Search Worlds Without End

This short story originally appeared in Omni, August 1993. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Seventh Annual Collection (1994), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and Blood and Other Cravings: Original Stories of Vampires and Vampirism by Today's Greatest Writers of Dark Fiction (2011), edited by Ellen Datlow. The story is included in the collections Report to the Men's Club and Other Stories (2002) and The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller Vol. 1 (2011).

Read the story for free at Small Beer Press.

When Irene Rutledge, a brilliant and beautiful young graduate student, meets the mysterious and fascinating Frank Mattison, the two soon fall in love and marry, despite the warnings of Irene's family and friends. But after their marriage, dark secrets from Frank's past begin to emerge to threaten their happiness, secrets that will lead to murder - and a shocking and horrific conclusion ...

Craig Jones's critically acclaimed first novel, the Edgar Award-nominated Blood Secrets (1978), was a bestseller when originally published and has since been acknowledged by many critics as a masterpiece of modern Gothic fiction. This edition features a new preface by the author.

Lost in Space...

Bound in Time.

Dr. Mark Elver can only stare at the man sitting across from him. Joe Heimblatt has just proposed the impossible - time travel.

However, after viewing the successful tests and experiments, Mark is strangely tempted by the possibility. Recently diagnosed with a heart condition that reduces his life expectancy to a couple years, he agrees to be the first human guinea pig and jump more than 400 years into the future.

The future can only be an improvement. New technology may mean a way to save his life. Or if not, at least he gets to travel and experience something new before he leaves.

After arriving, Mark finds the future to be a strange and dangerous place. He encounters primitive children among sophisticated technology. The dangers of the future Earth haven't even begun to reveal themselves...

After being whisked into space by a strange people, he discovers a rather soporific society living, self-contained, on a space station. Upon learning that Joe has followed him into the future, Mark follows in his steps and makes his way to the people living on the Moon.

Though Mark hated how the station was run, he quickly discovers that life on the Moon is dangerous; trading no leadership for a dictatorship was not beneficial.

Will he be able to return to Earth?

A scientist reports to a stunned world: "The whole earth may be shrivelling up like a punctured balloon." The flight from cities at high altitudes--whose nitrogen gas accidentally released from the earth's core is gathering to cause mass death--to the coastlines creates political chaos and violent anarchy. But worse is in store for mankind--for the coastline holds only temporary haven....

The great oceans of the world are about to deliver destruction on a scale never before envisioned even in nightmares of nuclear holocaust. Two men and two women in a flimsy yacht in the Pacific may hold the key to the earth's survival....

From a world far beyond our own, the ultimate invasion is here.

Alien horror becomes a living nightmare as the xenos, meaning "strangers", inflict mayhem on earth. International distress alerts are sent out when planes first seem to disappear, disturbing concepts of space and time and leaving a trail of death and disillusionment.

This bizarre series of "cosmic skyjackings" is shrouded in secrecy by a baffled and frightened military. Intense surveillance fails to reveal the cause of a seemingly hostile yet invisible enemy.

Aircraft continue to disappear, plucked out of the sky without warning, only to reappear months later, thousands of miles off course. National and global security is under threat and the ICARUS committee is formed to investigate.

Military officials, the government and the FBI work alongside physician Mark Freedman and Soviet scientists to uncover the supernatural mystery that lies behind these unexplainable events.

Earth has been found by a horde of creatures that not even the wildest imagination could invent - sinister parasitic creatures that took to their human hosts with deadly speed and bloodthirsty precision.

The terror that unfolds has terrifying consequences for all involved, and the invasion reveals something much more frightening and final than ever suspected.

Earth Has Been Found is a gripping and chilling first contact sci fi novel, from classic science fiction author D. F. Jones.

Breeding machines and fertility camps.

When a foreign power puts a sterility drug in Britain's reservoirs, the result is all too predictable.

The birth-rate plummets and the country's future looks bleak. There is only one way to save the nation; all women with a natural immunity to the drug must be placed in special camps where they can be bred from like prize cattle.

They must be given special hormone treatment and artificial insemination so that they can produce triplets, quads, quins time after time until they die of exhaustion.

They must become Nation Mums, the sole hope of a desperate people. They must be pampered and disciplined to accept their role.

Even if one of them happens to be the wife of the Minister in charge of the whole terrifying affair.

"The Taking of AT1: Before AT1 had ground down the slipway unchristened--rightly, said seamen, for it would be a ship with no soul--it had been dubbed 'Zombie'. That sinister name would stick & prove its accuracy. AT1 was a robot-ship, a ship with no crew, only a tiny security force of three men & a woman. 'Invulnerable,' said its inventors, 'foolproof'. But it was neither--not if one of the four security guards was an insane, ruthless killer. & if the greatest & most powerful & self-contained nuclear reactor in the world fell into the hands of such a person, the whole world was in peril!"

For aeons the mages of Arth, a neighbouring universe, have been looting Earth of ideas, innovations and technologies, all the while manipulating events and creating devastating catastrophes for their own edification. Now this brazen piracy is threatening Earth with total extinction. It is up to the Ring, a secret society of witches and warlocks dedicated to the continuance and well-being of mankind, to fight the virtuous, unbendingly traditional stronghold of Arth with an arsenal of psychological sabotage, internal dissension -- and kamikaze sex...

In 1939 an eleven-year-old London girl is kidnapped to Time City, a place existing outside the stream of time and manipulating the history of humanity, where she finds the inhabitants facing their worst hour of crisis.

"Face the facts! This town is run by seven megalomaniac wizards!"

When Howard Sykes comes home to find a giant thug -- the Goon -- in the kitchen, life turns upside down. Archer, one of seven siblings who control everything in their town from electricity to the police, has sent the Goon to collect the two thousand words Howard's father owes him. Suddenly, the Sykes family is caught in the middle of the wizards' battle for power -- and only Howard can save them!

Believing is seeing, as the title of this outstanding collection of fantasies proclaims. And "reading is seeing more than you've ever imagined when in the masterful hands of acclaimed author Diana Wynne Jones. Here are seven tales--seven doorways to bizarre, yet strangely familiar worlds--to transport one and all. In these worlds are a child born to an ordered society but preordained to spread Dissolution... a girl who so loves the sun that she renounces her humanity for eternity... a cat and a boy, held captive by an evil magician until they can find a bigger magic of their own... a woman imprisoned in a strange country dominated by three ravenous wolves... and many other characters and stories just as exceptional.

These richly drawn, razor-sharp stories showcase the skills and sheer narrative power of one of the most esteemed fantasy writers of our time.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - (1996) - essay
• The Sage of Theare - (1982) - novelette
• The Master - (1989) - shortstory
• Enna Hittims - (1999) - shortstory
• The Girl Who Loved the Sun - (1990) - shortstory
• Dragon Reserve, Home Eight - (1984) - novelette
• What the Cat Told Me - (1994) - novelette
• Nad and Dan adn Quaffy - (1990) - novelette

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?

When Auntie Christa spills some liquid from a conjuror's kit onto the seat of the old arm-chair, it becomes a solid, plump person. The chair person quickly establishes himself as a terrible nuisance, even a menace.

It is the 1960s and the small African country Nmkwami is preparing for independence from Britain. The prime minister is looking forward to becoming the first president. The last colonial governor is looking forward to a quiet retirement. The ordinary people are looking forward to a good party. But into this peaceful scene comes the shadowy figure of Mark Changeover. Is he an international terrorist? An anarchist bomber? Or really, nobody at all?

As the hunt for Changeover brings chaos and confusion to Nmkwami, Diana Wynne Jones has fun with colonial attitudes, communist students, military coups and more...

A powerful being fights for his life within the body of a humble, earthbound puppy.

Sirius, immortal Lord of the Dog Star and infamous for his quick temper, cannot believe it when he is falsely accused of murder and banished to Earth. There he is reborn into the body of a puppy and learns that he has the life-span of that creature to recover the missing murder weapon. If he fails, he will die.

He is adopted by Kathleen, who has no idea that her beloved Leo is anything more than an abandonded stray. She is a loving owner, but an unwanted guest in a family who mostly resent her presence.

Sirius soon learns that he has enemies amongst the humans as well as amongst the unearthly beings who sentenced him. How on earth can he clear his name without his special powers?

Everyone knows that orphanages are horrible places. But Earwig has a surprising amount of power over everyone else at St Morwald's Home for Children, and loves it there. So the last thing she wants is to be sent to live with the very strange Bella Yaga...

Earwig was left at St Morwald's as a baby. Unlike the other children, she loves it there, mostly because she has the run of the place and seems to be able to persuade people to do as she wants. Then one day Earwig is chosen to live with a very strange couple: Bella Yaga, her new 'mother', is actually a horrible witch. Earwig will need all her ingenuity (and some help from a talking cat) to survive...

"Just kindle a flame and I'll be with you."

It's summer vacation, but David's miserably stuck with his unpleasant relatives. Then a strange boy named Luke turns up, charming and fun, joking that David has released him from a prison. Or is he joking? He certainly seems to have strange powers, and control over fire...

Luke has family problems of his own, and some very dark secrets. And when David agrees to a bargain with the mysterious Mr. Wedding, he finds himself in a dangerous hunt for a lost treasure, one that will determine Luke's fate!

Aidan Cain has had the worst week of his life. His gran died, he was sent to a foster home, and now malicious beings are stalking him. There is one person Gran told Aidan to go to if he ever got into trouble-a powerful sorcerer who lives at Melstone House.

But when Aidan arrives on the doorstep, he finds that the sorcerer's grandson, Andrew, has inherited the house. The good news is that Aidan can tell immediately that Andrew's brimming with magic, too-and so is everyone else at Melstone. The bad news is that Andrew doesn't remember anything his grandfather taught him. Chaos is swiftly rising, and he has no idea how to control it. A sinister neighbor is stealing power from the land, magic is leaking between realms . . . and it's only a matter of time before the Stalkers find Aidan.

If Aidan and Andrew can harness their own magics, they may be able to help each other. But can they do it before the entire countryside comes apart at the seams?

A collection published by the New England Science Fiction Association to mark Diana's appearance as Guest of Honour at the 1995 Boskone SF convention. The introduction is by fantasy author Patricia Wrede.

Contents:

• Everard's Ride
• Nad and Dan and Quaffy
• The Shape of the Narrative in The Lord of the Rings (essay)
• No One
• Dragon Reserve, Home Eight
• The Master
• The Plague of Peacocks
• The True State of Affairs

The fire and hemlock photograph above Polly's bed sparks memories in her that don't seem to exist any more. Halloween; nine years ago; she gatecrashed a funeral party at the big house and met Thomas Lynn for the first time. Despite the fact that he's an adult, they struck up an immediate friendship, and began making up stories together - stories in which Tom is a great hero, and Polly is his assistant. The trouble is, these scary adventures have a nasty habit of coming true... But what has happened in the years between? Why has Tom been erased from Polly's mind, and from the rest of the world as well? Gradually Polly uncovers the awful truth and, at Halloween nine years on, realises that Tom's soul is forfeit to demonic powers unless she can save him.

Two quirky and hilarious stories from the bestselling Diana Wynne Jones. Two groups of children learn that while you can choose your friends, dealing with your family can make you wish you could choose a different one...

THE FOUR GRANNIES. Two children are left alone for a couple of days, while their parents go away on a business trip. They have four very different grandmas - a mean one, a snobby one, an anxious one, and a delicate one. Erg (the boy) tries to make all the grannies leave him alone, but manages to turn them into one 'Super-Granny'...

AUNTIE BEA'S DAY OUT. Annoying Auntie Bea always does things HER way. And when she decides to take the three children (Nancy, Debbie and Simon) to the seaside, despite what the signs say, she is determined that they will sit on the small, fenced off and isolated island. It turns out to be a magical island though, and whisks her & the children (and dog) around to different places trying to get rid of them...

Table of Contents:

• Auntie Bea's Day Out - (1979) - shortstory
• The Four Grannies - (1980) - novelette

"All I did was ask you for a role-playing game. You never warned me I'd be pitched into it for real! And I asked you for hobbits on a Grail quest, and not one hobbit have I seen!"

Hexwood Farm is a bit like human memory; it doesn't reveal its secrets in chronological order. Consequently, whenever Ann enters Hexwood, she cannot guarantee on always ending up in the same place or even the same time.

Hexwood Farm is full of machines that should not be tampered with - and when one is, the aftershock is felt throughout the universe. Only Hume, Ann and Mordion can prevent an apocalypse in their struggle with the deadly Reigners - or are they too being altered by the whims of Hexwood?

A complex blend of science fiction and all sorts of fantasy - including fantasy football!!

This short story originally appeared in the anthology The Dragon Book (2009), edited by Gardner Dozois. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Four (2010), edited by Jonathan Strahan.

This outstanding collection showcases the superb skills, the style, the offbeat quirkiness and sheer narrative power of this award-winning fantasist.

A child born to an ordered world, pre-ordained to spread Dissolution... a precognitive dream which turns into a nightmare... a girl who so loves the sun that she will deny her humanity for all time... a cat and a boy, held captive by a magician until they find their own magic... a girl cursed with magical powers that may destroy her – or help save a world... a writer battling for supremacy over her computer keyboard... a woman imprisoned in a strange country...

These seven tales show why Diana Wynne Jones is regarded as Britain's finest fantasy writer.

Contents:

• The Sage of Theare
• The Master
• The Girl Who Loved the Sun
• Dragon Reserve, Home Eight
• What the Cat Told Me
• Nad and Dan and Quaffy
• The True State of Affairs

Though the Moor is enchantingly beautiful, it holds great perils for the people who inhabit it. Powerful Giants, with extraordinary magical machines, clumsily roam the land, while silent Dorig, who possess devious shape-shifting abilities, terrify anyone unlucky enough to happen upon them.

The leader of Garholt has three children who know well the precautions that must be taken to avoid Giants and Dorig. Armed with their unique psychic Gifts, two of the children have fewer fears than most people who dare to venture into the open. But Gair, the middle child, is convinced that he has no Gift and is ordinary. He knows only that he must escape the constant taunting and bullying of his cruel cousin Ondo, and he is willing to risk confronting even Giants and Dorig in order to do so.

This eerily captivating tale, told with logic and total credibility by the masterful Diana Wynne Jones, will hold readers spellbound until the very last of the many secrets of this semi-mythical world are revealed.

This collection of more than twenty-five critical essays, speeches, and biographical pieces chosen by Diana Wynne Jones before her death in 2011 is essential reading for the author's many fans and for students and teachers of the fantasy genre and creative writing in general. The volume includes insightful literary criticism alongside autobiographical anecdotes, revelations about the origins of the author's books, and reflections about the life of an author and the value of writing for young people.

Reflections features the author's final interview, a foreword by award-winning author Neil Gaiman, and an introduction by Charlie Butler, a senior lecturer in English at the University of West England in Bristol.

How do you get rid of unwelcome visitors? Three stories which show that magic might be the answer, but you should always be careful about what you wish for!

The Four Grannies
When Erg and Emily's parents go away, they arrange for Granny to come and look after them. Unfortunately, they forget to say which granny, and all four turn up. Individually they're manageable, but when 'Strict', 'Worrier', 'Stingy' and 'Saint' get together it's a different matter - and when Erg tries to magic them away, the result is an awesome 'Supergranny'!

Chair Person
One day Simon and Marcia's parents decide to get rid of the old, striped armchair - next day Chair Person turns up, bad-tempered, demanding and with very bad manners. No one seems able to get the better of him, until Auntie Christa turns up too.

Who Got Rid of Angus Flint?
How do you get rid of a guest who picks you up by the hair, won't let you play the piano, watch television or shut the window? Candida and her family try everything - they poison his stew and litter the house with roller-skates in the hope that he will fall over them - but nothing works! Surely they can't be stuck with him for ever?

Table of Contents:

• Chair Person - (1989) - novelette
• The Four Grannies - (1980) - novelette
• Who Got Rid of Angus Flint? - (1975) - novelette

Erg and Emily have four grannies - strict, worrier, stingy, and a saint. Their parents have to go away and arrange for one of them to look after them. But all four turn up and things get out of hand - especially when Erg tries to "magic".

A dark castle in Ireland, a mysterious, secret game, and a host of magnificent characters - Diana Wynne Jones' latest magical offering is a splendid blend of the familiar and the unusual.

Hayley's parents disappeared when she was a baby, so she has been brought up by her grandparents. Then one day she is packed off to Ireland to live with her aunts - and a whole host of cousins she never new about! Here she is introduced to "the game" which involves adventures in the forbidden "mythosphere". And here also is where Hayley discovers the truth about her family.

If he finds the right world, Jamie can get Home again.

When Jamie stumbled upon the powerful Them playing Their mysterious games, They threw him out to the Boundaries of the worlds. Since then, he's been yanked from world to world, doomed to wonder in hope of one day finding his way back to his own city.

Bit by bit, though, Jamie realizes there are rules They have to play by. He forms an alliance with two other lost Homeward Bounders--bitter, powerful Helen and demon-hunter Joris--and takes a desperate chance, hoping that the three wanders can find a way back to their home worlds at last.

Once he becomes a pawn in a game played by a powerful group he calls Them, 12-year-old Jamie is repeatedly catapulted through space and time.

A stand-alone novel of magic and adventure by the renowned fantasy author Diana Wynne Jones, who also wrote Howl's Moving Castle and the Chrestomanci books. Almost finished upon her death in 2011, the manuscript was completed by Diana's sister Ursula Jones, an acclaimed novelist and actress. Publishers Weekly called The Islands of Chaldea "a story to cherish" in their starred review.

Aileen comes from a long line of magic makers, and her aunt Beck is the most powerful magician on Skarr. But Aileen's magic has yet to reveal itself, even though she is old enough and it should have by now. When Aileen is sent over the sea on a mission for the King, she worries that she'll be useless and in the way. A powerful talking cat changes all of that—and with every obstacle Aileen faces, she becomes stronger and more confident, until her magic blooms. This stand-alone novel, by the beloved and acclaimed author of such classic fantasy novels as Howl's Moving Castle and the Chrestomanci books, will be welcomed by fans old and new. "Jones's imaginative vigor is unabated in this last, picaresque novel; her deft, fluid style and penchant for precise, characterful description are amply present," proclaimed The Horn Book.

Casper, Johnny, and Gwinny are sure they'll never be happy again when their mother marries Jack, who is as mean as an ogre. To make matters worse, two obnoxious stepbrothers, Malcolm and Douglas, move in as well. No one -- except the parents -- seems happy. But when Jack gives a chemistry set to each group of kids, bigger problems take over. These are, it turns out, not your average chemicals. In one hilarious experiment after another, the kids discover they can fly, switch bodies with one another, and even disappear. If only they could figure out how to undo all of this! Are one combustible stepfamily and two explosive chemistry sets a formula for disaster?

There's been an accident! Something's wrong!

She doesn't know who she is, and doesn't know why she's invisibly floating through the buildings and grounds of a half-remembered boarding school. Then, to her horror, she encounters the ancient evil that four peculiar sisters have unwittingly woken -- and learns she is their only hope against a deadly danger.

A ghost, uncertain of her identity, watches the four Melford sisters hatch a plan to get their parents' attention and slowly becomes aware of the danger from a supernatural power unleashed by the girls and their friends from the boys boarding school run by the Melfords.

This authoritative A-Z constitutes an essential source of information for all who dare to venture into the imaginative hinterlands. It provides acute insights into such mysteries as how HORSES reproduce, the varying types of VIRGIN and the importance of CLOAKS to those wondering about going on a quest with a fellowship (of the Ring or otherwise). Features include: * A map. * Lively background on those you will meet, including: BARBARIAN HORDES, lots and lots of wild-seeming people advancing under a cloud of dust in order to devastate more civilised parts and ELVES, who claim they did not evolve like humans ...Certainly there seems to be no such thing as the Elvish ancestral ape. * Full details on the catering arrangements: BEER always foams and is invariably delivered in tankards. What do you mean, 'it tastes awful'? The Management is not concerned with the taste of it. That is your funeral. * Useful hints on coping in Fantasyland: ARMOUR is generally regarded as cheating. TORTURE is obligatory at some stage.

Master storyteller Diana Wynne Jones presents ariveting collection of unpredictable tales, including:

• A cat tells how the kindhearted wizard she owns is suddenly called upon to defeat a horrific Beast.
• When Anne has mumps, her drawings come to life, and she must protect her home from them.
• Four children become involved in the intrigue surrounding an innocent prince, an evil count, and a brave outlaw.

These fifteen stories and one novella will enchant, startle, and surprise!

Table of Contents:

• The Girl Jones - (1998) - shortstory
• Nad and Dan adn Quaffy - (1990) - novelette
• The Plague of Peacocks - (1984) - shortstory
• The Master - (1989) - shortstory
• Enna Hittims - (1999) - shortstory
• The Girl Who Loved the Sun - (1990) - shortstory
• The Fluffy Pink Toadstool - (1979) - shortstory
• Auntie Bea's Day Out - (1979) - shortstory
• Carruthers - (1978) - novelette
• What the Cat Told Me - (1994) - novelette
• The Green Stone - (1988) - shortstory
• The Fat Wizard - (1987) - shortstory
• No One - (1984) - novelette
• Dragon Reserve, Home Eight - (1984) - novelette
• Little Dot - (2003) - novelette
• Everard's Ride - (1995) - novella

Two hilarious stories from the bestselling and well-loved author Diana Wynne Jones, about the worst visitors in the world coming to stay.

In VILE VISITORS, we meet Angus Flint and Chair Person – the worst guests in the world. In Who Got Rid of Angus Flint? We meet a man so mean, he even insults the furniture! Despite the children's best pranks, he just won't leave. But when the furniture has had enough, it's time to rise up and get rid of this most vile of visitors...

In Chair Person, that old armchair with the broken crystal ball spilled on it has been locked in the shed. But then the children find a mysterious visitor... Transformed into the most annoying visitor ever, they are desperate to get rid of him. But can they turn him back into a chair before he ruins them forever?

Table of Contents:

• Who Got Rid of Angus Flint? - (1975) - novelette
• Chair Person - (1989) - novelette

A collection of humorous and light-hearted stories in which children achieve justice for themselves and others, often using the power of magic.

Table of Contents:

• Auntie Bea's Day Out - (1979) - shortstory
• Carruthers - (1978) - novelette
• Dragon Reserve, Home Eight - (1984) - novelette
• No One - (1984) - novelette
• The Fluffy Pink Toadstool - (1979) - shortstory
• The Plague of Peacocks - (1984) - shortstory
• The Sage of Theare - (1982) - novelette
• Warlock at the Wheel - (1984) - shortstory

Who Got Rid of Angus Flint? is included in the book Stopping for a Spell.

How do you get rid of a guest who picks you up by the hair, won't let you play the piano, watch television or shut the window?

Candida and her family try everything - they poison his stew and litter the house with roller-skates in the hope that he will fall over them - but nothing works! Surely they can't be stuck with him for ever?

In the grounds of Castlemaine is a peculiar mound, hidden by yew trees. People say it's the grave of Wild Robert...

Heather finds the mound when she tries to escape the hordes of tourists who invade the stately home where she lives.

"Wild Robert, I wish you were really under there!" she cries. "You could come out and deal with the tourists!"

All of a sudden, there is a smell like earth and strange spices. A voice says, "Did somebody call?"

Heather gets her wish, and nothing is ever the same again!

Wild Robert is a gentle, charming ghost, who is half a magician [on his mother's side]. He returns after 350 years and is horrified by the antics of the tourists at his once home Castlemaine House. Since he's a ghost who haunts by day, he plays some wonderfully wicked pratical jokes which drive the tourists away...

OWN BACK LIMITED
REVENGE ARRANGED, PRICE ACCORDING TO TASK, ALL DIFFICULT TASKS UNDERTAKEN, TREASURE HUNTED, ETC.

It seemed like a marvellous scheme at the time! Frank and Jess had set up the business because they needed money – their pocket-money had been stopped just when Frank owed Buster Knell ten pence. Their father had put a quick stop to ERRANDS RUN, so why not try something that was bad instead? Offering to do dreadful things that other people didn't dare to do? So they pinned up the notice on the potting-shed and waited for customers. But of course, nothing's ever THAT straightforward.

Kay catches a magic golden leaf and enters a world where wishes comes true, but when she tells each member of the family, they are too busy to listen and understand. But finally Kay tells Granny who does listen and understand because she can remember catching a magic leaf herself.

This story can be found in the following collections and anthologies:

• The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection (1998)
• The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 11th Annual Collection
• Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century (2006)
• Grazing the Long Acre

Big Cat and Other Stories gathers together the author's finest work from the past decade and features a brand new story, "Stella and the Adventurous Roots", which inspired the cover image. It includes tales that revisit the world of Bold as Love and also the Aleutian Universe (White Queen etc), as well as venturing into brand new possible tomorrows.

Full of passion, vivid imagination, and portent, this collection showcases a master storyteller at her best.

Table of Contents:

• Big Cat
• Stella And The Adventurous Roots
• The Flame Is Roses
• A Planet Called Desire
• The Old Schoolhouse
• The Kianna
• The Vicar Of Mars
• Bricks, Sticks, Straw
• Emergence
• The Seventh Gamer
• Cheats
• About the Author

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Edge of Infinity (2012), edited by Jonathan Strahan. It can also be foun din the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Seven (2013), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and Year's Best SF 18 (2013), edited by David. G. Hartwell. The story is included in the collection Big Cat & Other Stories (2019).

Sturgeon Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology Meeting Infinity (2015), edited by Jonathan Strahan. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Third Annual Collection (2016), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Ten (2016), edited by Jonathan Strahan. The story is included in the collection Big Cat & Other Stories (2019).

To VENTUR the Subs were a nuisance.

They were fed and housed under the stern but loving care of the great machine systems. They were housed in space-saving underground accommodation, designed to protect the surface of their planet, and perfectly functional if not luxurious. Their culture was respected, some even had employment. In reality, VENTUR saved them, and their planet, from their own thoughtless harm.

But some refuse to be appropriately grateful. Some refuse to know their place...

Visiting the homeworld, ALIC hoped to find a little old-fashioned excitement on the "Subcontinent". A retired games creator, however, ALIC can't resist when Millie invites her to play a game that is wholly unique. One from which she struggles to escape, as her life becomes entwined with the people around her as they strive for revolution.

First published in 1986, ESCAPE PLANS was lauded as an original feminist cyberpunk novel, one which pulls no punches in its exploration of humanity's relationships with computers, and our own flaws and follies.

Gwyneth Jones's novels have been acclaimed for three decades, and her modern fairytales Seven Tales And A Fable won two World Fantasy Awards in 1996. And now we have Grazing the Long Acre, the first UK collection of her short fiction. Some of the stories selected, including the BSFA award-winning "La Cenerentola", have been anthologised; several have never before been reprinted. The earliest here "The Eastern Succession" was written in 1985, the most recent "In The Forest Of The Queen" in 2007.

The settings range from a lyrical, Zelazny-influenced far-future South East Asia, to black comedy sci-fi in the New Space Opera style. There are ghosts and miracles, magical science and scientific magic; characters from novels, investigations of sexual difference, speculations on a future in which physics and neuroscience move into convergence, interrogations of our fascination with the other. Gwyneth Jones's capacity to move and astonish the reader is undimmed, when distilled into the shorter form.

Table of Contents:

• Gravegoods - (1989) - novelette
• The Eastern Succession - (1988) - novelette
• Blue Clay Blues - (1992) - novelette
• Identifying the Object - (1990) - novelette (variant of Forward Echoes)
• Balinese Dancer - (1997) - short story
• Grazing the Long Acre - (1998) - short story
• La Cenerentola - (1998) - short story
• Destroyer of Worlds - (2000) - short story
• The Fulcrum - [Buonarotti Transit] - (2005) - novelette
• The Voyage Out - [Buonarotti Transit] - (2007) - short story
• Saving Tiamaat - [Buonarotti Transit] - (2007) - short story
• The Tomb Wife - [Buonarotti Transit] - (2007) - short story
• In the Forest of the Queen - (2007) - short story

London in the first decade of the new century is the setting for this tale where RENEW reps in their preposterous angel fancy-dress stalk the dissidents, making many converts with their own brand of extremism. Kairos is the ruler of change, breaking down the barrier between mind and the world. An act of surreal terrorism is about to be set in motion and its about to go badly wrong.

This story can be found in the following anthologies and collections:

• The Mammoth Book of the Best New Science Fiction 12
• The Year's Best Science Fiction: Sixteenth Annual Collection
• Grazing the Long Acre
• The Universe of Things

"Life" is a richly textured fictional biography of the brilliant Anna Senoz, a scientist who makes a momentous discovery about the X and Y chromosomes. Anna's discovery provokes widespread sexual rage and impacts cruelly on her career, her marriage, and her child. Ultimately, Anna faces a challenge that the practice of science alone cannot meet.

On a desperately overcrowded future Earth, crippled by climate change, the most unlikely hope is better than none. Governments turn to Big Science to provide them with the dreams that will keep the masses compliant. The Needle is one such dream, an installation where the most abstruse theoretical science is being tested: science that might make human travel to a habitable exoplanet distantly feasible.

When the Needle's director offers her underground compound as a training base, Kir is thrilled to be invited to join the team, even though she knows it's only because her brain is host to a quantum artificial intelligence called Altair.

But Altair knows something he can't tell.

Kir, like all humans, is programmed to ignore future dangers. Between the artificial blocks in his mind, and the blocks evolution has built into his host, how is he going to convince her the sky is falling?

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Off Limits: Tales of Alien Sex (1996), edited by Ellen Datlow. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection (1997), edited by Gardner Dozois, Year's Best SF 2 (1997), edited by David G. Hartwell, Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology (2007), edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, and Dangerous Games (2007), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection The Universe of Things (2011).

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - (1995) - essay by Gwyneth Jones
• The Snow Apples - (1987) - short story
• Laiken Langstrand - (1988) - short story
• The Lovers - (1989) - short story
• The Princess, The Thief and the Cartesian Circle - (1993) - short story
• The Grass Princess - (1995) - short story
• Diamond Hand and the Rock Maid - (1995) - novelette
• Felicia - (1975) - novelette
• The Spider and the Fly - (1995) - short story

Bibi (it means princess) is the sole survivor of a massacre. Lady Nef, the General's wife, stops the General taking her as a concubine, winning Bibi's eternal and passionate devotion. Years later, a diplomatic mission to a supposedly friendly planet ends in disaster. Bibi, now a junior officer in Lady Nef's household, is incarcerated with her mistress in the notorious high-security prison on Fenmu.

Lady Nef, 150 years old when arrested, dies in prison; she bequeaths to Bibi her rank, her level of access to the AI systems that permeate the Diaspora of inhabited planets, and a highly secret set of 4-space co-ordinates. Bibi uses Lady Nef's death to escape from Fenmu, finds Spirit, an instantaneous-transit space pod, and follows Lady Nef's co-ordinates to a treasure beyond price: a virgin, perfect, uninhabited planet.

Soon after this, the mysterious, fantastically wealthy Princess of Bois Dormant makes her debut in the high society of Speranza, the Diaspora's capital city. Thus disguised, Bibi sets out to discover why she and her mistress were condemned to a living hell; and to punish the guilty. Twenty years have passed: Lady Nef's enemies now rule Speranza. As she uncovers a forgotten, ruthless and far-reaching conspiracy, Bibi's vengeance is transformed into a project of world-changing reparation.

World Fantasy Award winning short story. It originally appeared in the collection Seven Tales and a Fable (1995) and was reprinted in Interzone, #122 August 1997 and Lightspeed, August 2014. It can also be found in the anthology Myth-Understandings (2008), edited by Ian Whates.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Tales from the Forbidden Planet (1987), edited by Roz Kaveney. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 14 (1988), edited by Arthur W. Saha, and The Year's Best Fantasy: First Annual Collection (1988), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. The story is included in the collection Seven Tales and a Fable (1995).

The stories in The Universe of Things span Jones's career, from "The Eastern Succession," first published in 1988, to the just-published "Collision." Each opens a window into a richly depicted culture in which intelligent, resourceful characters struggle to make sense of the mysteries of their world.

In the introduction by Steven Shaviro, author of Doom Patrols and Connected, or What It Means to Live in the Network Society, Shaviro notes, "As a feminist writer, Jones refuses to accept compromises that leave gender inequities in place--and recognizes how they may well have staved off something worse. And as a science fiction writer, Jones shows deep awareness of how provisional, and fragile, all our acceptances and reconciliations can be, for there are always new potentials, new cultural or technological disruptions in the offing. Jones envisions a future that is different enough from the present that we are forced to recognize the contingency--and changeability--of the things we take most for granted."

Table of Contents:

• iii - Introduction (The Universe of Things) - essay by Steven Shaviro
• 1 - In the Forest of the Queen - (2007) - short story
• 25 - Total Internal Reflection - (2000) - short story
• 28 - Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland - (1996) - short story
• 48 - The Universe of Things - (1993) - short story
• 62 - Blue Clay Blues - (1992) - novelette
• 90 - Grazing the Long Acre - (1998) - short story
• 106 - Collision - [Buonarotti Transit] - (2009) - short story
• 121 - One of Sandy's Dreams - (1988) - short story
• 122 - Gravegoods - (1989) - novelette
• 148 - La Cenerentola - (1998) - short story
• 170 - Grandmother's Footsteps - (1990) - novelette
• 194 - The Early Crossing - (1998) - short story
• 196 - The Eastern Succession - (1988) - novelette
• 225 - The Thief, the Princess, and the Cartesian Circle - (1993) - short story
• 243 - Identifying the Object - (1990) - novelette (variant of Forward Echoes)

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Eclipse Four: New Science Fiction and Fantasy (2011), edited by Jonathan Strahan. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection (2012), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection Big Cat & Other Stories (2019).

How far will they go for their freedom--once they decide what freedom really means?

In an unspecified future, the United States' borders have receded behind a salt line--a ring of scorched earth that protects its citizens from deadly disease-carrying ticks. Those within the zone live safe, if limited, lives in a society controlled by a common fear. Few have any reason to venture out of zone, except for the adrenaline junkies who pay a fortune to tour what's left of nature. Those among the latest expedition include a popstar and his girlfriend, Edie; the tech giant Wes; and Marta; a seemingly simple housewife.

Once out of zone, the group find themselves at the mercy of deadly ticks--and at the center of a murderous plot. They become captives in Ruby City, a community made up of outer-zone survivors determined to protect their hardscrabble existence. As alliances and friendships shift amongst the hostages, Edie, Wes, and Marta must decide how far they are willing to go to get to the right side of the salt line.

Sinister sorcery. Gallows humor. A queer romance.

Rags is a thief--an excellent one. He's stolen into noble's coffers, picked soldier's pockets, and even liberated a ring or two off the fingers of passersby. Until he's caught by the Queensguard and forced to find an ancient fae relic for a sadistic royal sorcerer.

But Rags could never have guessed this "relic" would actually be a fae himself--a distractingly handsome, annoyingly perfect, ancient fae prince called Shining Talon. Good thing Rags can think on his toes, because things just get stranger from there...

Alpha-Males: You can't live with 'em, but sometimes you can't live without 'em. An alien migration fleet - 14,000 starships strong - searches the stars for a new home, its homeworld forever lost. When they finally find planets that can support them, all they have to do is eradicate the pesky human natives, a task they assume is easily within their powers. But Earth's Commonwealth of Worlds isn't about to give up so easily - even if it has to create and train something it hasn't had for centuries: soldiers!

Never will so many have given so much for so few. The aliens came to Earth not for conquest, but simply to create a way and watch it played out by humans. But they are prohibited from using any technology not developed on the planet - and 20th century armaments are too primitive for good sport. The answer is to persuade the Earth's leaders to found a thing tank group secretly guided by them to produce 22nd century tech.

The Guardian of Earth's call for the ultimate warrior transports Charley Judge three million years into the future and places him against the evil sorcerer Shu-Gwelth in the final battle between good and evil.

Johnny McKennah was the living embodiment of a dream come true for every middle-aged Walter Mitty in America. At age fifty-one he had arrived from nowhere to become the oldest rookie in the history of footbal and a record breaker by the end of the first season. That wasn't all: this man who claimed that two years ago he had been fas on the way to drunken extinction was now a syndicated newspaper columnist, the most popular pundit since Mark Twain and Will Rogers.

Who was he, this Johnny McKennah? When the government found out who he was and what he planned they knew he had to be stopped. But, even if you're willing to pay any price, how do you stop an invasion of supermen?

A ring that seeks blood instantly transports young Tessa McCamfrey to a realm where pictures and patterns hold vast magics; where a sorcerous crown--the Barbed Coil--can reweave destiny; where a mad king is using the crown to conquer an ancient land. And somehow Tessa, aided by two men whose pasts entwine with her own, must master a pattern of ancient powers before the Barbed Coil ravages the fate of a world.

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.

This short story originally appeared in in Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, edited by Daniel José Older and Rose Fox, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, January 2017. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume Two (2015), edited by Kathe Koja and Michael Kelly.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Note: the novel was revised for the 2016 publication.

What would you do if you suddenly found yourself twenty-five years in the past? For the nine billion people living in the year 2042 it's no longer a question... it's a reality.

When a seemingly simple experiment goes disastrously wrong, James Baston finds himself stranded in the past alongside the rest of mankind. Here the old are young once more, the dead live again, and civilization is in chaos.

With the fate of humanity on the line, James must join a hastily assembled group of scientists, a reincarnated murder victim, and a genius trapped in her six-year-old body to reconcile the earlier mistakes of their future counterparts. The team struggles to prevent global extinction, and along the way they come face-to-face with their past losses, new loves, and a cold-blooded killer. As the team plummets toward a final confrontation, will they be able to undo time's unraveling in order to save the human race?

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, February 2016.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

The Pacific Ocean is a big thing to steal, and Quietly's roommate Imani never does anything small. But then Imani goes and dies, and Quietly is left to travel to the Under-Ath (the underworld beneath Athens, Georgia), with angry gods at her heels, to clean up the mess Imani left behind and try to rescue her friend.

This story was first published in Crossed Genres #20 in August 2014. It was anthologized in Science Fiction Short Stories, edited by Laura Bulbeck, and The Long List Anthology: More Stories from the Hugo Awards Nomination List, edited by David Steffen. An audio version was published in PodCastle #345 in January 2015.

Read the full story for free at Crossed Genres.

This short story originally appeared in Diabolical Plots #28, June 2017. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 3 (2018), edited by Neil Clarke.

Read the full story for free at Diabolical Plots.

WFA-nominated short story. It originally appeared in the anthology Clockwork Phoenix 5 (2016), edited by Mike Allen.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, December 2017. 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.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Tiptree finalist shortstory for 2016.

Story available to read for free on Beneath Ceaseless Skies or listen to the audio version from BCS episode 180.

Moonbase One is in trouble. The first colony on the moon has only a thirty-day emergency food supply now that their hydroponic farm and its valuable store of water has been destroyed. Unless something can be done quickly, the moonbase will fail and the space settlers will have to be returned to Earth.

Like all pioneering colonies, Moonbase One includes families with children. Three space-age teenagers -- Tom Wood, Benny Howard and Dave Mason -- participate as much in the daily routine of the colony as their parents do.

In the struggle to save the moon colony and find ways of replacing the water supply, the three boys and their misfit companion, George Garrison, learn what kind of courage and skill it takes to colonize a new world. They learn how meaningless the technical skills of scientists are if the necessary human qualities are not also present. When the success of the moon colony is finally assured, the teenagers set their eyes on the distant goal of Mars.

Hugo Award nominated short story. It orginally appeaered in Analog Science Fiction -> Science Fact, April 1966. The story can also be found in Above the Human Landscape: A Social Science Fiction Anthology (1972) edited by Willis E. McNelly and Leon E. Stover, and You and Science Fiction (1976), edited by Bernard C. Hollister.

It was coming. A wave of deep, blasting heat swept through him. Then it was gone. He was running down a long corridor of twisting, writhing flames that flung his body about and tore at him with tangible fingers.

He was glowing, burning, every fiber of him, with an incandescent blaze that would have blinded ordinary eyes.

But he was not ordinary. He was a god in an inferno of light, a great bubble of it that swept him on and on through the reaches of space and eternity, aeons beyond Kronweld. Waves flung him from one end of the universe to the other... ripping him apart, creating him...

He was alone in infinity, alone in the seething center of the act of birth!

SYN

One was discovered by accident. A man in a mental hospital said he wasn't real. He wasn't.

SYN

There were more. Scientists feared that half the population of Earth might be Syns.

SYN

Methodically, the Syns were being rooted out and destroyed. In turn, they were carrying on their own fearful destruction of human life and works.

SYN

Everyone's humanity had been challenged. Every man was aligned against each other...

...because no one knew what a Syn was.

It was supercivilization, a Utopia. At its core were the Cybernetic Brains, brains taken from geniuses who were promised they would live forever.

Then engineer Al Demming discovers the truth accidentally, the terrible truth transmitted to him by one of the brains. The brains are in reality slaves and in terrible torment. It was now up to Demming to stop the inhuman practice.

Just when he planned to make the announcement to the Governing Board, Demming learned that the Board knew about the hideous living death. What was the real reason behind the facade? How could he convince the Board to suspend the system before the Brains revolted and destroyed the world?

Table of Contents:

• 7 - The Non-Statistical Man - (1956) - novella
• 87 - The Moon Is Death - (1953) - short story
• 101 - The Gardener - (1957) - short story
• 119 - Intermission Time - (1953) - novelette

Table of Contents:

• 9 - The Toymaker - (1946) - novelette
• 67 - The Model Shop - (1947) - novelette
• 103 - The Deadly Host - short story (variant of Deadly Host 1945)
• 137 - Utility - (1944) - short story
• 173 - Forecast - (1946) - novelette
• 239 - The Children's Room - (1947) - novelette

This Island Earth's thrills and romance begin when engineer Cal Meacham places a routine order for parts; he never dreams he is making himself a pawn in a struggle for galactic supremacy.

A fixup novel derived from three stories appearing in Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1949 and 1950.

The 1955 film version, directed by Joseph Newman, is one of the best-known science fiction films of the 1950s.

Included in this volume are two short novels by Raymond F. Jones: "The Memory of Mars" originally appeared in the December, 1961 issue of Amazing Stories. "Cubs of the Wolf" originally appeared in the November, 1955 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.

The landing was unlike any they had ever made. But then they had never before seen a planet so strange as this one - with its wild seas, scarred plains, and rubbled cities. It looked as if it had been totally devastated by some type of nuclear destruction. And they were most curious - these aliens with their green-scaled faces and stubby tails - to explore this peculiar place where man had once existed - until their ship exploded and they were stranded with no means of survival and no hope of rescue. Unless their high priest - Ama of the Keelong - prayed to the higher power they had rebelled against. For this was a spiritual mission - and the Alcoran had lost their way.

Remy is a young girl who lives in a town that believes in crystal count: that you are born with one-hundred crystals inside and throughout your life, through accidents and illness, your count is depleted until you reach zero.

As a city encroaches daily on the village, threatening their antiquated life, and the Earth grows warmer, Remy sets out to accomplish something no one else has: to increase her sick mother's crystal count.

An allegory, fable, touching family saga, and poetic sci-fi adventure, Shane Jones underlines his reputation as an inspired and unique visionary.

Stephen Jones, Britain's most acclaimed horror editor, has gathered together masters of the macabre from across the world in this cornucopia of classic chills and modern menaces. Within these pages you will discover the most successful and exciting writers of horror and dark fantasy today, with a spine-chilling selection of stories displaying the full diversity of the genre, from classic pulp style to more contemporary psychological tales, to cutting-edge terror fiction that will leave you uneasily looking over your shoulder, or in the wardrobe, or under the bed...

A BOOK OF HORRORS: an original anthology of all-new horror and dark fantasy fiction, in all of its many and magnificent guises, by those devoted to the Dark Side.

This short story originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, #17 February 2008. It can also be found in the anthology Realms 2: The Second Year of Clarkesworld Magazine (2010), edited by Nick Mamatas and Sean Wallace. The story is included in the collection The Ones That Got Away (2010).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

"Chapter Six", by Stephen Graham Jones, is an anthropological zombie story about Crain, a grad student, who has a theory of mankind's evolution. As he and his former professor scavenge on bone marrow left behind by the local zombie horde, he makes his well-reasoned argument.

This story can be found in the Ellen Datlow anthology The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Seven (2015)

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

In this unique book about horror fiction writer Clive Barker, readers get a fascinating look at the man and his work through a collection of interviews, essays, reviews, and discussions. Heavily illustrated with rare photos, stills, and drawings, 16 in full color. With an introduction by Stephen King.

The Nebula Awards are voted on, and presented by, active members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc. (or SWFA)?and the Grand Master Award is given by the SWFA to a living author for a lifetime's achievement in science fiction and/or fantasy.

Frederik Pohl, one of the world's finest SF authors and editors, has been authorized to edit an anthology in three large-format volumes featuring substantial selections of the work of all the first fifteen Grand Masters. These are the seminal writers within the modern SF field, those whose works are of dominant importance and lasting influence.

Volume Two, presenting the second five writers to receive the award, offers fiction by Andre Norton, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Alfred Bester, and Ray Bradbury.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Frederik Pohl
• Andre Norton b. 1912 - essay by Frederik Pohl
• Recommended Reading by Andre Norton - essay by uncredited
• Mousetrap - (1954) - short story by Andre Norton
• Were-Wrath - (1984) - novelette by Andre Norton
• All Cats Are Gray - (1953) - short story by Andre Norton
• Serpent's Tooth - (1987) - novella by Andre Norton
• Arthur C. Clarke b. 1917 - essay by Frederik Pohl
• Recommended Reading by Arthur C. Clarke - essay by uncredited
• Rescue Party - (1946) - novelette by Arthur C. Clarke
• The Secret - (1963) - short story by Arthur C. Clarke
• Reunion - (1971) - short story by Arthur C. Clarke
• The Star - (1955) - short story by Arthur C. Clarke
• A Meeting With Medusa - (1971) - novelette by Arthur C. Clarke
• Isaac Asimov 1920-1992 - essay by Frederik Pohl
• Recommended Reading by Isaac Asimov - essay by uncredited
• The Last Question - (1956) - short story by Isaac Asimov
• It's Such a Beautiful Day - (1955) - novelette by Isaac Asimov
• Strikebreaker - (1957) - short story by Isaac Asimov
• The Martian Way - (1952) - novella by Isaac Asimov
• Alfred Bester 1913-1987 - essay by Frederik Pohl
• Recommended Reading by Alfred Bester - essay by uncredited
• Disappearing Act - (1953) - short story by Alfred Bester
• Fondly Fahrenheit - (1954) - novelette by Alfred Bester
• Comment on Fondly Fahrenheit - (1970) - essay by Alfred Bester
• The Four-Hour Fugue - (1974) - short story by Alfred Bester
• Hobson's Choice - (1952) - short story by Alfred Bester
• Ray Bradbury b. 1920 - essay by Frederik Pohl
• Recommended Reading by Ray Bradbury - essay by uncredited
• The City - (1950) - short story by Ray Bradbury
• The Million-Year Picnic - (1946) - short story by Ray Bradbury
• All Summer in a Day - (1954) - short story by Ray Bradbury
• There Will Come Soft Rains - (1950) - short story by Ray Bradbury
• The Affluence of Despair - (1998) - essay by Ray Bradbury

An experimental tale of horror by the acclaimed author of All the Beautiful Sinners.

Following an unnerving phone call from his diabetic mother on Halloween night, Hale and six of his med school classmates return to the house where his sister disappeared years ago — only to find a chilling surprise in store for them. Written as a literary film treatment and littered with pop culture references and footnotes, Demon Theory is a refreshing addition to the "intelligent horror" genre.

Two hundred years ago two brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm, collected together a large selection of folk and fairy tales and published them as Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children's and Household Tales). So successful was the first collection of 88 stories that they kept adding more to subsequent editions. Since then, the tales of the Brothers Grimm have been translated into upwards of a hundred different languages and are known and loved throughout the world.

Now award-winning editor Stephen Jones has tasked some of the brightest and best horror writers in Britain, America and Europe with reinterpreting some of the traditional Hausmärchen, putting a decidedly darker spin on the classic stories.

A best of the best anthology that Lovecraft himself appreciated and recommended.

Contents:

• 1 - Supernatural Horror in Literature - [Supernatural Horror in Literature] - (1927) - essay by H. P. Lovecraft
• 66 - The Signalman - (1866) - shortstory by Charles Dickens
• 78 - The House and the Brain - (1859) - novelette by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (variant of The Haunted and the Haunters; or, The House and the Brain)
• 113 - The Body Snatcher - (1884) - shortstory by Robert Louis Stevenson
• 130 - The Spider - (1915) - novelette by Hanns Heinz Ewers (trans. of Die Spinne 1908)
• 151 - The Foot of the Mummy - (1882) - shortstory by Théophile Gautier (trans. of Le pied de momie 1840)
• 161 - The Horla - [Le Horla - 2] - (1890) - novelette by Guy de Maupassant (trans. of Le Horla 1887)
• 183 - The Fall of the House of Usher - (1839) - shortstory by Edgar Allan Poe
• 202 - The Damned Thing - (1893) - shortstory by Ambrose Bierce
• 211 - The Upper Berth - (1885) - novelette by F. Marion Crawford
• 229 - The Yellow Sign - [The King In Yellow] - (1895) - novelette by Robert W. Chambers
• 248 - The Shadows on the Wall - (1903) - shortstory by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman [as by Mary E. Wilkins]
• 263 - The Dead Valley - (1895) - shortstory by Ralph Adams Cram
• 271 - Fishhead - (1913) - shortstory by Irvin S. Cobb
• 282 - Lukundoo - (1907) - shortstory by Edward Lucas White
• 295 - The Double Shadow - [Poseidonis] - (1933) - shortstory by Clark Ashton Smith
• 306 - The Mark of the Beast - (1890) - shortstory by Rudyard Kipling
• 318 - Negotium Perambulans - (1922) - shortstory by E. F. Benson
• 333 - Mrs. Lunt - (1926) - shortstory by Hugh Walpole [as by Sir Hugh Walpole]
• 346 - The Hog - [Carnacki (William Hope Hodgson)] - (1947) - novelette by William Hope Hodgson
• 385 - The Great God Pan - (1894) - novella by Arthur Machen
• 434 - Count Magnus - (1904) - shortstory by M. R. James
• 448 - Lovecraft and the 'Literature of Cosmic Fear' - (1993) - essay by Stephen Jones

THE RESTLESS DEAD

Life is over but the dead live on. Within the drafty rooms of an old house, a tarnished locket tumbles to the floor. The haunted souls of the dearly departed are still among us. Ghosts, phantoms, revenants, lost souls - all these troubled spirits have unfinished business on this side of the veil. Doomed to seek out mortal answers, unable to rest until in death, they accomplish what they failed to achieve in life. This hair-raising collection of haunted tales brings together both new writers and celebrated masters - Ramsey Campbell, Christopher Fowler, Neil Gaiman, Richard Matheson, Michael Marshall Smith and others - for the ultimate collection from beyond the grave. Their characters are spirits, without bodies but still floating in our world. Some are motivated by love, others by loss or guilt. But sometimes they are driven by much stronger emotions, menacing and diabolical motives that take us up from our reading to check the hallways, secure the locks and question how firmly anchored we ourselves are to our world.

Horror: Another 100 Best Books features one hundred of the top names in the horror field discussing one hundred of the most spine-chilling novels ever written. Each entry includes a synopsis of the work as well as publication history, biographical information about the author of each title, and recommended reading and biographical notes on the contributor. Author Ramsey Campbell also offers a new foreword to the book describing the evolution of horror over the past two decades — from the way it's written by a crop of new and exciting writers to the way it's received by a new market of readers. Horror: Another 100 Best Books will be the definitive guide to the tremendous library of horror fiction available today —a reference that no fan can live without.

Selections range from Tourneur/Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy (1607) to Michael Marshall Smith's More Tomorrow & Other Stories (2003).

Editors Jones and Newman have paired horror's leading authors with the genre's milestones, featuring Peter Straub on Stephen King, Nell Gaiman on Anthony Boucher, Joe R. Lansdale on Ray Bradbury, Edgar Allan Poe on Nathaniel Hawthorne, Clive Barker on Christopher Marlowe, and many equally inspired matches.

The book consists of reviews of 100 books in chronological order, ranging from 1592 (Marlow's Doctor Faustus) to 1987 (Campbell's Dark Feasts). Unlike Pringle's seminal 100 Best books, this book features reviews from 100 different reviewers, so there are inevitable variances in taste, style and approach.

The books and authors covered in this volume are the basis for our Horror: 100 Best Books list.

The most blasphemous of tomes sit upon a dusty shelf in the Library of the Damned.

And amongst those titles - that should never be named - there is one volume that is the most terrible, the most hideous of them all. That book is the Lexicon of Fear.

But, long ago, some of its pages were ripped from the binding and spirited away by a lowly student of the ancient science of Horrorology, who was determined the secrets contained therein would one day be shared with the world.

And now that day has come. These are the words that comprise the very language of horror itself, and the tales they tell are not for the fainthearted. But be warned: once you have read them, there is no turning back. Soon, you too will know the true meanings of fear...

Featuring stories from Clive Barker, Robert Shearman, Michael Marshall Smith, Pat Cadigan, Mark Samuels, Joanne Harris, Muriel Gray, Kim Newman, Ramsey Campbell, Reggie Oliver, Angela Slatter and Lisa Tuttle.

Table of Contents:

• The Library of the Damned - (2015) - essay by Stephen Jones
• Ripper - (2015) - short fiction by Angela Slatter
• Guignol - (2015) - short fiction by Kim Newman
• Accursed - (2015) - short fiction by Robert Shearman
• Afraid - (2015) - short story by Clive Barker
• Afterlife - (2015) - short fiction by Michael Marshall Smith
• Chilling - (2015) - novelette by Pat Cadigan
• Decay - (2015) - short fiction by Mark Samuels
• Faceless - (2015) - short fiction by Joanne Harris
• Forgotten - (2015) - short fiction by Muriel Gray
• Nightmare - (2015) - short fiction by Ramsey Campbell
• Possessions - (2015) - short fiction by Reggie Oliver
• Vastation - (2015) - short fiction by Lisa Tuttle
• Epilogue - (2015) - essay by Stephen Jones

1989, Lamesa, Texas. A small west Texas town driven by oil and cotton - and a place where everyone knows everyone else's business. So it goes for Tolly Driver, a good kid with more potential than application, seventeen, and about to be cursed to kill for revenge.

Here Stephen Graham Jones explores the Texas he grew up in, the unfairness of being on the outside, through the slasher horror he lives but from the perspective of the killer, Tolly, writing his own autobiography. Find yourself rooting for a killer in this summer teen movie of a novel gone full blood-curdling tragic.

Shirley Jackson Award-nominated Novella

Walking through his own house at night, a fifteen-year-old thinks he sees another person stepping through a doorway. Instead of the people who could be there, his mother or his brother, the figure reminds him of his long-gone father, who died mysteriously before his family left the reservation. When he follows it he discovers his house is bigger and deeper than he knew.

The house is the kind of wrong place where you can lose yourself and find things you'd rather not have. Over the course of a few nights, the boy tries to map out his house in an effort that puts his little brother in the worst danger, and puts him in the position to save them... at terrible cost.

It's been two years since Jenna's ex-boyfriend left her alone in East Texas heartbroken. Now he's back in town and she wants to payback. One night, she stumbles upon a bloodthirsty Camaro that may be the key to carrying out her revenge.

Originally published on 20 April 2022, read it for free at Tor.com

A spellbinding and darkly humorous coming-of-age story about an unusual boy, whose family lives on the fringe of society and struggles to survive in a hostile world that shuns and fears them.

He was born an outsider, like the rest of his family. Poor yet resilient, he lives in the shadows with his aunt Libby and uncle Darren, folk who stubbornly make their way in a society that does not understand or want them. They are mongrels, mixed blood, neither this nor that. The boy at the center of Mongrels must decide if he belongs on the road with his aunt and uncle, or if he fits with the people on the other side of the tracks.

For ten years, he and his family have lived a life of late-night exits and narrow escapes--always on the move across the South to stay one step ahead of the law. But the time is drawing near when Darren and Libby will finally know if their nephew is like them or not. And the close calls they've been running from for so long are catching up fast now. Everything is about to change.

A compelling and fascinating journey, Mongrels alternates between past and present to create an unforgettable portrait of a boy trying to understand his family and his place in a complex and unforgiving world. A smart and innovative story--funny, bloody, raw, and real--told in a rhythmic voice full of heart, Mongrels is a deeply moving, sometimes grisly, novel that illuminates the challenges and tender joys of a life beyond the ordinary in a bold and imaginative new way.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 102, November 2018.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

We thought we'd play a fun prank on her, and now most of us are dead.

One last laugh for the summer as it winds down. One last prank just to scare a friend. Bringing a mannequin into a theater is just some harmless fun, right? Until it wakes up. Until it starts killing.

Luckily, Sawyer has a plan. He'll be a hero. He'll save everyone to the best of his ability. He'll do whatever he needs to so he can save the day. That's the thing about heroes--sometimes you have to become a monster first.

A collection of funny, frivolous and frightening poems by thirty of the world's best known science fiction, fantasy and horror authors, all written in the style of A. A. Milne's Now We are Six.

Table of Contents:

• A Landlady's Lament - (1986) - poem by Ramsey Campbell
• A Mother's Tender Love - (1986) - poem by Jo Fletcher
• A Slice of Life - (1986) - poem by Diana Wynne Jones
• The Good Ship "Revenger": or, What the Crew Don't Know Won't Hurt Me - (1991) - poem by Galad Elflandsson
• Another Cursed House Story (or) Always Enquire About the Prior Tenants - (1986) - poem by John M. Ford
• Auntie Ethel - (1991) - poem by Richard Hill
• Catcawls - (1991) - poem by Samantha Lee
• Chocolate and Worms - (1991) - poem by David Garnett
• In the Dark - (1991) - poem by Storm Constantine
• Lights Out - (1991) - poem by Alex Stewart
• Mummy's Blocked the Lav Again - (1991) - poem by John Grant
• Nasty Snow - (1991) - poem by Jody Scott
• Now We Are Sick - (1986) - poem by Neil Gaiman and Stephen Jones
• Radio Nasty - (1991) - poem by Stephen Gallagher
• Rice Pudding - (1991) - poem by Brian W. Aldiss
• Something Came Out of the Toilet - (1991) - poem by John Brosnan
• The Answering Machine - (1991) - poem by S. P. Somtow
• The Borgia Brats - (1991) - poem by Garry Kilworth
• The Children's Hour - (1986) - poem by Alan Moore
• The Dangers of Colour TV - (1991) - poem by John Brosnan
• The Dream of Omar K. Yam - (1991) - poem by David Sutton
• The Haunted Henhouse: or The Irate Ghost of Thomas Hood - (1991) - poem by Jessica Amanda Salmonson
• The Secret Book of the Dead - (1991) - poem by Terry Pratchett
• The Thing at the Top of the Stairs - (1991) - poem by Sharon Baker
• Things that Go Bump in the Night - (1991) - poem by Ian Pemble
• Waiting... - (1991) - poem by James Herbert
• Warning: Death May Be Injurious to Your Health - (1991) - poem by Robert Bloch
• When the Music Breaks - (1991) - poem by R. A. Lafferty
• Why Private War or, "Why They Pinned This Name on My Progenitor" - (1986) - poem by Gene Wolfe
• You Always Eat the One You Love - (1991) - poem by Kim Newman
• You're Deceased, Father William - (1991) - poem by Colin Greenland

This shot story originally appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 15, March-April 2017.

Read the full story for free at Uncanny Magazine.

Imagine a world where the American government signed a conservation act to "restore all indigenous flora and fauna to the Great Plains," which means suddenly the Great Plains are Indian again. Now fast-forward fourteen years to a bowling alley deep in the Indian Territories. People that bowling alley with characters named LP Deal, Cat Stand, Mary Boy, Courtney Peltdowne, Back Iron, Denim Horse, Naitche, and give them a chance to find a treaty signed under duress by General Sherman, which effectively gives all of the Americas back to the Indians, only hide that treaty in a stolen pipe, put it in a locker, and flush the key down the toilet. Ask LP Deal and the rest what they will trade to get that key back--maybe, everything.

Twenty-six terrifying tales set on the scariest night of the year!

Treat yourself to some very tricky stories! Halloween... All Hallows' Eve... Samhain... Día de los Muertos... the Day the Dead Come Back... When the barriers between the worlds are at their weakest?when ghosts, goblins, and grisly things can cross over into our dimension?then for a single night each year the natural becomes the supernatural, the normal becomes the paranormal, and nobody is safe from their most intimate and terrifying fears.

The Mammoth Book of Halloween Stories brings you a dark feast of frightening fiction by some of the most successful and respected horror writers working today, including Ramsey Campbell, Neil Gaiman, Joe R. Lansdale, Helen Marshall, Richard Christian Matheson, Robert Shearman, Robert Silverberg, Angela Slatter, Steve Rasnic Tem, and many more, along with a very special contribution by award-winning poet Jane Yolen.

Here you will encounter witches, ghosts, monsters, psychos, demonic nuns, and even Death himself in this spooky selection of stories set on the night when evil walks the earth...

Modern masters of the macabre bring the dead to life in this specially re-vamped edition of the classic compilation every horror fan will want to sink their teeth into.

From an award-winning editor who knows the genre backwards, here is the very best in vampire fiction: from tales of tempting sirens to contemporary serial killers; from the dark origins of fairy tales to a modern reinterpretation of the King of the Undead himself, Count Dracula.

This revised edition features over a dozen new stories, including Tina Rath's A Trick of the Dark and Kim Newman's Andy Warhol's Dracula, as well as classic novellas such as Hugh B. Cave's Stragella and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's Investigating Jericho. There are contributions by Nancy Kilpatrick, Christopher Fowler, Paul Mcauley, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Tina Rath, Neil Gaiman, Harlan Ellison and Kim Newman.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Children of the Night - essay by Stephen Jones
• Human Remains - (1984) - novelette by Clive Barker
• Necros - (1986) - short story by Brian Lumley
• The Man Who Loved the Vampire Lady - (1988) - novelette by Brian Stableford
• For the Blood Is the Life - (1905) - short story by F. Marion Crawford
• The Brood - (1980) - short story by Ramsey Campbell
• Hungarian Rhapsody - (1958) - short story by Robert Bloch
• Ligeia - (1838) - short story by Edgar Allan Poe
• Vampire - (1986) - poem by Richard Christian Matheson
• Stragella - (1932) - novelette by Hugh B. Cave
• A Week in the Unlife - (1991) - short story by David J. Schow
• The House at Evening - (1982) - short story by Frances Garfield
• The Labyrinth - (1974) - novelette by R. Chetwynd-Hayes
• Beyond Any Measure - (1982) - novella by Karl Edward Wagner
• Doctor Porthos - (1968) - short story by Basil Copper
• Dracula's Guest - (1914) - short story by Bram Stoker
• It Only Comes Out at Night - (1976) - short story by Dennis Etchison
• Dracula's Chair - (1980) - short story by Peter Tremayne
• The Better Half - (1989) - short story by Melanie Tem
• An Episode of Cathedral History - (1914) - short story by M. R. James
• Chastel - (1979) - novelette by Manly Wade Wellman
• Der Untergang des Abendlandesmenschen - (1976) - short story by Howard Waldrop
• The Room in the Tower - (1912) - short story by E. F. Benson
• Laird of Dundain - short story by Graham Masterton
• Midnight Mass - (1990) - novella by F. Paul Wilson
• Blood Gothic - (1985) - short story by Nancy Holder
• Yellow Fog - (1986) - short story by Les Daniels
• Vintage Domestic - short story by Steve Rasnic Tem
• Red Reign - novella by Kim Newman
• Vampire Sestina - (1989) - poem by Neil Gaiman

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Even a Man Who is Pure of Heart... - essay by Stephen Jones
• Twilight at the Towers - (1985) - novelette by Clive Barker
• The Dream of the Wolf - (1984) - novelette by Scott Bradfield
• Night Beat - (1973) - short story by Ramsey Campbell
• The Werewolf - (1978) - short story by R. Chetwynd-Hayes
• Rain Falls - short story by Michael Marshall Smith
• Guilty Party - (1988) - short story by Stephen Laws
• Essence of the Beast - short story by Roberta Lannes
• Immortal - short story by Mark Morris
• Cry Wolf - (1974) - short story by Basil Copper
• Rug - short story by Graham Masterton
• The Whisperers - (1942) - short story by Hugh B. Cave
• And I Shall Go in the Devil's Name - short story by David Sutton
• The Foxes of Fascoum - novelette by Peter Tremayne
• One Paris Night - (1992) - short story by Karl Edward Wagner
• Soul of the Wolf - short story by Brian Mooney
• The Hairy Ones Shall Dance - (1938) - novella by Manly Wade Wellman
• Heart of the Beast - short story by Adrian Cole
• Wereman - (1990) - short story by Les Daniels
• Anything but Your Kind - short story by Nicholas Royle
• The Nighthawk - (1978) - short story by Dennis Etchison
• The Cell - (1969) - novella by David Case
• Boobs - (1989) - short story by Suzy McKee Charnas
• Out of the Night, When the Full Moon is Bright ... - novella by Kim Newman
• Bright of Moon - poem by Jo Fletcher

The Night Cyclist by Stephen Graham Jones is a horror novelette about a middle-aged chef whose nightly bicycle ride home is interrupted by an unexpected encounter.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

These thirteen stories are our own lives, inside out.

A boy's summer romance doesn't end in that good kind of heartbreak, but in blood. A girl on a fishing trip makes a friend in the woods who's exactly what she needs, except then that friend follows her back to the city. A father hears a voice through his baby monitor that shouldn't be possible, but now he can't stop listening. A woman finds out that the shipwreck wasn't the disaster, but who she's shipwrecked with. A big brother learns just what he will, and won't, trade for one night of sleep.

From prison guards making unholy alliances to snake-oil men in the Old West doling out justice, these stories carve down into the body of the mind, into our most base fears and certainties, and there's no anesthetic. Turn the light on if you want, but that just makes for more shadows.

Four American Indian men from the Blackfeet Nation, who were childhood friends, find themselves in a desperate struggle for their lives, against an entity that wants to exact revenge upon them for what they did during an elk hunt ten years earlier by killing them, their families, and friends.

IN THE DARKNESS, SOMETHING WICKED SPREADS ITS WINGS THE ETERNAL BATTLE between fallen angels and their Heavenly counterpoints plays out daily here on Earth. Without warning, ordinary people find their lives forever changed by the intervention of divine beings. But meddling with the living does not always go according to plan and the angels themselves fall under an all-too-mortal spell--longing for love or thirsting for wicked revenge. With stories from such world-renowned authors of fantasy and horror as Michael Bishop, Ramsey Campbell, Neil Gaiman, Graham Masterton, Robert Silverberg, Michael Marshall Smith, Lisa Tuttle, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and Jane Yolen, Visitants presents a breathtaking collection of stories in which Heaven's hosts reveal themselves on Earth and fallen angels struggle toward final redemption.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: An Angelology, or Sorts - essay by Stephen Jones
• Murder Mysteries - (1992) - novelette by Neil Gaiman
• The Houses of the Favored - short story by Jay Lake
• An Infestation of Angels - (1985) - short story by Jane Yolen
• Second Journey of the Magus - (2010) - short story by Ian R. MacLeod
• The Bowmen - (1914) - short story by Arthur Machen
• Okay, Mary - (1949) - short story by Hugh B. Cave
• Plague Angel - short story by Yvonne Navarro
• Scent of the Green Cathedral - short story by Jay Lake
• Snow Angels - (2009) - short story by Sarah Pinborough
• Nephilim - (2003) - short story by Mark Samuels
• Thy Spinning Wheel Compleat - short story by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
• Old Mr. Boudreaux - (2007) - short story by Lisa Tuttle
• A Feast of Angels - short story by Jay Lake
• Transfiguration - short story by Richard Christian Matheson
• Evidence of Angels - (1995) - novelette by Graham Masterton
• Featherweight - novelette by Robert Shearman
• Molly and the Angel - (1999) - short story by Brian Stableford
• S. D. Watkins, Painter of Portraits - short story by Steve Rasnic Tem
• Being Right - (2003) - short story by Michael Marshall Smith
• Novus Ordo Angelorum - short story by Jay Lake
• Sariela; or, Spiritual Dysfunction & Counterangelic Longings: A Case Study in One Act - (1995) - short story by Michael Bishop
• With the Angels - short story by Ramsey Campbell
• Things I Didn't Know My Father Knew - (2001) - novelette by Peter Crowther
• The Fold - short story by Conrad Williams
• Basileus - (1983) - short story by Robert Silverberg
• Beautiful Men - short story by Christopher Fowler
• Going Bad - short story by Jay Lake

It's time for the annual Recipe Days bake-off in Lubbock, Texas. Soccer moms and grandmothers gather to show off their family recipes, learn new secrets for the perfect shortcake, and perhaps earn a chance to be on the famous cooking show, How Would You Cook It, Then?

When the bake-off is crashed by a federation of pro wrestlers -- including American Badass, Jersey Devil Jill, Tiny Giant, The Village Person, Jonah the Whale, the Hellbillies, and the fan favorite Xombie -- all hell is set to break loose. Your heart beats faster as you anticipate who will come out on top in the ultimate showdown of the century: soccer moms or pro wrestlers. Anything can happen.

An infected batch of donuts has transformed most of the wrestlers into mindless brain-eaters and the doors of the convention center have been chained shut, leaving the survivors locked inside, forced to fend for themselves against the hungry dead.

Possessing the intensity of a shotgun to the face, Zombie Bake-Off is a stripped-down masterpiece of blood and doughnuts from celebrated author Stephen Graham Jones.

Arguably the greatest collaboration in the whole history of comedy!

Bestselling author Douglas Adams wrote the storyline based on his CD-ROM game of the same name (as this novel, not as him, obviously).

Terry Jones of Monty Python wrote the book. In the nude! Parents be warned! Most of the words in this book were written by a naked man!

So. You want to argue with that? All right, we give in.

Starship Titanic is the greatest, most fabulous, most technologically advanced interstellar cruise line ever built. It is like a cross between the Queen Mary, the Chrysler Building, Tutankhamen's tomb, and Venice. Furthermore, it cannot possibly go wrong....

Sadly, however, seconds after its launch it undergoes SMEF, or Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure. And disappears.

Except, everything's got to be somewhere.

Coming home that night, on a little known planet called Earth, Dan and Lucy Gibson find something very large and very, very shiny sticking into their house...

Seventeen-year-old Aderyn ("Ryn") only cares about two things: her family and her family's graveyard. And right now, both are in dire straits. Since the death of their parents, Ryn and her siblings have been scraping together a meager existence as gravediggers in the remote village of Colbren, which sits at the foot of a harsh and deadly mountain range that was once home to the fae. The problem with being a gravedigger in Colbren, though, is that the dead don't always stay dead.

The risen corpses are known as "bone houses," and legend says that they're the result of a decades-old curse. When Ellis, an apprentice mapmaker with a mysterious past, arrives in town, the bone houses attack with new ferocity. What is it that draws them near? And more importantly, how can they be stopped for good?

Together, Ellis and Ryn embark on a journey that will take them into the heart of the mountains, where they will have to face both the curse and the deeply-buried truths about themselves.

WHEN THE VOICES CALL, DON'T ANSWER...

In the wake of his parents' tragic deaths fourteen-year-old Richard Elauved has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle in the remote town of Ballantyne, where all is not as it seems.

Richard quickly earns a reputation as an outcast, and when a classmate named Tom goes missing, no one believes him when he says the telephone booth out by the edge of the woods sucked Tom into the receiver like something out of a horror movie.

No one, that is, except the enigmatic Karen, who encourages Richard to pursue clues the police refuse to investigate. He traces the number to an abandoned house in the woods. There he catches a glimpse of a terrifying face in the window. And then the voices start.

The World Jones Made

Floyd Jones is sullen, ungainly, and quite possibly mad, but in a very short time he will rise from telling fortunes at a mutant carnival to convulsing an entire planet. For although Jones has the power to see the future -- a power that makes his life a torment -- his real gift lies elsewhere: in his ability to make people dream again in a world where dreaming has been made illegal, even when the dream is indistinguishable from a nightmare.

In Philip K. Dick's unsettling chronicle of the rise and fall of a postnuclear messiah, readers will find a novel that is as minutely realistic as it is prophetic. For along with its engineered mutants, hermaphroditic sex performers, and protoplasmic drifters from the stars, The World Jones Made gives us nothing less than a deadly accurate reading of our own hunger for belief.

Agent of the Unknown

Don Haig had been content to lie around and drink in the synthetic beauty of the pleasure planetoid Fyon, until a woman came into his life. A woman more beautiful and more perfect than any other female in the galaxy. A woman who brought about a curious change in Don.

For she was a pocket-sized doll -- a very strange and miraculous puppet who shed constant tears and held powers that Don never even dreamed of.

But what Don did know was that dangerous alien forces were swiftly focussing on him and his living puppet... and that he had to discover the doll's super-scientific secret before his own life was smashed to atoms!

Originally appeared in Ace Double D-150 (1956).

Floyd Jones is sullen, ungainly, and quite possibly mad, but in a very short time he will rise from telling fortunes at a mutant carnival to convulsing an entire planet. For although Jones has the power to see the future -- a power that makes his life a torment -- his real gift lies elsewhere: in his ability to make people dream again in a world where dreaming has been made illegal, even when the dream is indistinguishable from a nightmare.

In Philip K. Dick's unsettling chronicle of the rise and fall of a postnuclear messiah, readers will find a novel that is as minutely realistic as it is prophetic. For along with its engineered mutants, hermaphroditic sex performers, and protoplasmic drifters from the stars, The World Jones Made gives us nothing less than a deadly accurate reading of our own hunger for belief.

The subject matter of this collection is varied, but displays Jones' stance as a practicing SF writer and a feminist; the writing is characterized by both an incisive engagement with the texts and a refusal to dress that engagement in jargon. This very readable book provides insight into the work of one of the UK's most interesting writers and presents strong - sometimes even subversive - views of a range of modern SF and fantasy.

Contents:

• vii - Foreword (Deconstructing the Starships) - essay
• 3 - Introduction (Deconstructing the Starships) - (1988) - essay
• 9 - Getting Rid of the Brand Names - (1987) - essay
• 22 - The Lady and the Scientists - (1990) - essay
• 35 - Dreamer: An Exercise in Extrapolation 1989-2019 - (unknown) - essay
• 60 - My Crazy Uncles: C. S. Lewis and Tolkien as Writers for Children - (1995) - essay
• 77 - Fools: The Neuroscience of Cyberspace - (1997) - essay
• 91 - Trouble (Living in the Machine) - (1994) - essay
• 99 - Sex: The Brains of Female Hyena Twins - (1994) - essay
• 108 - Aliens in the Fourth Dimension - (1996) - essay
• 123 - Review: In the Chinks of the World Machine by Sarah LeFanu - (1988) - review
• 131 - Consider Her Ways: The Fiction of C. J. Cherryh - (unknown) - essay
• 141 - Review: Alien Sex by Ellen Datlow - (1990) - review
• 146 - Review: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson - (1992) - review
• 153 - Review: Glory Season by David Brin - (1993) - review
• 156 - Review: Virtual Light by William Gibson - review
• 161 - Review: A Million Open Doors by John Barnes - review
• 168 - Review: Winterlong by Elizabeth Hand - review
• 178 - Review: Plague of Angels by Sheri S. Tepper - review
• 184 - Review: The Furies by Suzy McKee Charnas - (1994) - review
• 192 - Review: Alien Influences by Kristine Kathryn Rusch - review
• 199 - No Man's Land: Feminised Landscapes in the Utopian Fiction of Ursula Le Guin - (1996) - essay
• 209 - Notes (Deconstructing the Starships) - essay

The man who'd given his handle as Drummer raised heavy eyes and spoke, sonorous as a prophet, from out of a full black beard. "We will be ordered to the transit chamber as we were ordered to this room, or drugged and carried by robots in our sleep. We will lie down in the Buonarotti capsules, and a code-self, the complex pattern of each human body and soul, will be split into two like a cell dividing. The copies will be sent flying around the torus, at half-light speed. You will collide with yourself and cease utterly to exist at these coordinates of space-time. The body and soul in the capsule will be annihilated, and know GOD no longer."

In Gwyneth Jones's White Queen Trilogy, the reclusive female genius called Peenemunde Buonarotti invented the instantaneous transit device of the same name. In The Buonaraotti Quartet, Gwyneth Jones shows us humans traveling via the device to alien worlds and situations. Some are diplomats, some are extreme travelers, some are prisoners. All are in for a rough, wild ride.

Table of Contents:

• Saving Tiamaat - (2007) - short story
• The Fulcrum - (2005) - novelette
• The Voyage Out - (2007) - short story
• The Tomb Wife - (2007) - short story

Ron Barron never expectied to see Clonar again. Clonar, the boy who alone had survived the crash of an interstllar saucer-ship near Ron's home, had been rescued by his people and returned to Rorla, a planet in the Great Galaxy of Andromeda, almost a million light-years from Earth. When he left, he assured Ron that communication between Rorla and Earth would be impossible. Yet only a year later, Ron listened with growing excitement to Clonar's voice coming over the interstellar communication system, inviting Ron and his family to journey to Rorla to attend a conference of the Galactic Federation.

None of the Barrons could have known that Clonar's invitation was violently opposed by the Rorlans, nor that on Rorla was an unknown enemy who resented their coming - a man who saw Earth's destruction as a necessity. And it was a bitter coincidence that that man should be in charge of the colony of delegates. As representatives of a planet whose civilization was considered dangerous and too inferior for membership in the Federation, the Barrons found themselves at the mercy of suspicious and hostile strangers bent on proving Earth's civilization unsalvageable. Not until Ron's father becomes an innocent party to an assassination plot, do they fully realize to what extent the Rorlans will carry their deception.

Climaxed by a shocking courtroom scene in which Ron stands trial for Earth, this sequel to Raymond Jones's Son of the Stars is an intricately plotted tale of what could happen if earth were to come face to face with long-established civilizations of Outer Space.

The Algorans. masters of time travel, had lost control of the time channels. In despair, they stood helplessly by as the barbarian hordes of the devastating Bakori were unleashed on the universe. In the little town of Midland, U.S.A., Joe Simmons worked feverishly to assemble the only device that had a chance to stop them. He knew that success depended on a beautiful Algoran woman, Tamarina, yet he didn't even know if she would re-appear! This whole disaster was his fault.

"This person is not even human. It's impossible for me to diagnose the injury or illness of such a structure as his!" With these words and a worried frown, Doc Smithers sums up the case of the strange creature that lay on Ron Barron's bed. For the boy, Clonar, is like nothing earth's medical books have ever cataloged. And the day Ron Barron found him, staggering away from the wrecked metal disk that lay hidden near Longview, is one that put earth's existence in jeopardy!

In Son of the Stars, Raymond Jones has written of a forthright friendship between a young castaway from space and his earthly counterpart. How a cold and suspicious military, recognizing Clonar only as an alien from an astonishingly advanced civilization, turns friendship into treachery that threatens earth's existence, makes this an electrifying story with a thought-provoking theme. In scenes uncomfortably vivid, you'll meet soldiers and citizens of a typical American city; people like calculating General Gillispie and frightened Mrs. Barron, whose reactions to an "interplanetary" situation bring the world to the brink of destruction.

Clonar's words, "They're coming to destroy your world!" refer to a planet whose wars and strife might shortly spread to other worlds. Climaxed with a scene of power and drama unmatched in science fiction, Son of the Stars is a breath-taking book you won't put down until the very last page - and won't be able to forget until men reach the stars and learn for themselves!

Adventure stories don't normally make a point as well, but Raymond F. Jones is no ordinary adventure story writer. In this touching and beautiful tale, Morten Bradwell shares his son's adventures and learns a lesson he will never forget. Neither will you. For Morten Bradwell is one of the elite in a time and society where stupidity and ignorance have been conquered by genetic engineering. But his son Freeman is a Retard. The King of Eolim is the story of the Bradwell's search for a home that will truly be "home" for Free.

All his life Manvar has had a dream. One day, he will escape the harshly primitive, blizzard-torn lands of the north. He will follow the paths of the Ancients and see for himself the fabled lands of the south: lands without ice and snow and perpetual night; lands of warmth and light, where life is easy and comfortable within walled cities of incredible beauty. Manvar follows his dream, but finds it hollow. Life in the wondrous city of Delphos is not the paradise it seemed.

Mayfield was the typical college town. Nothing too unusual ever happened there until a mysterious comet was suddenly observed by the scientists on College Hill.

And then one day the modified engine on Ken Maddox's car began overheating mysteriously. By morning it didn't run at all.

Art's Garage, local headquarters for hot-rodders, was soon so full of cars that wouldn't run, that Ken's science club began working in the garage after school. It didn't take long for the club to discover that all the moving parts on these stalled cars had fused together. Soon all machinery had stopped in Mayfield. There was no longer any light or power anywhere. This mysterious creeping paralysis was spreading.

The copper-yellow glow of the comet seemed to have brought the whole world to a grinding halt. Airplanes, trains, generators and heavy machinery were immobilized. Finally man was left with only a few primitive tools and communication became possible only by means of amateur radio. In the resulting chaos parts of Mayfield were burned and looted by hunger-crazed mobs that stole and killed as they advanced.

Here is science fiction at its thrilling best. A startling and thought-provoking book that shows how human nature might react to catastrophe.

Margerit Sovitre did not expect to inherit Baron Saveze's fortunes--even less his bodyguard, a ruthlessly efficient swordswoman known only as Barbara. Wealth suddenly makes Margerit a highly eligible heiress and buys her the enmity of the new Baron. He had expected to inherit all, and now eyes her fortune with open envy.

Barbara proudly served as the old Baron's duelist but she had expected his death to make her a free woman. Bitterness turns to determination when she finds herself the only force that stands between Margerit and the new Baron's greed.

At first Margerit protests the need for Barbara's services, but soon she cannot imagine sending Barbara away. And Barbara's duty has become something far more hazardous to her heart than the point of a sword. But greater dangers loom than one man's hatred--the Prince of Alpennia is ill. Deadly intrigue surrounds the succession and the rituals of divine power known as The Mysteries of the Saints.

Heather Rose Jones debuts with a sweeping story rich in intrigue and the clash of loyalties and love.

Antuniet Chazillen lost everything the night her brother was executed. In exile, she swore that treason would not be the final chapter of the Chazillen legacy in Alpennia's history. A long- hidden book of alchemical secrets provides the first hope of success, but her return to the capital is haunted by an enemy who wants those secrets for himself.

Jeanne, Vicomtesse de Cherdillac is bored. The Rotenek season is flat, her latest lover has grown tediously jealous and her usual crowd of friends fails to amuse. When Antuniet turns up on her doorstep seeking patronage for her alchemy experiments, what begins as amusement turns to interest, then something deeper. But Antuniet's work draws danger that threatens even the crown of Alpennia.

The alchemy of precious gems throws two women into a crucible of adversity, but it is the alchemy of the human heart that transforms them both in this breathtaking follow-up to the widely acclaimed Daughter of Mystery.

Winner of the Gaylactic Spectrum Best Novel Award

All her life, Serafina Talarico has searched in vain for a place where she and her mystical talents belong. She never found it in Rome--the city of her birth--where her family's Ethiopian origins marked them as immigrants. After traveling halfway across Europe to study with Alpennia's Royal Thaumaturgist, her hopes of finding a home among Margerit Sovitre's circle of scholars are dashed, for Serafina can perceive, but not evoke, the mystical forces of the Mysteries of the Saints and even Margerit can't awaken her talents.

When Serafina takes lodgings with Luzie Valorin, widowed music teacher and aspiring composer, both their lives are changed forever. Luzie's music holds a power to rival the Mysteries, and Serafina alone has the vision to guide her talents. For sorcery threatens the fate of Alpennia--indeed of all of Europe--locking the mountains in a malevolent storm meant to change the course of history. Alpennia's mystic protections are under attack and the key to survival may lie in the unlikeliest of places: Luzie's ambition to write an opera on the life of the medieval philosopher Tanfrit.

A lurid mix of Jules Verne's futuristic air warfare fantasies, the utopian visions of News from Nowhere and the future war invasion literature of Chesney and his imitators, it told the tale of a group of terrorists who conquer the world through airship warfare. Led by a crippled, brilliant Russian Jew and his daughter, the 'angel' Natasha, 'The Brotherhood of Freedom' establish a 'pax aeronautica' over the earth after a young inventor masters the technology of flight in 1903. The hero falls in love with Natasha and joins in her war against society in general and the Russian Czar in particular.

The novel is a sequal to The Angel of the Revolution, the tale of a worldwide brotherhood of anarchists fighting the world, armed with fantastical airships. The ending is on an apocalyptic note when a comet smashes into the earth.

A stunning return to Arkham Horror when a movie director shoots his silent horror masterpiece in eerie Arkham, capturing crawling nightmares instead of moving pictures, in this chilling novel of creeping dread...

Hollywood make-up artist and costumier, Jeany Lin, travels to Arkham to work on the new "nightmare movie" by enigmatic director Sydney Fitzmaurice. The star is her sister, Renee Love, Sydney's collaborator and lover. Desperate to outdo the thrills and terror of Lon Chaney's popular pictures, Sydney prepares occult-infused dream sequences for Love and her co-stars to perform. But there's more than mere imagery at play as the cast suffer recurring nightmares, accidents, and impossible waking visions. When events take a sinister turn and people start dying on set, it's up to Jeany to unmask the monsters before Sydney's obsessions doom them all.

A daring actress and a barnstorming pilot team up to save the world from supernatural disaster in this uncanny pulp adventure set in the world of Arkham Horror...

Betsy Baxter is the plucky stunt-actor star of the 1920s serial adventure, The Flapper Detective. While researching a wing-walking scene, she meets the fearless Winifred Habbamock and discovers a shared background of eerie encounters and eldritch phenomena. For years, Betsy has been investigating the disappearance of an old friend during the horror-struck filming of The Mask of Silver, when she learns of his reappearance in Arkham, she and Winifred hit the road to investigate. But Arkham is full of mysteries and danger. Betsy will need all her skills, and new allies, to prevent an otherworldly cataclysm from consuming her and all of Arkham.

Three extraordinary people in some most extraordinary times:

It's Dissolution Summer and as the United Kingdom prepares to break up into separate nations, the Counterculturals have gathered for a festival where everything's allowed. Among them is a talented little brat called Fiorinda, rock and roll princess by birth, searching for her father, the legendary Rufus O'Niall.

Instead, she finds Ax Preston, the softly spoken guitarman with bizarre delusions about saving the country from the dark ages. Together with Sage Pender, techno-wizard king of the lads, they join the pop-icon team that's supposed to make the government look cool.

Rock Legends. True Romance. A stunning fantasy about England.

Ax Preston, Sage Pender and Fiorinda, charismatic leaders of the Rock 'n' Roll Reich, have beaten the cascade of disasters that followed the collapse of the former United Kingdom. Now they have to find some resolution to the impossible dynamics of their own relationship, while the world keeps getting stranger. There are fearsome things going on in England's rural hinterland, and in Continental Europe the green nazis are planning a final solution to desperate environmental damage.

But there's nothing the Triumvirate can't handle - until Fiorinda's father, secret master of powers that are very old and very new, reaches out to reclaim his magical child, the flower-bride. And that's when darkness falls over Ax's England . . .

Harrowing . . . enchanting -- a dark fairy tale with an epic sweep, set in a world very like our own.

Rufus O'Niall is dead and the green nazi occupation has been defeated: but at a huge cost to the three extraordinary people who saved England from the dark. Shattered and deeply changed by the sacrifices each of them had to make, Fiorinda, Axe and Sage are in hiding from their friends and fans on the Pacific coast of Mexico when they're tracked down by an emissary of Fred Eiffrich, President of the United States. He's got an offer they can't refuse. It's about a movie, allegedly... Sage finds himself drawn to an old flame. Ax has to fight dirty, for the future and against the might of a collapsing superpower. And Fiorinda, the magical daughter of the monster, whose memories of utter horror are threatening her sanity, struggles with a deadly addiction. The Bold As Love adventure continues, spinning a web of daring, dread and enchantment, in a world that could almost be ours.

The riveting new instalment in Gwyneth Jones's award-winning 'Bold As Love' saga.

Ax Preston, former dictator, returns to England; he's agreed to take up the job of Green President. At close quarters he finds some outrageous details in the contract, so the Triumvirate decamps for Paris, to sit out the first hard winter after the A team destroyed crude oil in ostentatious poverty. He's quite certain he can negotiate a better deal.

But while Ax and Sage and Fiorinda are embarassing the English government over conditions in the new slavery labour camps, bad things are happening for the President of the USA. Fred Eiffrich's enemies in Washington are about to drop a bombshell, one that will shatter any hope of a return to former realities, former certainties. What happened at Lavoisier is not over. It's coming back, it's never going to end. At least not while Fiorinda lives ...or her child.

It's the final curtain call for flame-haired rock princess Fiorinda and her comrades Ax Preston and Sage Pender - a 21st century Guinevere, King Arthur, and Sir Lancelot. Together, the Triumvirate have fought to save their Britain, and America - indeed, the whole world - from the depredations of a collapsed economy and environmental meltdown. Together they have fought the evil magic of Fiorinda's wizard father; they have explored the depths and heights of ultimate consciousness, the fusion between mind and the world. And they have discovered a love that goes back centuries, and lives. But is all this enough to save a world that has fallen apart at the seams, a world that has given itself over to the dark side?

This short story originally appeared in the anthology When It Changed: Science Into Fiction (2009), edited by Geoff Ryman. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 15 (2010), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. The story is included in the collection The Universe of Things (2011).

This short story originally appeared in the anthology The New Space Opera (2007), edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection (2008), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Space Opera (2014), edited by Rich Horton. The story is included in the collections The Buonarotti Quartet (2009) and Grazing the Long Acre (2009).

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Constellations: The Best of New British SF (2005), edited by Peter Crowther. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Third Annual Collection (2006), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Science Fiction: The Very Best of 2005, edited by Jonathan Strahan. The story is included in the collections The Buonarotti Quartet (2009) and Grazing the Long Acre (2009).

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Engineering Infinity (2010), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld Magazine, #85 October 2013. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 17 (2012), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

Sturgeon and Nebula Award nominated short story. It was originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 2007. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 13 (2008), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, and the collections The Buonarotti Quartet (2009) and Grazing the Long Acre (2009).

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Periphery: Erotic Lesbian Futures (2008), edited by Lynne Jamneck. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection (2009), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Final Frontier (2018), edited by Neil Clarke. The story is included in the collections The Buonarotti Quartet (2009) and Grazing the Long Acre (2009).

Contents:

• vii - Introduction to Arkham Tales - essay by William Jones
• 1 - Mysterious Dan's Legacy - shortstory by Matthew Baugh
• 19 - Vaughn's Diary - shortstory by Robert Vaughn
• 36 - The Orb - shortstory by Tony Campbell
• 54 - The Nether Collection - shortstory by Cody Goodfellow
• 74 - Worms - shortstory by Pat Harrigan
• 91 - They Thrive in Darkness - shortstory by Ron Shiflet
• 108 - What Sorrows May Come - shortstory by Lee Clark Zumpe
• 125 - Arkham Pets - shortstory by James Ambuehl
• 130 - Small Ghost - shortstory by Michael Minnis
• 148 - Burnt Tea - shortstory by Michael Dziesinski
• 165 - Arkham Rain - shortstory by John Goodrich
• 183 - Regrowth - shortstory by David Conyers
• 199 - The Idea of Fear - shortstory by C. J. Henderson
• 212 - Disconnected - shortstory by Brian M. Sammons
• 237 - The Lady in the Grove - shortstory by Scott Lette
• 253 - On Leave to Arkham - shortstory by Bill Bilstad
• 272 - Geometry of the Soul - shortstory by Jason Andrew

Contents:

• 9 - The Long Road Home - shortstory by Paul Melniczek
• 23 - In Waters Black the Lost Ones Sleep - novelette by Angeline Hawkes
• 49 - Where Men Had Seldom Trod - novelette by Lee Clark Zumpe
• 77 - Something to Hold the Door Closed - shortstory by Lon Prater
• 89 - Terror from Middle Island - shortstory by Durant Haire and Stephen Mark Rainey
• 105 - Children of the Mountain - shortstory by Stewart Sternberg
• 117 - They Who Dwell Below - shortstory by William Jones
• 133 - Wagon Train for the Star - shortstory by Scott Lette
• 149 - Incident at Dagon Wells - shortstory by Ron Shiflet
• 165 - Ahiga and the Machine - shortstory by Robert J. Santa
• 177 - The Dead Man's Hand - shortstory by Jason Andrew
• 189 - Jedediah Smith and the Undying Chinaman - shortstory by Charles P. Zaglanis
• 205 - Snake Oil - shortfiction by Matthew Baugh
• 221 - Cemetery, Nevada - novelette by Tim Curran
• 251 - The Rider of the Dark - (2004) - shortstory by Darrell Schweitzer

Contents:

• 11 - Author's Note (The Strange Cases of Rudolph Pearson) - essay
• 15 - Foreword (The Strange Cases of Rudolph Pearson) - shortfiction
• 19 - Feasters of the Dark - (2003) - shortstory
• 35 - The Transgression of Effram Harris - (2004) - shortstory
• 45 - Shadow of the Past - novelette
• 75 - The Whispering Dead - novelette
• 103 - The Haunted Horror - shortstory
• 115 - Harami - (2004) - shortstory
• 129 - The Missing Curiosity - novelette
• 159 - The Mysterious Millionaire - novelette
• 191 - An Ancient Summoning - shortstory
• 217 - Through the Eye of a Needle - (2006) - shortstory
• 237 - Afterword (The Strange Cases of Rudolph Pearson) - shortfiction

Calliope Reaper-Jones so just wanted a normal life: buying designer shoes on sale, dating guys from Craig’s List, web-surfing for organic dim-sum for her boss...

But when her father—who happens to be Death himself—is kidnapped, and the Devil’s Protege embarks on a hostile takeover of the family business, Death, Inc., Callie returns home to assume the CEO mantle— only to discover she must complete three nearly impossible tasks in the realm of the afterlife first.

Calliope Reaper-Jones is Death's Daughter. She owes a debt to Cerberus, the three headed dog that guards the gate's of hell-a debt that involves a trip to Purgatory, Las Vegas, ancient Egypt, and a discount department store that's more frightening than any supernatural creature she'll ever encounter.

Calliope just wants to make it big in the Big Apple like any other working girl. But Callie is also Death's Daughter, no matter how much she tries to stay out of the family business. And now her older sister has made a deal with the Devil himself to engage in a hostile takeover of both Death Inc. and Heaven-once they get Callie out of the way.

All Calliope Reaper-Jones ever wanted out of life was a fabulous job in New York City and a really hot boyfriend. But now, she's the brand-new President of Death, Inc. With the Board of Death breathing down her neck and her dad's copy of How to be Death (A Fully Annotated Guide) unopened, Callie's really feeling the tension. And when the guide book is stolen at a fancy formal dinner, Callie has to figure out how to be the boss--before the powers held within the book get out and destroy humanity forever...

My name is Calliope Reaper-Jones (Callie to my friends). I'm Death's Daughter and—as of very recently—the (reluctant) head of my father's company, Death, Inc.

I was gradually learning how to be a businesswoman. Had the power suits and shoes down, though the day to day was slow going. Then I was blindsided by Enemies Unknown and sent off to I-don't-know-where. Not a good thing.

Now not only must my friends and family be frantic, but without a CEO, Death, Inc., can't function. With the newly deceased left free to roam the Earth, it's the zombie apocalypse come true.

I've got to get back—for my sake and the sake of, oh, all humanity...

Darynda Jones revisits the sexy, suspenseful world of supernatural shenanigans she created in her Grave series with For I Have Sinned. In this Charley Davidson story, Charley helps a woman find out how she died and gives her the closure she needs to pass through to the other side.

A smashing, award-winning debut novel that introduces Charley Davidson: part-time private investigator and full-time Grim Reaper Charley sees dead people. That's right, she sees dead people. And it's her job to convince them to "go into the light." But when these very dead people have died under less than ideal circumstances (i.e. murder), sometimes they want Charley to bring the bad guys to justice. Complicating matters are the intensely hot dreams she's been having about an Entity who has been following her all her life... and it turns out he might not be dead after all. In fact, he might be something else entirely.

If you hang around with dead people, life can deliver a whole world of trouble.

Take it from Charley Davidson, part-time P.I. and full-time Grim Reaper. The deceased find her very sparkly. Demons find her irresistible. And one entity in particular wants to seduce her in every way possible...

When Charley and Cookie, her best friend slash receptionist, have to track down a missing woman, the case is not quite as open and shut as they anticipate. Meanwhile, Reyes Alexander Farrow (otherwise known as the Son of Satan. Yes. Literally.) has left his corporeal body because he's being tortured by demons who want to lure Charley closer. But Reyes can't let that happen. Because if the demons get to Charley, they'll have a portal to heaven. And if they have a portal to heaven... well, let's just say it wouldn't be pretty.

Can Charley handle hot nights with Reyes and even hotter days tracking down a missing woman? Can she keep those she loves out of harm's way? And is there enough coffee and chocolate in the world to fuel her as she does?

Paranormal private eye. Grim reaper extraordinaire. Whatever. Charley Davidson is back! And she's drinking copious amounts of caffeine to stay awake because every time she closes her eyes she sees him: Reyes Farrow, the part-human, part-supermodel son of Satan. Yes, she did imprison him for all eternity, but come on. How is she supposed to solve a missing-persons case, deal with an ego-driven doctor, calm her curmudgeonly dad, and take on a motorcycle gang hell-bent on murder when the devil's son just won't give up on his plan of seduction... and revenge?

Sometimes being the grim reaper really is that. Grim. And since Charley's last case went so awry, she has taken a couple months off to wallow in the wonders of self-pity. But when a woman shows up on her doorstep convinced someone is trying to kill her, Charley has to force herself to rise above. Or at least get dressed. She quickly realizes something is amiss when everyone the woman knows swears she's insane. The more they refute the woman's story, the more Charley believes it.

In the meantime, the sexy, sultry son of Satan, Reyes Farrow, has been cleared of all charges. He is out of prison and out of Charley's life, as per her wishes and several perfectly timed death threats. But his absence has put a serious crimp in her sex life. While there are other things to consider, like the fact that the city of Albuquerque has been taken hostage by an arsonist, Charley is having a difficult time staying away. Especially when it looks like Reyes may be involved.

Never underestimate the power of a woman on a double espresso with a mocha latte chaser high. -- T-shirt

Charley Davidson isn't your everyday, run-of-the-mill grim reaper. She's more of a paranormal private eye/grim reaper extraordinaire. However, she gets sidetracked when the sexy, sultry son of Satan, Reyes Farrow, moves in next door. To further complicate matters, Reyes is her main suspect in an arson case. Charley has vowed to stay away from him until she can find out the truth... but then dead women start appearing in her apartment, one after another, each lost, confused, and terrified beyond reason. When it becomes apparent that her own sister, Gemma, is the serial killer's next target Charley has no choice but to ask for Reyes' help. Arsonist or not, he's the one man alive who could protect Gemma no matter who or what came at her. But he wants something in return. Charley. All of her, body and soul. And to keep her sister safe, it is a price she is willing to pay.

Sometimes I wrestle my demons. Sometimes we just snuggle. -- Bumper Sticker

Most girls might think twice before getting engaged to someone like Reyes Farrow but Charley Davidson is not most girls. She's a paranormal private eye and grim reaper-in-training who's known to be a bit of a hell-raiser, especially after a few shots of caffeine. Her beloved Reyes may be the only begotten son of evil, but he's dark and sultry and deeply sexy and everything Charley could hope for. Really. But when the FBI file on Reyes' childhood happens to land into her lap, she can't help herself: She opens it... and then the real fun begins. First, Charley finds a naked corpse riding shotgun in her car. Then, a man loses his soul in a card game. Throw in a Deaf boy who sees dead people, a woman running from mobsters, and a very suspicious Reyes, and things can't get any worse for Charley. Unless, of course, the Twelve Beasts of Hell are unleashed...

Lead me not into temptation.
Follow me instead! I know a shortcut!
--T-shirt

Twelve. Twelve of the deadliest beasts ever forged in the fires of hell have escaped onto our plane, and they want nothing more than to rip out Charley Davidson's jugular and serve her body to Satan for dinner. So there's that. But Charley has more on her plate than a mob of testy hellhounds. For one thing, her father has disappeared, and as she retraces his last steps she learns he was conducting an investigation of his own, one that has Charley questioning everything she's ever known about him. Add to that an ex-BFF who is haunting her night and day, a rash of suicides that has authorities baffled, and a drop-dead sexy fiancé who has attracted the attentions of a local celebrity, and Charley is not having the best week of her life.

But all of that barely scratches the surface of her problems. Recent developments have forced her to become a responsible adult. To conquer such a monumental task, she's decided to start small. Really small. She gets a pet. But how can she save the world against the forces of evil when she can't even keep a goldfish alive?

A tad north of hell, a hop, skip, and a jump past the realm of eternity, is a little place called Earth, and Charley Davidson, grim reaper extraordinaire, is determined to do everything in her power to protect it.

We're doomed.

Sometimes I wonder if the purpose of my life is to serve as a cautionary tale to others. -- T-shirt

Charley Davidson has enough going on without having to worry about twelve hellhounds hot on her trail. She is, after all, incredibly pregnant and feeling like she could pop at any moment. But, just her luck, twelve deadly beasts from hell have chosen this time to escape onto our plane, and they've made Charley their target. And so she takes refuge at the only place she thinks they can't get to her: the grounds of an abandoned convent. Of course, if hellhounds aren't enough, Charley also has a new case to hold her attention: the decades-old murder of a newly-vowed nun she keeps seeing in the shadows of the convent.

Add to that the still unsolved murder of her father, the strange behavior of her husband, and Charley's tendency to attract the, shall we say, undead, and she has her hands full... but also tied.

I see dead people. No wait. I take that back. I see people I want dead. -- e Card

Charley Davidson is living in New York City as Jane Doe, a girl with no memory of who she is or where she came from. So when she begins to realize she can see dead people, she's more than a bit taken aback. Strangers who enter the diner where she works seem to know things about her... Then she is confronted by a man who claims to have been sent to kill her. Sent by the darkest force in the universe. An enemy that will not stop until she is dead.

Thankfully, she has a Rottweiler. And the diner's devastatingly handsome fry cook, who vows to protect her even though he seems to be lying with every breath he takes. But in the face of such grave danger, who can Jane/Charley/whoever she is trust? She will find the truth even if it kills her... or the fry cook. Either way...

If one door closes and another one opens, your house is probably haunted. -- Bumper Sticker

My entire life can be summed up in one sentence: "Well, that didn't go as planned." -- T-Shirt

A typical day in the life of Charley Davidson involves cheating husbands, errant wives, missing people, philandering business owners, and, oh yeah...demons, hell hounds, evil gods, and dead people. Lots and lots of dead people. As a part time Private Investigator and full-time Grim Reaper, Charley has to balance the good, the bad, the undead, and those who want her dead.

Now, Charley is learning to make peace with the fact that she is a goddess with all kinds of power and that her own daughter has been born to save the world from total destruction. But the forces of hell are determined to see Charley banished forever to the darkest corners of another dimension. With the son of Satan himself as her husband and world-rocking lover, will Charley be able to defeat the ultimate evil and find a way to have her happily ever after after all?

Ever since Reyes Farrow escaped from a hell dimension in which Charley Davidson accidentally trapped him, the son of Satan has been brimstone-bent on destroying the world his heavenly Brother created. His volatile tendencies have put Charley in a bit of a pickle. But that's not the only briny vegetable on her plate. While trying to domesticate the feral being that used to be her husband, she also has to deal with her everyday life of annoying all manner of beings?some corporeal, some not so much?as she struggles to right the wrongs of society. Only this time she's not uncovering a murder. This time she's covering one up.

Add to that her new occupation of keeping a startup PI venture?the indomitable mystery-solving team of Amber Kowalski and Quentin Rutherford?out of trouble and dealing with the Vatican's inquiries into her beloved daughter, and Charley is on the brink of throwing in the towel and becoming a professional shopper. Or possibly a live mannequin. But when someone starts attacking humans who are sensitive to the supernatural world, Charley knows it's time to let loose her razor sharp claws. Then again, her number one suspect is the dark entity she's loved for centuries. So the question becomes: Can she tame the unruly beast before it destroys everything she's worked so hard to protect?

Charley Davidson, Grim Reaper extraordinaire, is pissed. She's been kicked off the earthly plane for eternity?which is exactly the amount of time it takes to make a person stark raving mad. But someone's looking out for her, and she's allowed to return after a mere hundred years in exile. Is it too much to hope for that not much has changed? Apparently it is. Bummer.

Dapper, debonair, and wise, the great enchanter Chrestomanci has nine lives and a strong personality as well as strong magic. That personality reverberates in each of these four dazzling stories.

A warlock tries to escape Chrestomanci's justice by fleeing to another world-with hilarious results. Cat Chant and Tonino Montana reluctantly join forces when Chrestomanci sends them on a visit that turns suddenly dangerous. The youngest best-selling dreamer needs Chrestomanci's help when she finds she can't dream anymore. And as the gods of an ever-so-orderly world try to destroy the young Sage of Dissolution, Chrestomanci lends a hand.

Like Chrestomanci himself, acclaimed author Diana Wynne Jones has a graceful flair, which sparkles in the remarkable wit, imagination, and intelligence of these fast-paced tales.

Table of Contents:

• Warlock at the Wheel - (1984) - shortstory
• Stealer of Souls - (2000) - novella
• Carol Oneir's Hundredth Dream - (1986) - novelette
• The Sage of Theare - (1982) - novelette

Cat Chant has nine lives and is destined to be the next Chrestomanci. He is not pleased when Tonino Montana, a magically-gifted Italian, is invited to live at Chrestomanci Castle. But Cat is forced to put aside his animosity towards Tonino when they are abducted by the enchanter, Master Spiderman.

A bewitching comic fantasy by a master of the supernatural

Cat doesn't mind living in the shadow of his sister, Gwendolen, the most promising young witch ever seen on Coven Street. But trouble starts brewing the moment the two orphans are summoned to live in Chrestomanci Castle. Frustrated that the witches of the castle refuse to acknowledge her talents, Gwendolen conjures up a scheme that could throw whole worlds out of whack.

Tonino is the only person in the famous Montana household who wasn't born with an instinct for creating spells, but he has other gifts. His ability to communicate with cats just might help defend the city of Caprona against a mysterious enchanter -- but only if Tonino can learn to cooperate with a girl from the hated Petrocchi family of spell-makers.

There are good witches and bad witches, but the law says that all witches must be burned at the stake. So when an anonymous note warns, "Someone in this class is a witch," the students in 6B are nervous--especially the boy who's just discovered that he can cast spells and the girl who was named after the most famous witch of all. Witch Week features the debonair enchanter Chrestomanci, who also appears in Charmed Life, The Magicians of Caprona, and The Lives of Christopber Chant. Someone in the class is a witch. At least so the anonymous note says. Everyone is only too eager to prove it is someone else--because in this society, witches are burned at the stake.

His father and uncles are enchanters, his mother a powerful sorceress, yet nothing seems magical about Christopher Chant except his dreams. Night after night, he climbs through the formless Place Between and visits marvelous lands he calls the Almost Anywheres. Then Christopher discovers that he can bring real, solid things back from his dreams. Others begin to recognize the extent of his powers, and they issue an order that turns Christopher's life upside down: Go to Chrestomanci Castle to train to be the controller of all the world's magic.

The Lives of Christopher Chant is the adventure-filled story of the boyhood of Chretomanci, the famous magician who also appears in Charmed Life, Witch Week, and The Magicians of Caprona.

Someone at Stallery Mansion is changing the world. At first, only small details, but the changes get bigger and bigger. It's up to Conrad, a twelve-year-old with terrible karma who's just joined the mansion's staff, to find out who is behind it.

But he's not the only one snooping around. His fellow servant-in-training, Christopher Chant, is charming, confident, and from another world, with a mission of his own -- rescuing his friend, lost in an alternate Stallery Mansion. Can they save the day before Conrad's awful fate catches up with them?

Cat Chant and Marianne Pinhoe have discovered something exciting--something truly precious, very strange, and valuable. An egg.

An egg that has been hidden away in an attic for who-knows-how-many years. An egg protected by some strong "Don't Notice" spells. An egg that Marianne gives to Cat, even though he lives at nearby Chrestomanci Castle. Chrestomanci himself, the strongest enchanter in the world, is sure to be interested in the egg--and interference from the Big Man is the last thing Marianne's family of secret rogue witches wants.

But how much longer can the Pinhoes keep their secrets? Gammer, the leaderof the clan, has gone mad, a powerfulbad luck spell is wreaking havoc, and there's an unexplained plague of frogs.Not to mention the mysterious barrierCat finds in the forest.

Marianne and Cat may be the only two who can set things right. But first Marianne must accept her own powerful magic, and Cat must uncover the secrets behind the mystical Pinhoe Egg.

In this new Chrestomanci book, Diana Wynne Jones is at her most magical.

THE CHRONICLES OF LUCIFER JONES

Being a Stirring Chronicle of Intrigue, Romance, Danger, Hairbreadth Escapes, and Thrilling Triumphs over Fierce Beasts and Fiercer Men in the Mysterious and Exotic Dark Continent, as Recounted by the Daring, Resourceful, Handsome, and Modest Christian Gentleman Who Experienced Them

Of all the characters that Mike has created, Lucifer Jones remains his favorite. We are proud to republish this hilarious series of adventures starring a most unique character.

Exploits is the second volume of the Chronicles.

THE CHRONICLES OF LUCIFER JONES: VOLUME II

Being a Thrilling Chronicle of Romance, Danger, Spectacle, High Adventure, Narrow Escapes, and Uplifting Triumphs Over Sinister Villains and Mystic Mages in the Exotic Continent of the East, as Recounted by the Bold, Daring, Handsome and Modest Christian Gentleman Who Experienced Them.

Of all the characters that Mike has created, Lucifer Jones remains his favorite. We are proud to republish this hilarious series of adventures starring a most unique character.

Encounters is the third volume of the Chronicles.

THE CHRONICLES OF LUCIFER JONES: VOLUME III

Being a Romantic Chronicle of Intrigue, High Adventure, Danger, Spectacle, and Thrilling Triumphs Over Wicked Villains, Painted Women, and Horrific Monsters in the Sinful Nations of Europe, as Recounted by the Daring, Handsome, Resourceful and Modest Christian Gentleman Who Experienced Them

After his Adventures in Africa, his Exploits in Asia, and his Encounters in Europe, everyone's favorite man of the cloth is back to tell you about the Hazards he encounters in South America. They include the terrifying Island of Annoyed Souls, the discovery of the Lost Continent of Moo (spelled correctly for a change), a battle with safari ants that even Charlton Heston wouldn't want any part of, and a pair of Bird Girls who live in matching Chartreuse Mansions.

You'll meet some old friends such as Capturin' Clyde Calhoun, old heartthrobs such the Scorpion Lady, old rivals such as Major Theodore Dobbins and Rupert Cornwall, an old nemesis (the remarkable Erich von Horst), a pair of naked high priestesses (or goddesses, take your choice), the sinister Dr. Mirbeau, the incredibly wealthy and incredibly undesirable Baroness Schimmelmetz, and a score of others--including Bubbles, an anaconda with an attitude.

And making his way through these hazards is the irrepressible Right Reverend Honorable Doctor Lucifer Jones. So come along-you don't want to miss the fun!

Lucifer Jones is back-and on the run again. Having been barred from the United States, Africa (Adventures), Asia (Exploits), Europe (Encounters), and South America (Hazards), he is island-hopping his way across the Pacific to Australia, the one remaining continent that will tolerate his presence.

Seems like it should be an idyllic trip, but then, nothing is ever quite idyllic where Lucifer is concerned. He meets a rather large, rather unhappy couple when he encounters King and Mrs. Kong; he comes across a hermit with an opera singer's name who has four gorgeous servants-Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday; he falls in with an arduous collector-of heads; he gets passage aboard a ship whose crazed captain is in maniacal pursuit of the Puce Whale; and he eventually tops General MacArthur's list of least favorite people.

During the course of his voyages he and the reader encounter old friends such as Capturin' Clyde Calhoun (who brings 'em back alive; not intact, but alive), Erich von Horst (a con man's con man), and Inspector Willie Wong (who has so many sons he has run out of names for them and uses numbers instead), as well as some new and equally memorable characters.

Join five-time Hugo winner Mike Resnick as he brings you more episodes from the life of his favorite creation, the Right Reverend Honorable Dr. Lucifer Jones ("Weddings done cheap, with a group rate for funerals.").

Charles Forbin has dedicated the last ten years of his life to the construction of his own supercomputer, Colossus, rejecting romantic and social endeavours in order to create the United States' very first Artificially Intelligent defence system.

Colossus is a supercomputer capable of in-taking and analyzing data rapidly, allowing it to make real time decisions about the nation's defense.

But Colossus soon exceeds even Forbin's calculated expectations, learning to think independently of the Colossus Programming Office, processing data over one hundred times faster than Forbin and his team had originally anticipated.

The President hands off full control of the nation's missiles and other defense protocols to Colossus and makes the announcement to the world that he has ensured peace.

However, the USSR quickly announces that it too has a supercomputer, Guardian, with capabilities similar to that of Colossus.

Forbin is concerned when Colossus asks--asks--to communicate with Guardian. The computer he built shouldn't be able to ask at all...

Colossus and Guardian begin to communicate, quickly bypassing existing knowledge ... and the parameters placed on them by their creators. They are perfectly smart and totally in control. However, they lack human empathy and emotion, creating horrific scenarios.

Colossus and its Russian counterpart, Guardian, soon compromise US military secrecy, ultimately subjugating their creators with the threat of nuclear war.

And while Colossus has been specifically designed not to understand emotion - so as to make quicker and more logical decisions about America's safety - this is exactly the thing that makes him so lethal; Colossus does not experience human empathy and is incapable of understanding the moral ramifications of his decisions.

Having handed over total control of American defence missiles to Colossus, the President and Forbin must act quickly to shut down the unstable machine.

Will Forbin be able to take down the machine he's spent ten years building?

Will Colossus cause real damage before it's too late?

Find out in D.F. Jones's thrilling novel Colossus, which deals with the ongoing battle - both physical and philosophical - between man and machine, addresses the author's own apprehensive attitude towards our future. His message is still as poignant and moving today and when the novel was originally published in 1966.

Charles Forbin is the Director: the one man on earth who speaks directly to Colossus. Five years before, the American supercomputer and the Soviet supercomputer were united -- combining their data, their analytic powers, their learning and growth capacity. In the few seconds of that process, they became one Colossus -- master of humankind. Programmed to solve humanity's problems, Colossus solved them: forestalled nuclear holocaust, eradicated poverty and the frustration and violence it breeds. Soon there was nothing for people to do -- but obey. Some made Colossus their God, and Charles Forbin was their Pope. Others wanted to be free of Colossus -- for Colossus was also ruthless beyond any human tyrant ever -- and they wanted Forbin as their deliverer. Either of these movements might get Forbin killed. He is appalled and disgusted by the religious cult, terrified by the rebels -- who haven't a chance, as he knows better than anyone on earth. Then Forbin is handed the key to the overthrow of Colossus -- or is it? He must commit his life to the chance that it is, just to begin with. Then he must commit the earth to the shadowy motives of the mysterious source of this new power.

BETRAYER OF MANKIND

In all his illustrious career Charles Forbin has never faced a challenge as awe-inspiring, and as hopeless! As the man who mediates between Colossus, the Super-Computer, and the rest of humanity, Forbin holds the key to Earth's fate. Now he has voluntarily used his power to switch off the Machine, and thus turned over mastery of the planet to alien invaders.

Will Forbin turn out to be the universal Judas, or can he prevent these strange beings from taking their horrendous tribute? The invaders are wise beyond mankind's conception, and Forbin meets his match in this thrilling third book in the Colossus series.

Coyote Jones, agent for the Tri-Galactic Intelligence Service, had been sent to a planet so unimaginably distant from the rest of the Federation that it bore the descriptive name Furthest. His mission: to find out why the total body of data about Furthest showed the world's inhabitants to be absolutely average down to the last decimal place. That data had to be false.

Coyote Jones had never heard of Abba until he was assigned there. It was a remotely beautiful world, but one which had been admitted to the society of civilized planets only after it had made concessions on its degrading treatment of women. Until then, women were considered as not human, as a sort of necessary beast, but not more. The concessions had been slight--but as a result one brilliant female, Jacinth, had risen to the very top of that strange society, to the Seventh Level. Thereby she had become the spiteful target of male fury, female envy, and finally of a deviously evil plot that might cost the world its status.

Coyote Jones, secret agent for the Tri-Galactic intelligence service, had a strange handicap. In a universe where every normal being is telepathic, he suffered from almost total mind-deafness. He can project, but he can't receive. When the social system of the planet Freeway began to reel under the force of an alleged female Messiah, Coyote's handicap made him the perfect choice for the assignment: FIND, is she a fake or isn't she?

If Drussa Silver is projecting telepathic illusions instead of performing miracles, Coyote would be immune to them. Since using religion to defraud is a criminal act, he could then bring her back to Mars-Central for trial. If she's the real thing however, the situation would be utterly different...

The Communipaths have traced a mind message of incredible strength to a seemingly empty sector of space, and now Tri-Galactic Federation agent Coyote Jones must find an invisible planet and bring back the unknown telepath who threatens to disrupt the entire Communipath system.

Bursting through a Spell of Invisibility and straight into Brightwater Kingdom on the planet Ozark, Coyote discovers a realm ruled by an iron-willed young woman named Responsible--perhaps the very telepath he seeks. But on this world where Magicians of Rank can call up a storm or cure a wounded and unwelcome offworlder with equal ease, will Coyote's psience or Ozark's spells prove the stronger?

For centuries, Dalemark has been a land divided by the warring earldoms of the North and South. Now, with the help of the Undying, the mysterious gods of Dalemark, four extraordinary young people -- from the past, present, and future -- nust join forces to reunify their beloved land.

When Moril inherits his father's prized instrument -- a Cwidder said to have belonged to one of the Undying -- he must learn to harness its strange power in time to prevent a destructive civil war.

The people of Holand in South Dalemark are bitterly oppressed by the tyrannical earl Hadd. Informers, secret police, and cruel rent-collectors terrorize the countryside, and Mitt has grown up with more than enough reasons for joining the freedom fighters.

When his protest against the tyrannical government fails, a young boy escapes, with two other children, to the mysterious Holy Islands where they learn the identity and the power of two folk figures celebrated by their countrymen.

Tanqui discovers she has the only means to conquer the evil Kankredin who threatens her own people and the Heathens who have invaded prehistoric Dalemark.

Tanaqui discovers she has the means to conquer the evil Kankredin who threatens her own people and the Heathens who have invaded prehistoric Dalemark.

When this final book of Diana Wynne Jones's quartet of novels about the mythical kingdom of Dalemark was published in 1995, it earned the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children's Literature.

The Crown of Dalemark continues the adventures of Mitt after his flight from Holand as a fugitive accused of attempted murder. Since his arrival in the North of Dalemark, Mitt has become disillusioned. The North seems no more free than the South from which he came. And now he has been given an order to kill someone he doesn't even know, or else risk the lives of his friends.

Forced once more to flee, Mitt is joined by Moril, the quietly powerful musician, and Maewen, out of her time but mysteriously fated to play a part in their quest. For the evil powers of the mage Kankredin are re-assembling, and only the Adon's gifts-the ring, sword, and cup-can reunite Dalemark.

The Countess and Lord Keril send Mitt to kill a young woman Noreth Onesdaughter, who claims to know where the lost crown is hidden.

A showcase anthology of the very best in horror and dark fantasy writing by modern masters of the macabre. Here is a hair-raising collection comprising some of the very finest in horror and dark fantasy. Drawing from both sides of the Atlantic, each volume features the work of some of the genres' biggest-selling names as well as their rising stars. In Dark Terrors I, tales by Peter Straub, Ramsey Campbell, Christopher Fowler, Kim Newman, Richard Christian Matheson, Graham Masterton, and Brian Lumley chill the blood.

Table of Contents:

• More Tomorrow by Michael Marshall Smith
• The Puppets by Ramsey Campbell
• Sampled by Steve Rasnic Tem
• The Hungry Moon by Graham Masterton
• Love Eats by Lisa Morton
• Uzzi by Brian Lumley
• Splatter of Black by Charles Gramlich
• The Laundry Imp by Christopher Fowler
• Food for Thought by Mandy Slater
• Screens by Terry Lamsley
• All My Friends Are Here by Charles Wagner
• Eternity Ltd by Mark Morris
• The Lagoon by Nicholas Royle
• At the Crossroads, Burying the Dog by Jeff VanderMeer
• The Travelling Salesman's Christmas Special by C. Bruce Hunter
• A Feast at Grief's Table by Roberta Lannes
• Bleed by Richard Christian Matheson
• Where the Bodies Are Buried 3: Black and White and Red All Over by Kim Newman
• I've Come to Talk With You Again by Karl Edward Wagner
• Fee by Peter Straub

A showcase anthology of the very best in horror and dark fantasy writing by modern masters of the macabre. Here is a hair-raising collection comprising some of the very finest in horror and dark fantasy. Drawing from both sides of the Atlantic, each volume features the work of some of the genres' biggest-selling names as well as their rising stars. Dark Terrors II features stories from, among others, Clive Barker, Peter Straub, Thomas Tessier, Nicholas Royle, Dennis Etchison, and James Miller. These two anthologies will take you to the furthest reaches of your imagination... and beyond!

Table of Contents:

• About The Editors
• Introduction by Stephen Jones and David Sutton
• The Comfort of Strangers by Nicholas Royle
• A Really Game Boy by Brian Lumley
• Something for Free by Conrad Williams
• (Melodrama) by David J. Schow
• Absolute Zero by James Miller
• Negative Equity by Paul J. McAuley
• To This Water (Johnstown, Pennsylvania 1889) by Caitlín R. Kiernan
• Out of the Woods by Ramsey Campbell
• The Rains by Steve Rasnic Tem
• Underbed by Graham Masterton
• Animal Life by Clive Barker
• Lily's Whisper by Jay Russell
• Hell Hath Enlarged Herself by Michael Marshall Smith
• Ghost Music: A Memoir by George Beaune by Thomas Tessier
• The Dead Cop by Dennis Etchison
• Where the Bodies Are Buried 2020 by Kim Newman
• The Museum on Cyclops Avenue by Harlan Ellison
• Hunger, an Introduction by Peter Straub

The award-winning team of Jones and Sutton once again push the boundaries of fear in this new collection of horror and dark fantasy. Drawing from both sides of the Atlantic, Dark Terrors 3 features stories by some of the genres' biggest names as well as their rising stars, including Ray Bradbury, Poppy Z. Brite, Pat Cadigan, Ramsey Campbell, Christopher Fowler, Neil Gaiman, Julian Rathbone, Mark Timlin, and Michael Marshall Smith. An anthology that will take you to the furthest reaches of your imagination--and beyond.

Table of Contents:

• About The Editors
• Introduction by Stephen Jones and David Sutton
• Free Dirt by Ray Bradbury
• Self-Made Man by Poppy Z. Brite
• The Price by Neil Gaiman
• Such a Nice Girl by Storm Constantine
• Pieces by Ray Garton
• Aunt Libby's Grave by Melanie Tem
• The Horror Under Warrendown by Ramsey Campbell
• Skinned Angels by Kathryn Ptacek
• The Windmill by Conrad Williams
• Sharp Edges by Steve Rasnic Tem
• This Is Your Life (Repressed Memory Remix) by Pat Cadigan
• Little Holocausts by Brian Hodge
• Fat Mary by Julian Rathbone
• The Last Reel by Dennis Etchison
• Everybody Needs Somebody to Love by Mark Timlin
• Sous Rature by Jay Russell
• Spanky's Back in Town by Christopher Fowler
• Estate by Caitlín R. Kiernan
• Walking Wounded by Michael Marshall Smith
• The Lost Boy Found by Terry Lamsley

The highlights of the world's most critically acclaimed original horror anthology include chilling tales of contemporary horror by some of the biggest and bestselling authors currently being published, both in the mainstream and dark fantasy fields: Poppy Z Brite, Ramsey Campbell, Dennis Etchison, Christopher Fowler, Neil Gaiman, Terry Lamsley, Richard Christian Matheson, Geoff Nicholson, Kathryn Ptacek, David Schow, Michael Marshall Smith and many others.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction by Stephen Jones & David Sutton
• The Great Fall by Richard Christian Matheson
• Normal Life by Christopher Fowler
• The Wedding Present by Neil Gaiman
• Never to Be Heard by Ramsey Campbell
• Tumbleweeds by Donald R. Burleson
• Family History by Stephen Baxter
• The Incredible True Facts in the Case by David J. Schow
• Mr. Guidry's Head by Roberta Lannes
• Inside the Cackle Factory by Dennis Etchison
• Entertaining Mr. Orton by Poppy Z. Brite
• The Country of Glass by Joel Lane
• My Pathology by Lisa Tuttle
• Curing Hitler by Thomas Tessier
• Weak End by James Miller
• Sullivan's Travails by Jay Russell
• The Suicide Pit by Conrad Williams
• Making Monsters by Geoff Nicholson
• A Place to Stay by Michael Marshall Smith
• Suburban Blight by Terry Lamsley

Once again, multi-award-winning editors Stephen Jones and David Sutton take you on a terrifying journey into the dark heart of modern horror fiction.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction by Stephen Jones & David Sutton
• At Home in the Pubs of Old London by Christopher Fowler
• Valentia by Caitlín Kiernan
• Barking Sands by Richard Christian Matheson
• Everything, in All the Wrong Order by Chaz Brenchley
• Savannah is Six by James Van Pelt
• Now Day Was Fled as the Worm Had Wished by Brian Hodge
• Why Rudy Can't Read by David J. Schow
• No Story in It by Ramsey Campbell
• Witch-Compass by Graham Masterton
• The Proposal by Nicholas Royle
• Changes by C. Bruce Hunter
• The Abortionist's Horse (A Nightmare) by Tanith Lee
• The Handover by Michael Marshall Smith
• Pearl by Roberta Lannes
• Beauregard by Eric Brown
• Necromimicos by Nancy Kilpatrick
• The Bootleg Heart by Joel Lane
• Saturday by Cherry Wilder
• The Girlfriends of Dorian Gray by Gregory Frost
• Bottle Babies by Mary A. Turzillo
• Going to Series by Kim Newman
• Haunts by Lisa Tuttle
• My Present Wife by Dennis Etchison
• Alicia by Melanie Tem
• The Haunted Bookshop by Brian Stableford
• Starfucker by Mick Garris
• Destroyer of Worlds by Gwyneth Jones
• The Geezers by Peter Straub
• Honeysuckle by William B. Trotter
• Final Departure by Gahan Wilson
• Pelican Cay by David Case

In this award-winning anthology, you'll encounter a strange museum where the past comes alive, a man who uses a time-traveling car to commit murder, an attempt to market Dr. Jekyll's famous formula, a series of cards that reveal a terrifying ritual, and many other original stories guaranteed to take you on a terrifying journey into the heart of modern horror fiction. Among the stellar contributors are Stephen Baxter, Ramsey Campbell, Graham Masterton, Christopher Fowler, Tanith Lee, and David J. Schow.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Stephen Jones and David Sutton
• The Retrospective - (2002) - short story by Ramsey Campbell
• We're Going Where the Sun Shines Brightly - short story by Christopher Fowler
• A Habit of Hating - short story by John Burke
• Dead Snow - short story by Trey R. Barker
• The Dinosaur Hunter - short story by Stephen Baxter
• There Lies the Danger ... - short story by Basil Copper
• Your Shadow Knows You Well - short story by Nancy Kilpatrick
• Eglantine's Time - short story by Jay Lake
• The Burgers of Calais - novelette by Graham Masterton
• Hide and Seek - short story by Nicholas Royle
• Moving History - short story by Geoff Nicholson
• Aversion Therapy - short story by Samantha Lee
• The Cure - short story by Tony Richards
• Plot Twist - short story by David J. Schow
• Job 37 - short story by Gemma Files
• Mother, Personified - short story by Yvonne Navarro
• The Receivers - short story by Joel Lane
• The Death of Splatter - short story by Lisa Morton
• A Long Walk, for the Last Time - short story by Michael Marshall Smith
• The Two Sams - short story by Glen Hirshberg
• In the Hours After Death - (2002) - short story by Jeff VanderMeer
• Under My Skin - short story by Les Daniels
• Sweetness and Light - short story by Joe Murphy
• Haifisch - short story by Conrad Williams
• The Road of Pins - (2002) - short story by Caitlín R. Kiernan
• Black - novelette by Tim Lebbon
• A Drug on the Market - (2001) - novelette by Kim Newman
• Slaves of Nowhere - short story by Richard Christian Matheson
• The Prospect Cards - novelette by Don Tumasonis
• Handwriting of the God - novelette by Chico Kidd
• Midday People - novelette by Tanith Lee
• The Boy Behind the Gate - short story by James Van Pelt
• A Hollywood Ending - novelette by Mick Garris

A hilarious adventure about a fantasy world in danger of destruction from that most vile of threats... tourism .Winner of the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children's Literature in 1999.

A humorous fantasy from Diana Wynne Jones. In a world next door to ours, the tourist industry is devastating the population by its desire to experience all the fantasy clichés - Dark Lords, impoverished villages, dragons etc.

The Head of the University resolves to shut the tours down; the only problem being the ruthless tour-master - and his all-powerful demons. To save them all, the incompetent wizard Derk is appointed as Dark Lord in the hope that he will ruin the tours, and sure enough proceeds to fail at everything due to his general uselessness. But can failing at everything lead to a win this time?

A hilarious fantasy sequel to The Dark Lord of Derkholm, set at the University after the 'fantasy world' tours have stopped, and centred around 6 students (one a Griffin) and the bumbling new University Head Wizard. From the 'Godmother of Fantasy', Diana Wynne Jones.

The Year of the Griffin is the sequel to the Dark Lord of Derkholm, set in the same world several years after the abolition of commercial 'fantasy world' tourism from our world.

The University now aims to produce competent wizards to repair the damage caused by the tours. It's broke, and out of date in terms of what it teaches. The new head, Wizard Corkoran, is obsessed with becoming the first man to visit the moon so is mostly preoccupied, and the new faculty is mostly inexperienced.

Wizard Corkoran has selected children from wealthy families to fill his own first-year classes, hoping to beg for money. But his students turn out to be more than he expected in oh-so-many ways, and despite the incompetence of their teacher, it falls to them to save the university... and themselves...

Chosen Among The Beautiful - Cho, for short - has been alone her whole life. Orphaned, she was raised by machines, with her cat, Divine Endurance, for company.

When an earthquake destroys her isolated shelter, Cho leaves to find her long lost brother, cat in tow. She finds herself in a land torn apart by warring gangs, clans and princes, revolutionaries and outcasts, all under the thumb of the distance Rulers, reduced to petty in-fighting to try and gain any power at all.

Divine Endurance seeks out the Rulers; Cho instead finds Derveet, a rebel leader. She finds love.

Can there be a future for them in this brutal world? What does Cho really know about humanity after being separated from it all her life? What does she even know about herself?

Since his creation one hundred and twenty years ago, the name of Dracula has become synonymous with the legend of the vampire and the character is one of the world's most iconic to appear in fiction and film. Now, this history of the blood-drinking nobleman follows Dracula from his origins in Transylvania, through his travels down the decades, into a dystopian twenty-first century where vampires rule the world.

Is it possible that the Count's condition can be cured by modern medicine? How does the mythology perpetuated by literature and movies affect the existence of a real bloodsucker? How can an immortal creature adapt to the social and technological changes that have already shaped our modern world? And what happens when Dracula turns up for his own birthday party?

These and many other questions are answered by acclaimed authors such as Ramsey Campbell, Christopher Fowler, Charlaine Harris, Nancy Holder, Nancy Kilpatrick, Brian Lumley, Graham Masterton, Paul McAuley, Kim Newman, Michael Marshall Smith, F. Paul Wilson and many others, including Dracula's original creator Bram Stoker with a long-lost version of the story first presented in 1897.

Table of Contents:

• The Giaour (excerpt) - (1813) - poem by Lord George Gordon Byron
• Introduction: I Bid You Welcome - (1997) - essay by Stephen Jones
• Dracula: or The Un-Dead: Prologue - (1897) - short fiction by Bram Stoker
• Dracula's Library - (1997) - short story by Christopher Fowler
• The Heart of Count Dracula, Descendant of Attila, Scourge of God - (1985) - short fiction by Thomas Ligotti
• Daddy's Little Girl - (1997) - short story by Mandy Slater
• Conversion - (1977) - short story by Ramsey Campbell
• The Devil Is Not Mocked - (1943) - short story by Manly Wade Wellman
• Teaserama - (1997) - short story by Nancy Kilpatrick
• Blood Freak - (1997) - short story by Nancy Holder
• Zack Phalanx Is Vlad the Impaler - (1977) - short story by Brian Lumley
• When Greek Meets Greek - (1997) - novelette by Basil Copper
• Coppola's Dracula - (1997) - novella by Kim Newman
• The Second Time Around - (1997) - short story by Hugh B. Cave
• Endangered Species - (1997) - novelette by Brian Mooney
• Melancholia - (1997) - short story by Roberta Lannes
• Children of the Long Night - (1997) - novelette by Lisa Morton
• Mbo - (1997) - short story by Nicholas Royle
• The Worst Place in the World - (1997) - novelette by Paul J. McAuley
• Larry's Guest - (1997) - short story by Guy N. Smith
• A Taste of Culture - (1997) - short story by Jan Edwards
• Rudolph - (1987) - novelette by R. Chetwynd-Hayes
• Roadkill - (1997) - short story by Graham Masterton
• Volunteers - (1997) - short story by Terry Lamsley
• Black Beads - (1997) - short story by John Gordon
• Your European Son - (1997) - short story by Joel Lane
• Quality Control - (1997) - novelette by Brian Stableford
• Dear Alison - (1997) - short story by Michael Marshall Smith
• Bloodlines - (1997) - novelette by Conrad Williams
• Windows '99 of the Soul - (1997) - short story by Chris Morgan
• Blood of Eden - (1997) - short story by Mike Chinn
• Dracula Night - (2007) - short story by Charlaine Harris
• The Last Testament - (1997) - short story by Brian Hodge
• The Last Vampire - (1997) - novelette by Peter Crowther
• The Lord's Work - (1992) - novelette by F. Paul Wilson
• Lord of the Undead - (1997) - poem by Jo Fletcher

In a world where sorcery is illegal, someone is murdering young women in ways that defy all reason--and all detection. Only one man knows how to track such an untraceable killer, a man called to deliver justice by an onslaught of...

For Dubric Bryerly, head of security at Castle Faldorrah, saving lives has become a matter of saving his sanity. A silent killer is afoot, savagely mutilating servant girls and leaving behind no clues and no witnesses--except the gruesome ghosts of the victims. Ghosts that only Dubric can see.

Caught in the eye of the grisly storm is Nella, a linen maid working to free herself from a dark past--if she can survive an invisible killer's rampage. But with the death toll rising and Nella under the protective wing of a man who may be a prime suspect, Dubric must resort to unconventional methods. With the future of Faldorrah and countless lives at stake, including his own, he can't afford to be wrong. And if he's right, the entire kingdom could be thrust into war.

One by one, young men in the kingdom's outer reaches are vanishing into the dark. So far, two bodies have washed up on the local riverbank. But Dubric Byerly, head of security at Castle Faldorrah, soon realizes there are countless more victims...for it's his curse to be forever haunted by the ghosts of those whose deaths demand justice.

The latest to vanish is Braoin, a seventeen-year-old painter whose mother came to Dubric's aid when he most needed it. All Dubric knows is that the boy is still alive. But time is running out, and it isn't only Braoin's life hanging in the balance. If Dubric can't untangle the twisted web of clues and lies and find his way to the killer, one of his own pages will be the next to die...

In the mage wars, Dubric Byerly risked his life-and sacrificed the woman he loved-to catch magic's darkest killers. Those battles are long over-and the monsters Dubric hunts these days are nothing more than men. Until now. A recent string of grisly crimes has Dubric and his pages scouring the countryside for clues that hint at the worst: that history's most murderous mage has come to Faldorrah.

As Dubric's hunt leads from secrets locked behind sanatorium walls to a hidden cache of souls preserved in fluid, other lives are shaken: a young woman given a power she doesn't want, a young man inheriting a legacy he can't understand, and a father fighting for his memory of a daughter who may already be lost. In the hardscrabble village of Quarry Run, the dark ghosts of the past have come calling-and the battle for the future begins.

Twelve million years ago, a war touched the Earth briefly. Now, in Antarctica, an archaeological team has discovered the detritus of the conflict. And it's alive.

Twelve million years ago, a creature evolved that was capable of consuming all life in the universe. Now someone, or something, is desperate enough to want to revive it.

Outside the ordered universe, things move. They're hungry. And something has given them the scent of our space/time.

In the far future, the Doctor has learnt of the war and feels he must intervene -- but it's more than just a local conflict of interest. One of the groups of combatants is from his own future, and the other has never, ever, existed.

The TARDIS arrives on a planet inhabited by a lost human colony that is dangerously close to an energy-emitting white hole. The Doctor and his companions are intent on discovering more about the territory, and find it is no ordinary planet. Various visitors contend for control over what will happen to this exotic shape-shifting world in the universe beyond.

Two political refugees are pursued by the Thought-Police and the violent warriors of eleventh-century Earth after they are trapped on a barbaric planet with only a small computer and a telepathic wolf to help them.

In this sequel to Fanglith, the oppressive Empire of Human Worlds has struck back; imperial fleets are reconquering its colony planets. Larn and Deneen must again flee their home -and this time establish a rebel base.

The Macurdies had been farmers for generations, and Curtis Macurdy would have been content to spend his life with his exotically beautiful wife Varia, earning a living by tilling his plot of land in the American Midwest. Varia was from Yuulith, a magical world separated from Earth by only a dimensional barrier that could sometimes be broached.

Curtis Macurdy leads two lives. On earth, he is a farmer; but on the other side of the secret cross-dimensional gate, in the world of Yuulith, he is the invincible mystic warrior, the Lion of Farside. With the war over, Macurdy hopes to return to his life as a farmer. But trouble is growing in Europe as Adolph Hitler rises to power and the Nazis threaten more than the fate of Earth...

Curtis Macurdy passes through a cross-dimensional gate into a land where his peculiarities are honored, not cursed. There he finds old enemies and another war, and discovers that peace carries a steep price. Meanwhile, his old adversary prepares a doomsday weapon.

Explore the terrifying depths of the dungeons of Faerun with the merriest band of misfits to ever dig a tunnel!

The Siegebreakers are a tight-knit group of eccentric mercenaries who boast they can safely bring down the walls of any fortress, and will do so for the right amount of coin. But when the walls of their latest job crash down on their heads, trapping them in ruins treacherous with magic, monsters, and ever-rising water, it's all they can do to stay alive. Undaunted, the Siegebreakers are determined to escape and finish the job. If only the camel hadn't eaten their breakfast.

A haunting adventure hand-picked by Ed Greenwood...

Something is causing trouble in the City of the Dead, and Sophraea Carver, born and bred next to the historic graveyard, is determined to solve the mystery before it places all of Waterdeep in peril.

Set in the classic City of Splendors and presented by Forgotten Realms campaign setting creator and celebrated author Ed Greenwood, you don't want to miss out on this exciting glimpse into what the latest edition of the Realms has to offer.

Frankenstein... his very name conjures up images of plundered graves, secret laboratories, electrical experiments and reviving the dead.

Within these pages, the maddest doctor of them all and his demented disciples once again delve into the Secrets of Life, as science fiction meets horror when the world's most famous creature lives again!

The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein collects together for the first time twenty-fourelectrifying tales of cursed creation that are guaranteed to spark your interest - with classics from the pulp magazines by Robert Bloch and Manly Wade Wellman, modern masterpieces from Ramsey Campbell, Dennis Etchison, Karl Edward Wagner, David J. Schow and R. Chetwynd-Hayes, and contributions from Graham Masterson, Basil Copper, John Brunner, Guy N. Smith, Kim Newman, Paul J. McAuley, Roberta Lannes, Michael Marshall Smith, Daniel Fox, Adrian Cole, Nancy Kilpatrick, Brian Mooney and Lisa Morton.

Plus you're sure to get a charge from three complete novels: The Hound of Frankenstein by Peter Tremayne, The Dead End by David Case, and Mary W. Shelley's original masterpiece Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.

As an electrical storm rages overhead, the generators are charged up, and beneath the sheet a cold form awaits its miraculous rebirth. Now it's time to throw that switch and discover all that Man Was Never Meant to Know.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: It's Alive! - (1994) - essay by Stephen Jones
• Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus - (1818) - novel by Mary Shelley
• A New Life - (1987) - short story by Ramsey Campbell
• The Creator - (1978) - short story by R. Chetwynd-Hayes
• Better Dead - (1994) - short story by Basil Copper
• Creature Comforts - (1994) - short story by Nancy Kilpatrick
• Mannikins of Horror - (1939) - short story by Robert Bloch
• El Sueño de la Razón - (1994) - short story by Chaz Brenchley
• Pithecanthropus Rejectus - (1938) - short story by Manly Wade Wellman
• Tantamount to Murder - (1994) - short story by John Brunner
• Last Train - (1994) - short story by Guy N. Smith
• The Hound of Frankenstein - (1977) - novelette by Peter Tremayne
• Mother of Invention - (1994) - short story by Graham Masterton
• The Frankenstein Legacy - (1994) - short story by Adrian Cole
• The Dead Line - (1979) - short story by Dennis Etchison
• Poppi's Monster - (1994) - short story by Lisa Morton
• Undertow - (1977) - novelette by Karl Edward Wagner
• A Complete Woman - (1994) - short story by Roberta Lannes
• Last Call for the Sons of Shock - (1991) - short story by David J. Schow
• Chandira - (1994) - short story by Brian Mooney
• Celebrity Frankenstein - (2012) - short story by Stephen Volk
• Completist Heaven - (1994) - short story by Kim Newman
• The Temptation of Dr Stein - (1994) - novelette by Paul J. McAuley
• To Receive Is Better - (1994) - short story by Michael Marshall Smith
• The Dead End - (1969) - novella by David Case
• Frankenstein - (1994) - poem by Jo Fletcher

Speculate for a moment on the enormous challenge to archaeology when interplanetary travel is possible... and relics are found of a race extinct for half a million years! A race that was so far in advance of ours that they held the secret of life restoration! What happens when a member of that race is brought back after 500,000 years of death...

Also published as The Deviates.

In a world where but one man in a hundred, and eight women in a hundred, could produce children, only one science counted: Genetics. And the most respected, feared, and hated man in the world was the Chief of the Genetics Bureau, Robert Wellton. It was under his direction that gene charts were made of every citizen, and where those who dared to take the test discovered their fate. A few were Normals, who could be parents; the majority were Deviate-carriers, whose progeny would be monsters -- Uglies, as the Deviates were called.

Wellton alone knew the truth. The Genetics Program was failing, for fewer Normals were discovered every year. More and more citizens were falling back on their legal right not to be tested, not daring to learn that they might be Deviate-carriers. The whole world hungered for children, but each man and woman wanted to be the parents of the children they reared; and the fortunate few were hated by the vast majority.

But Wellton's father, who had been Genetics Chief before him, had discovered that not all Deviates were Uglies -- Nature's failures. Some were successes, improved human beings. These were telepathic and long-lived; their average intelligence level was that of the most intelligent Normals. They were what humanity needed.

Humanity could not accept them. Bitter and hate-filled, they would not believe that a Deviate could be anything but a monster; and the legal forces of the entire world were committed to the extermination of all Uglier on sight. Thus, Adam Wellton's giant plan was devised. And when he was assassinated, Robert Wellton carried it on. The plan called for the creation of a secret people -- the Children.

Born of Normal mothers, they were all Wellton's sons and daughters, bearing his improved genes. Telepathic as he was, Wellton was in mental contact with the Children from the moment of their birth, comforting and guiding them, sending them away from civilization to a hidden colony in the Canadian wilds. Here, under the direction of Wellton's first son, Barron, they built their own world. Here they waited for the mysterious being they knew only as the Father, who had promised to come to them some day and lead them to their destiny. For Wellton had never seen any of the Children -- nor had any of them seen him.

Then disaster struck, while the second generation of Children was growing up. A powerful committee, headed by a bitter man who suspected the existence of concealed Deviates, started an investigation. Wellton knew that Rossi and his associates would discover the secret, sooner or later. And there would be only one result: the Children would be hunted down and wiped out.

Thus starts a moving novel of fear and hope in a world where the only hope for humanity lay in that which all men feared.

Magic flickers.
Love flames.
Chaos reigns.

Magic is forbidden throughout the Morning Realms. Magicians are called an abomination, and blamed for the plague of monsters that razed the land twenty years before.

Jin Zhara already had enough to worry about?appeasing her stepmother's cruel whims, looking after her blind younger sister, and keeping her own magical gifts under control?without having to deal with rumors of monsters re-emerging in the marsh. But when a chance encounter with an easily flustered young man named Han brings her into contact with a secret magical liberation organization called the Guardians of Dawn, Zhara realizes there may be more to these rumors than she thought. A mysterious plague is corrupting the magicians of Zanhei and transforming them into monsters, and the Guardians of Dawn believe a demon is responsible.

In order to restore harmony and bring peace to the world, Zhara must discover the elemental warrior within, lest the balance between order and chaos is lost forever.

The stars were closed to Max Jones. To get into space you either needed connections, a membership in the arcane Guild, or a whole lot more money than Max, the son of a widowed, poor mother, was every going to have. What Max doeshave going for him are his uncle's prized astrogation manuals-book on star navigation that Max literally commits to memory word for word, equation for equation. When Max's mother decides to remarry a bullying oaf, Max takes to the road, only to discover that his uncle Chet's manuals, and Max's near complete memorization of them, is a ticket to the stars. But serving on a spaceship is no easy task. Duty is everything, and a mistake can mean you and all aboard are lost forever. Max loves every minute of his new life, and he steadily grows in the trust of his superior officers, and seems to be on course for a command track position. But then disaster strikes, and it's going to take every trick Max ever learned from his tough life and his uncle's manuals to save himself and the ship from a doom beyond extinction itself.

From the First Golden Age of Heinlein, this is the so-called juvenile (written, Heinlein always claims, just as much for adults) that started them all and made Heinlein a legend for multiple generations of readers.

Sophie has the great misfortune of being the eldest of three daughters, destined to fail miserably should she ever leave home to seek her fate. But when she unwittingly attracts the ire of the Witch of the Waste, Sophie finds herself under a horrid spell that transforms her into an old lady. Her only chance at breaking it lies in the ever-moving castle in the hills: the Wizard Howl's castle. To untangle the enchantment, Sophie must handle the heartless Howl, strike a bargain with a fire demon, and meet the Witch of the Waste head-on. Along the way, she discovers that there's far more to Howl—and herself—than first meets the eye.

Having long indulged himself in daydreams more exciting than his mundane life as a carpet merchant, Abdullah unexpectedly purchases a magic carpet and his life changes dramatically as his daydreams come true and dangerous adventures become daily fare.

Charmain Baker is in over her head. Looking after Great Uncle William's tiny cottage while he's ill should have been easy, but Great Uncle William is better known as the Royal Wizard Norland and his house bends space and time. Its single door leads to any number of places - the bedrooms, the kitchen, the caves under the mountains, the past, to name but a few. By opening that door, Charmain is now also looking after an extremely magical stray dog, a muddled young apprentice wizard and a box of the king's most treasured documents, as well as irritating a clan of small blue creatures. Caught up in an intense royal search, she encounters an intimidating sorceress named Sophie. And where Sophie is, can the Wizard Howl and fire demon Calcifer be far behind?

When the MK virus swept across the planet, a vaccine was created to stop the epidemic, but it came with some unexpected side effects. A small percentage of the population developed superhero-like powers, and Americans suffering from these so-called adverse effects were given an ultimatum: Serve the country or be declared a traitor.

Some people chose a third option: live a life of crime.

Seventeen-year-old Ciere Giba has the handy ability to change her appearance at will. She's what's known as an illusionist. She's also a thief. After crossing a gang of mobsters, Ciere must team up with a group of fellow superpowered criminals on a job that most would have considered impossible: a hunt for the formula that gave them their abilities. It was supposedly destroyed years ago - but what if it wasn't?

Government agents are hot on their trail, and the lines between good and bad, us and them, and freedom and entrapment are blurred as Ciere and the rest of her crew become embroiled in a deadly race that could cost them their lives.

These are the words that echo through the minds of all immune Americans--those suffering the so-called adverse effects of an experimental vaccine, including perfect recall, body manipulation, telepathy, precognition, levitation, mind-control, and the ability to change one's appearance at will.

When great numbers of immune individuals begin to disappear, fear and tension mount, and unrest begins to brew across the country. Through separate channels, super-powered teenagers Ciere, Daniel, and Devon find themselves on the case; supercriminals and government agents working side-by-side. It's an effort that will ultimately define them all, for better or for worse.

A country house murder mystery with a supernatural twist (An Ishmael Jones Mystery).

Ishmael Jones is someone who can't afford to be noticed, someone who lives under the radar, who drives on the dark side of the road. He's employed to search out secrets, investigate mysteries and shine a light in dark places. Sometimes he kills people. Invited by his employer, the enigmatic Colonel, to join him and his family for Christmas, Ishmael arrives at the grand but isolated Belcourt Manor in the midst of a blizzard to find that the Colonel has mysteriously disappeared. As he questions his fellow guests, Ishmael concludes that at least one of them - not least Ishmael himself - is harbouring a dangerous secret, and that beneath the veneer of festive cheer lurk passion, jealousy, resentment and betrayal. As a storm sets in, sealing off the Manor from the rest of the world, Ishmael must unmask a ruthless murderer before they strike again.

"Call me Ishmael. Ishmael Jones. I am the man in the shadows, that even the shadows are afraid of. The secret agent whose life is the greatest secret of all. And some of the cases I work are trickier than others."

A rogue agent has come in from the cold and wants to spill his secrets. The Organisation wants Ishmael to find out if Frank Parker is who he says he is, what he really knows, and why he has emerged from the shadows after all this time.

Ishmael heads to Ringstone Lodge in Yorkshire where Parker is being held to find that an atmosphere of fear and suspicion prevails. As he and his fellow residents are menaced by a series of alarming and inexplicable incidents, Ishmael sets out to prove that it's human trickery rather than any supernatural being behind the seemingly ghostly goings-on. But matters take an unexpected turn when one of their number is brutally murdered, and once again Ishmael must turn detective in order to entrap a twisted killer before they strike again.

Ishmael Jones travels to the Scottish Highlands on a mysterious dual mission in this intriguing, genre-blending mystery.

The Organisation has despatched Ishmael and his partner Penny to Coronach House on the shores of Loch Ness where the secretive but highly influential Baphamet Group are holding their annual meeting. The Organisation believes an imposter has infiltrated the Group and they have instructed Ishmael to root him--or her--out. It's not Ishmael's only mission. The first agent sent by the Organisation has been found dead in her room, murdered in a horribly gruesome manner. Ishmael must also discover who killed his fellow agent, Jennifer Rifkin--and why.

Dismissive of rumours that the legendary 'Coronach Creature' is behind Jennifer's death, Ishmael sets out to expose the human killer in their midst. But he must act fast--before any more Very Important People are killed.

Death shall come on swift wings to whoever desecrates this tomb...

Ishmael Jones and his partner Penny have been summoned to remote Cardavan House, home of the world's largest private collection of Ancient Egyptian artefacts, for the unveiling of George Cardavan's latest acquisition: a bone fide Egyptian mummy.

When a bloodstained body is discovered beside the empty sarcophagus, Ishmael is dismissive of the theory that the mummy's curse is to blame. Instead he sets out to uncover the human killer responsible. But how can Ishmael explain the strange, shuffling footsteps that creep along the corridors? Who is playing games with them... and why?

Dinner at an ancient Cornish inn leads to one baffling disappearance after another in the latest intriguing Ishmael Jones mystery.

"It's just a nice weekend, in a nice country inn. Nothing bad is going to happen ..."

Ishmael Jones and his partner Penny are attending the re-opening of Tyrone's Castle, an ancient Cornish inn originally built by smugglers. Over dinner that night, the guests entertain one another with ghost stories inspired by local legends and superstitions. But it would appear that the curse of Tyrone's Castle has struck for real when one of their number disappears into thin air. And then another...

Is the inn really subject to an ancient curse? Sceptical of ghost stories, Ishmael believes the key to the mystery lies in the present rather than the past. But with no bodies, no evidence and no clues to go on, how can he prove it?

The sudden appearance of a sinister black hole in the English countryside leads to a baffling murder investigation for Ishmael Jones.

"The past is England's dreaming, and not all of it sleeps soundly..."

Ishmael Jones and his partner Penny have been despatched to assist a group of scientists who are investigating a mysterious black hole which has appeared on a Somerset hillside. Could it really be a doorway to another dimension, an opening into another world?

When one of the scientists disappears into the hole - with fatal consequences - Ishmael must prove whether it was an accident - or murder. But with no clues, no witnesses and no apparent motive, he has little to go on. Is there an alien predator at large, or is an all-too-human killer responsible? Only one thing is certain: if Ishmael does not uncover the truth in time, more deaths will follow.

A wedding. A murder. A 200-year-old curse: Ishmael Jones is plunged into a baffling investigation when he answers an old friend's call for help.

Although he hasn't seen Robert Bergin for 40 years, Ishmael feels duty bound to respond when his old friend calls for help. Robert's daughter Gillian is about to be married, and he is afraid she'll fall prey to the ancient family curse.

Arriving in rural Yorkshire, Ishmael and his partner Penny learn that the vicar who was to perform the ceremony has been found dead in the church, hanging from his own bell rope. With no clues, no evidence and no known motive, many locals believe the curse is responsible. Or is someone just using it as a smokescreen for murder? With the wedding due to take place the following day, Ishmael has just a few hours to uncover the truth.

When a body is discovered in a locked toilet cubicle on the late-night train to Bath, Ishmael Jones is faced with his most puzzling case to date.

When Ishmael Jones and his partner Penny are asked to escort a VIP on the late-night train to Bath, it would appear to be a routine case. The Organisation has acquired intelligence that an attempt is to be made on Sir Dennis Gregson's life as he travels to Bath to take up his new position as Head of the British Psychic Weapons Division. Ishmael's mission is to ensure that Sir Dennis arrives safely.

How could anyone orchestrate a murder in a crowded railway carriage without being noticed and with no obvious means of escape? When a body is discovered in a locked toilet cubicle, Ishmael Jones has just 56 minutes to solve a seemingly impossible crime before the train reaches its destination.

Ishmael Jones investigates a haunted house... but is haunted by his own past in the latest of this quirky paranormal mystery series.

"That house is a bad place. Bad things happen there..."

Set high on top of Widows Hill, Harrow House has remained empty for years. Now, on behalf of an anonymous prospective buyer, Ishmael and Penny are spending a night there in order to investigate the rumours of strange lights, mysterious voices, unexplained disappearances, and establish whether the house is really haunted.

What really happened at Harrow House all those years ago? Joined by a celebrity psychic, a professional ghost-hunter, a local historian and a newspaper reporter, it becomes clear that each member of 'Team Ghost' has their own pet theory as to the cause of the alleged haunting. But when one of the group suddenly drops dead with no obvious cause, Ishmael realizes that if he can find out how and why the victim died, he will have the key to solving the mystery.

Returning to the small town where he crash-landed in 1963, Ishmael Jones is in search of answers. But his investigation is de-railed by a brutal murder.

"I think something very bad and very dangerous has come to your little town, Inspector..."

As long-buried memories from his hidden past begin to resurface, Ishmael Jones and his partner Penny feel compelled to return to the small country town where Ishmael crash-landed in 1963; the place where his memories began.

Norton Hedley is no ordinary town. Apparitions, sudden disappearances, sightings of unusual beasts: for centuries, the place has been plagued by a series of inexplicable events. Ishmael's first task is to track down local author Vincent Smith, the one man he believes may have some answers.

Ishmael and Penny aren't the only ones seeking the mysterious Mr Smith. When their search unearths a newly-dead body in the local mortuary - a body that's definitely not supposed to be there - Ishmael becomes the prime suspect in the ensuing murder investigation. His only hope of discovering the truth about his origins lies in exposing a ruthless killer.

Ishmael Jones knows all there is to know about solving mysteries. Together with his love and partner in crimes, Penny Belcourt, he specializes in cases of the weird and uncanny.

Lucas Carr went to Glenbury Hall, an old country manor house turned hotel. He signed in at reception, took his key, and went upstairs to his room. But he never got there. Somehow he vanished along the way, with not a single clue to suggest what might have happened to him.

Lucas belonged to the same mysterious organization that employs Ishmael and Penny, so they are sent in to solve the mystery. But when they arrive at grim and isolated Glenbury Hall, they discover it has a reputation as one of the most haunted old houses in England. None of the usual headless monks or walled-up nuns--just stories of lost souls that dance with the statues in the grounds; doors that won't stay shut, and rooms that aren't always there; and something that prowls the house in the early hours, endlessly searching. They say... it crawls.

Does Lucas' disappearance have something to do with the organization or the Hall's haunted past? Ishmael and Penny have to work their way through a series of mysterious clues and misleading suspects, uncovering secret after secret, before they finally arrive at a truth that no one suspected.

The problem with history is that it's not always content to stay in the past.

WE ALL HAVE DEMONS. SOME DEMONS HAVE YOU.

The world you know is dead. We did this to ourselves.

The epidemic struck at the end of the Third World War. Fighting over oil, power, and religion, governments ignored the rise of an antibacterial-resistant plague. In just five years, the Earth was annihilated. Only one city survived--Etyom--a frozen hellhole in northern Siberia, engulfed in endless conflict.

The year is 2251.

Two groups emerged from the ashes of the old world. Within the walled city of Lower Etyom dwell the Robusts--descendants of the poor who were immune to the New Black Death. Above them, in a metropolis of pristine platforms called lillipads, live the Graciles--the progeny of the superrich, bio-engineered to resist the plague.

Mila Solokoff is a Robust who trades information in a world where knowing too much can get you killed. Caught in a deal gone bad, she's forced to take a high-risk job for a clandestine organization hell-bent on revolution.

Demitri Stasevich is a Gracile with a dark secret--a sickness that, if discovered, will get him Ax'd. His only relief is an illegal narcotic produced by the Robusts, and his only means of obtaining it is a journey to the arctic hell far below New Etyom.

Thrust together in the midst of a sinister plot that threatens all life above and below the cloud line, Mila and Demitri must master their demons and make a choice--one that will either salvage what's left of the human race or doom it to extinction...

DESTINY HAS NO ALLEGIANCE.

Four years have passed since the lillipads fell and Etyom slipped into darkness.

The New Black Death has mutated again, spreading to near epidemic proportions. What little order existed in Earth's last city has disintegrated into chaos. Rippers roam the Vapid, robbing and leaving their victims butchered. The Robusts have spilled out of their broken enclaves and hide in any dark corner that will conceal them. Meanwhile, the elite Graciles, fallen from their pristine towers in the sky, have all mysteriously disappeared.

Demitri is a prisoner in his own mind. His demon, Vedmak--now known as the Vardøger--is manipulating Demitri's body and knowledge to execute a secret plan far more disastrous than even the Gracile Leader dared.

Mila, her status among the fractured resistance elevated to that of Paladyn--a protector of the people--leads the fight against zealots intent on destroying what little remains of Etyom. It is a responsibility she never wanted, a calling that prevents her from doing what she truly desires.

Yet, Mila should be careful for what she longs. Caught between annihilation and loyalties that refuse to die, she must reconcile a single immutable truth: following your heart comes at a price.

For the last decade we really have been waging a secret war against super-villains. It's just as well the general public are too common-sense to believe any of it...

It's 1969. Astronauts have just landed on the moon. In Britain, Harold Wilson is Prime Minister. And the Avengers are on TV. Detective Sergeant Clare Seeley, juggling work and family commitments, is aware of peculiar goings-on at the heart of the concrete-jungle new town that is her patch...

Agnes Doyle, brilliant computer scientist and unwilling precognitive, is about to be plunged into a lethally perilous situation...

The Sergeant and Lucy Pennyweather, gaudy swinging-London adventurers, are drawn to a peculiar conspiracy surrounding a pirate radio ship...

Henry Messen, veteran of the First World War and a special forces operative in the Second under the cover of a bumbling Home Guard officer, is on the track of a fugitive Nazi engineer with a very strange secret...

And Thelma Bennet, head of Project CLIO, the Cross-Agency League of Intelligence Operatives - is closing in on a global threat.

It's 1969. Not as you know it. The way you always thought it was.

Features the characters from previous CLIO novellas "Project Hades" and "Project Herakles", which were published together as The Paradox Conspiracy (2015).

It's a thousand years after World War III and Earth lies supine beneath the heel of a gang of alien sociopaths (they look like snakes with legs) who like to torture whole populations for sport. The Lizards could not have conquered us in our heyday, but our heyday was long gone when they stumbled upon us; the 16th century level of technology they found here was relatively easy to squelch.

What was not so easy to squelch was the mystic warrior sects that had evolved in the meantime. What should have been a simple mopping up operation to pacify the wilderness becomes... The Lizard War.

After a global war had crippled Earth's civilization, lizard-like aliens had thought they would have no trouble in moving in and taking over. That was a big mistake--secret galactic agents had been training the mystic warriors of Earth to defend themselves against just such a power grab. The alien sociopaths had expected the low-tech humans to be easy pickings, but instead they found they had stumbled into a buzz saw, and were soon driven off.

Luis Raoul DenUyl had been only a young recruit in the warrior brotherhood, but still played a pivotal role in what some called The Lizard War. Now, years later, he has just completed his training--and not a moment too soon. The Helverti, furry but definitely not cute aliens, were members of a cult that revered chaos and tried to spread it throughout the galaxy. To that end, they plan to plunge the different tribes of humanity into war. It's mystic warriors vs. alien technology--and the Earthlings are not as weak as they appear....

Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft's classic, today's masters of horror take up their pens and turn once more to that decayed, forsaken New England fishing village with its sparkling treasure, loathsome denizens, and unspeakable evil. This anthology features seventeen chilling stories by authors such as Neil Gaiman, Ramsey Campbell and Kim Newman, as well as the original masterpiece of horror.

Contents:

• ix - Introduction: Spawn of the Deep Ones (Shadows Over Innsmouth) - essay by Stephen Jones
• 1 - The Shadow Over Innsmouth - [Cthulhu Mythos] - (1936) - novelette by H. P. Lovecraft
• 51 - Beyond the Reef - novella by Basil Copper
• 101 - The Big Fish - [The Diogenes Club] - novelette by Kim Newman [as by Jack Yeovil ]
• 127 - Return to Innsmouth - (1992) - shortstory by Guy N. Smith
• 132 - The Crossing - shortstory by Adrian Cole
• 146 - Down to the Boots - (1989) - shortstory by D. F. Lewis
• 149 - The Church in High Street - (1962) - shortstory by Ramsey Campbell
• 161 - Innsmouth Gold - shortstory by David Sutton
• 173 - Daoine Domhain - (1992) - novelette by Peter Tremayne
• 191 - A Quarter to Three - (1988) - shortstory by Kim Newman
• 195 - The Tomb of Priscus - novelette by Brian Mooney
• 221 - The Innsmouth Heritage - (1992) - shortstory by Brian Stableford
• 237 - The Homecoming - shortstory by Nicholas Royle
• 255 - Deepnet - shortstory by David Langford
• 260 - To See the Sea - novelette by Michael Marshall Smith
• 285 - Dagon's Bell - (1988) - novelette by Brian Lumley
• 316 - Only the End of the World Again - shortstory by Neil Gaiman
• 330 - Afterwords: Contributors' Notes (Shadows Over Innsmouth) - essay by uncredited

For decades, H. P. Lovecraft's masterpiece of terror has inspired writers with its gripping account of a village whose inhabitants have surrendered to an ancient and hideous evil. In this companion to the acclaimed anthology Shadows Over Innsmouth, World Fantasy Award winning editor Stephen Jones has assembled eleven of today's most prominent and well-respected horror authors - the finest of the Lovecraftian acolytes.. Included is Lovecraft's own unpublished draft of The Shadow Over Innsmouth.

Contents:

• 1 - Introduction: Weird Shadows... - essay by Stephen Jones
• 6 - Discarded Draft of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" - (1931) - shortstory by H. P. Lovecraft
• 13 - The Quest for Y'ha-nthlei - novelette by John S. Glasby [as by John Glasby ]
• 34 - Brackish Waters - novelette by Richard A. Lupoff
• 62 - Voices in the Water - shortstory by Basil Copper
• 81 - Another Fish Story - [The Diogenes Club] - novelette by Kim Newman
• 115 - Take Me to the River - novelette by Paul J. McAuley [as by Paul McAuley ]
• 142 - The Coming - (1997) - shortstory by Hugh B. Cave
• 156 - Eggs - (2000) - shortstory by Steve Rasnic Tem
• 169 - From Cabinet 34, Drawer 6 - novelette by Caitlín R. Kiernan
• 196 - Raised by the Moon - (2001) - novelette by Ramsey Campbell
• 211 - Fair Exchange - shortstory by Michael Marshall Smith
• 228 - The Taint - novella by Brian Lumley
• 281 - Afterwords: Contributors' Notes - essay by uncredited

Respected horror anthologist Stephen Jones edits this collection of 17 stories inspired by the 20th century's master of horror, H.P. Lovecraft's "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," in which a young man goes to an isolated, desolate fishing village in Massachusetts, and finds that the entire village has interbred with strange creatures that live beneath the sea, and worship ancient gods.

Contents:

• xiii - Introduction: Weirder Shadows... - essay by Stephen Jones
• 1 - The Port - [Fungi from Yuggoth - 8] - (1930) - poem by H. P. Lovecraft
• 2 - Innsmouth Bane - (2005) - shortstory by John S. Glasby [as by John Glasby ]
• 17 - Richard Riddle, Boy Detective in "The Case of the French Spy" - [The Diogenes Club] - (2005) - novelette by Kim Newman
• 46 - Innsmouth Clay - (1971) - shortstory by H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth
• 58 - The Archbishop's Well - novelette by Reggie Oliver
• 83 - You Don't Want To Know - novelette by Adrian Cole
• 108 - Fish Bride - (2009) - shortstory by Caitlín R. Kiernan
• 119 - The Hag Stone - novelette by Conrad Williams
• 153 - On the Reef - (2011) - shortfiction by Caitlín R. Kiernan
• 162 - The Song of Sighs - shortstory by Angela Slatter
• 179 - The Same Deep Waters as You - novelette by Brian Hodge
• 218 - The Winner - (2005) - shortstory by Ramsey Campbell
• 232 - The Transition of Elizabeth Haskings - shortstory by Caitlín R. Kiernan
• 237 - The Chain - shortstory by Michael Marshall Smith
• 258 - Into the Water - shortstory by Simon Kurt Unsworth
• 275 - Rising, Not Dreaming - (2011) - shortstory by Angela Slatter
• 279 - The Long Last Night - (2012) - novelette by Brian Lumley
• 314 - Afterwords: Contributors' Notes - essay by Stephen Jones

All over the multiverse the Magids, powerful magicians, are at work to maintain the balance between positive and negative magic, for the good of all.

Rupert Venables is the junior Magid assigned to Earth and to the troublesome planets of the Koyrfonic Empire. When the Emperor dies without a known heir, Rupert is called into service to help prevent the descent of the Empire into chaos. At the same time, the senior Magid on Earth dies, making Rupert a new senior desperately in need of a junior. Rupert thinks his problems are partially solved when he discovers he can meet all five of the potential Magids on Earth by attending one SF convention in England. However, the convention hotel sits on a node, a nexus of the universes. Rupert soon finds that other forces, some of them completely out of control, are there too....

When the Merlin of Blest dies, everyone thinks it's a natural death. But Roddy and Grundo, two children traveling with the Royal Court, soon discover the truth. The Merlin's replacement and other courtiers are scheming to steal the magic of Blest for their own purposes.

Roddy enlists the help of Nick, a boy from another world, and the three turn to their own impressive powers. The dangers are great, and if Roddy, Grundo, and Nick cannot stop the conspirators, the results will be more dreadful than they could possibly imagine.

This stunning epic fantasy debut introduces two exciting new authors—and a world brimming with natural and man-made wonders, extraordinary events, and a crisis that will test the mettle of men, the boundaries of magic, and the heart and soul of a kingdom.

Thanks to its elite Dragon Corps, the capital city of Volstov has all but won the hundred years’ war with its neighboring enemy, the Ke-Han. The renegade airmen who fly the corps’s mechanical, magic-fueled dragons are Volstov’s greatest weapon. But now one of its members is at the center of a scandal that may turn the tide of victory. To counter the threat, four ill-assorted heroes must converge to save their kingdom: an exiled magician, a naive country boy, a young student—and the unpredictable ace who flies the city’s fiercest dragon, Havemercy. But on the eve of battle, these courageous men will face something that could make the most formidable of warriors hesitate, the most powerful of magicians weak, and the most unlikely of men allies in their quest to rise against it.

Led to victory by its magic-fueled Dragon Corps, Volstov has sent a delegation to its conquered neighbors to work out the long-awaited terms of peace. Among those in the party are the decorated war hero General Alcibiades and the formerly exiled magician Caius Greylace. But even this mismatched pair can’t help but notice that their defeated enemies aren’t being very cooperative. The hidden truth is that the new emperor is harboring a treacherous secret—and once it is revealed, Alcibiades and Caius may be powerless to stop it.

With their only ally an exiled prince now fleeing his brother’s assassins, the countryside rife with terror, and Alcibiades and Caius all but prisoners, it will take the most powerful kind of magic to heal the rift between two strife-worn lands and unite two peoples against a common enemy: shadow magic.

During the war between the kingdoms of Volstov and Ke-Han, no fighter could match Rook for sheer arrogance and skill. Only Rook could ride the great dragon Havemercy, whose savagery and bloodlust matched his own. His brother, Thom, is bookish, diffident, and reserved, yet he yearns for Rook’s approval—and fears he can never earn it. With the war over, and an uneasy truce between the two nations, Thom hopes the long-lost brothers can bond on a trip together.

But Rook cares only that Havemercy lies scattered in pieces across Ke-Han—and someone is buying up her parts, and those of other fallen dragons. The beasts are dead, but the magic that powered them is not. And now a Ke-Han agent, a Volstov sorceress, and a group of desert tribesmen are vying to possess that magic and control the future.

With Havemercy, Shadow Magic, and Dragon Soul, the acclaimed writing team of Jaida Jones and Danielle Bennett has fused magic and technology into something that can only be termed "magicpunk." Their distinctive style, featuring a chorus of quirky first-person narrators and brilliantly sophisticated world-building, has won these young writers the plaudits of fans and critics.

In the Volstov capital of Thremedon, Owen Adamo, the hard-as-nails ex–Chief Sergeant of the Dragon Corps, learns that Volstov's ruler, the Esar, has been secretly pursuing the possibility of resurrecting magically powered sentient robot dragons—even at the risk of igniting another war. That Adamo will not allow. Though he is not without friends—Royston, a powerful magician, and Balfour, a former corpsman—there is only so much Adamo and his allies can do. Adamo has been put out to pasture, given a professorship at the University. Royston, already exiled once, dares not risk the Esar's wrath a second time. And Balfour, who lost both hands in the climactic battle of the war, is now a diplomat who spends most of his time trying to master his new hands—metal replacements that operate on the same magical principles as the dragons and have earned him an assortment of nicknames of which "Steelhands" is the least offensive.

But sometimes help comes where you least expect it. In this case, from two first-year university students freshly arrived in Thremedon from the country: Laurence, a feisty young woman whose father raised her to be the son he never had, and Toverre, her fiancé, a brilliant if neurotic dandy who would sooner share his wife-to-be's clothes than her bed. When a mysterious illness strikes the first-year students, Laurence takes her suspicions to Adamo—and unwittingly sets in motion events that will change Volstov forever.

Experimental, strange, and unabashedly feminist, Joanna Russ's groundbreaking science fiction grew out of a belief that the genre was ideal for expressing radical thought. Her essays and criticism, meanwhile, helped shape the field and still exercise a powerful influence in both SF and feminist literary studies.

Award-winning author and critic Gwyneth Jones offers a new appraisal of Russ's work and ideas. After years working in male-dominated SF, Russ emerged in the late 1960s with Alyx, the uber-capable can-do heroine at the heart of Picnic on Paradise and other popular stories and books. Soon, Russ's fearless embrace of gender politics and life as an out lesbian made her a target for male outrage while feminist classics like The Female Man and The Two of Them took SF in innovative new directions. Jones also delves into Russ's longtime work as a critic of figures as diverse as Lovecraft and Cather, her foundational place in feminist fandom, important essays like "Amor Vincit Foeminam," and her career in academia.

The planet Tyss has only one resource: soldiers. But they are very good soldiers. And once a regiment is formed, it never recruits again; as its members fall in battle, it simply grows smaller to become a battalion, a company, a platoon, a squad... and then there are none. But before the last man of this regiment has flung himself into battle, the Federation of Worlds will never be the same.

This long awaited companion novel to The Regiment finds those legendary warriors training the first test regiment of teenagers--the first ever White Regiment. But teenagers who make the perfect warriors are about as easy to train and control as wildcats. And there's little time to whip them into shape before the horrendous Klestronu unleash their massive firepower on the inexperienced regiment.

The White Regiment had driven back the soldiers of the Karghanik Empire, but the Kalif was certain he could succeed in bringing the true faith of the Prophet of Kargh to the Confederation--even if he had to bombard the infidels' planets with nuclear weapons to do it!

His plan began with the construction of a huge invasion fleet of spaceships. But before he could invade other worlds, he would have to thwart a conspiracy in his own ranks that was planning to replace him with a more tractable figurehead...

Ordered to defend one planetary nation from invasion by another, the Iralyans who make up the White Regiment find themselves up against a hired regiment from Tyss, the people who trained them in the first place.

For millennia after the collapse of the great galactic empire in a war that destroyed hundreds of whole planets, the surviving worlds of the Confederation had permitted no new scientific research. The resultant stagnation was considered an acceptable price, since it meant no new weapons of war would be developed, and wars could be confined to disputes between nations on a single planet. But when one of their colony planets was discovered by warships from the Caliphate, another surviving group of planets with technology far superior to anything the Confederation possessed, the Confederation discovered that they had made a fatal mistake. Only the nearly superhuman abilities of the Tyss-trained White Regiment had driven off the attackers. But now the Caliphate is returning in force, with a vast fleet warships, determined to conquer the Confederation.

And there is a third player. Between the regions of the galaxy separating the two forces is a third empire of reptilian beings who were attacked without provocation by an earlier Caliphate incursion--and who make no distinction between one group of humans and another. They are determined to eliminate this dangerous ape species from the galaxy once and for all.

The Caliphate thinks it has the element of complete surprise, as do the lizardlike aliens. But the mystic warriors of Tyss have made mental contact with both fleets, and they have a plan which is the only hope to avert a second galaxy-wide war, a war that could shatter the worlds of all three sides.

Lenox, the Earl of Redgrave, has made the greatest scientific discovery in the history of the world: a flying ship with the power to break free of Earth's gravity and take to the stars. But before he uses it to expand humanity's understanding of the universe, he has some personal business to attend to--namely, wooing an old flame.

The lady in question is Zaidie, the daughter of Lenox's colleague Professor Rennick. With Zaidie about to be forced into a loveless marriage, Lenox knows he must do something drastic. He steals her away and takes her out of this world--literally.

Griffith's accounts of other planets are spectacularly engaging--from subterranean civilizations on the moon to the warlike Martians to the musical inhabitants of Venus. This remarkable adventure makes for a memorable honeymoon indeed.

In The Fairy Tale: The Magic Mirror of Imagination, Steven Swann Jones draws upon his extensive knowledge of the genre to provide readers with a study that is at once a sorely needed introduction to the subject and an original contribution to existing scholarship.

Step by step, Jones guides the reader in understanding and appreciating the genre's origins and its evolution over the past 3,000 years; synthesizes the various approaches - psychological, sociohistorical, and formalist taken by scholars studying the form; and isolates five key characteristics distinguishing the fairy tale from related forms of folk narrative, such as myths and legends.

A series of close readings of selected old and new fairy tales - among them The Wizard of Oz and The Cat in the Hat - serve to illuminate these characteristics for readers, while chapters on the gendering of fairy tale protagonists and other topics stimulate readers to consider fairy tales from new and multifaceted perspectives.

Complemented by a chronology detailing fairy tales from Boccaccio's The Decameron to Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, as well as a reflective bibliographic essay and a valuable list of recommended readings, The Fairy Tale: The Magic Mirror of Imagination is a comprehensive handbook for students from secondary through graduate levels, a one-of-a-kind reference for scholars, and an engaging overview for any interested reader.

In Spire Vanis, an uncrowned ruler steals magic from tortured captives, while an innocent girl is haunted by nightmares of ice. On the frigid steppes, two brothers find their kinsmen slain by swords that draw no blood. At a remote homestead, a hardened warrior leaves his family to follow a raven's summons.

And in a deadly wilderness where nature and the gods have no mercy, two young fugitives will confront the unfolding of an apocalyptic prophecy.

Ash March knew Raif Sevrance was special from the moment he helped rescue her from the tyranny of her foster father in the city of Spire Vanis. Like her, Raif was an outcast. Though from different worlds, he from the clanholds, she from the fortress city, their lives were somehow entwined by fate and by the need of the cold, dark north of their world. It has been a thousand years since the dreaded Endlords have tried to breach the boundary between the living and the dead, but now the forces that hold back the damned souls of the dead have weakened; new heroes must emerge to combat this terrible threat.

Raif, wrongly accused and cast out of his clan by the treachery of their new headsman. Ash, raised as a foundling, is a warrior sacred to the Sull, an ancient race who once ruled the north. But raised in isolation, she must learn and accept the power and responsibility of her heritage.

As Ash learns of the role she must fulfill, Raifs task looms dark and desperate: he must journey through the nightmare realm of the desolate Want, where even the Sull fear to tread. For deep within the Want is the Fortress of Grey Ice, and there he must heal the breach in the Blindwall that already threatens the world. Should he fail, not even Ash's powers can save them.

The Long Night has begun. The Endlords and their dark army of Unmade prepare to unleash untold destruction upon the world. Every Sull warrior must step forward and fight, or risk the North falling into eternal darkness.

Key to mankind's survival is the sacred warrior Ash March. But for Ash to realise her true potential as a Reach, and become the Sull's greatest weapon, she must keep herself safe as the perils that surround her multiply. Raif Sevrance has an equally perilous task. The exile must travel to the barren wastes of the Red Glaciers and recover the legendary sword named Loss. For Sull legend decrees that he who wields the Sword from Red Ice will bring terror to their enemies.

But fulfilment of these goals may yet come too late. In the remote reaches of the Bitter Hills, the Endlords' minions have made a cataclysmic discovery: a crack in the Blindwall, an ancient and unguarded passage leading directly into the realms of men.

In the frigid wasteland of the north, Raif Sevrance, Watcher of the Dead, has endured many trials to lay claim to the renowned sword known as Loss. But the price of wielding the legendary weapon is high, and Raif is unsure if he is willing to pay it. Ash Marsh, Daughter of the Sull, still struggles to come to terms with her heritage, and the knowledge that the Watcher, armed with Loss, could be the one who will save the Sull, or end them. Raina Blackhail, widow of a murdered ruler and wife of his brutal successor, has seen her clan disgraced and has, herself, taken up the mantle of chief. But there are enemies both beyond her gates and within. And in the murky swamps of the Stillwater, two children will learn the secrets of the Marsh clan. Secrets so old they threaten everything.

In the year 2038, the earth has been ravaged by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Retroviruses run rampant through humanity. Economic disaster has destabilised the world, the US has undergone a socialist revolution, and the balance of power has changed.

Then the aliens arrive.

With no clear understanding of the visitors' intent, factions form, including the anti-alien group White Queen, working to turn humans against these extra-terrestrial tourists. Caught in the middle is Johnny Guglio, an American exile whose only fault was living near the landing site, and Braemar Wilson, a cutthroat reporter who will do whatever she needs to get ahead of the story. And for better or for worse, it seems being caught in the middle is the best place for them to uncover the truth.

The earth changed forever when the Aleutians landed. A hundred years after the invasion, the planet is firmly under extra-terrestrial rule. While the aliens pursue a form of immortality, small bands of human rebels still try to fight back.

Bella is an Aleutian, with a limited understanding of human cultures and gender. Their expectations of society and life are shaped by their own upbringing. But then they meet Sidney Carton, a human. Bella learns quickly as the pair scour the war-ravaged ruins of Europe to find the last vestige of human technology that could be the only hope for saving civilisation as it still exists.

After two hundred years colonising earth, the Aleutians prepare to return to space, leaving behind humanity and an earth that have been shaped by their presence, their care, and their cruelty.

In the dying days of Aleutian rule, Catherine has altered her body to appear more alien, and soaks herself in the decadence of their culture. Misha idolises the Aleutians, and begins a love affair with Catherine, both desperate to forget their humanity and embrace the alien.

What will be left for the humans when the Aleutians leave? What will the Aleutians take with them from their time on earth? Could humanity have changed them as much as they changed it?

At vast Castle Harvell, where King Lesketh lies dying, two fates collide. In her regal suite, young Melliandra, the daughter of an influential lord, rebels against her forced betrothal to the sinister Prince Kylock. In the kitchens, an apprentice named Jack is terrified by his sudden, uncontrolled power to work miracles. Together they flee the castle, stalked by a sorcerer who has connived for decades to control the crown, even committing supernatural murder to advance his schemes.

And a young knight begins a quest, leaving behind his home and family to seek out the treacherous Isle of Larn, where lies a clue to his desperate search for the truth.

At Castle Harvell demented Prince Kylock grabs the reins of power and hate by murdering his father. Harvell's two young refugees are torn apart by the storms of war. Headstrong young Melliandra is captured by brutal slavers and Jack, whose wild power works miracles, falls prey to a smuggler's lying charms and a woman's seductive schemes. Meanwhile, in the distant stronghold of Bren, Kylock's betrothed, beautiful, mad Catherine, dabbles with darkest sorceries. A knight's shattered destiny is about to lead from death-sport pits to the blood-strewn creation of an empire--and a wondrous epic of grandeur and magic continues.

From dungeon to cathedral, from brothel to hermit's hut, the gambits of the mighty face the power of seers and stars. In the fortress of Bren, mad King Kylock and the wizard Baralis spread their sadistic terror across the shattered kingdoms. Meanwhile, the fallen knight Tawl and Jack, the baker's boy, meet in a quest to save widowed Melliandra and her unborn child.

Soon sons will turn on fathers and dread secrets will be revealed, as Jack and Kylotk clash in a magical apocalypse that will rewrite the meaning of Destiny and unknit the very fabric of time... in the wondrous conclusion to the brilliant saga The Book of Words.

The glittering tradition of sword-and-sorcery sweeps into the sands of ancient Arabia with the heart-stopping speed of a whirling dervish in this thrilling debut.

In 8th century Baghdad, the scholar Dabir realizes that a jeweled tablet may unlock secrets hidden within the lost city of Ubar, the Atlantis of the sands. But when the tablet is stolen by a cunning Greek spy and a fire wizard of the Magi, Dabir and Captain Asim go after it on the life-or-death adventure of a lifetime...

As a snowfall blankets 8th century Mosul, a Persian noblewoman arrives at the home of the scholar Dabir and his friend the swordsman Captain Asim. Najya has escaped from a dangerous cabal that has ensorcelled her to track down ancient magical tools of tremendous power, the bones of the old ones.

To stop the cabal and save Najya, Dabir and Asim venture into the worst winter in human memory, hunted by a shape-changing assassin. The stalwart Asim is drawn irresistibly toward the beautiful Persian even as Dabir realizes she may be far more dangerous a threat than anyone who pursues them, for her enchantment worsens with the winter. As their opposition grows, Dabir and Asim have no choice but to ally with their deadliest enemy, the treacherous Greek necromancer, Lydia. But even if they can trust one another long enough to escape their foes, it may be too late for Najya, whose soul is bound up with a vengeful spirit intent on sheathing the world in ice for a thousand years...

Jade Daniels is an angry, half-Indian outcast with an abusive father, an absent mother, and an entire town that wants nothing to do with her. She lives in her own world, a world in which protection comes from an unusual source: horror movies... especially the ones where a masked killer seeks revenge on a world that wronged them. And Jade narrates the quirky history of Proofrock as if it is one of those movies. But when blood actually starts to spill into the waters of Indian Lake, she pulls us into her dizzying, encyclopedic mind of blood and masked murderers, and predicts exactly how the plot will unfold.

Yet, even as Jade drags us into her dark fever dream, a surprising and intimate portrait emerges... a portrait of the scared and traumatized little girl beneath the Jason Voorhees mask: angry, yes, but also a girl who easily cries, fiercely loves, and desperately wants a home. A girl whose feelings are too big for her body.

Four years after her tumultuous senior year, Jade Daniels is released from prison right before Christmas when her conviction is overturned. But life beyond bars takes a dangerous turn as soon as she returns to Proofrock. Convicted Serial Killer, Dark Mill South, seeking revenge for thirty-eight Dakota men hanged in 1862, escapes from his prison transfer due to a blizzard, just outside of Proofrock, Idaho.

Dark Mill South's Reunion Tour began on December 12th, 2019, a Thursday.

Thirty-six hours and twenty bodies later, on Friday the 13th, it would be over.

It's been four years in prison since Jade Daniels last saw her hometown of Proofrock, Idaho, the day she took the fall, protecting her friend Letha and her family from incrimination. Since then, her reputation, and the town, have changed dramatically.

There's a lot of unfinished business in Proofrock, from serial killer cultists to the rich trying to buy Western authenticity. But there's one aspect of Proofrock no one wants to confront... until Jade comes back to town.

The curse of the Lake Witch is waiting, and now is the time for the final stand.

The first annual collection of the world's best horror stories and short novels showcases fiction from every part of the field--from terror to supernatural chills--and features the talents of Ian Watson, Stephen Gallagher, Ramsey Campbell, and others.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Horror in 1989 - essay by Stephen Jones and Ramsey Campbell
• Pin - (1989) - short story by Robert R. McCammon
• The House on Cemetery Street - (1988) - novelette by Cherry Wilder
• The Horn - (1989) - novelette by Stephen Gallagher
• Breaking Up - (1989) - short story by Alex Quiroba
• It Helps If You Sing - (1989) - short story by Ramsey Campbell
• Closed Circuit - (1989) - novelette by Laurence Staig
• Carnal House - (1989) - short story by Steve Rasnic Tem
• Twitch Technicolor - (1989) - short story by Kim Newman
• Lizaveta - (1988) - novelette by Gregory Frost
• Snow Cancellations - (1989) - short story by Donald R. Burleson
• Archway - (1989) - novelette by Nicholas Royle
• The Strange Design of Master Rignolo - (1989) - short story by Thomas Ligotti
• ...To Feel Another's Woe - (1989) - short story by Chet Williamson
• The Last Day of Miss Dorinda Molyneaux - (1989) - novelette by Robert Westall
• No Sharks in the Med - (1989) - novelette by Brian Lumley
• Mort au Monde - (1989) - short story by D. F. Lewis
• Blanca - (1989) - novelette by Thomas Tessier
• The Eye of the Ayatollah - (1990) - short story by Ian Watson
• At First Just Ghostly - (1989) - novella by Karl Edward Wagner
• Bad News - (1989) - short story by Richard Laymon
• Necrology: 1989 - essay by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman

Twenty-eight spine-tinglers are showcased by the editors, both veteran horror writers,in this fine anthology, which runs the horror gamut from occult shocker to psychological thriller. Though it opens with a rather tasteless entry, K. W. Jeter's grisly "The First Time" (told with au courant splatterpunk brio), the collection redeems itself many times over with a score of tales that make the prerequisite suspension of disbelief a hair-raising pleasure. In Michael Marshall Smith's imaginative "The Man Who Drew Cats," a mysterious street-artist stretches his creativity to alarmingly grim lengths when an abused child wins his heart. Thomas Ligotti's fluently written novella, "The Last Feast of Harlequin," reveals the dark nature lurking just beneath the whiteface. The searing final image in "Cedar Lane," by Karl Edward Wagner, will invoke for many genre fans Ray Bradbury's classic "There Will Come Soft Rains." J. L. Comeau's riveting "Firebird" pits supernatural forces against a feisty ballerina who also happens to be a cop. In one of the collection's strongest entries, "Mister Ice Cold," cartoonist Gahan Wilson proves that a few thousand well-chosen words just might be worth more than a picture, after all.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Horror in 1990 - essay by Stephen Jones and Ramsey Campbell
• The First Time - (1990) - shortstory by K. W. Jeter
• A Short Guide to the City - (1990) - shortstory by Peter Straub
• Stephen - (1990) - novelette by Elizabeth Massie
• The Dead Love You - (1989) - shortstory by Jonathan Carroll
• Jane Doe #112 - (1990) - shortstory by Harlan Ellison
• Shock Radio - (1990) - shortstory by Ray Garton
• The Man Who Drew Cats - (1990) - shortstory by Michael Marshall Smith
• The Co-Op - (1990) - shortstory by Melanie Tem
• Negatives - (1990) - shortstory by Nicholas Royle
• The Last Feast of Harlequin - (1990) - novelette by Thomas Ligotti
• 1/72nd Scale - (1990) - novelette by Ian R. MacLeod
• Cedar Lane - (1990) - shortstory by Karl Edward Wagner
• At a Window Facing West - (1990) - shortstory by Kim Antieau
• Inside the Walled City - (1990) - novelette by Garry Kilworth
• On the Wing - (1990) - shortstory by Jean-Daniel Brèque
• Firebird - (1990) - novelette by J. L. Comeau
• Incident on a Rainy Night in Beverly Hills - (1990) - novelette by David J. Schow
• His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood - (1990) - shortstory by Poppy Z. Brite
• The Original Dr Shade - (1990) - novelette by Kim Newman
• Madge - (1990) - shortstory by D. F. Lewis
• Alive in Venice - (1990) - shortstory by Cherry Wilder
• Divertimento - (1989) - shortstory by Gregory Frost
• Pelts - (1989) - novelette by F. Paul Wilson
• Those of Rhenea - (1990) - shortstory by David Sutton
• Lord of the Land - (1990) - novelette by Gene Wolfe
• Aquarium - (1990) - shortstory by Steve Rasnic Tem
• Mister Ice Cold - (1990) - shortstory by Gahan Wilson
• On the Town Route - (1989) - novelette by Elizabeth Hand
• Necrology: 1990 - essay by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman

Through intelligent selection and commentary, Jones (ed. Fantasy Tales) and Campbell (The Count of Eleven, p. 479, etc.) again prove that horror literature, widely considered an oxymoron not so very long ago, is a field of fiction worthy of serious cultivation. As in their first two annuals, the authors have combed through sources both high-profile (A Whisper of Blood, 1991, etc.) and desperately obscure (Tekeli-li! Journal of Terror) to dig out "a varied selection... that illustrates the themes and ideas currently being explored in the genre." The emphasis on ideas can be seen in the authors' roster, which includes big names (Robert McCammon, Dennis Etchison, Thomas Tessier, et al.), fast-rising young stars (Nancy Collins, Thomas Ligotti, Kathe Koja, et al.), and several newcomers--but only a couple of splatterpunks and absolutely no hacks, with most of the 29 entries distinguished by deft style and ambitious subjects. The triangle of love, suffering, and death surfaces as the dominant theme--from K.W. Jeter's opening "True Love" (a vampire's daughter cares for her senile but immortal father) through Douglas Clegg's gothic "Where Flies are Born" (a woman reanimates her dead child through grotesque means), Alan Brennert's "Ma Qui" and S.P. Somtow's "Chui Chai" (two wrenching Vietnam-set tales), and the collection's strongest story, Grant Morrison's "The Braille Encyclopedia" (a sly shocker about the pursuit of sensual pleasure), and others. A few stories fail, mostly through straining (e.g., those by David J. Schow and Charles Grant) but the vast majority succeed, and equally of interest is the editors' opinionated rundown of the year's (1991) horror fiction, criticism, film and comics, and their invaluable necrology. For the third year running, horror's annual of record, as well as its premier showcase. Not to be missed by any serious fan.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Horror in 1991 - (1992) - essay by Stephen Jones and Ramsey Campbell
• True Love - (1991) - shortstory by K. W. Jeter
• The Same in Any Language - (1991) - shortstory by Ramsey Campbell
• Impermanent Mercies - (1991) - shortstory by Kathe Koja
• Ma Qui - (1991) - shortstory by Alan Brennert
• The Miracle Mile - (1991) - novelette by Robert R. McCammon
• Taking Down the Tree - (1991) - shortstory by Steve Rasnic Tem
• Where Flies Are Born - (1991) - shortstory by Douglas Clegg
• Love, Death and the Maiden - (1991) - shortstory by Roger Johnson
• Chui Chai - (1991) - shortstory by S. P. Somtow
• The Snow Sculptures of Xanadu - (1991) - shortstory by Kim Newman
• Colder Than Hell - (1991) - shortstory by Edward Bryant
• Raymond - (1991) - shortstory by Nancy A. Collins
• One Life, in an Hourglass - (1991) - shortstory by Charles L. Grant
• The Braille Encyclopedia - (1991) - shortstory by Grant Morrison
• The Bacchae - (1991) - shortstory by Elizabeth Hand
• Busted in Buttown - (1991) - shortstory by David J. Schow
• Subway Story - (1990) - shortstory by Russell Flinn
• The Medusa - (1991) - novelette by Thomas Ligotti
• Power Cut - (1991) - shortstory by Joel Lane
• Moving Out - (1991) - shortstory by Nicholas Royle
• Guignoir - (1991) - shortstory by Norman Partridge
• Blood Sky - (1991) - shortstory by William F. Nolan
• Ready - (1991) - shortstory by David Starkey
• The Slug - (1991) - novelette by Karl Edward Wagner
• The Dark Land - (1991) - shortstory by Michael Marshall Smith
• When They Gave Us Memory - (1991) - shortstory by Dennis Etchison
• Taking Care of Michael - (1991) - shortstory by J. L. Comeau
• The Dreams of Dr. Ladybank - (1991) - novella by Thomas Tessier
• Zits - (1991) - shortfiction by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
• Necrology: 1991 - (1992) - essay by Kim Newman and Stephen Jones

A collection of short horror stories features the work of Peter Atkins, Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, Kim Newman, Peter Straub, Karl Edward Wagner, and others.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Horror in 1992 (Best New Horror 4) - essay by Stephen Jones and Ramsey Campbell
• The Suicide Artist - (1992) - short story by Scott Edelman
• Dancing on a Blade of Dreams - (1992) - novelette by Roberta Lannes
• The Departed - (1992) - short story by Clive Barker
• How to Get Ahead in New York - (1992) - short story by Poppy Z. Brite
• They Take - (1992) - novelette by John Brunner
• Replacements - (1992) - novelette by Lisa Tuttle
• Under the Pylon - (1992) - short story by Graham Joyce
• The Glamour - (1991) - short story by Thomas Ligotti
• Under the Ice - (1992) - short story by John Gordon
• And Some Are Missing - (1992) - short story by Joel Lane
• The Little Green Ones - (1992) - short story by Les Daniels
• Mirror Man - (1992) - short story by Steve Rasnic Tem
• Mothmusic - (1992) - short story by Sarah Ash
• Did They Get You to Trade? - (1992) - novelette by Karl Edward Wagner
• Night Shift Sister - (1992) - short story by Nicholas Royle
• The Dead - (1992) - short story by M. John Harrison and Simon Ings
• Norman Wisdom and the Angel of Death - (1992) - novelette by Christopher Fowler
• Red Reign - (1992) - novella by Kim Newman
• Aviatrix - (1992) - short story by Peter Atkins
• Snodgrass - (1992) - novelette by Ian R. MacLeod
• The Day of the Sharks - (1992) - short story by Kate Wilhelm
• Anima - (1992) - short story by M. John Harrison
• Bright Lights, Big Zombie - (1992) - novelette by Douglas E. Winter
• The Ghost Village - (1992) - novelette by Peter Straub
• Necrology: 1992 - essay by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman

This new edition of the premiere collection of the year's finest horror stories continues its tradition of riveting tales of terror from some of the best-known contemporary writers. Contributors include Peter Straub, Clive Barker, Lisa Tuttle, Thomas Ligotti, Karl Edward Wagner, and Kim Newman.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Ramsey Campbell and Stephen Jones
• Later - (1993) - shortstory by Michael Marshall Smith
• When the Red Storm Comes - (1993) - shortstory by Sarah Smith
• The Exhibit - (1993) - shortstory by Martin Plumbridge
• Leavings - (1993) - shortstory by Kathe Koja
• Human Remains - (1992) - shortstory by Edward Bryant
• Flying Into Naples - (1993) - shortstory by Nicholas Royle
• The Sixth Sentinel - (1993) - shortstory by Poppy Z. Brite
• The Brothers - (1993) - shortstory by Rick Cadger
• The Owen Street Monster - (1993) - shortstory by J. L. Comeau
• One Size Eats All - (1993) - shortstory by T. E. D. Klein
• Mulligan's Fence - shortstory by Donald R. Burleson
• How She Dances - (1993) - shortstory by Daniel Fox
• Passages - shortstory by Karl Edward Wagner
• Easing the Spring - (1993) - shortstory by Sally Roberts Jones
• Safe at Home - (1993) - shortstory by Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem
• Mother of the City - (1993) - shortstory by Christopher Fowler
• Justice - (1993) - novelette by Elizabeth Hand
• The Big Fish - (1993) - novelette by Kim Newman
• In the Desert of Deserts - (1993) - shortstory by Thomas Tessier
• Two Returns - (1993) - shortstory by Terry Lamsley
• The Moment the Face Falls - (1993) - shortstory by Chet Williamson
• Darker Angels - (1993) - novelette by S. P. Somtow
• The Timbrel Sound of Darkness - (1993) - shortstory by Kathe Koja and Barry N. Malzberg
• The Tsalal - shortstory by Thomas Ligotti
• In the Still, Small Hours - (1993) - shortstory by Charles L. Grant
• Ice House Pond - (1993) - novella by Steve Rasnic Tem
• The Dog Park - (1993) - shortstory by Dennis Etchison
• The Marble Boy - (1993) - shortstory by Gahan Wilson
• Mefisto in Onyx - (1993) - novella by Harlan Ellison
• Necrology: 1993 - essay by Kim Newman and Stephen Jones

This premier collection of the year's finest horror stories contains fear-filled tales from some of the best contemporary writers, such as Brian Hodge, Joel Lane, Ian McLeod, Kim Newman, and others.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Horror in 1994 - (1995) - essay by Stephen Jones
• Dead Babies - (1994) - short story by Lawrence Watt-Evans
• Sensible City - (1994) - short story by Harlan Ellison
• Blade and Bone - (1994) - short story by Terry Lamsley
• Harvest - (1994) - short story by Norman Partridge
• Sometimes, in the Rain - (1994) - short story by Charles L. Grant
• Menage a Trois - (1994) - short story by Richard Christian Matheson
• Like Shattered Stone - (1994) - short story by Joel Lane
• Black Sun - (1991) - short story by Douglas E. Winter
• Isobel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring - (1994) - novelette by M. John Harrison
• The Dead Orchards - (1994) - short story by Ian R. MacLeod
• What Happened When Mosby Paulson Had Her Painting Reproduced on the Cover of the Phone Book - (1994) - short story by Elizabeth Massie
• The Alternative - (1994) - novelette by Ramsey Campbell
• In the Middle of a Snow Dream - (1994) - short story by Karl Edward Wagner
• The Temptation of Dr Stein - (1994) - novelette by Paul J. McAuley
• Wayang Kulit - (1994) - short story by Garry Kilworth
• The Scent of Vinegar - (1994) - novelette by Robert Bloch
• The Homecoming - (1994) - short story by Nicholas Royle
• The Singular Habits of Wasps - (1994) - novelette by Geoffrey A. Landis
• To Receive Is Better - (1994) - short story by Michael Marshall Smith
• The Alchemy of the Throat - (1994) - novelette by Brian Hodge
• Out of the Night, When the Full Moon is Bright... - (1994) - novella by Kim Newman
• Lovers - (1994) - poem by Esther M. Friesner
• Necrology: 1994 - (1995) - essay by Kim Newman and Stephen Jones

A premier collection of contemporary horror fiction includes shocking and macabre tales from Ramsey Campbell, Kim Newman, Neil Gaiman, Lisa Tuttle, Michael Marshall Smith, and many other masters of the horror genre.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Horror in 1995 - (1996) - essay by Stephen Jones
• Tirkiluk - (1995) - novelette by Ian R. MacLeod
• The Most Boring Woman in the World - (1995) - short story by Christopher Fowler
• Extinctions in Paradise - (1995) - short story by Brian Hodge
• Food Man - (1994) - short story by Lisa Tuttle
• More Tomorrow - (1995) - novelette by Michael Marshall Smith
• Going Under - (1995) - short story by Ramsey Campbell
• Survivor - (1995) - novelette by Dave Smeds
• The Stones - (1995) - short story by Patrick Thompson
• Back of Beyond - (1975) - short story by Cherry Wilder
• A Hundred Wicked Little Witches - (1995) - short story by Steve Rasnic Tem
• The Finger of Halugra - (1995) - short story by Manly Wade Wellman
• The Toddler - (1995) - short story by Terry Lamsley
• Not Here, Not Now - (1995) - short story by Stephen Gallagher
• The Bungalow House - (1995) - novelette by Thomas Ligotti
• Cradle - (1995) - short story by Alan Brennert
• The Sixth Dog - (1995) - novelette by Jane Rice
• Scaring the Train - (1994) - novelette by Terry Dowling
• La Serenissima - (1995) - novelette by David Sutton
• The Bars on Satan's Jailhouse - (1995) - novelette by Norman Partridge
• The Bone-Carver's Tale - (1995) - short story by Jeff VanderMeer
• Queen of Knives - (1995) - short story by Neil Gaiman
• The True History of Doctor Pretorius - (1995) - novelette by Paul J. McAuley
• The Grey Madonna - (1995) - short story by Graham Masterton
• Loop - (1995) - novelette by Douglas E. Winter
• The Hunger and Ecstasy of Vampires - (1995) - novella by Brian Stableford
• Lacuna - (1995) - short fiction by Nicholas Royle
• Necrology: 1995 - (1996) - essay by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman
• Useful Addresses - (1996) - essay by Stephen Jones

The latest annual of the world's premier collection of horror, terror, and dark fantasy again showcases the talents of the finest writers working the field. Along with his annual review of the year in horror, award-winning editor Stephen Jones has chosen the year's best stories by old masters and new voices alike.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Horror in 1996 - essay by Stephen Jones
• Walking the Dog - (1996) - novelette by Terry Lamsley
• Mussolini and the Axeman's Jazz - (1995) - novelette by Poppy Z. Brite
• An Eye for an Eye - (1996) - short story by Norman Partridge
• Unforgotten - (1996) - novelette by Christopher Fowler
• The Curse of Kali - (1996) - short story by Cherry Wilder
• The Film - (1997) - short story by Richard Christian Matheson
• Of a Cat, but Her Skin - (1996) - short story by Storm Constantine
• Hopscotch - (1996) - short story by Donald R. Burleson
• Ghost in the Machine - (1996) - short story by Steve Rasnic Tem
• The Moon Never Changes - (1996) - short story by Joel Lane
• Butcher's Logic - (1996) - short story by Roberta Lannes
• Kites and Kisses - (1996) - short story by D. F. Lewis
• Last Train to Arnos Grove - (1996) - short story by Marni Scofidio Griffin
• The King of Rain - (1996) - novelette by Mark Chadbourn
• Hardball - (1996) - short story by Iain Sinclair
• Gas Station Carnivals - (1996) - short story by Thomas Ligotti
• Ghost Music: A Memoir by George Beaune - (1996) - novelette by Thomas Tessier
• That Blissful Height - (1996) - novelette by Gregory Frost
• Skin Deep - (1996) - short story by Nicholas Royle
• Hell Hath Enlarged Herself - (1996) - novelette by Michael Marshall Smith
• Underworld - (1996) - short story by Douglas Clegg
• A Plague on Both Your Houses - (1996) - short fiction by Scott Edelman
• Final Cut - (1996) - short story by Karl Edward Wagner
• The Break - (1996) - novelette by Terry Lamsley
• Necrology: 1996 essay by Kim Newman and Stephen Jones
• Useful Addresses - essay by uncredited

The internationally acclaimed annual collection of the bloodcurdling best in horror and dark fantasy, showcasing the very best writers working in the genre today.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Horror in 1997 - (1998) - essay by Stephen Jones
• Dying Words - (1997) - novelette by David J. Schow
• The Windmill - (1997) - short story by Conrad Williams
• The Right Ending - (1997) - short story by John Burke
• Swallowing a Dirty Seed - (1997) - short story by Simon Clark
• This Is Your Life (Repressed Memory Remix) - (1997) - short story by Pat Cadigan
• Christmas Forever - (1997) - short story by Christopher Fowler
• Four Famines Ago - (1997) - short story by Yvonne Navarro
• The Crawl - (1997) - novelette by Stephen Laws
• Serpent Eggs - (1994) - short story by David Langford
• No One You Know - (1997) - short story by Dennis Etchison
• The Dripping of Sundered Wineskins - (1997) - novella by Brian Hodge
• The Bells Will Sound Forever - (1997) - short story by Thomas Ligotti
• The Word - (1997) - novelette by Ramsey Campbell
• The Map to the Homes of the Stars - (1997) - short story by Andy Duncan
• Emptiness Spoke Eloquent - (1997) - short story by Caitlín R. Kiernan
• Save As ... - (1997) - short story by Michael Marshall Smith
• Coppola's Dracula - (1997) - novella by Kim Newman
• Grazing the Long Acre - (1998) - short story by Gwyneth Jones
• The Zombies of Madison County - (1997) - novella by Douglas E. Winter
• Necrology: 1997 - (1998) - essay by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman
• Useful Addresses - (1998) - essay by Stephen Jones

Going ten years strong, the acclaimed collection of contemporary horror fiction again showcases the talents of the finest writers working the field of fear. Along with his annual review of the year in horror, award-winning editor Stephen Jones has chosen the year's best stories by the old masters and new voices alike.

The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 10 includes bloodcurdlers and flesh-crawlers from Ramsey Campbell, Nell Gaiman, Dennis Etchison, Thomas Ligotti, Michael Marshall Smith, Peter Straub, Kim Newman, Harlan Ellison, and many others.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Horror in 1998 - (1999) - essay by Stephen Jones
• Learning to Let Go - (1998) - shortstory by Christopher Fowler
• The Wedding Present - (1998) - shortstory by Neil Gaiman
• Adventures in Further Education - (1998) - shortstory by Peter Atkins
• Bondage - (1998) - shortstory by Kathe Koja
• The Keys to D'Espérance - (1998) - novelette by Chaz Brenchley
• The Song My Sister Sang - (1998) - shortstory by Stephen Laws
• A Victorian Ghost Story - (1999) - shortstory by Kim Newman
• The Dead Boy At Your Window - (1998) - shortstory by Bruce Holland Rogers
• Ra*e - (1998) - novelette by Ramsey Campbell
• Upstairs - (1998) - shortfiction by Lawrence Watt-Evans
• Postcards from the King of Tides - (1998) - shortstory by Caitlín R. Kiernan
• Everybody Goes - (1992) - shortstory by Michael Marshall Smith
• Yellow & Red - (1998) - shortstory by Tanith Lee
• What Slips Away - (1998) - shortstory by Steve Rasnic Tem
• Inside the Cackle Factory - (1998) - novelette by Dennis Etchison
• The Specialist's Hat - (1998) - shortstory by Kelly Link
• The Boss in the Wall: A Treatise on the House Devil - (1998) - novella by Avram Davidson and Grania Davis
• Objects of Desire in the Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear - (1999) - shortstory by Harlan Ellison
• Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff - (1997) - novella by Peter Straub
• Necrology: 1998 - (1999) - essay by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman
• Useful Addresses - (1999) - essay by Stephen Jones

Now in its eleventh year, this winner of the World Fantasy Award and the International Horror Critics Guild Award again showcases the finest talents writing contemporary horror fiction -- established masters as well as new voices -- and presents its lively review of the past year in the field of fear and terror.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Horror in 1999 - (2000) - essay by Stephen Jones
• Halloween Street - (1999) - short story by Steve Rasnic Tem
• Others (excerpt) - (1999) - short fiction by James Herbert
• Growing Things - (1999) - short story by T. E. D. Klein
• Unhasped - (1999) - short story by David J. Schow
• The Emperor's Old Bones - (1999) - short story by Gemma Files
• The Entertainment - (1999) - novelette by Ramsey Campbell
• Harlequin Valentine - (1999) - short story by Neil Gaiman
• The Stunted House - (1999) - short story by Terry Lamsley
• Just Like Eddy - (1999) - short story by Kim Newman
• The Long Hall on the Top Floor - (1999) - short story by Caitlín R. Kiernan
• Lulu - (1999) - novelette by Thomas Tessier
• The Ballyhooly Boy - (1999) - novelette by Graham Masterton
• Welcome - (1999) - novelette by Michael Marshall Smith
• Burden - (1999) - short story by Michael Marano
• Naming the Dead - (1999) - short story by Paul J. McAuley
• Aftershock - (1999) - novelette by F. Paul Wilson
• A Fish Story - (1999) - short story by Gene Wolfe
• Jimmy - (1999) - novella by David Case
• White - (1999) - novella by Tim Lebbon
• Pork Pie Hat - (1994) - novella by Peter Straub
• Tricks & Treats: One Night on Halloween Street - (1999) - short story by Steve Rasnic Tem
• Necrology: 1999 - (2000) - essay by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman
• Useful Addresses - (2000) - essay by Stephen Jones

The acclaimed collection of contemporary horror fiction, this year's Best New Horror again showcases the talents of the finest writers working the field of terror. Sifting through the year in horror, award-winning editor Stephen Jones has chosen the year's best stories by the old masters and new voices alike. The latest volume of the Best New Horror series features stories by Ramsey Campbell, Dennis Etchison, Tim Lebbon, Kim Newman, and horror movie director Mick Garrick (adapter of the upcoming film of Stephen King's Desperation), among many writers. As a bonus, there is Jones's always-informative overview of the year in horror, making this a truly state-of-the-dark-art annual.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Horror in 2000 - essay by Stephen Jones
• Castle in the Desert - (2000) - short story by Kim Newman
• The Keeper of the Rothenstein Tomb - (2000) - short story by Iain Sinclair
• Forever Gramma - (2000) - short story by Mick Garris
• At Home in the Pubs of Old London - (2000) - short story by Christopher Fowler
• In the Water Works (Birmingham, Alabama 1888) - (2000) - short story by Caitlín R. Kiernan
• Bone Orchards - (2000) - short story by Paul J. McAuley
• No Strings - (2000) - short story by Ramsey Campbell
• The Grotto - (2000) - short story by Kathryn Ptacek
• Merry Roderick - (2000) - short story by Geoffrey Warburton
• Climbing Down from Heaven - (2000) - novelette by Terry Lamsley
• Empty Stations - (2000) - short story by Nicholas Royle
• Flesh of Leaves, Bones of Desire - (2000) - short story by Charlee Jacob
• The Repulsion - (2000) - short story by Tim Lebbon
• The Detailer - (2000) - short story by Dennis Etchison
• Coming Home - (2000) - short story by Mark Morris
• The Hunger of the Leaves - (2000) - short story by Joel Lane
• Xenos Beach - (2000) - short story by Graham Joyce
• At Eventide - (2000) - short story by Kathe Koja
• Pareidolia - (2000) - short story by Steve Rasnic Tem
• I Have a Special Plan for This World - (2000) - novelette by Thomas Ligotti
• The Handover - (2000) - short story by Michael Marshall Smith
• The Other Side of Midnight - (2000) - novella by Kim Newman
• Necrology: 2000 - essay by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman

Number 13 - lucky for horror fans! This award-winning anthology series has now reached its thirteenth spectacular volume and to mark the event, Steve Jones has chosen only the very best short stories and novellas by today's finest exponents of the horror genre. Contributors to this volume include: Gala Blau, Ramsey Campbell, Dennis Etchison, Charles Grant, Glen Hirshberg, Chico Kidd, Nancy Kilpatrick, Paul J. McAuley, Conrad Williams. Also featuring the most comprehensive overview of the year, a fascinating necrology and a list of useful contacts, this is the one book that all lovers of the supernatural and psychological terror will want on their shelves.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Horror in 2001 - (2002) - essay by Stephen Jones
• Mark of the Beast - (2001) - novelette by Chico Kidd
• Crocodile Lady - (2001) - short story by Christopher Fowler
• All for Sale - (2001) - short story by Ramsey Campbell
• The Two Dicks - (2001) - novelette by Paul J. McAuley
• By Her Hand, She Draws You Down - (2001) - short story by Douglas Smith
• O' Death, Where Is Thy Spatula? - (2001) - short story by Poppy Z. Brite
• Got to Kill Them All - (2001) - short story by Dennis Etchison
• No More A-Roving - (2001) - short story by Lynda E. Rucker
• First, Catch Your Demon - (2001) - short story by Graham Joyce
• Pump Jack - (2001) - short story by Donald R. Burleson
• Outfangthief - (2001) - short story by Conrad Williams
• The Lost District - (2001) - short story by Joel Lane
• Simeon Dimsby's Workshop - (2001) - short story by Richard A. Lupoff
• Our Temporary Supervisor - (2001) - short story by Thomas Ligotti
• Whose Ghosts These Are - (2001) - short story by Charles L. Grant
• Shite-Hawks - (2001) - short story by Muriel Gray
• Off the Map - (2001) - short story by Michael Chislett
• Most of My Friends Are Two-Thirds Water - (2001) - short story by Kelly Link
• City in Aspic - (2001) - short story by Conrad Williams
• Where All Things Perish - (2001) - novelette by Tanith Lee
• Struwwelpeter - (2001) - novelette by Glen Hirshberg
• Cleopatra Brimstone - (2001) - novella by Elizabeth Hand
• Cats and Architecture - (2001) - short story by Chico Kidd
• Necrology: 2001 - (2002) - essay by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman
• Useful Addresses - (2002) - essay by uncredited

The finest exponents of horror fiction writing today, Neil Gaiman, China Mieville, Ramsey Campbell, Kim Newman, Graham Joyce, Paul McCauley, Stephen Gallagher, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Basil Cooper, Glen Hirshberg, Jay Russell, feature in the world's premier annual horror anthology series, another bumper showcase devoted exclusively to excellence in macabre fiction. To accompany the very best in short stories and novellas is the year's most comprehensive horror overview and contacts listing as well as a fascinating necrology.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Horror in 2002 - (2003) - essay by Stephen Jones
• October in the Chair - (2002) - short story by Neil Gaiman
• Details - (2002) - short story by China Miéville
• The Wretched Thicket of Thorn - (2002) - novelette by Don Tumasonis
• The Absolute Last of the Ultra-Spooky, Super-Scary Hallowe'en Horror Nights - (2002) - short story by David J. Schow
• Standard Gauge - (2002) - short story by Nicholas Royle
• Little Dead Girl Singing - (2002) - short story by Stephen Gallagher
• Nesting Instincts - (2002) - novelette by Brian Hodge
• The Two Sams - (2002) - short story by Glen Hirshberg
• Hides - (2002) - novelette by Jay Russell
• The Unbeheld - (2002) - short story by Ramsey Campbell
• Ill Met By Daylight - (2002) - short story by Basil Copper
• Catskin - (2003) - short story by Kelly Link
• 20th Century Ghost - (2002) - short story by Joe Hill
• Egyptian Avenue - (2002) - short story by Kim Newman
• The Boy Behind the Gate - (2002) - short story by James Van Pelt
• Nor the Demons Down Under the Sea - [Dandridge Cycle] - (2002) - short story by Caitlín R. Kiernan
• The Coventry Boy - (2002) - novelette by Graham Joyce
• The Prospect Cards - (2002) - novelette by Don Tumasonis
• The Cage - (2002) - novelette by Jeff VanderMeer
• Dr. Pretorius and the Lost Temple - (2002) - novella by Paul J. McAuley
• Useful Addresses - (2003) - essay by Stephen Jones

This edition of The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror comes with another generous sampling of the past year's best horror fiction, earning acclamations from the likes of Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly. With contributions from such favorites as Ramsey Campbell and Kim Newman, along with the talented likes of Neil Gaiman, China Mieville, Graham Joyce, Paul McCauley, Stephen Gallagher, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Jay Russell, Glen Hirshberg and many more, the hair-raising tales in this edition hold nightmares for travelers in alien lands, unveil the mystery and menace lurking in our everyday reality, explore the terrors of the supernatural, and honor horror's classic tradition. Like all of the other volumes in this series, award-winning editor Stephen Jones once again brings us the best new horror, revisiting momentous events and chilling achievements on the dark side of fantasy in 2004.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Horror in 2003 - essay by Stephen Jones
• Fear the Dead - (2002) - novelette by Ramsey Campbell
• The Hanged Man of Oz - (2003) - short story by Steve Nagy
• Mara - (2003) - short story by Michael Chislett
• Cell Call - (2003) - short story by Marc Laidlaw
• In the Tunnels - (2003) - short story by Pauline E. Dungate
• Hunger: A Confession - (2003) - short story by Dale Bailey
• Seven Feet - (2004) - short story by Christopher Fowler
• The Centipede - (2003) - short story by Susan Davis
• The Goat Cutter - (2003) - short story by Jay Lake
• Maybe Next Time - (2003) - short story by Michael Marshall Smith
• Story Time with the Bluefield Strangler - (2002) - short story by John Farris
• Hunter Lake - (2003) - short story by Gene Wolfe
• Mr. Sly Stops for a Cup of Joe - (2003) - short story by Scott Emerson Bull
• The Bereavement Photographer - (2003) - short story by Steve Rasnic Tem
• Kissing Carrion - (2003) - short story by Gemma Files
• The White Hands - (2003) - short story by Mark Samuels
• Waycross - (2003) - novelette by Caitlín R. Kiernan
• Lucy, In Her Splendor - (2003) - short story by Charles Coleman Finlay
• Dead Boy Found - (2003) - short story by Christopher Barzak
• The Haunting - (2003) - short story by Joyce Carol Oates
• Dancing Men - (2003) - novelette by Glen Hirshberg
• Bitter Grounds - (2003) - novelette by Neil Gaiman
• Child of the Stones - (2003) - novelette by Paul J. McAuley
• The Silence of the Falling Stars - (2003) - novelette by Mike O'Driscoll
• Exorcizing Angels - (2003) - novella by Simon Clark and Tim Lebbon
• Necrology: 2003 - essay by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman
• Useful Addresses - essay by Stephen Jones

This is the latest edition of the world's foremost annual showcase of horror and dark fantasy fiction. Here are some of the very best short stories and novellas by today's finest exponents of horror fiction-including Kim Newman, Neil Gaiman, China Miéville, Paul McAuley, Glen Hirshberg, Ramsey Campbell and Tanith Lee.

The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 16 also contains the most comprehensive overview of horror around the world during the year, lists of useful contact addresses and a fascinating necrology. It is the one book that is required reading for every fan of macabre fiction.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Horror in 2004 - (2005) - essay by Stephen Jones
• Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Nameless House of the Night of Dread Desire - (2004) - novelette by Neil Gaiman
• Lilies - (2004) - short story by Iain Rowan
• Breaking Up - (2004) - short story by Ramsey Campbell
• "The King", in: Yellow - (2004) - short story by Brian Keene
• A Trick of the Dark - (2004) - short story by Tina Rath
• The Mutable Borders of Love - (2004) - short story by Leslie What
• Flour White and Spindle Thin - (2004) - short story by L. H. Maynard and M. P. N. Sims
• Tighter - (2004) - short story by Christa Faust
• Restraint - (2004) - short story by Stephen Gallagher
• Israbel - (2004) - short story by Tanith Lee
• The Growlimb - (2004) - novelette by Michael Shea
• This Is Now - (2004) - short story by Michael Marshall Smith
• Remnants - (2004) - novella by Tim Lebbon
• Safety Clowns - (2004) - novelette by Glen Hirshberg
• The Devil of Delery Street - (2004) - short story by Poppy Z. Brite
• Apocalypse Now, Voyager - (2004) - novella by Jay Russell
• Stone Animals - (2004) - novelette by Kelly Link
• Soho Golem - (2004) - novella by Kim Newman
• Spells for Halloween: An Acrostic - (2004) - short story by Dale Bailey
• My Death - (2004) - novella by Lisa Tuttle
• The Problem of Susan - (2004) - short story by Neil Gaiman
• Necrology - (2005) - essay by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman
• Useful Addresses - (2005) - essay by Stephen Jones

Here is the latest edition of the world's premier annual showcase of horror and dark fantasy fiction. This collection features some of the very best short stories and novellas by today's masters of the macabre - including such writers as Neil Gaiman, Glen Hirshberg, tanith Lee, ramsey Campbell and Charles Coleman Finlay. The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror also features the most comprehensive yearly overview of horror around the world, lists of useful contact addresses, and a fascinating necrology. It is the one book that is required reading for every fan of macabre fiction.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Horror in 2005 - essay by Stephen Jones
• The Decorations - (2005) - shortstory by Ramsey Campbell
• Black and Green and Gold - (2005) - novelette by David Herter
• I Live with You and You Don't Know It - (2005) - shortstory by Carol Emshwiller
• The Cubist's Attorney - (2005) - shortstory by Peter Atkins
• All Fish and Dracula - (2005) - shortstory by Liz Williams
• The Ball Room - (2005) - shortstory by China Miéville and Emma Bircham and Max Schaefer
• Gulls - (2005) - shortstory by Tim Pratt
• Pinkie - (2005) - shortstory by Elizabeth Massie
• Glyphotech - (2005) - novelette by Mark Samuels
• One of the Hungry Ones - (2005) - novelette by Holly Phillips
• If I Should Wake Before I Die - (2005) - shortstory by Brian Hodge
• The Other Family - (2005) - shortstory by Roberta Lannes
• The Outermost Borough - (2005) - shortstory by Gahan Wilson
• American Morons - (2005) - shortstory by Glen Hirshberg
• Where Angels Come In - (2005) - shortstory by Adam Nevill
• Sickhouse Hospitality - (2005) - novelette by Terry Lamsley
• Best New Horror - (2005) - shortstory by Joe Hill
• La Peau Verte - (2005) - novelette by Caitlín R. Kiernan
• Time Was - (2005) - novelette by David Morrell
• Haeckel's Tale - (2005) - shortstory by Clive Barker
• The Taint - (2005) - novella by Brian Lumley
• The Winner - (2005) - shortstory by Ramsey Campbell
• Necrology: 2005 - essay by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman

The year's darkest tales of terror.

Here is the latest edition of the world's premier annual showcase of horror and dark fantasy fiction. It features some of the very best short stories and novellas by today's masters of the macabre - including Neil Gaiman, Brian Keene, Elizabeth Massie, Glen Hirshberg, Peter Atkins and Tanith Lee. The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror also features the most comprehensive yearly overview of horror around the world, lists of useful contact addresses and a fascinating necrology. It is the one book that is required reading for every fan of macabre fiction.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Horror in 2006 - essay by Stephen Jones
• Summer - (2006) - shortstory by Al Sarrantonio
• Digging Deep - (2006) - shortstory by Ramsey Campbell
• The Night Watch - (2006) - shortstory by John Gordon
• The Luxury of Harm - (2006) - shortstory by Christopher Fowler
• Sentinels - (2006) - shortstory by Mark Samuels
• The Saffron Gatherers - (2006) - shortstory by Elizabeth Hand
• What Nature Abhors - (2006) - novella by Mark Morris
• The Last Reel - (2006) - shortstory by Lynda E. Rucker
• The American Dead - (2006) - shortstory by Jay Lake
• Between the Cold Moon and the Earth - (2006) - shortstory by Peter Atkins
• Sob in the Silence - (2006) - shortstory by Gene Wolfe
• Continuity Error - (2006) - novelette by Nicholas Royle
• Dr. Prida's Dream-Plagued Patient - (2006) - shortstory by Michael Bishop
• The Ones We Leave Behind - (2006) - shortstory by Mark Chadbourn
• Mine - (2006) - shortstory by Joel Lane
• Obsequy - (2006) - novelette by David J. Schow
• Thrown - (2006) - shortstory by Don Tumasonis
• Houses Under the Sea - (2006) - novelette by Caitlín R. Kiernan
• They - (2006) - shortstory by David Morrell
• The Clockwork Horror - (2006) - shortstory by F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre
• Making Cabinets - (2006) - shortstory by Richard Christian Matheson
• Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy) - (2006) - novelette by Geoff Ryman
• Devil's Smile - (2006) - novelette by Glen Hirshberg
• The Man Who Got Off the Ghost Train - (2006) - novella by Kim Newman
• Necrology: 2006 - (2007) - essay by Kim Newman and Stephen Jones
• Useful Addresses - essay by Stephen Jones

This collection features the most comprehensive yearly overview of horror around the world in all its incarnations, an impressively researched necrology, and a list of indispensable contact addresses for the dedicated reader and budding writer alike. This is the very best of new short stories and novellas by today's masters of the macabre. Contributors include such names as Neil Gaiman, Gene Wolfe, Brian Keene, Michael Marshall Smith, Ramsey Campbell, Kim Newman, Elizabeth Massie, Glen Hirshberg, Peter Atkins, and Tanith Lee. This is required reading for any fan of ghoulish fiction.

Table of Contents:

• The Things He Said - (2007) - short story by Michael Marshall Smith
• The Church on the Island - (2007) - short story by Simon Kurt Unsworth
• The Twilight Express - (2007) - short story by Christopher Fowler
• Peep - (2007) - novelette by Ramsey Campbell
• From Around Here - (2007) - novelette by Tim Pratt
• Pumpkin Night - short fiction by Gary McMahon
• The Other Village - (2007) - short story by Simon Strantzas
• 13 O'Clock - (2007) - short story by Mike O'Driscoll
• Still Water - (2007) - short story by Joel Lane
• Thumbprint - (2007) - novelette by Joe Hill
• Lancashire - (2007) - short story by Nicholas Royle
• The Admiral's House - (2007) - short story by Marc Lecard
• Man, You Gotta See This! - (2007) - short story by Tony Richards
• The Fisherman - (2007) - novella by David Sutton
• The Children of Monte Rosa - (2007) - short story by Reggie Oliver
• The Witch's Headstone - (2007) - novelette by Neil Gaiman
• Calico Black, Calico Blue - (2007) - short story by Joel Knight
• This Rich Evil Sound - (2007) - short story by Steven Erikson
• Miss Ill-Kept Runt - (2007) - short story by Glen Hirshberg
• Deadman's Road - (2007) - novelette by Joe R. Lansdale
• A Gentleman from Mexico - (2007) - short story by Mark Samuels
• Loss - (2007) - novelette by Tom Piccirilli
• Behind the Clouds: In Front of the Sun - (2007) - short fiction by Christopher Harman
• The Ape's Wife - (2007) - short story by Caitlín R. Kiernan
• Tight Wrappers - (2007) - short story by Conrad Williams
• Cold Snap - (2007) - short story by Kim Newman
• Necrology: 2007 - essay by Kim Newman and Stephen Jones

2009's best, and darkest, tales of terror, showcasing the most outstanding new short stories and novellas by contemporary masters of the macabre, including the likes of Ramsey Campbell, Neil Gaiman, Brian Keene, Tanith Lee, Elizabeth Massie, Kim Newman, Michael Marshall Smith, and Gene Wolfe. The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror also includes a comprehensive annual overview of horror around the world in all its incarnations; an impressively researched necrology; and a list of indispensable contact addresses for the dedicated horror fan and aspiring writer alike. It is required reading for every fan of macabre fiction.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Horror in 2008 - essay by Stephen Jones
• Front-Page McGuffin and the Greatest Story Never Told - (1998) - novelette by Peter Crowther
• It Runs Beneath the Surface - (2008) - short story by Simon Strantzas
• These Things We Have Always Known - (2008) - short story by Lynda E. Rucker
• Feminine Endings - (2008) - short story by Neil Gaiman
• Through the Cracks - (2008) - short story by Gary McMahon
• Falling Off the World - (2008) - short story by Tim Lebbon
• The Old Traditions Are Best - (2008) - short story by Paul Finch
• The Long Way - (2008) - novelette by Ramsey Campbell
• The Pile - (2008) - short story by Michael Bishop
• Under Fog - (2008) - short story by Tanith Lee
• Arkangel - (2008) - novelette by Christopher Fowler
• The Camping Wainwrights - (2008) - novelette by Ian R. MacLeod
• A Donkey at the Mysteries - (2008) - novelette by Reggie Oliver
• The Oram County Whoosit - (2008) - novelette by Steve Duffy
• The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates - (2008) - short story by Stephen King
• One Man in the Sudan - (2008) - novelette by Sarah Pinborough
• "Destination Nihil" by Edmund Bertrand - (2008) - short story by Mark Samuels
• The Overseer - (2008) - novella by Albert E. Cowdrey
• The Beginnings of Sorrow - (2008) - novelette by Pinckney Benedict
• The Place of Waiting - (2008) - novella by Brian Lumley
• 2:00 pm: The Real Estate Agent Arrives - (2008) - short story by Steve Rasnic Tem
• Necrology: 2008 - essay by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman
• Useful Addresses - essay by Stephen Jones

The year's best, and darkest, tales of terror, showcasing the most outstanding new short stories and novellas by both contemporary masters of the macabre and exciting newcomers.

As ever, this acclaimed anthology also offers the most comprehensive annual overview of horror around the world in all its incarnations; a comprehensive necrology of famous names; and a list of indispensable contact addresses for the dedicated horror fan and writer alike.

The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror remains the world's leading annual anthology dedicated solely to presenting the best in contemporary horror fiction.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Horror in 2009 - (2010) - essay by Stephen Jones
• The Woods - (2009) - shortstory by Michael Kelly
• Throttle - (2009) - novelette by Joe Hill and Stephen King
• Out and Back - (2009) - novelette by Barbara Roden
• Respects - (2009) - shortstory by Ramsey Campbell
• Cold to the Touch - (2009) - shortstory by Simon Strantzas
• The Game of Bear - (2009) - shortstory by M. R. James and Reggie Oliver
• Shem-el-Nessim: An Inspiration in Perfume - (2009) - shortstory by Chris Bell
• What Happens When You Wake Up in the Night - (2009) - shortstory by Michael Marshall Smith
• The Reunion - (2009) - shortstory by Nicholas Royle
• Mami Wata - (2009) - shortstory by Simon Kurt Unsworth
• Venturi - (2009) - shortstory by Richard Christian Matheson
• Party Talk - (2009) - shortstory by John Gaskin
• Two Steps Along the Road - (2009) - novelette by Terry Dowling
• The Axholme Toll - (2009) - shortstory by Mark Valentine
• Granny's Grinning - (2009) - shortstory by Robert Shearman
• In the Garden - (2009) - shortstory by Rosalie Parker
• After the Ape - (2009) - novelette by Stephen Volk
• The Nonesuch - (2009) - novella by Brian Lumley
• Princess of the Night - (2009) - shortstory by Michael Kelly
• Necrology: 2009 - (2010) - essay by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman
• Useful Addresses - (2010) - essay by Stephen Jones

The year's best, and darkest, tales of terror, showcasing the most outstanding new short stories and novellas by both contemporary masters of the macabre and exciting newcomers.

As ever, this acclaimed anthology also offers the most comprehensive annual overview of horror around the world in all its incarnations; a comprehensive necrology of famous names; and a list of indispensable contact addresses for the dedicated horror fan and writer alike.

The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror remains the world's leading annual anthology dedicated solely to presenting the best in contemporary horror fiction.

Table of Contents:

• Acknowledgments - (2010) - essay by Stephen Jones
• Introduction: Horror in 2010 - (2010) - essay by Stephen Jones
• What Will Come After - (2010) - short fiction by Scott Edelman
• Substitutions - (2010) - novelette by Michael Marshall Smith
• A Revelation of Cormorants - (2010) - short story by Mark Valentine
• Out Back - (2011) - short fiction by Garry Kilworth
• Fort Clay, Louisiana: A Tragical History - (2010) - short story by Albert E. Cowdrey
• Just Outside Our Windows, Deep Inside Our Walls - (2010) - short story by Brian Hodge
• Fallen Boys - (2010) - short story by Mark Morris
• The Lemon in the Pool - (2010) - short fiction by Simon Kurt Unsworth
• The Pier - (2010) - short fiction by Thana Niveau
• Featherweight - (2010) - novelette by Robert Shearman
• Black Country - (2010) - short story by Joel Lane
• Lavender and Lychgates - (2010) - novelette by Angela Slatter
• Christmas with the Dead - (2010) - short story by Joe R. Lansdale
• We All Fall Down - (2010) - short story by Kirstyn McDermott
• Oh I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside - (2010) - short story by Christopher Fowler
• Losenef Express - (2010) - short story by Mark Samuels
• Lesser Demons - (2010) - novelette by Norman Partridge
• Telling - (2010) - short fiction by Steve Rasnic Tem
• As Red as Red - (2010) - short story by Caitlín R. Kiernan
• With the Angels - (2010) - short story by Ramsey Campbell
• Autumn Chill - (2010) - poem by Richard L. Tierney
• City of the Dog - (2010) - novelette by John Langan
• When the Zombies Win - (2010) - short story by Karina Sumner-Smith
• Necrology: 2010 - (2010) - essay by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman

This new anthology represents the most outstanding new short stories and novellas by both contemporary masters of horror and exciting newcomers. The award-winning series offers a chilling overview of this year in horror.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Horror in 2011 - (2012) - essay by Stephen Jones
• Holding the Light - (2011) - short story by Ramsey Campbell
• Lantern Jack - (2011) - short story by Christopher Fowler
• Rag and Bone - (2011) - short story by Paul Kane
• Some Kind of Light Shines from Your Face - (2011) - short story by Gemma Files
• Midnight Flight - (2011) - short story by Joel Lane
• Trick of the Light - (2011) - short story by Tim Lebbon
• But None Shall Sing for Me - (2011) - short story by Gregory Nicoll
• About the Dark - (2011) - short story by Alison Littlewood
• The Photographer's Tale - (2011) - short story by Daniel Mills
• The Tower - (2011) - short story by Mark Samuels
• Dancing Like We're Dumb - (2011) - short story by Peter Atkins
• An Indelible Stain Upon the Sky - (2012) - short story by Simon Strantzas
• Hair - (2011) - short story by Joan Aiken
• Miri - (2011) - short story by Steve Rasnic Tem
• Corbeaux Bay - (2011) - short story by Geeta Roopnarine
• Sad, Dark Thing - (2011) - short story by Michael Marshall Smith
• Smithers and the Ghosts of the Thar - (2011) - short story by Robert Silverberg
• Quieta Non Movere - (2011) - short story by Reggie Oliver
• The Crawling Sky - (2009) - novelette by Joe R. Lansdale
• Wait - (2011) - novelette by Conrad Williams
• The Ocean Grand, North West Coast - (2011) - novelette by Simon Kurt Unsworth
• They That Have Wings - (2011) - novelette by Evangeline Walton
• White Roses, Bloody Silk - (2011) - short story by Thana Niveau
• The Music of Bengt Karlsson, Murderer - (2011) - novelette by John Ajvide Lindqvist
• Passing Through Peacehaven - (2011) - short story by Ramsey Campbell
• Holiday Home - (2011) - short story by David Buchan
• Necrology: 2011 - (2012) - essay by Stephen Jones

For nearly twenty-five years The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror has been the world's leading annual anthology dedicated solely to showcasing the best in contemporary horror fiction. Comprising the most outstanding new short fiction by both contemporary masters of horror and exciting newcomers, this multiple award-winning series also offers an overview of the year in horror, a comprehensive necrology of recent obituaries, and an indispensable directory of contact details for dedicated horror fans and writers.

The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror remains the world's leading annual anthology dedicated solely to presenting the best in contemporary horror fiction.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Horror In 2012 - (2013) - essay by Stephen Jones
• Witch Work - (2012) - poem by Neil Gaiman
• The Discord of Being - (2012) - shortfiction by Alison Littlewood
• Necrosis - (2012) - shortstory by Dale Bailey
• The Hunt: Before, and the Aftermath - (2012) - shortfiction by Joe R. Lansdale
• The Cotswold Olimpicks - (2012) - shortfiction by Simon Kurt Unsworth
• Where the Summer Dwells - (2012) - shortstory by Lynda E. Rucker
• The Callers - (2012) - shortfiction by Ramsey Campbell
• The Curtain - (2012) - shortfiction by Thana Niveau
• The Fall of the King of Babylon - (2012) - shortfiction by Mark Valentine
• Nightside Eye - (2012) - shortfiction by Terry Dowling
• The Old and the New - (2012) - shortfiction by Helen Marshall
• Waiting at the Crossroads Motel - (2012) - shortfiction by Steve Rasnic Tem
• His Only Audience - (2012) - shortfiction by Glen Hirshberg
• Marionettes - (2012) - shortfiction by Claire Massey
• Between Four Yews - (2012) - novelette by Reggie Oliver
• Slick Black Bones and Soft Black Stars - (2012) - shortstory by Gemma Files
• The Other One - (2012) - shortstory by Evangeline Walton
• Slow Burn - (2012) - shortstory by Joel Lane
• Celebrity Frankenstein - (2012) - shortfiction by Stephen Volk
• Blue Crayon, Yellow Crayon - (2012) - shortfiction by Robert Shearman
• October Dreams - (2012) - shortfiction by Michael Kelly
• The Eyes of Water - (2012) - shortfiction by Alison Littlewood
• Necrology: 2012 - (2013) - essay by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman
• Useful Addresses (Best New Horror 24) - essay by Stephen Jones

For a quarter of a century, this multiple award-winning annual selection has showcased some of the very best, and most disturbing, short stories and novellas of horror and the supernatural. As always, this landmark volume features superior fiction from such masters of the genre and newcomers in contemporary horror as Michael Chislett; Thana Niveau; Reggie Oliver; Tanith Lee; Niel Gaiman; Robert Shearman; Simon Strantzas; Lavie Tidhar; Simon Kurt Unsworth and Halli Villegas. With an in-depth introduction covering the year in horror, a fascinating necrology and a unique contact directory, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror remains the world's leading anthology dedicated solely to presenting the very best in modern horror.

Table of Contents

• Horror in 2013 - essay by Stephen Jones
• Who Dares Wins: Anno Dracula 1980 - short story by Kim Newman
• Click-Clack the Rattlebag - (2012) - short story by Neil Gaiman
• Dead End - (2013) - short story by Nicholas Royle
• Isaac's Room - (2013) - short story by Daniel Mills
• The Burning Circus - (2013) - short story by Angela Slatter
• Holes for Faces - (2013) - novelette by Ramsey Campbell
• By Night He Could Not See - short story by Joel Lane
• Come Into My Parlour - (2013) - short story by Reggie Oliver
• The Middle Park - (2013) - short story by Michael Chislett
• Into the Water - (2013) - short story by Simon Kurt Unsworth
• The Burned House - (2013) - short story by Lynda E. Rucker
• What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Z---- - (2013) - short story by Lavie Tidhar
• Fishfly Season - (2013) - short story by Halli Villegas
• Doll Re Mi - (2013) - novelette by Tanith Lee
• A Night's Work - short story by Clive Barker
• The Sixteenth Step - (2013) - short story by Robert Shearman
• Stemming the Tide - (2013) - short story by Simon Strantzas
• The Gist - (2013) - short story by Michael Marshall Smith
• Guinea Pig Girl - (2013) - novelette by Thana Niveau
• Miss Baltimore Crabs: Anno Dracula 1990 - novelette by Kim Newman
• Whitstable (excerpt) - novella by Stephen Volk
• Necrology (obituary) - essay by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Horror in 2014
• Secondhand Magic - Helen Marshall
• The Culvert - Dale Bailey
• The Patter of Tiny Feet - Richard Gavin
• The Four Strengths of Shadow - Ron Weighill
• The Night Run - Simon Kurt Unsworth
• Home and Hearth - Angela Slatter
• Dust - Rebecca Lloyd
• Suffer Little Children - Robert Shearman
• The Night Doctor - Steve Rasnic Tem
• The Desecrator - Derek John
• The Walk - Dennis Etchison
• Dirt on Vicky - Clint Smith
• Skullpocket - Nathan Ballingrud
• Testimony of Samuel Frobisher Regarding Events Upon His Majesty's Ship Confidence, 14-22 June 1818, with Diagrams - Ian Tregillis
• At Lorn Hall - Ramsey Campbell
• Selfies - Lavie Tidhar
• Matilda of the Night - Stephen Volk
• The Collected Short Stories of Freddie Prothero Introduction by Torless Magnussen, Ph.D. - Peter Straub
• Burnt Black Suns - Simon Strantzas
• Necrology: 2014 - Stephen Jones & Kim Newman

In this latest edition of THE WORLD'S LONGEST-RUNNING ANNUAL SHOWCASE OF HORROR AND DARK FANTASY you will find CUTTING-EDGE stories by such authors as Robert Aickman, Storm Constantine, Gemma Files, Neil Gaiman, John Langan, Helen Marshall And Steve Rasnic Tem, amongst many others, along with the usual OVERVIEW OF THE YEAR IN HORROR and NECROLOGY of those who have left us.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Horror in 2015 - The Editor
• The Coffin House - Robert Aickman
• The Lake - Daniel Mills
• The Barnacle Daughter - Richard Gavin
• Exposure - Helen Marshall
• The Larder - Nicholas Royle
• The Seventh Wave - Lynda E. Rucker
• Underground Economy - John Langan
• The Drowning City - Loren Rhoads
• The Chapel of Infernal Devotion - Ron Weighell
• Alma Mater - Kate Farrell
• Hibakusha - L. P. Lee
• The Offing - Conrad Williams
• Marrowvale - Kurt Fawver
• Hairwork - Gemma Files
• Black Dog - Neil Gaiman
• In the Earth - Storm Constantine
• In the Lovecraft Museum - Steve Rasnic Tem
• Necrology: 2015 - Stephen Jones & Kim Newman

In this latest edition of THE WORLD'S LONGEST-RUNNING ANNUAL SHOWCASE OF HORROR AND DARK FANTASY you will find cutting-edge stories by such authors as Angela Slatter, Stephen Volk, Richard Christian Matheson, Dennis Etchison, Lisa Tuttle and Steve Rasnic Tem, amongst many others, along with the usual OVERVIEW OF THE YEAR IN HORROR and NECROLOGY of those who have left us.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Horror in 2016 - The Editor
• Pale Tree House - Angela Slatter
• The Light at the Centre - Maura McHugh
• En Plein Air - J.T. Glover
• India Blue - Glen Hirshberg
• Walking with the Cross - Peter Bell
• Bedtime Story - Richard Christian Matheson
• The Symphony of the Normal - Darren Speegle
• The Ballet of Dr. Caligari - Reggie Oliver
• Who is This Who is Coming? - Lynda E. Rucker
• The House That Moved Next Door - Stephen Volk
• Princess - Dennis Etchison
• A Home in the Sky - Lisa Tuttle
• On These Blackened Shores of Time - Brian Hodge
• The Enemy Within - Steve Rasnic Tem
• The Court of Midnight - Mark Samuels
• Far from Any Shore - Caitlín R. Kiernan
• The Fig Garden - Mark Valentine
• White Feathers - Alison Littlewood
• Over to You - Michael Marshall Smith
• In the Dark, Quiet Places - Kristi DeMeester
• Mare's Nest - Richard Gavin
• The Red Forest - Angela Slatter
• Necrology: 2016 - Stephen Jones & Kim Newman

He did not know if his powers could save him until the horses' hooves had crushed his ribs and his heart had stopped beating. After that, it was obvious.

1880's France: the corrupt world of the Third Republic. A clandestine brotherhood is engaged in a desperate internal power struggle; a race of beings seeks to free itself from perpetual oppression; and a rip in time threatens an entire city. The future of Europe is at stake, in a war fought with minds and bodies altered to the limits of human evolution.

Chris finds himself working undercover with a suspicious French gendarme; Roz follows a psychic artist whose talents are attracting the attention of mysterious forces; and the Doctor befriends a shape-shifting member of a terrifying family. And, at the heart of it all, a dark and disturbing injustice is being perpetrated. Only an end to the secret war, and the salvation of an entire race, can prevent Paris from being utterly destroyed.

"We're not like you - we can't be whole on our own."

Seeking respite after the traumatic events in the thirtieth century, the Doctor and Chris travel to 1950s London. But all is not well in bohemian Soho: racist attacks shatter the peace; gangs struggle for territory; and a bloodthirsty driverless cab stalks the night.

While Chris enjoys himself at the mysterious and exclusive Tropics club, the Doctor investigates a series of ritualistic murders with an uncommon link - the victims all have no past. Meanwhile, a West End gangster is planning to clean up the town, apparently with the help of the Devil himself. And, in the quiet corridors of an abandoned mental hospital, an enigmatic psychiatrist is conducting some very bad therapy indeed.

As the stakes are raised, healing turns to killing, old friends appear in the strangest places - and even toys can have a sinister purpose.

A family is hunted by a centuries-old monster: a man with a relentless obsession who can take on any identity.

The String Diaries opens with Hannah frantically driving through the night--her daughter asleep in the back, her husband bleeding out in the seat beside her. In the trunk of the car rests a cache of diaries dating back 200 years, tied and retied with strings through generations. The diaries carry the rules for survival that have been handed down from mother to daughter since the 19th century. But how can Hannah escape an enemy with the ability to look and sound like the people she loves?

Stephen Lloyd Jones's debut novel is a sweeping thriller that extends from the present day, to Oxford in the 1970s, to Hungary at the turn of the 19th century, all tracing back to a man from an ancient royal family with a consuming passion--a boy who can change his shape, insert himself into the intimate lives of his victims, and destroy them.

If Hannah fails to end the chase now, her daughter is next in line. Only Hannah can decide how much she is willing to sacrifice to finally put a centuries-old curse to rest.

See the girl. Leah Wilde is twenty-four, a runaway on a black motorbike, hunting for answers while changing her identity with each new Central European town.

See the man, having come of age in extraordinary suffering and tragedy in nineteenth-century Budapest; witness to horror, to love, to death, and the wrath of a true monster. Izsák still lives in the present day, impossibly middle-aged. He's driven not only to hunt this immortal evil but to find his daughter, stolen from an Arctic cabin and grown into the thing Izsák has sworn to kill.

See the monster, a beautiful, seemingly young woman who stalks the American West, seeking the young and the strong to feed upon, desperate to return to Europe where her coven calls.

Written in the Blood is the epic thriller of the year, a blazing and dexterous saga spanning generations, and threading the lives of five individuals driven by love, by sacrifice, by hunger and by fear. They seek to save a race--or to extinguish it forever.

In the dark and gothic world of Warhammer, the ravaging armies of the Ruinous Powers sweep down from the savage north to assail the lands of men. Realm of Chaos is a searing collection of a dozen all-action fantasy short stories set in those desperate times.

The last night of the year. Now the days of winter begin and the Goblin King rides abroad, searching for his bride...

All her life, Liesl has heard tales of the beautiful, dangerous Goblin King. They've enraptured her mind, her spirit, and inspired her musical compositions. Now eighteen and helping to run her family's inn, Liesl can't help but feel that her musical dreams and childhood fantasies are slipping away.

But when her own sister is taken by the Goblin King, Liesl has no choice but to journey to the Underground to save her. Drawn to the strange, captivating world she finds?and the mysterious man who rules it?she soon faces an impossible decision. And with time and the old laws working against her, Liesl must discover who she truly is before her fate is sealed.

Rich with music and magic, S. Jae-Jones's Wintersong will sweep you away into a world you won't soon forget.

Six months after the end of Wintersong, Liesl is working toward furthering both her brother's and her own musical careers. Although she is determined to look forward and not behind, life in the world above is not as easy as Liesl had hoped. Her younger brother Josef is cold, distant, and withdrawn, while Liesl can't forget the austere young man she left beneath the earth, and the music he inspired in her.

When troubling signs arise that the barrier between worlds is crumbling, Liesl must return to the Underground to unravel the mystery of life, death, and the Goblin King?who he was, who he is, and who he will be. What will it take to break the old laws once and for all? What is the true meaning of sacrifice when the fate of the world?or the ones Liesl loves?is in her hands?