These doomed love stories and twisted fairytales explore the lives of women--particularly queer women and mothers--and reveal the monsters lurking in our daily lives: the madness, isolation, betrayals, and regrets that arise as we seek human connection.Through this collection, readers are taken to places where the sun never sets, where cornfields rustle ominously and sleepwalkers prowl the night. In "Weekend," the lead actors of an avant-garde television show begin to confuse their characters' identities with their own; in "Go West, and Grow Up," a young girl living in a car with her mother is forced to shed her innocence too soon; and in "Safekeeping," a woman trapped inside a futuristic safehouse gradually unravels as she waits for her lover, who may never return.With exquisite prose and transfixing imagery, Joffre explores worlds both strange and familiar, homing in on the darker side of humanity. Powerful, unsettling, and wildly imaginative, Night Beast is a mind-bending, genre-hopping debut, a provocative and uncommonly raw examination of relationships and sexuality, trauma and redemption, the meaning of family, and coming-of-age--and growing old--as an outsider.

    The Honourable Aubrey Fanshawe, second son of an earl, is Society. They have nothing in common, until a casual encounter leads to a crisis.  Aubrey isn’t looking for love. He already has it, in his long-term clandestine relationship with Lord and Lady Hernedale. And Lucien is the last man Aubrey should want. He’s a commoner, raised in service, socially unacceptable. Worse, he writes for a disreputable, gossip-hungry newspaper. Aubrey can’t afford to trust him when arrest and disgrace are just a breath away. Lucien doesn’t trust nobs. Painful experience has taught him that working people simply don’t count to them. Years ago, he turned his back on a life of luxury so his future wouldn’t depend on an aristocrat’s whim. Now, thanks to Aubrey, he’s becoming entangled in the risky affairs of the upper classes, antagonising people who could destroy him with a word. Aubrey and Lucien have too much to hide—and too much between them to ignore. Rejecting the strict rules and closed doors of Edwardian society might lead them both to ruin… but happiness and integrity alike demand it.  An Edwardian Romance.

     Hit the road with this anthology of trucking horror fiction!

    And sometimes there isn't.Summer, 1993. Claire has been dumped in rural Indianola, Texas, to spend her whole vacation taking care of mean, sickly Grammy. There's nothing too remarkable about Indianola: it's run-down, shabby, and stifling hot, a pin-dot on the Gulf Coast.Well, there is one remarkable thing, she discovers. Something otherworldly.But if you leave Indianola, you forget about it... and if you stay, you have to live with it every day.Because there's a confluence of energies at Indianola, a fissure in time and space, a gap in reality. Nothing is as it seems. And unless Claire can figure out this town--the talkative lizards under the pecan trees; the honey-sweet but terrifying girl next door; the cute daughter of a powerful family, who would answer Claire's questions if she had any answers; the pervasive sense of history coming unspooled, like a video tape--she might never leave.

    And when a face in the mirror confronts her with a dire warning, she realizes her life is at risk. Has she awakened a curse—or been struck by madness? “Queen Joanna” presents a haunting twist on the legend of Bloody Mary. This short story originally appeared in the From the Indie Side anthology.

    Their home. Her sanctuary. When Prue Bridgewater first glimpses the abandoned old house, it's love at first sight. Her husband Ray is not so sure. The property has been neglected for decades, and Ray can’t help wondering why. But with Prue on the brink of a nervous breakdown, he’ll do whatever it takes to keep her sane, even if it means he has to live there. Once ensconced in their new home, Prue begins fixing up the place while Ray is away at work. But after a series of disturbing discoveries, she fears she's losing her mind. She hears things and sees people who couldn’t possibly be there, and she can’t shake the feeling she’s being watched. As Prue’s hold on reality begins to disintegrate, along with her marriage, she struggles to tell truth from delusion. But things go from bad to worse, and soon not just her sanity, but her survival hinges upon the long-buried secrets of THE HOUSE. This is a novella of approximately 27,287 words

    Exiled to Canada for seven years, he has to find a job to pay his bills. For reasons he refuses to reveal, Mordred decides “Software Engineer” has a nice ring to it. And though experience with “killing the Once and Future King, my father” and “that time in feudal Japan” makes for a poor résumé, he is hired by a small tech startup in Toronto.In the midst of dealing with a crippling caffeine addiction and learning C++, Mordred thinks he has finally found someone to anchor him to the world of the living: Alan, the company’s offsite lead developer. Except that Alan might not be a "living" entity at all—he may, in fact, be the world's first strong AI. Or a demon that mistook a Windows install for the highway to Hell. Or, just maybe, the ghost of Alan Turing, currently inhabiting a laptop.Mordred's attempts to figure out his love life are hampered by constant interference from the Inquisitors of the Securitates Arcanarum, corporate espionage, real espionage, a sysadmin bent on enslaving the world, and Marketing's demands that Mordred ship software to the Russian Federation. Then Alan gets himself kidnapped. To save him, Mordred must ally himself with the company’s CEO, who will stop at nothing to rescue her lead developer so he can get back to work. But the Prince doesn’t just want to rescue Alan, he wants a Happily Ever After—and he will travel beyond Death itself to get one.Too bad Alan is perfectly happy as a computer.

    . .In the cathedral city of Strasbourg in the years before the French Revolution, a church restorer is commissioned to paint a series of portraits that chart the changing appearance of a beautiful woman over the course of her life, although the woman herself seems ageless . . .In Prohibition-era New York, an idealistic young Marxist is catapulted into the realms of elite society, and forced to assume the identity of someone who never existed . . .Red Snow is a novel of love and violence, ideas and dreams, and revolves around the mystery of a monster drawn from humanity's darkest myths which still somehow survives, and thrives, and kills, in this modern age.

    It was once an asylum for the mentally ill, where therapies were thinly veiled tortures, and the afflicted rarely recovered. But the institution's most notorious incident occurred when the patients turned against their captors, setting many of the buildings on fire, and killing numerous staff members. For nearly twenty years it sat vacant before its reconstruction to house criminals...Tim Saget is fresh from the correctional officers' training facility as the newest recruit to walk the halls of The Hill. But he's been there before - in disturbing dreams that have him wandering through the building's eerie corridors. Even stranger is the increasingly erratic behavior of the inmates, who appear to be suffering varying degrees of madness.As a dense, suffocating fog rolls in to enshroud the facility, Tim begins to uncover The Hill's darkest secrets - one more horrific than the next. It is now terrifyingly clear that the prisoners are channeling the spirits of the patients who once lived there. They want freedom just as much as their human hosts do - and they believe Tim is their key...

    

    Not thinking about what might be lurking in the shadows, he soon finds out that you are never truly alone in the woods.

    for New Orleans, but when he walks into a burned out Garden District mansion, he discovers there are some things he can't outrun. The spooks can find him anywhere. As the resident historian for the cable show Haunts and Hoaxes, Professor Adam Morales keeps an open mind about the supernatural. Or that's what he tells himself, until he meets a man who puts that principle to the test. Noel's smart, sexy, and has killer cop instincts. One glance from his bedroom eyes has Adam ready to believe anything. But is Noel haunted, crazy, or just another hoax?

    Even better than the promise of new knowledge is the unexpected connection he forges with Dr. Armin Savage-Hall, leader of the team brought down to study the thing.For Armin, the object is the find of a lifetime. It could prove his controversial theories and secure his scientific reputation. And Mo is a fascinating bonus.Then crew members start behaving strangely. Worse, they start to change: their eyes glow purple, their teeth sharpen. Then the violence begins, the brutal deaths. As BathyTech descends deeper into chaos, the surviving crew works desperately to find the cause of the horrors around them. What they uncover could annihilate the human race. And they can’t stop it.

    Two days before Christmas, he sees the new librarian’s car in a ditch and knows he can’t leave him on the road, but it’s too late to take him back to town. He’ll have something he’s never had in his cabin in the ten years that’s he’s lived there…company.The Book Nerd from the CityAdam Parker moved to the small community to make big changes in his life, but being snowbound with the bearded lumberjack in his rustic cabin was something he’d thought only existed in his fantasies. Simon pushes away anyone who wants to get close to him, but Adam sees what he’s hiding in his heart and he wants it. Badly.A Christmas to RememberAdam smells like cinnamon and redemption and Simon aches to run his fingers over the scrape of stubble on his cheeks. To pull him into a kiss. To reignite feelings he’d denied himself for too long. Life is right there, blazing in the eyes of the town librarian. A man who isn’t afraid of him. But he learned long ago that everything he touches gets tainted, and he’ll do anything to keep his darkness away from Adam’s light.But Adam has something else on his side—he’s been a very good boy this year and all he wants for Christmas is Simon.

    She’s happy—or is at least she’s willing to tell herself she is.But when a relationship from the past resurfaces, it throws Evelyn’s world into turmoil. Suddenly she finds herself tempted in a way she hasn’t thought about in years.Evelyn wants to do the right thing—but she wants to follow her heart more.As her passion and desires intensify, she’s forced to weigh the cost of stepping out of her old life and into the arms of a new lover—and decide whether she’s willing to lose the things she thought she held dear to reunite with the person she thought she’d lost forever.A riveting page-turner about burning desires and secret passions, Out of Bounds is a smoldering romance that will delight hot-blooded women of all ages.