This edition brings together some of the best horror writers from the last few decades. Featuring stories from Ray Garton, Kelley Armstrong, Simon Clark, Gord Rollo, Chad Lutzke, Mike Duke, Christina Bergling, David Owain Hughes, P. Mattern & Kevin J. Kennedy.

    He idolizes Sarah Roberts from afar, and has done so for more than five years. He has studied her pictures, memorized her news clippings and now waits in the dark for the day when he can make Sarah his hostage.A steel cage waits for Sarah, where Elmore has practiced what he will do to her. The other girls he has practiced with now lay discarded, buried about his property. He keeps their fingernails and toenails to roll between his teeth, to savor their strength, to feel the nails weaken and give in, just as his victims do.Elmore has a plan for Sarah, and she walks right into his trap. Sarah Roberts is his hostage and no one knows where they are. In Sarah Roberts Book Four, The Hostage, Sarah is in a fight not just for her freedom, but also her life.The Victim (Sarah Roberts Book Five)In Book Five, Sarah Roberts is The Victim.Sarah is killed in a horrible car accident, the DNA found in the car verified as hers. But the government men at the Sophia Project have faked her death to keep her to themselves.After her funeral, she shows up in the food court of a busy mall where a violent exchange takes place. Things go wrong fast. The people protecting Sarah die within seconds from a mysterious drug. She runs, escaping the clutches of the police who want to figure out her connection to the murderers. A group of men called The Rapturites surface to take responsibility for the carnage. They want Sarah raptured as the end times are upon us. As the police hunt her, and the Rapturites get close, people she loves, old friends who have helped her in the past, start to die around her. Vivian, her sister, watches. Vivian listens. Sarah executes.In Sarah Roberts Book Five, Sarah is The Victim, and there's nothing she can do about it. Except she won't stay dead.The Enigma (Sarah Roberts Book Six)In Book Six, The Enigma, Sarah Roberts heads to Las Vegas, Nevada.Her dead sister has left her a message with two tasks to complete in Vegas. She is supposed to choose a random guy with a cell phone and send a message to a number her sister has supplied. Before she can complete this first task, she notices a man following her. This man begs her, with tears in his eyes, to not send the text.On the west side of Vegas, a man is being tortured. Sarah's second task is to arrive at a certain time to stop it. When she shows up late, people start to die. The man who had followed her also shows up. With people dead at the warehouse, the police want to know what she's doing in Vegas and why she was there.All Sarah wants is to get her bike and leave Las Vegas. But Maxwell Ramsey has a different plan for Sarah. She has entered his territory and intervened in his business. She has cost him money and time as he plans the acquisition of a local casino. For that, Sarah has to be removed.What she doesn't expect are the deep ties to her family and what that means to her now, and in the future.In Book Six, The Enigma, Sarah Roberts is in Vegas gambling with her life and can only make it out alive if she plays her cards right.

    So when this mysterious drifter falls for a beautiful and sensible Iowa farmwoman, he knows full well the perils of getting too close. And yet, for the first time in his miserable existence, life feels normal ... feels real. But as those around him soon realize, reality is not what it seems. For when a tragic accident forces Kain's hand, his astonishing secret—and godlike power—changes their lives, and the world, forever.*** AUTHOR'S WARNING ***VELVET RAIN CONTAINS GRAPHIC VIOLENCE AND PROFANITY

    Their clients are the richest people in the country and they pay a lot of money to stay safe. He works on the outer perimeter of a security team and is one of the best in the business. From running with gangs as a teenager, and with the US Army in Iraq during the surge, he has a unique set of skills to keep his team alive.It was a standard operation, a bread and butter job, get a client from one point to another and back again.Badger works the perimeter as always, and the client is a beautiful young singer, a rising star who is going to a nightclub in the gritty belly of the city after midnight. Everything is going smooth until the convoy is ambushed, and Badger wakes up in the hospital with no memory of what happened.Everyone else in the convoy is dead, the singer is missing, and Badger is a prime suspect.The agency is in trouble, more ruthless than the mob, and they’ll get answers out of him using any means necessary, if they can only get their hands on him.He is on the run from the agency, the kidnappers, and the police, and he has to find the girl, or die trying.

    Not just those you choose to keep from others, or even those that others guard from you. There remains those secrets that you so desperately keep hidden from yourself. They all catch up with Lempi Makinen Lahti.When Lempi's teenage son Danny discovers her suicide, he seeks to solve the mysteries that defined her life and death. A pack of letters and clippings hidden in an old family trunk may be the only keep to understanding both his mother's past and his own future.The Finnish Girl is a richly told tapestry of interwoven characters - the family patriarch who emigrates from Finland to the United States to create his own future, a son who turns his back on his home as part of an ill-fated mission to Russia during the Depression, the elderly mother who faces deportation in an America driven by fear during the Red Scare, and the young Finnish girl who cares too much about the injustices she sees.Decisions in one generation propel another on unexpected paths, until on family's hope for the American dream threaten to be come its nightmare.

    These stories bewitch and transport the reader. Though you may not know where Shipp will travel next, each story is an unforgettable thrill-ride and you'll be glad you took the trip. Shipp's novel Vacation established him as one of the foremost authors in the "bizarro fiction" movement. Now he turns his attention to short fiction and literary horror. The themes of alienation and cultural homogenization on a global scale are explored in closer detail. Shipp notes, "This intimacy makes Sheep and Wolves much darker than its predecessor. Because now, the darkness is invading your homes, your dreams, your lives." The author's trademark quirky characters populate an otherwise bleak landscape, this time around facing horrors at home rather than evils abroad.

    The carnival is about to begin, and the show is to die for... Grab your ticket and take a seat. The ringmaster’s opening act? A creature showcasing its bloody feat.There are haunting spirits with much to tell. Tales of torture and screams straight from the burning flames of hell.Tick-tock goes the time, seconds passing by as you slowly lose your mind.Watch.Wait.Listen.Evil is coming, and it’s striking from behind.Horror and fear, like filth on your skin it clings,Question is, are you brave enough to endure…The Carnival of Strange Things?

    At the heart of each is Angie's daughter, Kaya. Angie's dreams end in death, the spreading of hand-shaped bruises across her daughter's throat. Curtis' dreams end in something else, something closer to obsession than love. Angie is worlds away, trying to keep her drug-shattered mind from falling apart, traveling through an American underbelly filled with inhuman shapes, dark whispers and old friends with empty eyes. Curtis is Kaya's new neighbor. He's getting closer to her, and her mentally unstable grandmother, Colleen. He's had families before, but he'd always made mistakes. Mistakes that led to new names, new towns. But this one time, he swears, things will all work out. He's got so much love to give. Siren Promised Featuring an introduction from author Simon Clark, over thirty illustrations by Alan M. Clark and an afterword by the book's creators, Siren Promised sets a new benchmark in visual and written storytelling.

    The most exciting book yet! More "special" stories, an all-new 'Russell Lee Interview' section and over 50 stories inside! A must-read, extra-special 10th book!

    Secrets dug up from the grave. The truth about vampires has been unearthed. These are the journals of an ageless woman, a hybrid half human, half "Pet Mer," (Sky Gods in ancient Egypt). A blood drinker from the ancients. Their story is scarce told, but Kesi's is all too clear... She appears a delusive goddess, wanting more than anything a family. Unable to bear children, and after the death of her husband, she travels the world searching for a way to share her bloodline ("creating" children, later known as "Vampyre"). She offers aid to those who need her. But her deep desire to have kin of her own blood is not met, until she comes across a Chinese alchemist named Yin - another of her race. Hope for a life with him is banished, however, by his dark desires to destroy all the world's hybrid offspring, to find a "cure" for the "blood drinking aberrations" created by those of his and Kesi's kind. Taking what she needs and leaving behind chaos, Kesi runs, always searching. Her everlasting quest takes her through history, from one continent to the next; from her home in Egypt, to China, Rome, Scotland, and finally France. But she is never able to outrun Yin, and eventually she must face her enemy and the darkness within herself in order to have that which she truly desires. Read her story, learn the truth behind the "myth" of what humans call the vampire, read about Kesi’s unique take on her species and those they create, and discover the mayhem and bloodshed caused by a man determined to put an end to vampires forever.

    The Devil is making his job very difficult. Samuel Harrigan is a murdering low-life who used ancient black magic to escape a deal with the Devil. Now he's on the trail of a crystal skull that he believes will complete his effots to evade Lucifer. But Lucifer wants Samuel's soul for eternity and refuses to wait a second longer for it. Now Isiah must protect Samuel and keep the Devil at bay, because Isiah needs Samuel's search for the skull to continue... ...not for Samuel's sake, but for the sake of all humankind. RealmShift is an engrossing dark fantasy thriller; a fascinating exploration of the nature of belief and its effect on the world. Magic, action, and intrigue, from dank city streets to the depths of hell and beyond.

    

    After the release of three startling, award-winning movies that have played around the world and been added to the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, S. Craig Zahler wanted to return to his first artistic passion―illustration.With tools that he had developed as a director, screenwriter, cinematographer, novelist, and songwriter, he committed himself to writing, drawing, inking, and lettering his graphic novel debut, a full-length work of noir horror entitled, Forbidden Surgeries of the Hideous Dr. Divinus.Here’s the setup…Homeless people are disappearing in New Bastion, and occasionally, a dismantled corpse turns up in a dumpster. These crimes are left alone, until the day a comatose woman named Lillian Driscoll is kidnapped from the hospital. Her brothers―a grumpy detective named Leo and a slick mobster named Tommy―seek answers that lead them to darkness, arcane medicine, and pain.Fans of Bone Tomahawk (recently named best film of the decade by Conan O’Brien) will enjoy Zahler’s return to the supernatural, and the idiosyncratic, tough guy dialogue found in his crime pictures Dragged Across Concrete and Brawl in Cell Block 99 (both of which premiered at the Venice Film Festival) is also present in this starkly rendered, black-and-white graphic novel, a stylistic confluence of pre-code horror, vintage comic strip, and modern indie art styles.

    Unfortunately for the scumbag who killed him, Novak will keep on cracking skulls and breaking bones until he finds the piece of trash that set him up, or is turned into a walking sack of rotten meat. With Undead On Arrival, Justin Robinson gives us a hard boiled zombie tale, and one of the most brutally compellingly examinations of the living dead you’ll ever read.No Cure. No Hope. No Mercy.

    Her religious parents try to fix her disturbing fantasies with prayers and scriptures. But Lili isn't suffering from fantasies, and her family isn't going to be able to save her as she fights for her sanity and for her life. The whispers are real, the nightmares are more than what they seem, and The Being waiting in the shadows wants to pull her into the darkness forever.But reality is much more sinister than any of her nightmares. Lili isn't the only one who hears whispers in the dark. Her parents pray to a god who has abandoned them. The demons do not live in the bible, nor do they hide in the shadows any longer. They are in minds of men. Whispering in their ears, a part of their very souls.The whispers become louder, the nightmares bleed into reality, and this presence refuses to be ignored.A twisted and disturbing journey through the dark side of humanity, The Eighth Day (Vol.1) is an epic tale of extreme horror that will terrorize your waking thoughts and haunt your dreams long after you've turned your last page.