Search Worlds Without End

A chilling thriller that brilliantly blends domestic drama, psychological suspense, and a touch of modern horror, reminiscent of Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, John Ajvide Lindqvist's Let the Right One In, and Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House.

The lives of the Barretts, a normal suburban New England family, are torn apart when fourteen-year-old Marjorie begins to display signs of acute schizophrenia.

To her parents' despair, the doctors are unable to stop Marjorie's descent into madness. As their stable home devolves into a house of horrors, they reluctantly turn to a local Catholic priest for help. Father Wanderly suggests an exorcism; he believes the vulnerable teenager is the victim of demonic possession. He also contacts a production company that is eager to document the Barretts' plight. With John, Marjorie's father, out of work for more than a year and the medical bills looming, the family agrees to be filmed, and soon find themselves the unwitting stars of The Possession, a hit reality television show. When events in the Barrett household explode in tragedy, the show and the shocking incidents it captures become the stuff of urban legend.

Fifteen years later, a bestselling writer interviews Marjorie's younger sister, Merry. As she recalls those long ago events that took place when she was just eight years old, long-buried secrets and painful memories that clash with what was broadcast on television begin to surface--and a mind-bending tale of psychological horror is unleashed, raising vexing questions about memory and reality, science and religion, and the very nature of evil.

Monsters: As old as the oldest of stories, as new as our latest imaginings. From the ancient stone corridors of the labyrinth to the graffitied alleyways of the contemporary metropolis, they stalk the shadows. Leering from the darkness of the forest, jostling for space in our closets, they walk, crawl, creep and scuttle through our nightmares. Close as the clutter under the bed or the other side of the mirror, they are our truest companions.

Creatures features the best monster fiction from the past thirty years, offering a wide variety of the best monster stories including original stories from the field's most relevant names and hottest newcomers including Clive Barker, Sarah Langan, Joe R. Lansdale, Kelly Link, China Miéville, and Cherie Priest.

Table of Contents:

• Godzilla's Twelve-Step Program - (1994) - shortstory by Joe R. Lansdale
• The Creature from the Black Lagoon - (2011) - shortfiction by Jim Shepard
• After Moreau - (2008) - shortstory by Jeffrey Ford
• Among Their Bright Eyes - (2006) - shortstory by Alaya Dawn Johnson
• Under Cover of Night - (2007) - shortstory by Christopher Golden
• The Kraken - (2007) - shortfiction by Michael Kelly
• Underneath Me, Steady Air - (2011) - shortfiction by Carrie Laben
• Rawhead Rex - (1984) - novelette by Clive Barker
• Wishbones - (2006) - shortstory by Cherie Priest
• The Hollow Man - (2011) - shortfiction by Norman Partridge
• Not from Around Here - (1990) - novelette by David J. Schow
• The Ropy Thing - (1999) - shortstory by Al Sarrantonio
• The Third Bear - (2007) - shortstory by Jeff VanderMeer
• Monster - (2005) - novelette by Kelly Link
• Keep Calm and Carillon - (2011) - shortfiction by Genevieve Valentine
• The Deep End - (1987) - shortstory by Robert R. McCammon
• The Serpent & the Hatchet Gang - (2007) - shortstory by F. Brett Cox
• Blood Makes Noise - (1999) - shortstory by Gemma Files
• The Machine Is Perfect, the Engineer Is Nobody - (2011) - shortfiction by Brett Alexander Savory
• Proboscis - (2005) - novelette by Laird Barron
• Familiar - (2002) - shortstory by China Miéville
• Replacements - (1992) - novelette by Lisa Tuttle
• Little Monsters - (2011) - shortfiction by Stephen Graham Jones
• The Changeling - (2011) - shortstory by Sarah Langan
• The Monsters of Heaven - (2007) - shortstory by Nathan Ballingrud
• Absolute Zero - (2011) - shortstory by Nadia Bulkin

A family is shaken to its core after the mysterious disappearance of a teenage boy in this eerie tale, a blend of literary fiction, psychological suspense, and supernatural horror from the author of A Head Full of Ghosts.

"A Head Full of Ghosts scared the living hell out of me, and I'm pretty hard to scare," raved Stephen King about Paul Tremblay's previous novel. Now, Tremblay returns with another disturbing tale sure to unsettle readers.

Late one summer night, Elizabeth Sanderson receives the devastating news that every mother fears: her thirteen-year-old son, Tommy, has vanished without a trace in the woods of a local park.

The search isn't yielding any answers, and Elizabeth and her young daughter, Kate, struggle to comprehend Tommy's disappearance. Feeling helpless and alone, their sorrow is compounded by anger and frustration: the local and state police have uncovered no leads. Josh and Luis, the friends who were the last to see Tommy before he vanished, may not be telling the whole truth about that night in Borderland State Park, when they were supposedly hanging out a landmark the local teens have renamed Devil's Rock.

Living in an all-too-real nightmare, riddled with worry, pain, and guilt, Elizabeth is wholly unprepared for the strange series of events that follow. She believes a ghostly shadow of Tommy materializes in her bedroom, while Kate and other local residents claim to see a shadow peering through their windows in the dead of night. Then, random pages torn from Tommy's journal begin to mysteriously appear--entries that reveal an introverted teenager obsessed with the phantasmagoric; the loss of his father, killed in a drunk-driving accident a decade earlier; a folktale involving the devil and the woods of Borderland; and a horrific incident that Tommy believed connects them.

As the search grows more desperate, and the implications of what happened become more haunting and sinister, no one is prepared for the shocking truth about that night and Tommy's disappearance at Devil's Rock.

A masterful anthology featuring nineteen pieces of short fiction, Growing Things is an exciting glimpse into Paul Tremblay's fantastically fertile imagination.

In "The Teacher," a Bram Stoker Award nominee for best short story, a student is forced to watch a disturbing video that will haunt and torment her and her classmates' lives.

Four men rob a pawn shop at gunpoint only to vanish, one-by-one, as they speed away from the crime scene in "The Getaway."

In "Swim Wants to Know If It's as Bad as Swim Thinks," a meth addict kidnaps her daughter from her estranged mother as their town is terrorized by a giant monster . . . or not.

Joining these haunting works are stories linked to Tremblay's previous novels. The tour de force metafictional novella "Notes from the Dog Walkers" deconstructs horror and publishing, possibly bringing in a character from A Head Full of Ghosts, all while serving as a prequel to Disappearance at Devil's Rock. "The Thirteenth Temple" follows another character from A Head Full of Ghosts--Merry, who has published a tell-all memoir written years after the events of the novel. And the title story, "Growing Things," a shivery tale loosely shared between the sisters in A Head Full of Ghosts, is told here in full.

From global catastrophe to the demons inside our heads, Tremblay illuminates our primal fears and darkest dreams in startlingly original fiction that leaves us unmoored. As he lowers the sky and yanks the ground from beneath our feet, we are compelled to contemplate the darkness inside our own hearts and minds.

Table of Contents:

• 1 - Growing Things
• 17 - Swim Wants to Know If It's As Bad As Swim Thinks
• 31 - Something About Birds
• 53 - The Getaway
• 69 - 19 Snapshots of Dennisport
• 83 - Where We Will All Be
• 97 - The Teacher
• 109 - Notes for "The Barn in the Wild"
• 125 - _____
• 137 - Our Town's Monster
• 151 - A Haunted House Is a Wheel Upon Which Some Are Broken
• 175 - It Won't Go Away
• 191 - Notes from the Dog Walkers
• 235 - Further Questions for the Somnambulist
• 245 - The Ice Tower
• 253 - The Society of the Monsterhood
• 267 - Her Red Right Hand
• 283 - It's Against the Law to Feed the Ducks
• 299 - The Thirteenth Temple
• 323 - Notes (Growing Things and Other Stories)

In June 1993, a group of young guerilla filmmakers spent four weeks making Horror Movie, a notorious, disturbing, art-house horror flick.

The weird part? Only three of the film's scenes were ever released to the public, but Horror Movie has nevertheless grown a rabid fanbase. Three decades later, Hollywood is pushing for a big budget reboot.

The man who played "The Thin Kid" is the only surviving cast member. He remembers all too well the secrets buried within the original screenplay, the bizarre events of the filming, and the dangerous crossed lines on set that resulted in tragedy. As memories flood back in, the boundaries between reality and film, past and present start to blur. But he's going to help remake the film, even if it means navigating a world of cynical producers, egomaniacal directors, and surreal fan conventions -- demons of the past be damned.

But at what cost?

In a matter of weeks, Massachusetts has been overrun by an insidious rabies-like virus that is spread by saliva. But unlike rabies, the disease has a terrifyingly short incubation period of an hour or less. Those infected quickly lose their minds and are driven to bite and infect as many others as they can before they inevitably succumb. Hospitals are inundated with the sick and dying, and hysteria has taken hold. To try to limit its spread, the commonwealth is under quarantine and curfew. But society is breaking down and the government's emergency protocols are faltering.

Dr. Ramola "Rams" Sherman, a soft-spoken pediatrician in her mid-thirties, receives a frantic phone call from Natalie, a friend who is eight months pregnant. Natalie's husband has been killed--viciously attacked by an infected neighbor--and in a failed attempt to save him, Natalie, too, was bitten. Natalie's only chance of survival is to get to a hospital as quickly as possible to receive a rabies vaccine. The clock is ticking for her and for her unborn child.

Natalie's fight for life becomes a desperate odyssey as she and Rams make their way through a hostile landscape filled with dangers beyond their worst nightmares--terrifying, strange, and sometimes deadly challenges that push them to the brink.

Paul Tremblay has won widespread acclaim for illuminating the dark horrors of the mind in novels and stories that push the boundaries of storytelling itself. The fifteen pieces in this brilliant collection, The Beast You Are, are all monsters of a kind, ready to loudly (and lovingly) smash through your head and into your heart.

In "The Dead Thing," a middle-schooler struggles to deal with the aftermath of her parents' substance addictions and split. One day, her little brother claims he found a shoebox with "the dead thing" inside. He won't show it to her and he won't let the box out of his sight. In "The Last Conversation," a person wakes in a sterile, white room and begins to receive instructions via intercom from a woman named Anne. When they are finally allowed to leave the room to complete a task, what they find is as shocking as it is heartbreaking.

The title novella, "The Beast You Are," is a mini epic in which the destinies and secrets of a village, a dog, and a cat are intertwined with a giant monster that returns to wreak havoc every thirty years.

A masterpiece of literary horror and psychological suspense, The Beast You Are is a fearlessly imagined collection from one of the most electrifying and innovative writers working today.

Table of Contents:

• 1 - Ice Cold Lemonade 25? Haunted House Tour: 1 Per Person?
• - (2019) - short fiction
• 22 - Mean Time - (2010) - short fiction
• 24 - I Know You're There - (2022) - short fiction
• 36 - The Postal Zone: The Possession Edition - (2019) - short fiction
• 45 - Red Eyes - (2018) - short fiction
• 49 - The Blog at the End of the World - (2008) - short story
• 62 - Them: A Pitch - (2020) - short fiction
• 65 - House of Windows - (2012) - short story
• 76 - The Last Conversation - (2019) - novelette
• 121 - Mostly Size - (2021) - short fiction
• 124 - The Large Man - (2014) - short fiction
• 137 - The Dead Thing - (2018) - short fiction
• 153 - Howard Sturgis and the Letters and the Van and What He Found When He Went Back to His House - (2019) - short fiction
• 170 - The Party - (2021) - short story
• 180 - The Beast You Are - novella

Seven-year-old Wen and her parents, Eric and Andrew, are vacationing at a remote cabin on a quiet New Hampshire lake. Their closest neighbors are more than two miles in either direction along a rutted dirt road.

One afternoon, as Wen catches grasshoppers in the front yard, a stranger unexpectedly appears in the driveway. Leonard is the largest man Wen has ever seen but he is young, friendly, and he wins her over almost instantly. Leonard and Wen talk and play until Leonard abruptly apologizes and tells Wen, "None of what's going to happen is your fault". Three more strangers then arrive at the cabin carrying unidentifiable, menacing objects. As Wen sprints inside to warn her parents, Leonard calls out: "Your dads won't want to let us in, Wen. But they have to. We need your help to save the world."

Thus begins an unbearably tense, gripping tale of paranoia, sacrifice, apocalypse, and survival that escalates to a shattering conclusion, one in which the fate of a loving family and quite possibly all of humanity are entwined. The Cabin at the End of the World is a masterpiece of terror and suspense from the fantastically fertile imagination of Paul Tremblay.

What if the coolest girl you've ever met decided to be your friend...

Art Barbara was so not cool. He was a seventeen-year-old high school loner in the late 1980s who listened to hair metal, had to wear a monstrous back-brace at night for his scoliosis, and started an extracurricular club for volunteer pallbearers at poorly attended funerals. But his new friend thought the Pallbearers Club was cool. And she brought along her Polaroid camera to take pictures of the corpses.

Okay, that part was a little weird.

So was her obsessive knowledge of a notorious bit of New England folklore that involved digging up the dead. And there were other strange things -- terrifying things -- that happened when she was around, usually at night. But she was his friend, so it was okay, right?

Decades later, Art tries to make sense of it all by writing The Pallbearers Club: A Memoir. But somehow this friend got her hands on the manuscript and, well, she has some issues with it. And now she's making cuts.

This short story originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, #8 May 2007. It can also be found in the anthlogy Realms: The First Year of Clarkesworld Magazine (2007), edited by Sean Wallace and Nick Mamatas. The story is included in the collection In the Mean Time (2011).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

What's more frightening: Not knowing who you are? Or finding out? A Bram Stoker Award-winning author explores the answer in a chilling story about identity and human consciousness.

Imagine you've woken up in an unfamiliar room with no memory of who you are, how you got there, or where you were before. All you have is the disconnected voice of an attentive caretaker. Dr. Kuhn is there to help you--physically, emotionally, and psychologically. She'll help you remember everything. She'll make sure you reclaim your lost identity. Now answer one question: Are you sure you want to?

The wickedly entertaining debut featuring Mark Genevich, Narcoleptic Detective

Mark Genevich is a South Boston P.I. with a little problem: he's narcoleptic, and he suffers from the most severe symptoms, including hypnagogic hallucinations. These waking dreams wreak havoc for a guy who depends on real-life clues to make his living.

Clients haven't exactly been beating down the door when Mark meets Jennifer Times?daughter of the powerful local D.A. and a contestant on American Star?who walks into his office with an outlandish story about a man who stole her fingers. He awakes from his latest hallucination alone, but on his desk is a manila envelope containing risqué photos of Jennifer. Are the pictures real, and if so, is Mark hunting a blackmailer, or worse?

Wildly imaginative and with a pitch-perfect voice, Paul Tremblay's The Little Sleep is the first in a new series that casts a fresh eye on the rigors of detective work, and introduces a character who has a lot to prove?if only he can stay awake long enough to do it.

Mark Genevich is stuck in a rut: his narcolepsy isn't improving, his private-detective business is barely scraping by, and his landlord mother is forcing him to attend group therapy sessions. Desperate for companionship, Mark goes on a two-day bender with a new acquaintance, Gus, who is slick and charismatic?and someone Mark knows very little about. When Gus asks Mark to protect a friend who is being stalked, Mark inexplicably finds himself in the middle of a murder investigation and soon becomes the target of the police, a sue-happy lawyer, and a violent local bouncer. Will Mark learn to trust himself in time to solve the crime - and in time to escape with his life?

Written with the same "witty voice that doesn't let go"* that has won Paul Tremblay so many fans, No Sleep Till Wonderland features a memorable detective whose only hope for reconciling with his difficult past is to keep moving - asleep or awake - toward an uncertain future.