These tales come from the pen of many well-known writers in the field, including Michael Gilbert, Edward Wellen, Edward D. Hack, Bill Bronzini, Lawrence Treat, and Francis Nevins, Jr. Whether it’s “The Unfriendly Neighbor,” or a “Class Reunion,” “A Recipe for Revenge,” or “An Exercise in Insurance,” these stories are sure to keep you up all night, puzzling over their possible solutions. Each one has its own particular and irresistible appeal: an unexpected twist, a delectable puzzle, a devastating revelation, or perhaps even a refreshing display of pernicious spit

    Valente, Dexter Palmer and others KAREN JOY FOWLER, guest editor, is the author of six novels and four short story collections, including We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. She is the winner of the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award, a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, and has won numerous Nebula and World Fantasy awards. JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS, series editor, is the best-selling editor of more than two dozen anthologies, including Brave New Worlds and Wastelands. He is the editor and publisher of the digital magazines Lightspeed and Nightmare and is the editor of John Joseph Adams Books, a new science fiction/fantasy novel imprint from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.Table of Contents:"Meet Me in Iram" by Sofia Samatar"The Game of Smash and Recovery" by Kelly Link"Interesting Facts" by Adam Johnson"Planet Lion" by Catherynne M. Valente"The Apartment Dweller’s Bestiary" by Kij Johnson"By Degrees and Dilatory Time" by S.L. Huang"The Mushroom Queen" by Liz Ziemska"The Daydreamer by Proxy" by Dexter Palmer"Tea Time" by Rachel Swirsky"Headshot" by Julian Mortimer Smith"The Duniazát" by Salman Rushdie"No Placeholder for You, My Love" by Nick Wolven"The Thirteen Mercies" by Maria Dahvana Headley"Lightning Jack’s Last Ride" by Dale Bailey"Things You Can Buy for a Penny" by Will Kaufman"Rat Catcher’s Yellows" by Charlie Jane Anders"The Heat of Us: Notes Toward an Oral History" by Sam J. Miller"Three Bodies at Mitanni" by Seth Dickinson"Ambiguity Machines: an Examination" by Vandana Singh"The Great Silence" by Ted Chiang

    "Gone" and "The Box" were honored with the prestigious Bram Stoker Award. Whether you are already familiar with Ketchum's unique brand of suspense or are experiencing it for the first time, here is a book no aficionado of fear can do without.Contents:1 · Introduction · in 5 · The Rifle · ss Cemetery Dance Win ’95 18 · The Box · ss Cemetery Dance Spr ’94 31 · Mail Order · ss Voices from the Night, ed. John Maclay, Maclay & Associates, 1994 45 · Luck · ss Skull Full of Spurs: A Roundup of Weird Westerns, ed. Jason Bovberg & Kirk Whitham, Dark Highway Press, 2000 56 · The Haunt · ss Cemetery Dance #34, 2001 70 · Megan’s Law · ss Subterranean Gallery, ed. Richard T. Chizmar & William K. Schafer, Subterranean Press, 1999 81 · If Memory Serves · ss Darkside, ed. John Pelan, Darkside Press, 1996 93 · Father and Son · ss, 2000 99 · The Business · ss Murder for Mother, ed. Martin H. Greenberg, Signet, 1994 109 · Mother and Daughter · ss The Spook (online) Aug, 2001 120 · When the Penny Drops · ss The Exit at Toledo Blade Boulevard, Obsidian Books, 1998 133 · Rabid Squirrels in Love · ss Cemetery Dance Spr ’97 143 · Sundays · ss, 2000 153 · Twins · ss * 168 · Amid the Walking Wounded · ss The UFO Files, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, DAW, 1998 183 · The Great San Diego Sleasy Bimbo Massacre · ss The Exit at Toledo Blade Boulevard, Obsidian Books, 1998 202 · The Holding Cell · ss Bizarre Bazaar #2 ’93 216 · The Work · ss, 1997 226 · The Best · ss, 2000 231 · Redemption · ss Night Screams, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Roc, 1996 245 · The Exit at Toledo Blade Boulevard · ss The Exit at Toledo Blade Boulevard, Obsidian Books, 1998 259 · Chain Letter · ss The Exit at Toledo Blade Boulevard, Obsidian Books, 1998 267 · Forever · ss Imagination Fully Dilated 2, ed. Elizabeth Engstrom, IFD Publishing, 2000 281 · Gone · ss October Dreams, ed. Richard Chizmar & Robert Morrish, CD Publications, 2000 288 · Closing Time · na * 331 · The Rose · ss Deadly After Dark, ed. Jeff Gelb & Michael Garrett, Pocket, 1994 348 · The Turning · ss Vampire Detectives, ed. Martin H. Greenberg, DAW, 1995 354 · To Suit the Crime · ss Bizarre Sex & Other Crimes of Passion #1, ed. Stan Tal, Tal Publications ’92 363 · Lines: or Like Franco, Elvis Is Still Dead · ss * 372 · The Visitor · ss The Exit at Toledo Blade Boulevard, Obsidian Books, 1998 380 · Snakes · ss Fear Itself, ed. Jeff Gelb, Warner, 1995 400 · Firedance · ss Imagination Fully Dilated, ed. Alan M. Clark & Elizabeth Engstrom, CD Publications, 1998 413 · Afterword · aw

    These short stories examine the world of unwinding in a way we haven’t seen before, providing a fresh framework, new characters, and a different take on some events.With UnBound, Shusterman’s fans can continue to get caught up in the world he has created in this “gripping, brilliantly imagined futuristic thriller” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

    Told by individual inhabitants, the stories recount tales of disappearing dead deer, enchanted gardens, invisible killer dogs, and rattlesnakes that fall from the sky; each contribution adds to a composite portrait that skitters between eerie, ghoulish, and poignant. Miller is a master storyteller, clearly delighting in his mischievous creations.” Thirty-Three Tales. Thirty-Three Tellers. One Lost Town.

    In the big white house on the hill angels are said to appear. A forgotten tenant in an isolated building becomes addicted to milk. A strange goddess is worshipped by a home-invading disciple. The least remembered gods still haunt the oldest forests. Cannibalism occurs in high society at the end of the world. The sainted undead follow their prophet to the Great Dead Sea. A confused and vengeful presence occupies the home of a first-time buyer . . . In ghastly harmony with the nightmarish visions of the award-winning writer's novels, these stories blend a lifelong appreciation of horror culture with the grotesque fascinations and childlike terrors that are the author's own. Adam Nevill's best early horror stories are collected here for the first time.

    A superbly crafted collection of thirteen tightly plotted tales that treats readers to murder, mystery, and mayhem in the world of horseracing.Notes on the racecard --Raid at Kingdom Hall --Dead on red --Song for Mona --Bright white star --collision course --Nightmare --Carrot for a chestnut --Gift --Spring fever --Blind chance --Corkscrew --Day of the losers --Haig's death

    In Like A Charm, the cream of British and American crime writers combine for a must-have collection. From nineteenth-century Georgia, where the bracelet is forged in fire, to wartime Leeds, a steam train across Europe, the violent backstreets of 1980s Scotland, present-day London, a Manhattan taxi, the Mojave desert and back to Georgia, each writer weaves a gripping story of murder, betrayal and intrigue.

    They argue, they laugh, and they tell their stories. Some tell their own stories, some tell stories they have heard elsewhere. Some of them are true, some are not. But each tale draws you closer.One by one, the storytellers depart, until suddenly it's just you and the narrator, alone in the dark...

    And no story about a young writer struggling to launch his career ever matched its subject matter better than the tale behind Leonard's Western oeuvre.In 1950, fresh out of college -- having written two "pointless" stories, as he describes them -- Leonard decided he needed to pick a market, a big one, which would give him a better chance to be published while he learned to write. In choosing between crime and Westerns, the latter had an irresistible pull -- Leonard loved movies set in the West. As he researched deeper into settings, Arizona in the 1880s captured his imagination: the Spanish influence, the standoffs and shootouts between Apache Indians and the U.S. cavalry ...His first dozen stories sold for 2 cents a word, for $100 each. The rest is history.This first-ever complete collection of Leonard's thirty Western tales will thrill lovers of the genre, his die-hard fans, and everyone in between -- and makes a terrific study of the launch of a phenomenal career.From his very first story ever published -- "The Trail of the Apache" -- through five decades of classic Western tales, The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard demonstrates again and again the superb talent for language and gripping narrative that has made Leonard one of the most acclaimed and influential writers of our time.

    Enter a world of mystics and unicorns, angels and kings -- all realized with the same dazzling style and imagination that has made Stephen R. Donaldson a modern master of the fantasy genre.Daughter of Regals is a fantasy novella concerning a unique royal line and an unusual conception of magic.The Conqueror Worm is a deliciously creepy "horror" piece in which havoc is wreaked by one lowly centipede.Ser Visal's Tale begins as a simple story told over several flagons of wine at the local inn, this novella ends with a surprising twist.Gilden-Fire is the famous chapter about Korik of the Bloodguard and his mission to Seareach that was part of the original manuscript of The Illearth War, but omitted from the published version.

    Henry Jekyll discovers a monster.This spine-chilling thriller is a terrifying study of the duality of man's nature, and it is the book which established Stevenson's reputation as a writer.Also included in this volume is Stevenson's collection of short stories The Merry Men containing two other sinister tales Markheim and Thrawn Janet.

    My sister was not most little girls.Inside you'll experience intimate first hand accounts of modern day murders, kidnappings, and violent revenge. Other stories are heart-warming with whimsical mysteries, gothic fairy tales, and supernatural monstrosities.

    A long forgotten oath. A town with a deadly secret. Something sinister is at work in Hyde River, an isolated mining town in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest. Something evil. Under the cover of darkness, a predator strikes without warning--taking life in the most chilling and savage fashion.The community of Hyde River watches in terror as residents suddenly vanish. Yet the more locals are pressed for information, the more they close ranks, sworn to secrecy by their forefathers' hidden sins.Only when Hyde River's secrets are exposed is the true extent of the danger fully revealed. What the town discovers is something far more deadly than anything they'd imagined. Something that doesn't just stalk its victims, but has the power to turn hearts black with decay as it slowly fills their souls with darkness.

    Why, she asks, when writers such as Samuel Clemens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Saul Bellow, and John Updike have among them written hundreds of short stories, do anthologists settle on the same two or three titles by each author again and again? Isn't the implicit promise of an anthology that it will, or aspires to, present something different, unexpected? In The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, Joyce Carol Oates offers a sweeping survey of American short fiction, in a collection of fifty-six tales that combines classic works with many different, unexpected gems, and that invites readers to explore a wealth of important pieces by women and minority writers. Some selections simply can't be improved on, Oates admits, and she happily includes such time-honored works as Irving's Rip Van Winkle, Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, and Hemingway's A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. But alongside these classics, Oates introduces such little-known stories as Mark Twain's Cannibalism in the Cars, a story that reveals a darker side to his humor (That morning we had Morgan of Alabama for breakfast. He was one of the finest men I ever sat down to...a perfect gentleman, and singularly juicy). From Melville come the juxtaposed tales The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids, of which Oates says, Only Melville could have fashioned out of 'real' events...such harrowing and dreamlike allegorical fiction. From Flannery O'Connor we find A Late Encounter With the Enemy, and from John Cheever, The Death of Justina, one of Cheever's own favorites, though rarely anthologized. The reader will also delight in the range of authors found here, from Charles W. Chesnutt, Jean Toomer, and Sarah Orne Jewett, to William Carlos Williams, Kate Chopin, and Zora Neale Hurston. Contemporary artists abound, including Bharati Mukherjee and Amy Tan, Alice Adams and David Leavitt, Bobbie Ann Mason and Tim O'Brien, Louise Erdrich and John Edgar Wideman. Oates provides fascinating introductions to each writer, blending biographical information with her own trenchant observations about their work, plus a long introductory essay, in which she offers the fruit of years of reflection on a genre in which she herself is a master. This then is a book of surprises, a fascinating portrait of American short fiction, as filtered through the sensibility of a major modern writer.