. . Tremble at the artist who can see the future and prevent it, at a price . . . Beware of the dark, and the evil that lurks within it . . . Tremble, and hide, at the sound of the jingle-bells . . .Do figures of fear really bring bad luck? Or are they nothing more than stories? Only you can figure out how fearful you are . . .

    Through the lens of Link's vivid imagination, nothing is what it seems, and everything deserves a second look. From the multiple award-winning The Faery Handbag, in which a teenager's grandmother carries an entire village (or is it a man-eating dog?) in her handbag, to the near-future of The Surfer, whose narrator (a soccer-playing skeptic) waits with a planeload of refugees for the aliens to arrive, Link's stories are funny and full of unexpected insights and skewed perspectives on the world. Her fans range from Michael Chabon to Peter Buck of R.E.M. to Holly Black of Spiderwick Chronicles fame. Now teens can have their world rocked, too!

    A memo to her boss that's replaced by obscene insults. Amanda—a successful architect in a happy marriage—finds her life going off kilter by degrees. She starts smoking again, and one night for no reason, without even the knowledge that she's doing it, she burns her husband with a cigarette. At night she dreams of a beautiful woman with pointed teeth on the shore of a blood-red sea.The new voice in Amanda's head, the one that tells her to steal things and talk to strange men in bars, is strange and frightening, and Amanda struggles to wrest back control of her life. Is she possessed by a demon, or is she simply insane? Described as “a new kind of psychological thriller” by George Pelecanos and “this year's scariest novel” by Time Out New York, Come Closer has become a modern classic “with a kick that will stay with the reader for days afterward” (The Dallas Morning News).

    Once the abuse becomes too much to handle, the two siblings embark on a sordid cross-country murder spree beginning with their mom. As the murder tally rises, Suzy’s mental state spirals into irredeemable madness.

    They’re well aware that the first forty-eight hours are critical and after that, the odds usually point to a worst-case scenario. And despite Stevie Clark’s youth, he knows that, too; he’s seen the cop shows. He knows what each ticking moment may mean for Jude, his cousin and best friend.That, and there was that boy, Max Larsen...the one from years ago, found dead after also disappearing under mysterious circumstances. And then there were the animals: pets gone missing out of yards. For years, the residents of Deer Valley have murmured about these unsolved crimes…and that a killer may still be lurking around their quiet town. Now, fear is reborn—and for Stevie, who is determined to find out what really happened to Jude, the awful truth may be too horrifying to imagine.

    Welcome to a world where humans live side-by-side with monsters, from vampires both nostalgic and bumbling, to an eight-legged alien who makes tea. Here you'll find mercurial forms that burrow into warm fat, spectral boy toys, a Maori force of nature, a landform that claims lives, and an architect of hell on earth. Through these, and a few monsters that defy categorization, some of today's top young-adult authors explore ambition and sacrifice, loneliness and rage, love requited and avenged, and the boundless potential for connection, even across extreme borders.Moriabe's Children / Paolo Bacigalupi --Old souls / Cassandra Clare --Ten rules for being an intergalactic smuggler (the successful kind) / Holly Black --Quick hill / M.T. Anderson --The diabolist / Nathan Ballingrud --This whole demoning thing / Patrick Ness --Wings in the morning / Sarah Rees Brennan --Left foot, right / Nalo Hopkinson --The Mercurials / G. Carl Purcell --Kitty Capulet and the invention of underwater photography / Dylan Horrocks --Son of abyss / Nik Houser --A small wild magic / Kathleen Jennings --The new boyfriend / Kelly Link --The woods hide in plain sight / Joshua Lewis --Mothers, lock up your daughters because they are terrifying / Alice Sola Kim

    Praised as one of the best collections of heartfelt and gut-wrenching horror written in recent history, it's a disturbing trip through the ages exploring the painful tragedies of life, love and loss.Each of the five masterfully written novellas included in THE END IN ALL BEGINNINGS examine complex themes running the gamut from the loss of childhood innocence, to the dreadful reality of survival after everything we hold dear is gone, to some of the most profound aspects of human tragedy.As one of the best storytellers of the modern age, John F.D. Taff takes readers on a skillfully balanced emotional journey into nostalgia, through personal pain and beyond the everyday terrors that are uncomfortably real over the course of the human lifetime. His straight-forward, nuanced writing style is at times darkly comedic, often deeply poetic and always accurate in the most terrifying of ways.Evoking the literary styles of horror legends Mary Shelley, Edgar Allen Poe and Bram Stoker, in THE END IN ALL BEGINNINGS also pays homage to modern genre masters Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, Ray Bradbury, Rod Serling and Clive Barker, solidifying author John F.D. Taff as modern horror's new King of Pain.

    An enchanted object curses a grieving widow. A haunted reel torments a film student. A murder trial hinges on a chilling testimony.In Howls From Hell, sixteen emerging horror writers pave the way for the future of the genre. Fans of dark and macabre fiction will savor this exhibition of all-original tales born from one of the fastest-growing horror communities in the world: HOWL Society.With a foreword by Grady Hendrix, this anthology unveils the horror writers of tomorrow with spine-tingling stories from P.L. McMillan, J.W. Donley, Shane Hawk, Christopher O'Halloran, Alex Wolfgang, Amanda Nevada DeMel, Lindsey Ragsdale, Solomon Forse, Justin Faull, M. David Clarkson, B.O.B. Jenkin, S.E. Denton, Thea Maeve, Joseph Andre Thomas, Joe Radkins, and Quinn Fern.

    That is, until Fox 8 develops a unique skill: He teaches himself to speak "Yuman" by hiding in the bushes outside a house and listening to children's bedtime stories. The power of language fuels his abundant curiosity about people—even after "danjer" arrives in the form of a new shopping mall that cuts off his food supply, sending Fox 8 on a harrowing quest to help save his pack.

    'Disappearances', inspired by local legends of mysterious vanishings, mixes gossip and fact; 'Lois the Witch', a novella based on an account of the Salem witch hunts, shows how sexual desire and jealousy lead to hysteria; while in 'The Old Nurse's Story' a mysterious child roams the freezing Northumberland moors. Whether darkly surreal, such as 'The Poor Clare', where an evil doppelganger is formed by a woman's bitter curse, or mischievous like 'Curious, if True', a playful reworking of fairy tales, all the pieces in this volume form a start contrast to the social realism of Gaskell's novels, revealing a darker and more unsettling style of writing.Laura Kranzler's introduction discusses how Gaskell's tales, with their ghostly doublings and transgressive passions, show the Gothic underside of female identity, domestic relations and male authority. This edition also contains a chronology, further reading and explanatory notes.

     In "Sticky Note," Gary finds a note with two simple words on it in the gutter: Kill her. Was it part of someone's to-do list? Bentley Little tells us where this yellow square piece of paper takes Gary in a way that only he can. A bad confrontation with a maid at a fancy resort leads a couple on a chilling journey they never dreamed would happen. "The Maid" may make you think twice about asking the front desk for extra towels or complaining about anything ever again. You'll never think of small-town rodeos the same way after reading "The Last Rodeo on the Circuit," and neither will Rob and Teena after they decide to take in the local bizarre entertainment in an unscheduled stop along their road trip to Vegas. Would you anonymously write your negative thoughts about your friends in a slam book? What if the words you wrote changed things? "Slam Dance" shows you what the consequences of that might be. Sometimes, a "Palm Reader" knows more than they're willing to reveal to their customers, chilling things that their clients don't really want to know. Would you tell them anyway? Snowmen aren't scary, right? Hal and April Katz are out on a wintery drive when they see a snowman on the side of the road. Then another that looks almost the same a few miles later. And then, hundreds of snowmen around the next bend. You might think snowmen aren't scary, but "Snow" will prove you dead wrong. Bentley Little can take the innocuous, twist it around, and write a story that will change your way of thinking. Walking Alone: Short Stories is a shining example of his talent to scare you, creep you out, and make you shudder. Table of Contents: Milk Ranch Point Snow Children's Hospital Palm Reader Slam Dance Last Rodeo on the Circuit The Car Wash The Feeb The Mall Hunting The Piano Player has no Fingers The Man Who Watched Cartoons Apt Punishment Black Friday MoNA Retrospective, Los Angeles Jorgensen's Fence The Silence of Trees Sticky Note The Smell of Overripe Loquats The Maid Schoolgirls Under Midwest Skies Pictures of Huxley My College Admission Essay Pool, Air Conditioning, Free HBO The Train A Random Thought from God's Day

    Fear of loss, fear of pain, fear of madness, fear of being trapped, fear of the inescapable, unspeakable horrors that fester deep within the soul.... No matter who or where you are, fear is always with you, always ready to attack from behind the masks of thought and dream.Let David Morrell tell you a story...A Trap for the Unwary • (1999)Black and White and Red All Over • (1985)Black Evening • (1981)But at My Back I Always Hear • (1983)Dead Image • (1985)For These and All My Sins • (1984)Mumbo Jumbo • (1985)Orange Is for Anguish, Blue Is for Insanity • (1999)The Beautiful Uncut Hair of Graves • (1991)The Dripping • (1972)The Hidden Laughter • (1981)The Partnership • (1981)The Road to Damascus • (1999)The Shrine • (1992)The Storm • (1984)The Typewriter • (1983)

    By placing ordinary characters in extraordinary situations, Adjei-Brenyah reveals the violence, injustice, and painful absurdities that black men and women contend with every day. These stories tackle urgent instances of racism and cultural unrest and explore the many ways we fight for humanity in an unforgiving world.

    These are but some of the men and women who fill this searingly imaginative and emotionally taut collection of short stories by Mark Haddon, that weaves through time and space to showcase the author's incredible versatility.     Yet the collection achieves a sum that is greater than its parts, proving itself a meditation not only on isolation and loneliness but also on the tenuous and unseen connections that link individuals to each other, often despite themselves. In its titular story, the narrator describes with fluid precision a catastrophe that will collectively define its victims as much as it will disperse them—and brilliantly lays bare the reader's appetite for spectacle alongside its characters'. Cut with lean prose and drawing inventively from history, myth, fairy tales, and, above all, the deep well of empathy that made his three novels so compelling, The Pier Falls reveals a previously unseen side of the celebrated author.

    though I did leave out some of the original "diary" entries that appeared on an earlier version of the Morganville website, simply because they were just scenes and not stories, and were generally really short snippets. This is all short fiction, and it's been carefully organized into the timeline, so you can read from the earliest adventures (some of which belong to vampires) all the way through some post-Daylighters goodies.MIDNIGHT BITES includes a total of more than 50,000 words of brand new content, which makes me very happy indeed (and I hope will also make you happy, too). From stories featuring our favorite bunny-slipper-wearing mad scientist to a mystery solved by police chief Hannah Moses, I think you'll find this is a diverse group of stories that will shine a little more light in the murkiest corners of Morganville.