Get married. Buy a house. Cut off your hands and replace them with gardening tools. Dig a hole. Can you hear the worms calling? Keep digging.

    It is a sad city, the saddest of cities, a place so utterly depressing that even their ales are brewed with the most sorrow-filled tears. They built it on the back of a colossal mountain-sized animal, where its woeful citizens live like human fleas within the hairy, pulsing landscape. And those tasked with keeping the city in a state of constant melancholy are the Stressmen-a team of professional sadness-makers who are perpetually striving to invent new ways of causing absolute misery. But for the Stressman known as Fernando Mendez, creating grief hasn't been so easy as of late. His ideas aren't effective anymore. His treatments are more likely to induce happiness than sadness. And if he wants to get back in the game, he's going to have to relearn the true meaning of despair.Like "James and the Giant Peach" combined with one of David Cronenberg's early body horror films, "The Tick People" is a charming children's fable that quickly devolves into a grotesque sexual nightmare.

    A sort of new and bizarre Tomás Rivera, Rios is able to blend the familiar of the domestic with the all the wilderness of the universe. Her stories will grab you in places you didn’t know you had, take you by those places to where you’ve always wanted to go—though you never knew how to get there. Buy this book and enjoy that journey.” —Brian Allen Carr “In The Pulse between Dimensions and the Desert, Rios de la Luz’s writing is electric and alive. It grabs you and pulls you into her universe, one that is both familiar and foreign, a place where Martians find love, bad guys get their ears cut off, and time travel agents save lost children. In this innovative, heartfelt debut, de la Luz takes her place as a young author that demands to be read and watched.” —Juliet Escoria

    From kidnapping to bank robbing, pursuing rainbow trout to unspeakable monsters, from the deserts of Texas to the desolate forests of Oregon, Our Love Will Go the Way of the Salmon is about the extreme measures people take to recapture the ones that got away.

    But with the master storyteller Josh Malerman as your tour guide, you'll discover the secrets that hide behind its closed doors. These six novellas tell the story of a place where the rain is always falling, nighttime is always near, and your darkest fears and desires await. Welcome to Goblin. . . .A Man in Slices: A man proves his "legendary love" to his girlfriend with a sacrifice even more daring than Vincent van Gogh's--and sends her more than his heart.Kamp: Walter Kamp is afraid of everything, but most afraid of being scared to death. As he sets traps around his home to catch the ghosts that haunt him, he learns that nothing is more terrifying than fear itself.Happy Birthday, Hunter!: A famed big-game hunter is determined to capture--and kill--the ultimate prey: the mythic Great Owl who lives in Goblin's dark forests. But this mysterious creature is not the only secret the woods are keeping.Presto: All Peter wants is to be like his hero, Roman Emperor, the greatest magician in the world. When the famous magician comes to Goblin, Peter discovers that not all magic is just an illusion.A Mix-Up at the Zoo: The new zookeeper feels a mysterious kinship with the animals in his care . . . and finds that his work is freeing dark forces inside him.The Hedges: When his wife dies, a man builds a hedge maze so elaborate no one ever solves it--until a little girl resolves to be the first to find the mysteries that wait at its heart.

    The following list is a compilation of suggested actions you can execute to ruin your life. This is not a guarantee for complete destruction of your current social status, family affairs, and or friendships. Reader discretion is advised.1. Live your life exactly how you want.2. Disregard any advice or concern from family or friends.3. Move far away from everyone you know.4. Meet a mysterious stranger and let them into your home.5. Chase after the stranger and enter a microcosm of your own making.6. Revisit all the people you have wronged.And remember: This book is not about you.

    A cup full of tentacles mixed with existential nihilism and sprinkled with liberal quantities of gore, this is Lovecraftian horror with a bloody bent that few others have dared to explore. --Peter Rawlik, author of ReanimatorsThey called it the Event.The Event changed everything. The earthquakes came first, including the Big One, shattering the Pacific Rim and plunging the world into chaos. Then the seas came, the skies opened, and the never-ending rain began. But as bad as that was, there is something worse.The Rising has begun.A lone man who abandoned the world for his addictions searches a waterlogged Austin for something, anything to cling to. Little does he know that something else searches for him.In the Sonoran Desert, the downtrodden of the world search for a better life north of the border, only to see the desert become an ocean: an ocean that takes life and gives death.In the woods of Alabama, survivors escape to Fort Resistance, but soon discover that it isn't just the horrors of the deep places of the world that they need to fear; but rather a new and more deadly pestilence that has grown in their own ranks.In England, it's too late to fight, and all that's left is to survive. One man reaches for his own humanity, but what to do when humanity is an endangered species?And in the Pacific, He is rising.In The Abyssal Plain: The R'lyeh Cycle, authors William Holloway, Michelle Garza and Melissa Lason, Brett J. Talley, and Rich Hawkins have created a timely and uniquely modern reimagining of the Cthulhu Mythos.

    He thought he had one—or many—but that might be the result of the failing memories of the personalities imprinted within him. Or maybe he really is called X.He’s also not as human as he believes himself to be.But when he discovers the existence of another—above ground, outside the protection of the Warren—X must learn what it means to be human, or face the destruction of their two species.

    A war breaks out over greeting cards. A suicidal amputee tries to kill himself. William S. Burroughs becomes an amateur archaeologist and Tao Lin drinks an ape-flavored smoothie.Between a breakfast of clocks, a lunch date with Adolf Hitler, and breakdancing in outer space, anything is possible in the work of Bradley Sands. Just never wear a bear costume to an orgy.Praise for Sorry I Ruined Your Orgy:"Nothing I could dream up compares to the strangeness and wildness of Sorry I Ruined Your Orgy. You should read this book." - SHANE JONES, author of Light Boxes"Words cannot express what Bradley Sands can do with words. Every page in this book is shocking, hilarious, sad and surprising. Reading it is like crowd-surfing a bookstore full of basketball players on MDMA." - MYKLE HANSEN, author of HELP! A Bear is Eating Me!"Sorry I Ruined Your Orgy is like an Adult Swim show written by Russell Edson." - CARLTON MELLICK III, author of The Faggiest Vampire"A new strange amusement." - DENVER EXAMINER

    His selection was vast, and all models were stamped MADE IN HEAVEN.Under the watchful glare of a giant eyeball in the sky, Ralph walks door to door selling dildos. He doesn't know why he sells dildos, but he does know that with each house, and each strange customer, he moves closer to solving the mystery of the eternal dildo curse.A nightmare comedy about destiny, faith, and sex toys, The Traveling Dildo Salesman is another classic from Kevin L. Donihe, the Wonderland Award-winning author of House of Houses and Night of the Assholes.This edition also features Donihe's most lurid and infamous short stories: Milky Agitation, Two-Way Santa, The Helen Mower, Living Room Zombies, and Revenge of the Living Masturbation Rag.

    LeVoit knows how to seduce you with a lullaby when she's going for blood." --Danger Slater, author of Puppet Skin"It is masterful, it is beautiful and awful, it is sweepingly and breathtakingly artistic, the impact of seeing some great natural wonder or work of art for the first time." --The Horror Fiction Review"Revelatory, gut-punching, brilliantly anarchic perfection." --J David Osborne, author of Black Gum

    Monique learns that the hard way after her girlfriend Donna vanishes without a trace. Only after the disappearances of several other impoverished women does Monique hear the rumors. A taloned monster stalks the city’s underground and snatches victims into the dark.Donna isn’t missing. She was taken.To save the woman she loves, Monique must descend deeper than the known underground, into a subterranean world of enigmatic cultists and shadowy creatures. But what she finds looms beyond her wildest fears—a darkness that stretches from the dawn of time and across the stars.

    P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe." Ghosts, murderers, monsters, and more lurk within the pages of It Came from Anomaly Flats!"Scary as hell!""Creepy and brilliant.""A true resurrection of classic American horror writing!""Another triumph!"The oddest little town in the Midwest has a thousand demented stories to tell...some of them are horrifying enough to send shivers down the strongest of spines. There’s the tale of a man whose utter fear of germs sends him plummeting to the depths of depravity, and the victims he takes with him; the story of a couple escaping Missouri to fulfill their California dreams who take an innocent detour and find themselves trapped in the most unexpected of nightmares instead; the legend of a demonic creature who thrives on human flesh, which may be more reality than fiction. In this first collected volume of chill-inducing stories from everyone’s favorite transdimensional town, you’ll find reason enough to question your own sanity, even as you try to reassure yourself that things like this only happen in stories.Don’t they? Welcome to Anomaly Flats.How loud can you scream?

    Blissed out club kids dying at the speed of sound. The un-dead and the very soon-to-be-dead. They're all here, trying to claw their way free. From the radioactive streets of a war-scarred future, where the nuclear bombs have become self-aware, to the fallow fields of Nebraska where the kids are mainlining lightning bugs, this is a world both alien and intensely human. This is a place where self-discovery involves scalpels and horse tranquilizers; where the doctors are more doped-up than the patients; where obsessive-compulsive acid-freaks have unlocked the gateway to God and can't close the door. This is not a safe place. You can turn back now, or you can head straight into the heart of. the Angel Dust Apocalypse

    Nine misfit academics on an expedition to find the volcryn, a mythic race of intersteller nomads, and the only ship available for this strange quest is the Nightflyer, a cybernetic wonder with a never-seen captain...Nine innocents are about to find themselves in deep space, trapped with an insane murderer who can go anywhere, do anything, and intends to kill them all.