Search Worlds Without End

It begins in Toronto, in the years after the smart drug revolution. Any high school student with a chemjet and internet connection can download recipes and print drugs, or invent them. A seventeen-year-old street girl finds God through a new brain-altering drug called Numinous, used as a sacrament by a new Church that preys on the underclass. But she is arrested and put into detention, and without the drug, commits suicide.

Lyda Rose, another patient in that detention facility, has a dark secret: she was one of the original scientists who developed the drug. With the help of an ex-government agent and an imaginary, drug-induced doctor, Lyda sets out to find the other three survivors of the five who made the Numinous in a quest to set things right.

This novelette was originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, December 2006. It can also be found in the anthologies Year's Best SF 12 (2007), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Kramer, and The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection (2007), edited Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection Unpossible and Other Stories (2011).

Read the full story for free at the Baen website.

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, August 2007. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Two (2008), edited by Jonathan Strahan. The story is included in the collection Unpossible and Other Stories (2011).

This short story originally appeared in The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales (2016), edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eleven (2017), edited by Jonathan Strahan.

This short story originally appeared in Technology Review Magazine, November/December 2008. It can also be found in the anthologies Year's Best SF 14 (2009), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, and The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2009, edtied by Rich Horton. The story is included in the collection Unpossible and Other Stories (2011).

From award winning author Daryl Gregory, a thrilling and colorful Lovecraftian adventure of a teenage boy searching for his mother, and the macabre creatures he encounters.

Harrison Harrison--H2 to his mom--is a lonely teenager who's been terrified of the water ever since he was a toddler in California, when a huge sea creature capsized their boat, and his father vanished. One of the "sensitives" who are attuned to the supernatural world, Harrison and his mother have just moved to the worst possible place for a boy like him: Dunnsmouth, a Lovecraftian town perched on rocks above the Atlantic, where strange things go on by night, monsters lurk under the waves, and creepy teachers run the local high school. On Harrison's first day at school, his mother, a marine biologist, disappears at sea.

Harrison must attempt to solve the mystery of her accident, which puts him in conflict with a strange church, a knife-wielding killer, and the Deep Ones, fish-human hybrids that live in the bay. It will take all his resources--and an unusual host of allies--to defeat the danger and find his mother.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Glitter & Mayhem (2013), edited by John Klima, Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, and was reprinted in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 9, March-April 2016.

Read the full story for free at Uncanny Magazine.

Hugo Award-nominated Short Story

When the seeds rained down from deep space, it may have been the first stage of an alien invasion--or something else entirely. How much time do we have left, and do we even understand what timescale to use? As a slow apocalypse blooms across the Earth, planets and plants, animals and microbes, all live and die and evolve at different scales. Is one human life long enough to unravel the mystery?

This story is included in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year: Volume Thirteen (2019), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Four (2019), edited by Neil Clarke.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com

It is a world like our own in every respect... save one. In the 1950s, random acts of possession begin to occur. Ordinary men, women, and children are the targets of entities that seem to spring from the depths of the collective unconscious, pop-cultural avatars some call demons. There's the Truth, implacable avenger of falsehood. The Captain, brave and self-sacrificing soldier. The Little Angel, whose kiss brings death, whether desired or not. And a string of others, ranging from the bizarre to the benign to the horrific.

As a boy, Del Pierce is possessed by the Hellion, an entity whose mischief-making can be deadly. With the help of Del's family and a caring psychiatrist, the demon is exorcised... or is it? Years later, following a car accident, the Hellion is back, trapped inside Del's head and clamoring to get out.

Del's quest for help leads him to Valis, an entity possessing the science fiction writer formerly known as Philip K. Dick; to Mother Mariette, a nun who inspires decidedly unchaste feelings; and to the Human League, a secret society devoted to the extermination of demons. All believe that Del holds the key to the plague of possession–and its solution. But for Del, the cure may be worse than the disease.

From award-winning author Daryl Gregory, whom Library Journal called "[a] bright new voice of the twenty-first century," comes a new breed of zombie novel--a surprisingly funny, vividly frightening, and ultimately deeply moving story of self-discovery and family love.

In 1968, after the first zombie outbreak, Wanda Mayhall and her three young daughters discover the body of a teenage mother during a snowstorm. Wrapped in the woman's arms is a baby, stone-cold, not breathing, and without a pulse. But then his eyes open and look up at Wanda--and he begins to move.

The family hides the child--whom they name Stony--rather than turn him over to authorities that would destroy him. Against all scientific reason, the undead boy begins to grow. For years his adoptive mother and sisters manage to keep his existence a secret--until one terrifying night when Stony is forced to run and he learns that he is not the only living dead boy left in the world.

In 1933, nine-year-old Stella is left in the care of her grandmother, Motty, in the backwoods of Tennessee. The mountains are home to dangerous secrets, and soon after she arrives, Stella wanders into a dark cavern where she encounters the family's personal god, an entity known as the Ghostdaddy.

Years later, after a tragic incident that caused her to flee, Stella--now a professional bootlegger--returns for Motty's funeral, and to check on the mysterious ten-year-old girl named Sunny that Motty adopted. Sunny appears innocent enough, but she is more powerful than Stella could imagine--and she's a direct link to Stella's buried past and her family's destructive faith.

Sturgeon Award nominated novette. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, September 2005 and was reprinted in Clarkesworld, #134, November 2017. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Third Annual Collection (2006), edited by Gardner Dozois, Year's Best SF 11 (2006), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, and Twenty-First Century Science Fiction (2013), edited by David G. Hartwell and Patrick Nielsen Hayden. It is included in the collection Unpossible and Other Stories (2011).

Read the full story for free at the Baen website or Clarkesworld.

The Telemachus family is known for performing inexplicable feats on talk shows and late-night television. Teddy, a master conman, heads up a clan who possess gifts he only fakes: there's Maureen, who can astral project; Irene, the human lie detector; Frankie, gifted with telekinesis; and Buddy, the clairvoyant.

But when, one night, the magic fails to materialize, the family withdraws to Chicago where they live in shame for years. Until: As they find themselves facing a troika of threats (CIA, mafia, unrelenting skeptic), Matty, grandson of the family patriarch, discovers a bit of the old Telemachus magic in himself.

Now, they must put past obstacles behind them and unite like never before. But will it be enough to bring The Amazing Telemachus Family back to its amazing life?

It's 2001, and the WyldBoyZ are the world's hottest boy band, and definitely the world's only genetically engineered human-animal hybrid vocal group. When their producer, Dr. M, is found murdered in his hotel room, the "boyz" become the prime suspects. Was it Bobby the ocelot ("the cute one"), Matt the megabat ("the funny one"), Tim the Pangolin ("the shy one"), Devin the bonobo ("the romantic one"), or Tusk the elephant ("the smart one")?

Las Vegas Detective Luce Delgado has only twenty-four hours to solve a case that goes all the way back to the secret science barge where the WyldBoyZ' journey first began - a place they used to call home.

From Daryl Gregory, whose Pandemonium was one of the most exciting debut novels in memory, comes an astonishing work of soaring imaginative power that breaks new ground in contemporary fantasy.

Switchcreek was a normal town in eastern Tennessee until a mysterious disease killed a third of its residents and mutated most of the rest into monstrous oddities. Then, as quickly and inexplicably as it had struck, the disease--dubbed Transcription Divergence Syndrome (TDS)--vanished, leaving behind a population divided into three new branches of humanity: giant gray-skinned argos, hairless seal-like betas, and grotesquely obese charlies.

Paxton Abel Martin was fourteen when TDS struck, killing his mother, transforming his preacher father into a charlie, and changing one of his best friends, Jo Lynn, into a beta. But Pax was one of the few who didn't change. He remained as normal as ever. At least on the outside.

Having fled shortly after the pandemic, Pax now returns to Switchcreek fifteen years later, following the suicide of Jo Lynn. What he finds is a town seething with secrets, among which murder may well be numbered. But there are even darker--and far weirder--mysteries hiding below the surface that will threaten not only Pax's future but the future of the whole human race.

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Eclipse Two: New Science Fiction and Fantasy (2008), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld Magazine, #82 July 2013. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection (2009), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Year's Best Fantasy 9 (2009), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Kramer. The story is included in the collection Unpossible and Other Stories (2011).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

This short story originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October-November 2007. It can aslo be found in the anthologies Fantasy: The Best of the Year, 2008 Edition, edited by Rich Horton, and Year's Best Fantasy 8 (2008), edited by David. G Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. The story is included in the collection Unpossible and Other Stories (2011).

Read or listen to the full story for free at PodCatle.

The short stories in this first collection by critically acclaimed writer Daryl Gregory run the gamut from science fiction to contemporary fantasy, with a few stories that defy easy classification. His characters may be neuroscientists, superhero sidekicks, middle-aged heroes of children's stories, or fantatics spreading a virus-borne religion, but they are all convincingly human.

Table of Contents

• Daryl Gregory:Facts and Obsessions - (2011) - essay by Nancy Kress
• Second Person, Present Tense - (2005) - novelette
• Unpossible - (2007) - short story
• Damascus - (2006) - novelette
• The Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm - (2008) - novelette
• Gardening at Night - (2006) - novelette
• Petit Mal #1: Glass - (2008) - short fiction
• What We Take When We Take What We Need - (2010) - novelette
• Petit Mal #2: Digital - (2011) - short fiction
• Message from the Bubblegum Factory - (2010) - short story
• Free, and Clear - (2004) - short story
• Dead Horse Point - (2007) - short story
• In the Wheels - (1990) - novelette
• Petit Mal #3: Persistence - (2011) - short fiction
• The Continuing Adventures of Rocket Boy - (2004) - novelette
• Story Notes - essay
• About You - essay

Nebula- and World Fantasy-nominated Novella

Harrison is the Monster Detective, a storybook hero. Now he's in his mid-thirties and spends most of his time not sleeping. Stan became a minor celebrity after being partially eaten by cannibals. Barbara is haunted by the messages carved upon her bones. Greta may or may not be a mass-murdering arsonist. And for some reason, Martin never takes off his sunglasses.

Unsurprisingly, no one believes their horrific tales until they are sought out by psychotherapist Dr. Jan Sayer. What happens when these questionably-sane outcasts join a support group? Together they must discover which monsters they face are within, and which are lurking in plain sight.