink of extinction. But, for the first time, there is hope.

Clare and Dorran have set their sights on returning home to Winterbourne Hall. It's a daunting journey, but vital. Humanity needs more refuges - safe areas where food can be grown without attracting the attention of the hollow ones - and the old gothic manor is their best bet.

But their home is no longer a sanctuary. It's become a trap: carefully crafted for them, lying in wait for their return. By the time they realise just how dangerous Winterbourne has become, it's already too late.

The fight for survival is far from over.

An exiled captain returns to help the son of the king who died under his protection in this rich and multi-layered first book in an action-packed new series.

Twenty two years have passed since Kellas, once Captain of the legendary Black Wolves, lost his King and with him his honor. With the King murdered and the Black Wolves disbanded, Kellas lives as an exile far from the palace he once guarded with his life.

Until Marshal Dannarah, sister to the dead King, comes to him with a plea-rejoin the palace guard and save her nephew, King Jehosh, before he meets his father's fate.

Combining the best of Shogun and Netflix's Marco Polo, Black Wolves is an unmissable treat for epic fantasy lovers everywhere.

Publication of this book has been cancelled by the publisher

Marshal Dannarah devoted her life to her father's legacy of stable rule in the Hundred, only to find it betrayed by people she thought she could trust. As Captain Kellas and his rebel Black Wolves struggle to overthrow the last heirs of the palace regime she was once part of, Dannarah abandons her homeland to fight for the throne of the Sirniakan Empire.

But the fates of the Hundred and the Empire are linked in a way no one, not even Dannarah and Kellas, could ever expect, when stolen magic rouses an enemy long ago left for dead.

Blackbeard, probably the most idealized pirate of all time, is inadvertently raised from the dead by the two teenage boys of this story. Either tradition carved out an undeserved reputation for him, or his personality faded over the ages, but this folksy apparition seems to be missing his old swashbuckle. The prologue blends some facts about Blackbeard's last days, protected by the Governor of the Carolinas until his undoing by the Governor of Virginia, with a tale about a tavern built by the pirate and his crew.

When the old tavern is to be torn down and replaced by a gas station, J.D. Jones and Hank Obertuffer poke around in the rubble and find an old incantation which they read aloud at a mock seance. The spectral old salt makes his appearance, and rants about town until he gets to repossess the tavern, and thereby avenge his betrayal. Blackbeard emerges as a greasy looking fellow, with an underlay of bluster rather than fire. The boys, who seem too young for their high school classes, have tedious wise-cracking, ungrammatical conversations. The author has included a number of paintings in his widely popular Saturday Evening Post style. -Kirkus Reviews

The ghosts of Boar's Head Tavern match wits with flesh-and-blood spies.

In exchange for help escaping her long and wrongful imprisonment, embittered magical healer Blackthorn has vowed to set aside her bid for vengeance against the man who destroyed all that she once held dear. Followed by a former prison mate, a silent hulk of a man named Grim, she travels north to Dalriada. There she'll live on the fringe of a mysterious forest, duty bound for seven years to assist anyone who asks for her help.

Oran, crown prince of Dalriada, has waited anxiously for the arrival of his future bride, Lady Flidais. He knows her only from a portrait and sweetly poetic correspondence that have convinced him Flidais is his destined true love. But Oran discovers letters can lie. For although his intended exactly resembles her portrait, her brutality upon arrival proves she is nothing like the sensitive woman of the letters.

With the strategic marriage imminent, Oran sees no way out of his dilemma. Word has spread that Blackthorn possesses a remarkable gift for solving knotty problems, so the prince asks her for help. To save Oran from his treacherous nuptials, Blackthorn and Grim will need all their resources: courage, ingenuity, leaps of deduction, and more than a little magic.

Disillusioned healer Blackthorn and her companion, Grim, have settled in Dalriada to wait out the seven years of Blackthorn's bond to her fey mentor, hoping to avoid any dire challenges. But trouble has a way of seeking out Blackthorn and Grim.

Lady Geiléis, a noblewoman from the northern border, has asked for the prince of Dalriada's help in expelling a howling creature from an old tower on her land--one surrounded by an impenetrable hedge of thorns. Casting a blight over the entire district, and impossible to drive out by ordinary means, it threatens both the safety and the sanity of all who live nearby. With no ready solutions to offer, the prince consults Blackthorn and Grim.

As Blackthorn and Grim begin to put the pieces of this puzzle together, it's apparent that a powerful adversary is working behind the scenes. Their quest is about to become a life and death struggle--a conflict in which even the closest of friends can find themselves on opposite sides.

Feather bright and feather fine, None shall harm this child of mine...

Healer Blackthorn knows all too well the rules of her bond to the fey: seek no vengeance, help any who ask, do only good. But after the recent ordeal she and her companion, Grim, have suffered, she knows she cannot let go of her quest to bring justice to the man who ruined her life.

Despite her personal struggles, Blackthorn agrees to help the princess of Dalriada in taking care of a troubled young girl who has recently been brought to court, while Grim is sent to the girl's home at Wolf Glen to aid her wealthy father with a strange task--repairing a broken-down house deep in the woods. It doesn't take Grim long to realize that everything in Wolf Glen is not as it seems--the place is full of perilous secrets and deadly lies...

Back at Winterfalls, the evil touch of Blackthorn's sworn enemy reopens old wounds and fuels her long-simmering passion for justice. With danger on two fronts, Blackthorn and Grim are faced with a heartbreaking choice--to stand once again by each other's side or to fight their battles alone...

A traveller walks down a forest road alone.

A thief waits by the roadside.

But today, Kinch has chosen the wrong mark. Galva is a knight, a survivor of the brutal goblin wars, and patron of the goddess of death. She is searching for her missing queen, whom no one has seen since her city fell to giants.

After Kinch's attempt to rob Galva goes horribly wrong, his fate becomes locked to hers. Thief and knight must traverse lands where goblins hunger for kynd flesh, krakens hunt in dark waters, and the gods only laugh when you ask them for help.

Yet far worse are the dangers that lie in wait at their journey's end...

Enter the fray in this luminous new adventure set during the war-torn, goblin-infested years just before The Blacktongue Thief.

The goblins have killed all of our horses and most of our men. They have enslaved our cities, burned our fields, and still they wage war. Now, our daughters take up arms.

Galva, Galvicha to her three brothers, two of whom the goblins will kill - has defied her family's wishes and joined the army's untested new unit, the Raven Knights. They march toward a once-beautiful city overrun by the goblin horde, accompanied by scores of giant war corvids. Made with the darkest magics, these fearsome black birds may hold the key to stopping the goblins in their war to make cattle of mankind.

The road to victory is bloody, and goblins are clever and merciless. The Raven Knights can take nothing for granted - not the bonds of family, nor the wisdom of their leaders, nor their own safety against the dangerous war birds at their side. But some hopes are worth any risk.

Now, McDowell's masterpiece--the serial novel, Blackwater--returns to thrill and terrify a new generation of readers, with all six volumes available for the first time as a single e-book.

Featuring an insightful new introduction by John Langan, Blackwater traces more than fifty years in the lives of the powerful Caskey family of Perdido, Alabama, under the influence of the mysterious and beautiful--but not quite human--Elinor Dammert.

The Flood heralds the arrival of a visitor who will change the Caskey family--and the town--forever...

When the town builds The Levee, it proves a vain attempt to control a horrific power that can never be contained...

The House hides terrible secrets that whisper in closed rooms and scrabble at locked doors...

The War reveals family secrets more deadly and devastating than anything Perdido has ever dreamed in its deepest nightmares...

The Fortune brings happiness and power--but even greater terror...

And finally, the mysterious saga of the Caskey family ends the only way it can--in terrible judgment and fury delivered under the cover of a relentless, earth-shattering Rain.

The mysterious saga of the Caskey family begins in Blackwater I: The Flood, as a devastating flood brings a strange and beautiful visitor to the small, sleepy lumber town of Perdido, Alabama.

Elinor Dammert's arrival will forever change the town and the wealthy and powerful Caskey family.

James, who dotes on Elinor like a second daughter...

Sister, who pines for Elinor's strength and independence...

Oscar, who loves Elinor and determines to build a life with her...

And matriarch Mary-Love, perhaps the only person in Perdido with an inkling of Elinor's true power and purpose.

For Elinor is more than she appears, and she brings to Perdido--and to the Caskeys--a deadly, inexplicable otherness from which no one can ever be safe.

In Blackwater I: The Flood, McDowell introduced readers to the powerful Caskey family of Perdido, Alabama, whose lives were irrevocably changed by the arrival of the strange and beautiful Elinor Dammert.

Now the mysterious saga of the Caskey family continues in Blackwater II: The Levee.

Through a startling sacrifice, Elinor has finally managed to wrench her husband Oscar away from his powerful and demanding mother, Mary-Love.

But Mary-Love Caskey is not one to relinquish power easily, and she knows precisely the revenge that will hurt Elinor most.

As work begins on the levee that will block Elinor's beloved river from view, the two women battle for control of the Caskey family and perhaps the very soul of the town itself.

A strange child is born and baptized secretly in the dark waters of the Perdido River...

A lonely spinster turns to dark magic that will haunt her for the remainder of her life...

And a damaged boy goes for a walk in the moonlight and encounters something beyond his wildest nightmares...

Elinor Caskey's daughters, Miriam and Frances, have grown up next door to one another but separated by a veritable ocean of differences.

Miriam is spoiled and doted upon by her grandmother Mary-Love, while Frances is entirely Elinor's little girl... with all the mystery and otherness such a legacy entails.

As the Great Depression begins, the Caskey family grows ever more wealthy and powerful, and the enmity between Elinor and Mary-Love grows ever more deadly.

An unwelcome visitor makes the fatal mistake of attacking the Caskeys and then seeking escape across the dark river...

Oscar begins to suspect that Elinor is hiding secrets he can never hope to fathom...

And Mary-Love finally realizes the true and terrible extent of her adversary's overwhelming power...

A family war has ended, but a world war is about to begin--one that will prove yet another boon to the wealthy and powerful Caskeys.

As lumber orders pour in from the war effort, the Caskeys seem at times almost preternaturally charmed.

But secrets flow about the family as well, treacherous as the murky waters of the Perdido River.

A secret hidden deep in the woods, discovered by two young soldiers on their way to the war...

A secret revealed in the waters of a nearby lake, far more dangerous than the alligator that sometimes swims there...

And soon the mysterious Elinor will reveal the biggest secret of all--the secret that will change the Caskey family forever.

Already the most powerful family in Perdido, the Caskeys will soon experience success beyond their wildest imaginings. But prosperity comes with a price, and in the end even the Caskeys must pay.

One woman will risk everything to rid herself of the dreams she once begged for...

Another will make herself brutal in business and even more unyielding with the family that loves her...

And a third will finally confront her mysterious and terrible otherness as she faces marriage and motherhood and the relentless pleading call of the dark river...

Time heals old wounds and dissipates old illusions as a new generation of Caskeys ascends to power.

But even unimaginable wealth can't protect the Caskey family from the sins of its past or the judgment that is soon coming due.

An unexpected union brings joy and tragedy in equal measure...

Secrets long forgotten bubble to the surface of the dark river, and scrabble at the door of an abandoned room...

And a tragic encounter in the swamp conjures a storm the likes of which Perdido hasn't seen since the great flood of 1919...

In a dense star cluster, the solar winds blow fiercely. The star sailing ship HMSS Daring is running at full sheet with a letter of marque allowing them to capture enemy vessels involved in illegal trading. Sailing under a false flag to protect the ship and its mission, Daring's crew must gather intelligence that will lead them to the pirates' base.

Posing as traders, Daring's dashing second-in-command Liam Blackwood and brilliant quartermaster Amelia Virtue infiltrate shady civilian merchant networks, believing one will lead them to their quarry.

But their mission is threatened from within their own ranks when Daring's enigmatic captain makes a series of questionable choices, and rumblings of discontent start bubbling up from below decks, putting the crew on edge and destroying morale. On top of it all, Liam and Amelia must grapple with their growing feelings for each other.

Facing danger from unexpected quarters that could steer the expedition off course, Blackwood and Virtue must identify the real enemy threat and discover the truth about their commander--and their mission--before Daring falls prey to the very pirates she's meant to be tracking.

Exuberant after scoring a major victory against enemy pirates, the star sailing ship HMSS Daring eagerly embarks on its new mission. Until the pirate network is dismantled and its mysterious leader Dark Star brought to justice, the safety of the empire remains in jeopardy.

Supported by the ship's misfit crew, Subcommander Liam Blackwood and Quartermaster Amelia Virtue go undercover, following leads that take them deep into the pirate network. Yet the closer they get to its center and the elusive Dark Star, the clearer it becomes that all is not what it seems.

Pirates aren't the only danger the duo face. Empowered by imperial decree, an old enemy is murdering noble families and taking their property--an enemy that has a personal grudge against Daring and her crew. And now he is on his way across the galaxy to exact revenge.

Caught between ruthless pirates, a vengeful enemy, and their own increasingly intense feelings, Liam and Amelia must use all their cunning, charm, and daring to get out this alive.

Odessa Hardwicke's life is derailed when she's forced to turn her gun on her partner, Walt Leppo, a decorated FBI agent who turns suddenly, inexplicably violent while apprehending a rampaging murderer. The shooting, justified by self-defense, shakes the young FBI agent to her core. Devastated, Odessa is placed on desk leave pending a full investigation. But what most troubles Odessa isn't the tragedy itself -- it's the shadowy presence she thought she saw fleeing the deceased agent's body after his death.

Questioning her future with the FBI and her sanity, Hardwicke accepts a low-level assignment to clear out the belongings of a retired agent in the New York office. What she finds there will put her on the trail of a mysterious figure named Hugo Blackwood, a man of enormous means who claims to have been alive for centuries, and who is either an unhinged lunatic, or humanity's best and only defense against unspeakable evil.

From the authors who brought you The Strain Trilogy comes a strange, terrifying, and darkly wondrous world of suspense, mystery, and literary horror. The Hollow Ones is a chilling, spell-binding tale, a hauntingly original new fable from Academy Award-winning director Guillermo del Toro and bestselling author Chuck Hogan featuring their most fascinating character yet.

Having prevented the ferocious Bloodfiends from bringing disaster to their homeworld of Baal, the Blood Angles go in search of the renegade who almost destroyed them-Fabius Bile. Tracking the Chaos traitor down to his secret base on Dynikas V, a world beset by alien tyranids, the Blood Angels find horrors more terrible than even they can imagine. And with a sample of primarch's blood in his possession, the Blood Angels must discover what nefarious plot Fabius Bile is bent on.

Frain and Tirell, princes of Melior, ventured together into mysterious regions of Vale in search of an army and the hope of victory. For his father's murder of the gentle, beautiful Mylitta, Tirell's spirit ached with a black hatred. And nothing, not Frain the healer, not a beautiful virgin goddess, not his plundering sword could soothe the prince's raging pain -- until all gentleness itself had been laid to waste!

This is an epic odyssey to the far reaches of passion, the wilds of love, loyalty and war. This is the story of two princes, and a woman -- and the dark presence that would haunt them all.

Pinball, Roatax, Faction, Eeekold: Four men and a woman - the most dangerous group in the world - The Cabal! These aliases can be found in Interpol TCID crimino-records, but The Cabal are outside the law-they make their own laws. They are brilliant lethal, feared-and virtually indestuctable. Pinball is on the run from the doffers hiding out in a derelict area of soho with the rest of the cabal unable to contact him. Solitude and depression lead him to the final act of self destruction but through the curtains comes the vision of Woo. Answering her call, Pinball jumps time and space to discover sanctuary with one fatal drawback-a virulent cancer to which even a member of The Cabal is not immune.

When half-human Cal Leandros wakes up on a beach littered with the slaughtered remains if a variety of hideous creatures, he's not that concerned. In fact, he can't remember anything-including who he is.

And that's just the way his deadly enemies like it...

Tabloids sold in the Duchy of Stonehold claim that the High King, Caliph Howl, has been raised from the dead. His consort, Sena Iilool, both blamed and celebrated for this act, finds that a macabre cult has sprung up around her.

As the news spreads, Stonehold-long considered unimportant-comes to the attention of the emperors in the southern countries. They have learned that the seed of Sena's immense power lies in an occult book, and they are eager to claim it for their own.

Desperate to protect his people from the southern threat, Caliph is drawn into a summit of the world's leaders despite the knowledge that it is a trap. As Sena's bizarre actions threaten to unravel the summit, Caliph watches her slip through his fingers into madness.

But is it really madness? Sena is playing a dangerous game of strategy and deceit as she attempts to outwit a force that has spent millennia preparing for this day. Caliph is the only connection left to her former life, but it's his blood that Sena needs to see her plans through to their explosive finish.

Dark and rich, epic in scope, Anthony Huso has crafted a fantasy like no other, teeming with unthinkable horrors and stylish wonders.

Jandar the alien tortured by his love for the magnificent Princess Darloona in the savage and primitive world of Thanator, devises an incredible plan to infiltrate the ranks of the barbaric and merciless Black Legion who hold both the city of Shondakor and the Princess - in their relentless power.

It is a plan of inconceivable daring, fraught with dangers unthinkable by the human mind... and when the gates of the city lock behind him, Jandar realizes that death might be their only way out...

When a young woman disappears from the streets of New York City, ties of friendship and blood inevitably draw ingenious, tortured detective Charlie Parker into the search. Soon he discovers links to a church of bones in Eastern Europe, a 1944 slaughter at a French monastery, and to the myth of an object known as the Black Angel -- considered by evil men to be beyond priceless. But the Black Angel is not a legend. It is real. It lives. It dreams. And the mystery of its existence may contain the secret of Parker's own origins.

A complex, adult epic fantasy from a new Australian author... original, dramatic, unputdownable... Sierra has a despised and forbidden gift - she raises power from the suffering of others. Enslaved by the king's torturer, Sierra escapes, barely keeping ahead of Rasten, the man sent to hunt her down.

Then she falls in with dangerous company: the fugitive Prince Cammarian and his crippled foster-brother, Isidro. But Rasten is not the only enemy hunting them in the frozen north and as Sierra's new allies struggle to identify friend from foe, Rasten approaches her with a plan to kill the master they both abhor. Sierra is forced to decide what price she is willing to pay for her freedom and her life...

Sierra has always battled to control her powers, but now her life and Isidro's depend on keeping her skills hidden from the Akharians as they draw closer to Demon's Spire. In the relics left by Ricalan's last great mage, Isidro hopes to find the knowledge Sierra needs to master her powers, but instead uncovers his own long-buried talent for magecraft. When Sierra's untrainable powers turn destructive, she has nowhere to turn for help except to the uncertain mercy of an old enemy. But what will Rasten do when she returns to his hands at last?

Some things are broken beyond mending... Grievously wounded in battle, Isidro's life hangs in the balance - but the only person who can help him is the man he can never trust. Sierra is desperate to rebuild shattered bonds with her old friends, but with Isidro incontrovertibly changed and her own wounds still fresh, things can never be as they once were. Burdened by all he's done at Kell's command, Rasten knows he cannot atone for the horrors of his past. But when their enemies in Akhara follow Cam's small clan back to Ricalan, carrying a thirst for vengeance, the skills Rasten swore he'd renounce may be their only hope for victory...

A mythic tale of magic, passion, and primal power.

In the rich and tragic world beyond the River, magic springs from the elements--and danger, fear, and friendship each wait to claim their place in the grand design of life . . .

Everywhere the River God touched, he ruled. But the world beyond his reach was a dangerous riot of gods, ghosts, and strange spirits. And in that ominous otherworld, Hezhi--the River's own daughter--fought to master the magic that was her birthright. Spurned, the River bent all his might and slumbrous cunning to the task of reclaiming his wayward child.

Only the Blackgod saw a way for Hezhi to defeat the River once and for all.

But the Blackgod was a creature of mystery and--perhaps--of limitless duplicity. To trust him might be the most perilous choice young Hezhi could make . . .

Bordertown: a city on the border between our human world and the elfin realm. Runaway teens come from both sides of the border to find adventure, to find themselves. Elves play in rock bands and race down the street on spell-powered motorbikes. Human kids recreate themselves in the squats and clubs and artists' studios of Soho.

Terri Windling's original Bordertown series was the forerunner of today's urban fantasy, introducing authors that included Charles de Lint, Will Shetterly, Emma Bull, and Ellen Kushner. In this volume of all-new work (including a 15-page graphic story), the original writers are now joined by the generation that grew up dreaming of Bordertown, including acclaimed authors Holly Black, Cassandra Clare, Cory Doctorow, Neil Gaiman, Catherynne M. Valente, and many more. They all meet here on the streets of Bordertown in more than twenty new interconnected songs, poems, and stories.

Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Holly Black
• Introduction - essay by Terri Windling
• Welcome to Bordertown - novella by Terri Windling and Ellen Kushner
• Shannon's Law - novelette by Cory Doctorow
• Cruel Sister - poem by Patricia A. McKillip
• A Voice Like a Hole - short story by Catherynne M. Valente
• Stairs in Her Hair - poem by Amal El-Mohtar
• Incunabulum - novelette by Emma Bull
• Run Back Across the Border - poem by Steven Brust
• A Prince of Thirteen Days - novelette by Alaya Dawn Johnson
• The Sages of Elsewhere - short fiction by Will Shetterly
• Soulja Grrrl: A Long Line Rap - poem by Jane Yolen
• Crossings - short fiction by Janni Lee Simner
• Fair Trade (Comic) - short fiction by Sara Ryan and Dylan Meconis
• Night Song for a Halfie - poem by Jane Yolen
• Our Stars, Our Selves - short fiction by Tim Pratt
• Elf Blood - short fiction by Annette Curtis Klause
• Ours is the Prettiest - short fiction by Nalo Hopkinson
• The Wall - poem by Delia Sherman
• We Do Not Come in Peace - short fiction by Christopher Barzak
• A Borderland Jump-Rope Rhyme - poem by Jane Yolen
• The Rowan Gentleman - short fiction by Cassandra Clare and Holly Black
• The Song of the Song - poem by Neil Gaiman
• A Tangle of Green Men - novella by Charles de Lint

The Coldfire trilogy tells a story of discovery and battle against evil on a planet where a force of nature exists that is capable of reshaping the world in response to psychic stimulus. This terrifying force, much like magic, has the power to prey upon the human mind, drawing forth a person's worst nightmare images or most treasured dreams and indiscriminately giving them life. This is the story of two men: one, a warrior priest ready to sacrifice anything and everything for the cause of humanity's progress; the other, a sorcerer who has survived for countless centuries by a total submission to evil. They are absolute enemies who must unite to conquer an evil greater than anything their world has ever known.

When Queen Rufia entreats the Cinnerian to save her city from the undead with Zeriti's spell, the mighty warrior must strive to overcome his dread of the supernatural. For to undo the hex he must journey through the nightmare world of the dead. There lies the Silver Lotus, the only antidote tothe nefarious incantation. But thee also dwells the witch's bloodthirsty lover, who Conan must defeat should he wish to return to the world of the living.

After five hundred years, the Sunken Kingdom has returned, and brought with it a monstrous secret that threatens to destroy every country on the Star.

As an inhuman army gathers on its shores, poised to invade the Immaculate Isles, the members of the Cobalt Company face an ugly choice: abandon their dreams of glory and vengeance to combat a menace from another realm, or pursue their ambitions and hope the Star is still there when the smoke clears.

Five villains. One legendary general. A battle for survival.

Table of Contents:

• Blackwater Days - interior artwork by Shaun Tan
• Downloading - (1998) - novelette
• Beckoning Nightframe - (1996) - shortstory
• First Interview: A Journey - shortstory
• Basic Black - novelette
• Second Interview: Psychosleuths - shortstory
• The Saltimbanques - (2000) - novelette
• Third Interview: A Forgetting - shortstory
• Jenny Come to Play - (1997) - novelette
• Light from the Deep Pavilion - shortstory
• Blackwater Days - novelette
• L'Envoi: A Homecoming - shortstory

Tracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter: "He has a nose," people say. Engaged to track down a mysterious boy who disappeared three years earlier, Tracker breaks his own rule of always working alone when he finds himself part of a group that comes together to search for the boy. The band is a hodgepodge, full of unusual characters with secrets of their own, including a shape-shifting man-animal known as Leopard.

As Tracker follows the boy's scent--from one ancient city to another; into dense forests and across deep rivers--he and the band are set upon by creatures intent on destroying them. As he struggles to survive, Tracker starts to wonder: Who, really, is this boy? Why has he been missing for so long? Why do so many people want to keep Tracker from finding him? And perhaps the most important questions of all: Who is telling the truth, and who is lying?

Shockwaves of atomic destruction turned 22nd-century America into a hellzone, but in the ruins the human spirit remains unconquerable. Daily survival depends on raw courage and a deadly aim, and with his warrior band Ryan Cawdor roams the forbidding new frontier known as Deathlands, determined to unlock its secrets....

Emerging from a gateway in the midwest, Ryan senses trouble within the well-fortified ville of a local baron, whose understanding of pre-Dark medicine may be their one chance to save a wounded Jak. But while his whitecoats can make the drugs that heal, the baron knows the real power and money is in the hardcore Deathlands jolt. And where drugs and riches go, death shadows every step, no matter which side of a firefight you stand on.... In the Deathlands, tomorrow is never just another day.

For the devoted followers of the dazzling Deverry and Westlands cycle, Katharine Kerr continues the magical epic saga she began in The Red Wyvern.

The Black Raven

Her latest tale shifts effortlessly between the shattered lands of the Rhiddaer and Dun Deverry itself. At the historic end of the Civil Wars, Lilli, newly apprenticed to the dweomer, fights with her untried powers to save her beloved Prince Maryn from evil. Centuries later, in the city of Cerr Cawnen, the old evil awakens yet again when the sorceress Raena schemes to destroy Rhodry Maelwaedd, her bitter enemy during life after life. But her malice will draw the intervention of astral powers--and unleash the ravaging rage of Rhodry's guardian dragon. Only another untried dweomer can buy safety for the city and the berserker himself--and only at a most fearsome price....

All the guests were dressed as gangsters but their millionaire host was dead in the library with a black spot over his heart. Then the black spot struck again. And again. The Man of Bronze and his courageous crew leap into action against Jingles Sporado and his mob but they soon suspect a peril greater than any they have ever confronted.

Laurence Donovan authored this novel under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

Satan Black

The Man of Bronze is pegged for murder in a family feud over a pipeline stretching from Arkansas to the Atlantic. The precious oil it carries is needed by the army for the invasion of Europe that will end the war. Only Doc Savage and his fearless sidekicks can find the real culprit and see that the pipeline gets built -- at the risk of death by dynamite!

This is # 97 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about Satan Black available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

Cargo Unknown

Doc Savage's men are on a top secret mission aboard the Pilotfish when the submarine explodes and sinks to the ocean floor. The Man of Bronze tracks down the treacherous vipers behind the sabotage and searches for the purgatory of terror 200 feet below the ocean surface -- with only 12 hours of air left!

This is # 98 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about Cargo Unknown available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

Lester Dent authored both novels under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

Jiu San

A malevolent new leader has risen to terrorize the Western world. No one knows who he is. Doc, his crew, and a blonde war correspondent risk everything to find out. But to get the answers, they must face the death-dealing powers of a madman on the nighttime streets of a city known for its bloodthirsty killers -- Yokohama!

This is # 107 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about Jiu San Twice available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

The Black, Black Witch

From war-ravaged Manila to an ocean liner bound for chaos, Doc races to solve three mysteries at once -- the kidnapping of one of his valuable crew, the sinister secret behind a strange dancing girl and the identity of a power-crazed dictator more malevolent that Hitler!

This is # 108 in the Doc Savage Novels series.

More information about The Black, Black Witch available at the Hidalgo Trading Company website.

Lester Dent authored both novels under pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

On a lonely stretch of Welsh coastline a fisherman is killed by a hideous creature from beneath the waves. When the Doctor and Rose arrive, they discover a village where the children are plagued by nightmares, and the nights are ruled by monsters. The villagers suspect that ancient industrialist Nathanial Morton is to blame, but the Doctor has suspicions of his own.

Who are the ancient figures that sleep in the old priory? What are the monsters that prowl the woods after sunset? What is the light that glows in the disused lighthouse on Black Island? As the children's nightmares get worse, The Doctor and Rose discover an alien plot to resurrect an ancient evil...

The Battle of the Run is over, but for Barreth Forlo victory is bitter.

With only a dragon's scale to aid them, Barreth and his friends must find his missing wife before it's too late. A strange evil is stirring and a foul ritual has begun.

And Forlo's unborn child lies at the heart of it. Explore the legendary continent of Taladas, where barbarian chiefs struggle for survival against power-mad sorcerers in the uneasy aftermath of the War of Souls.

An ancient ogre empire threatens cataclysm for all in this new Dragonlance trilogy!

With a dire enemy now seated on the throne of the minotaur empire, the one-handed half-breed ogre Golgren returns to his own realm on the mainland and uses brutal means to consolidate his power and forge unlikely alliances. He must cope with an elite band of sorcerers, whose magical tactics are not easily thwarted. These Ogre Titans--led by their inner circle, the Black Talon--emerge as his greatest rivals. Golgren's obsession to resurrect the glorious past of the ogre race will engulf humans and elves, but may ultimately be decided by a deadly, capricious god.

Presents the story of the black dragon of Xak Tsaroth, ruins that lie in the heart of a murky and dangerous swamp, detailing the origins of the creature and its role as a minion of the Dark Queen. Original.

Valashu Elahad rescued the Lightstone from the dark hell of the enemy's own city, only to have his triumph overturned. Once more the Lord of Lies has the sacred gem in his possession and its power is invincible. Val burns with shame. Treachery surrounds him. His only hope is the Black Jade that lies buried in the heart of a cursed and blighted forest, forgotten since the War of the Stone. Through this, the greatest black gelstei ever created, Val will seek to understand the darkness inside himself so that he can use evil to fight evil. If he does not, the world will fall into final corruption as the Dark Universe of the Lord of Lies. In either case, evil prevails.

But Val must risk everything, even his soul. The stakes are too high for anything less. Val is the Guardian of the Lightstone until a new master is made known, that person who will rightfully wield its power. Should Val find the sacred gem and take it for himself, he will become a new Red Dragon, only mightier and more terrible than the Lord of Lies.

An Anthology of Science Fiction from Germany and Austria.

This entertaining anthology delivers great reading and an overview of German-language science fiction, including works by the "German father of science fiction" Kurd Lasswitz, the Austrian writer Ludwig Hevesi (author of "Jules Verne in Hell"), the fantasist Paul Scheerbart (a scurrilous, idiosyncratic writer who was an outsider in both literature and science fiction), popular writers Otto Willi Gail and Hans Dominik, as well as the contemporary luminaries of the genre: Wolfgang Jeschke, Herbert W. Franke, Andreas Eschbach, and Carl Amery. The introduction by the editor gives a succinct history of German language science fiction, including its representation in Hugo Gernsback's popular magazines. With select bibliographies of German language science fiction and writings on German science fiction, this book will be appreciated by scholars and general readers alike.

Contents:

• xi - Introduction: A Short History of Science Fiction in German - essay by Franz Rottensteiner
• 3 - Kurd Lasswitz: "To the Absolute Zero of Existence: A Story from 2371" - [Author and Shortfiction Introductions for 'The Black Mirror'] - essay by Franz Rottensteiner
• 5 - To the Absolute Zero of Existence - novelette by Kurd Lasswitz (trans. of Bis zum Nullpunkt des Seins 1871)
• 37 - Kurd Lasswitz: "Apoikis" - [Author and Shortfiction Introductions for 'The Black Mirror'] - essay by Franz Rottensteiner
• 39 - Apoikis - shortstory by Kurd Lasswitz (trans. of Apoikis 1882)
• 49 - Ludwig Hevesi: "Jules Verne in Hell: A Letter to the Editor from the Late Writer" - [Author and Shortfiction Introductions for 'The Black Mirror'] - essay by Franz Rottensteiner
• 50 - Jules Verne in Hell: A Letter to the Editor from the Late Writer - shortstory by Ludwig Hevesi (trans. of Jules Verne in der Hölle: Ein Brief des verstorbenen Schriftstellers an den Herausgeber 1906)
• 59 - Carl Grunert: "The Martian Spy" - [Author and Shortfiction Introductions for 'The Black Mirror'] - essay by Franz Rottensteiner
• 61 - The Martian Spy - shortstory by Carl Grunert (trans. of Der Marsspion 1908)
• 68 - Paul Scheerbart: "Malvu the Helmsman: A Story of Vesta" - [Author and Shortfiction Introductions for 'The Black Mirror'] - essay by Franz Rottensteiner
• 70 - Malvu the Helmsman - shortstory by Paul Scheerbart (trans. of Steuermann Malwu. Eine Vesta-Novellette 1912)
• 79 - Otto Willi Gail: "The Missing Clock Hands: An Implausible Happening" - [Author and Shortfiction Introductions for 'The Black Mirror'] - essay by Franz Rottensteiner
• 81 - The Missing Clock Hands - shortstory by Otto Willi Gail (trans. of Die verschwundenen Uhrzeiger 1929)
• 91 - Egon Friedell: "Is the Earth Inhabited?" - [Author and Shortfiction Introductions for 'The Black Mirror'] - essay by Franz Rottensteiner
• 93 - Is the Earth Inhabited? - shortstory by Egon Friedell (trans. of Ist die Erde bewohnt? 1931)
• 95 - Hans Dominik: "A Free Flight in 2222" - [Author and Shortfiction Introductions for 'The Black Mirror'] - essay by Franz Rottensteiner
• 97 - A Free Flight in 2222 - shortstory by Hans Dominik (trans. of Ein Freiflug im Jahre 2222 1934)
• 121 - Herbert W. Franke: "Thought Control"; "Welcome Home"; and "Meteorites" - [Author and Shortfiction Introductions for 'The Black Mirror'] - essay by Franz Rottensteiner
• 123 - Thought Control - shortstory by Herbert W. Franke (trans. of Gedankenkontrolle 1958)
• 125 - Welcome Home - shortstory by Herbert W. Franke (trans. of Willkommen daheim 1960)
• 127 - Meteorites - shortstory by Herbert W. Franke (trans. of Meteoriten 1960)
• 130 - Ernst Vlcek: "Say It With Flowers" - [Author and Shortfiction Introductions for 'The Black Mirror'] - essay by Franz Rottensteiner
• 132 - Say It With Flowers - shortstory by Ernst Vlcek (trans. of Ein Motor wie Monika 1980)
• 133 - Carl Amery: "Just One Summer" - [Author and Shortfiction Introductions for 'The Black Mirror'] - essay by Franz Rottensteiner
• 135 - Just One Summer - (2008) - shortstory by Carl Amery
• 156 - Horst Pukallus: "The Age of the Burning Mountains" - [Author and Shortfiction Introductions for 'The Black Mirror'] - essay by Franz Rottensteiner
• 157 - The Age of the Burning Mountains - (2008) - shortstory by Horst Pukallus (trans. of Die Ära der brennenden Berge 1989)
• 175 - Johanna Braun & Günter Braun: "A Visit to Parsimonia. A Scientific Report" - [Author and Shortfiction Introductions for 'The Black Mirror'] - essay by Franz Rottensteiner
• 177 - A Visit to Parsimonia. A Scientific Report - (2008) - shortstory by Johanna Braun and Günter Braun
• 184 - Erik Simon: "The Black Mirror" - [Author and Shortfiction Introductions for 'The Black Mirror'] - essay by Franz Rottensteiner
• 186 - The Black Mirror - [Riddh - 2] - shortstory by Erik Simon (trans. of Der schwarze Spiegel 1983)
• 192 - Angela Steinmüller & Karlheinz Steinmüller: "The Eye That Never Weeps" - [Author and Shortfiction Introductions for 'The Black Mirror'] - essay by Franz Rottensteiner
• 195 - The Eye That Never Weeps - shortstory by Angela Steinmüller and Karlheinz Steinmüller (trans. of Das Auge, das niemals weint 1984)
• 213 - Peter Schattschneider: "A Letter from the Other Side" - [Author and Shortfiction Introductions for 'The Black Mirror'] - essay by Franz Rottensteiner
• 214 - A Letter from the Other Side - shortstory by Peter Schattschneider
• 224 - Wolfgang Jeschke: "Partners for Life" - [Author and Shortfiction Introductions for 'The Black Mirror'] - essay by Franz Rottensteiner
• 226 - Partners for Life - shortstory by Wolfgang Jeschke (trans. of Partner fürs Leben 1996)
• 233 - Michael Marrak: "Astrosapiens" - [Author and Shortfiction Introductions for 'The Black Mirror'] - essay by Franz Rottensteiner
• 234 - Astrosapiens - shortstory by Michael Marrak (trans. of Astrosapiens 1998)
• 256 - Thorsten Küper: "Project 38 or the Game of Small Causes" - [Author and Shortfiction Introductions for 'The Black Mirror'] - essay by Franz Rottensteiner
• 257 - Project 38 or the Game of Small Causes - shortstory by Thorsten Küper (variant of Projekt 38, oder Das Spiel der kleinen Ursachen 2003)
• 274 - Michael K. Iwoleit: "Planck Time" - [Author and Shortfiction Introductions for 'The Black Mirror'] - essay by Franz Rottensteiner
• 276 - Planck Time - novelette by Michael K. Iwoleit (trans. of Planck-Zeit 2005)
• 303 - Oliver Henkel:"Hitler on the Campaign Trail in America" - [Author and Shortfiction Introductions for 'The Black Mirror'] - essay by Franz Rottensteiner
• 305 - Hitler on the Campaign Trail in America - shortstory by Oliver Henkel (trans. of Hitler auf Wahlkampf in Amerika 2005)
• 322 - Helmuth W. Mommers: "Habemus Papam" - [Author and Shortfiction Introductions for 'The Black Mirror'] - essay by Franz Rottensteiner
• 323 - Habemus Papam - shortstory by Helmuth W. Mommers (trans. of Habemus papam 2005)
• 335 - Andreas Eschbach: "Mother's Flowers" - [Author and Shortfiction Introductions for 'The Black Mirror'] - essay by Franz Rottensteiner
• 337 - Mother's Flowers - shortstory by Andreas Eschbach (trans. of Mutters Blumen)

This short story originally appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 13, November-December 2016.

Read the full story for free at Uncanny Magazine.

Although she was orphaned at birth, Eden Moore is never alone. Three dead women watch from the shadows, bound to protect her from harm. But in the woods a gunman waits, convinced that Eden is destined to follow her wicked great-grandfather--an African magician with the power to curse the living and raise the dead.

Now Eden must decipher the secret of the ghostly trio before a new enemy more dangerous than the fanatical assassin destroys what is left of her family. She will sift through lies in a Georgian ante-bellum mansion and climb through the haunted ruins of a 19th century hospital, desperately seeking the truth that will save her beloved aunt from the curse that threatens her life.

There's nothing worse than a cruel, cunning enemy with time to kill--and my murder to plan. With wicked Fire elemental Mab Monroe long gone, you'd think I could finally catch a break. But someone's always trying to take me down, either as Gin Blanco or my assassin alter-ago. Now along comes the Spider's new arch-nemesis, the mysteriously named M. M. Monroe, who is gleefully working overtime to trap me in a sticky web of deceit.

The thing is, I'm not the only target. I can see through the tangled threads enough to know that every bit of bad luck my friends have been having lately is no accident--and that each unfortunate "coincidence" is just one more arrow drawing ever closer to hitting the real bull's-eye. Though new to Ashland, this M. M. Monroe is no stranger to irony, trying to get me, an assassin, framed for murder. Yet, as my enemy's master plan is slowly revealed, I have a sinking feeling that it will take more than my powerful Ice and Stone magic to stop my whole life from going up in flames.

A runaway queen. A reluctant prince. And a quest that may destroy them both.

Eight years have passed since the Battle of the Serpent. But in the icy north, Lady Nore of the Court of Teeth has reclaimed the Ice Needle Citadel. There, she is using an ancient relic to create monsters of stick and snow who will do her bidding and exact her revenge.

Suren, child queen of the Court of Teeth, and the one person with power over her mother, fled to the human world. There, she lives feral in the woods. Lonely, and still haunted by the merciless torments she endured in the Court of Teeth, she bides her time by releasing mortals from foolish bargains. She believes herself forgotten until the storm hag, Bogdana chases her through the night streets. Suren is saved by none other than Prince Oak, heir to Elfhame, to whom she was once promised in marriage and who she has resented for years.

Now seventeen, Oak is charming, beautiful, and manipulative. He's on a mission that will lead him into the north, and he wants Suren's help. But if she agrees, it will mean guarding her heart against the boy she once knew and a prince she cannot trust, as well as confronting all the horrors she thought she left behind.

An imprisoned prince. A vengeful queen. And a battle that will determine the future of Elfhame.

Prince Oak is paying for his betrayal. Imprisoned in the icy north and bound to the will of a monstrous new queen, he must rely on charm and calculation to survive. With High King Cardan and High Queen Jude willing to use any means necessary to retrieve their stolen heir, Oak will have to decide whether to attempt regaining the trust of the girl he's always loved or to remain loyal to Elfhame and hand over the means to end her reign - even if it means ending Wren, too?

With a new war looming on the horizon and treachery lurking in every corner, neither Oak's guile nor his wit will be enough to keep everyone he loves alive. It's just a question of whom he will doom.

When Chup's castle fell to the forces of the West, the ex-lord was reduced to beggary at its gates. Each day he faced the Black Mountains of the East to which he had sworn fealty--and where he hoped his unclaimed bride still waited.

Behind, the West plotted to assault the Black Mountains with their new weapons from the forbidden lore of Old Technology. Ahead, lay the three most powerful lords in all creation. One was good, one was Evil, one was immortal.

Chup knew the East would not help him unless the could profit by it. Nor could he refuse anything asked of him and still survive. If they reached him in any way, he might be both blessed and cirsed. and then, one howling, windy night, came the deformed luminescence of a demon...

Necromancer is such an ugly word, but it's a title Eric Carter is stuck with.

He sees ghosts, talks to the dead. He's turned it into a lucrative career putting troublesome spirits to rest, sometimes taking on even more dangerous things. For a fee, of course.

When he left L.A. fifteen years ago he thought he'd never go back. Too many bad memories. Too many people trying to kill him.

But now his sister's been brutally murdered and Carter wants to find out why.

Was it the gangster looking to settle a score? The ghost of a mage he killed the night he left town? Maybe it's the patron saint of violent death herself, Santa Muerte, who's taken an unusually keen interest in him.

Carter's going to find out who did it and he's going to make them pay.

As long as they don't kill him first.

Sister murdered, best friend dead, married to the patron saint of death, Santa Muerte. Necromancer Eric Carter's return to Los Angeles hasn't gone well, and it's about to get even worse.

His link to the Aztec death goddess is changing his powers, changing him, and he's not sure how far it will go. He's starting to question his own sanity, wonder if he's losing his mind. No mean feat for a guy who talks to the dead on a regular basis.

While searching for a way to break Santa Muerte's hold over him, Carter finds himself the target of a psychopath who can steal anyone's form, powers, and memories. Identity theft is one thing, but this guy does it by killing his victims and wearing their skins like a suit. He can be anyone. He can be anywhere.

Now Carter has to change the game -- go from hunted to hunter. All he has for help is a Skid Row bruja and a ghost who's either his dead friend Alex or the manifestation of Carter's own guilt-fueled psychotic break.

Everything is trying to kill him. Nothing is as it seems. If all his plans go perfectly, he might survive the week.

He's hoping that's a good thing.

Necromancer Eric Carter's problems keep getting bigger. Bad enough he's the unwilling husband to the patron saint of death, Santa Muerte, but now her ex, the Aztec King of the dead, Mictlantecuhtli, has come back -- and it turns out that Carter and he are swapping places. As Mictlantecuhtli breaks loose of his prison of jade, Carter is slowly turning to stone.

To make matters worse, both gods are trying to get Carter to assassinate the other. But only one of them can be telling him the truth and he can't trust either one. Carter's solution? Kill them both.

If he wants to get out of this situation with his soul intact, he'll have to go to Mictlan, the Aztec land of the dead, and take down a couple of death gods while facing down the worst trials the place has to offer him: his own sins.