Search Worlds Without End

As part of the search for a serial murderer nicknames "Buffalo Bill," FBI trainee Clarice Starling is given an assignment. She must visit a man confined to a high-security facility for the criminally insane and interview him.

That man, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, is a former psychiatrist with unusual tastes and an intense curiosity about the darker corners of the mind. His intimate understanding of the killer and of Clarice herself form the core of The Silence of the Lambs--an unforgettable classic of suspense fiction.

Heart of Darkness is a short novel by Polish novelist Joseph Conrad, written as a frame narrative, about Charles Marlow's experience as an ivory transporter down the Congo River in Central Africa.

The river is "a mighty big river, that you could see on the map, resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land". In the course of his travel in central Africa, Marlow becomes obsessed with Mr. Kurtz.

The story is a complex exploration of the attitudes people hold on what constitutes a barbarian versus a civilized society and the attitudes on colonialism and racism that were part and parcel of European imperialism.

Originally published as a three-part serial story, in Blackwood's Magazine, the novella Heart of Darkness has been variously published and translated into many languages. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Heart of Darkness as the sixty-seventh of the hundred best novels in English of the twentieth century.

After an automobile accident, novelist Paul Sheldon meets his biggest fan. Annie Wilkes is his nurse-and captor. Now, she wants Paul to write his greatest work-just for her. She has a lot of ways to spur him on. One is a needle. Another is an ax. And if they don't work, she can get really nasty...

The classic companion to the most essential science fiction anthology ever published. 46 original stories edited with introductions by Harlan Ellison. Featuring: John Heidenry / Ross Rocklynne / Ursula K. Le Guin / Andrew J. Offutt / Gene Wolfe / Ray Nelson / Ray Bradbury / Chad Oliver / Edward Bryant / Kate Wilhelm / James B. Hemesath / Joanna Russ / Kurt Vonnegut / T. L. Sherred / K. M. O'Donnell (Barry N. Malzberg) / H. H. Hollis / Bernard Wolfe / David Gerrold / Piers Anthony / Lee Hoffman / Gahan Wilson / Joan Bernott / Gregory Benford / Evelyn Lief / James Sallis / Josephine Saxton / Ken McCullough / David Kerr / Burt K. Filer / Richard Hill / Leonard Tushnet / Ben Bova / Dean R. Koontz / James Blish and Judith Ann Lawrence / A. Parra (y Figueredo) / Thomas M. Disch / Richard A. Lupoff / M. John Harrison / Robin Scott / Andrew Weiner / Terry Carr / James Tiptree, Jr.

Table of Contents:

• An Assault of New Dreamers - (1972) - essay by Harlan Ellison
• The Counterpoint of View - (1972) - shortstory by John Heidenry
• Ching Witch! - (1972) - shortstory by Ross Rocklynne
• The Word for World Is Forest - (1972) - novella by Ursula K. Le Guin
• For Value Received - (1972) - shortstory by Andrew J. Offutt
• Mathoms from the Time Closet - (1972) - shortfiction by Gene Wolfe
• Robot's Story - (1972) - shortstory by Gene Wolfe
• Against the Lafayette Escadrille - (1972) - shortstory by Gene Wolfe
• Loco Parentis - (1972) - shortstory by Gene Wolfe
• Time Travel for Pedestrians - (1972) - shortstory by Ray Nelson
• Christ, Old Student in a New School - (1972) - poem by Ray Bradbury
• King of the Hill - (1972) - shortstory by Chad Oliver
• The 10:00 Report is Brought to You By... - (1972) - shortstory by Edward Bryant
• The Funeral - (1972) - novelette by Kate Wilhelm
• Harry the Hare - (1972) - shortstory by James B. Hemesath
• When It Changed - (1972) - shortstory by Joanna Russ
• The Big Space Fuck - (1972) - shortstory by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
• Bounty - (1972) - shortstory by T. L. Sherred
• Still-Life - (1972) - shortstory by Barry N. Malzberg
• Stoned Counsel - (1972) - shortstory by H. H. Hollis
• Monitored Dreams and Strategic Cremations - (1972) - shortfiction by Bernard Wolfe
• The Bisquit Position - (1972) - shortstory by Bernard Wolfe
• The Girl With Rapid Eye Movements - (1972) - shortstory by Bernard Wolfe
• With a Finger in My I - (1972) - shortstory by David Gerrold
• In the Barn - (1972) - novelette by Piers Anthony
• Soundless Evening - (1972) - shortstory by Lee Hoffman
• * - (1972) - shortstory by Gahan Wilson
• The Test-Tube Creature, Afterward - (1972) - shortstory by Joan Bernott
• And the Sea Like Mirrors - (1972) - shortstory by Gregory Benford
• Bed Sheets Are White - (1972) - shortstory by Evelyn Lief
• Tissue - (1972) - shortfiction by James Sallis
• Elouise and the Doctors of the Planet Pergamon - (1972) - shortstory by Josephine Saxton
• Chuck Berry, Won't You Please Come Home? - (1972) - shortstory by Ken McCullough
• Epiphany for Aliens - (1972) - shortstory by David Kerr
• Eye of the Beholder - (1972) - shortstory by Burt K. Filer
• Moth Race - (1972) - shortstory by Richard Hill
• In re Glover - (1972) - shortstory by Leonard Tushnet
• Zero Gee - (1972) - novelette by Ben Bova
• A Mouse in the Walls of the Global Village - (1972) - shortstory by Dean R. Koontz
• Getting Along - (1972) - novelette by James Blish and J. A. Lawrence
• Totenbüch - (1972) - shortstory by Parra y Figuéredo
• Things Lost - (1972) - shortstory by Thomas M. Disch
• With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama - (1972) - novella by Richard A. Lupoff
• Lamia Mutable - (1972) - shortstory by M. John Harrison
• Last Train to Kankakee - (1972) - shortstory by Robin Scott Wilson
• Empire of the Sun - (1972) - shortstory by Andrew Weiner
• Ozymandias - (1972) - shortstory by Terry Carr
• The Milk of Paradise - (1972) - shortstory by James Tiptree, Jr.
• Ed Emshwiller - (1972) - essay by Anonymous

When the Bates Motel loomed up out of the storm, Mary Craine thought it was her salvation. The rooms were musty but clean, and the manager, Norman Bates, seemed like a nice enough fellow, if a little strange....

Then Mary met Norman's mother. And the butcher knife.

The nightmare had just begun....

The year is 1896, the place, New York City. On a cold March night New York Times reporter John Schuyler Moore is summoned to the East River by his friend and former Harvard classmate Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, a psychologist, or "alienist." On the unfinished Williamsburg Bridge, they view the horribly mutilated body of an adolescent boy, a prostitute from one of Manhattan's infamous brothels.

The newly appointed police commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt, in a highly unorthodox move, enlists the two men in the murder investigation, counting on the reserved Kreizler's intellect and Moore's knowledge of New York's vast criminal underworld. They are joined by Sara Howard, a brave and determined woman who works as a secretary in the police department. Laboring in secret (for alienists, and the emerging discipline of psychology, are viewed by the public with skepticism at best), the unlikely team embarks on what is a revolutionary effort in criminology-- amassing a psychological profile of the man they're looking for based on the details of his crimes. Their dangerous quest takes them into the tortured past and twisted mind of a murderer who has killed before. and will kill again before the hunt is over.

Fast-paced and gripping, infused with a historian's exactitude, The Alienist conjures up the Gilded Age and its untarnished underside: verminous tenements and opulent mansions, corrupt cops and flamboyant gangsters, shining opera houses and seamy gin mills. Here is a New York during an age when questioning society's belief that all killers are born, not made, could have unexpected and mortal consequences.

"Two years after I killed Blyth, I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different reasons and more fundamental reasons than I'd disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did my young cousin Esmeralda, more or less on a whim. That's my score to date. Three. I haven't killed anybody for years, and don't intend to ever again. It was just a stage I was going through."

Jack Gladney teaches Hitler studies at a liberal arts college in Middle America where his colleagues include New York expatriates who want to immerse themselves in "American magic and dread." Jack and his fourth wife, Babette, bound by their love, fear of death, and four ultramodern offspring, navigate the usual rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism.

Then a lethal black chemical cloud floats over their lives, an "airborne toxic event" unleashed by an industrial accident. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the "white noise" engulfing the Gladney family - radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmerings - pulsing with life, yet heralding the danger of death.

A quiet summer night...a neat suburban house...and another innocent, happy family is shattered - the latest victims of a grisly series of hideous sacrificial killings that no one understands, and no one can stop. Nobody lives to tell of the unimaginable carnage. Only the blood-stained walls bear witness.

All hope rests on Special Agent Will Graham, who must peer inside the killer's tortured soul to understand his rage, to anticipate and prevent his next vicious crime. Desperate for help, Graham finds himself locked in a deadly alliance with the brilliant Dr. Hannibal Lecter, the infamous mass murderer who Graham put in prison years ago.

As the imprisoned Lecter tightens the reins of revenge, Graham's feverish pursuit of the Red Dragon draws him inside the warped mind of a psychopath, into an unforgettable world of demonic ritual and violence, beyond the limits of human terror.

If J.J. Abrams and Margaret Atwood collaborated on a novel, it might look something like 'Annihilation', the first in an extraordinary trilogy.

Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilisation. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; all the members of the second expedition committed suicide; the third expedition died in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another; the members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within months of their return, all had died of aggressive cancer.

This is the twelfth expedition.

Their group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain and collect specimens; to record all their observations, scientific and otherwise, of their surroundings and of one another; and, above all, to avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.

They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers - they discover a massive topographic anomaly and life forms that surpass understanding - but it's the surprises that came across the border with them, and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another, that change everything.

You remember Hannibal Lecter: gentleman, genius, cannibal. Seven years have passed since Dr. Lecter escaped from custody. And for seven years he's been at large, free to savor the scents, the essences, of an unguarded world. 

But intruders have entered Dr. Lecter's world, piercing his new identity, sensing the evil that surrounds him. For the multimillionaire Hannibal left maimed, for a corrupt Italian policeman, and for FBI agent Clarice Starling, who once stood before Lecter and who has never been the same, the final hunt for Hannibal Lecter has begun. All of them, in their separate ways, want to find Dr. Lecter. And all three will get their wish. But only one will live long enough to savor the reward.

On an island off the coast of Maine, a man is found dead. There's no identification on the body. Only the dogged work of a pair of local newspapermen and a graduate student in forensics turns up any clues.
But that's just the beginning of the mystery. Because the more they learn about the man and the baffling circumstances of his death, the less they understand. Was it an impossible crime? Or something stranger still...?
No one but Stephen King could tell this story about the darkness at the heart of the unknown and our compulsion to investigate the unexplained. With echoes of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon and the work of Graham Greene, one of the world's great storytellers presents a surprising tale that explores the nature of mystery itself...

Stan and Charmaine are a married couple trying to stay afloat in the midst of an economic and social collapse. Job loss has forced them to live in their car, leaving them vulnerable to roving gangs. They desperately need to turn their situation around--and fast. The Positron Project in the town of Consilience seems to be the answer to their prayers. No one is unemployed and everyone gets a comfortable, clean house to live in... for six months out of the year. On alternating months, residents of Consilience must leave their homes and function as inmates in the Positron prison system. Once their month of service in the prison is completed, they can return to their "civilian" homes.

At first, this doesn't seem like too much of a sacrifice to make in order to have a roof over one's head and food to eat. But when Charmaine becomes romantically involved with the man who lives in their house during the months when she and Stan are in the prison, a series of troubling events unfolds, putting Stan's life in danger. With each passing day, Positron looks less like a prayer answered and more like a chilling prophecy fulfilled.