Book picks similar to
The Edge of Running Water by William Sloane
horror
fiction
science-fiction
sci-fi
Blue World
Robert R. McCammon - 1989
From the battlefields of a Vietnam veteran's memory to an old-time movie hero's search for a serial killer, from Halloween in a special town--where the rules of trick-or-treat are written in blood--to a Texas road where a wrong turn leads to a nest of evil, horror master McCammon is at his terrifying best in this collection of stories.
The Fall
Bethany Griffin - 2014
Until she woke up in a coffin.Ushers die young. Ushers are cursed. Ushers can never leave their house, a house that haunts and is haunted, a house that almost seems to have a mind of its own. Madeline’s life—revealed through short bursts of memory—has hinged around her desperate plan to escape, to save herself and her brother. Her only chance lies in destroying the house.In the end, can Madeline keep her own sanity and bring the house down? The Fall is a literary psychological thriller, reimagining Edgar Allan Poe’s classic The Fall of the House of Usher.
Lost Worlds
Clark Ashton Smith - 1944
A close correspondent and collaborator with H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, Smith was widely celebrated as a master by his contemporaries. Back in print for the first time since 1971, Lost Worlds brings together twenty-three of Smith's classic stories, all of which were originally published in Weird Tales. Rather than center his works on heroes, Smith created fantastical worlds around which he built cycles of stories. Included here are tales from the realms of Averoigne, Zothique, Hyperborea, and others. Told in lush poetic prose, these haunting stories bring to life dark, dreamlike realms full of gothic monsters and mortals. Jeff VanderMeer provides an introduction for this Bison Books edition.
Rod Serling's Night Gallery
Rod Serling - 1971
Miraculously, the boat is still afloat--and its only passenger is alive!"Make Me Laugh": Fat, ugly Jackie Slater is a third-rate comic playing the desperation circuit of sleazy nightclubs. Enter Chatterje, the miracle guru. Suddenly, Jackie is a big-time TV comic--but the laughs are tinged with hysteria."Pamela's Voice": Jonathan has ever-so-neatly "disposed" of his nagging, druid-like wife, Pamela. Strange, then, that she should return from the grave in full bloom--and bitchier than ever.PLUS "Does the Name Grimsby Do Anything to You?"--The worst space risk of all: Lunar Insanity... "Clean Kills and Other Trophies"... Father and son play the most dangerous game... and the Emmy Award Nominee "They're Tearing Down Tim Riley's Bar".Don't miss television's most imaginative show -- Rod Serling's Night Gallery
Android Karenina
Ben H. Winters - 2010
Winters is back with an all-new collaborator, legendary Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, and the result is Android Karenina an enhanced edition of the classic love story set in a dystopian world of robots, cyborgs, and interstellar space travel.As in the original novel, our story follows two relationships: the tragic adulterous romance of Anna Karenina and Count Alexei Vronsky, and the much more hopeful marriage of Konstantin Levin and Kitty Shcherbatskaya.These four, yearning for true love, live in a steampunk-inspired 19th century of mechanical butlers, extraterrestrial-worshiping cults, and airborne debutante balls. Their passions alone would be enough to consume them-but when a secret cabal of radical scientific revolutionaries launches an attack on Russian high society's high-tech lifestyle, our heroes must fight back with all their courage, all their gadgets, and all the power of a sleek new cyborg model like nothing the world has ever seen."Filled with the same blend of romance, drama, and fantasy that made the first two Quirk Classics New York Times best sellers, Android Karenina brings this celebrated series into the exciting world of science fiction.
Ring
Kōji Suzuki - 1991
Exactly one week after watching the tape, four teenagers die one after another of heart failure. Asakawa, a hardworking journalist, is intrigued by his niece's inexplicable death. His investigation leads him from a metropolitan tokyo teeming with modern society's fears to a rural Japan--a mountain resort, a volcanic island, and a countryside clinic--haunted by the past. His attempt to solve the tape's mystery before it's too late--for everyone--assumes an increasingly deadly urgency. Ring is a chillingly told horror story, a masterfully suspenseful mystery, and post-modern trip.
The Howling Man
Charles Beaumont - 1992
Beaumont's talents also helped bring to life such cinematic terrors as 'The Premature Burial' and 'The Masque of the Red Death'. As a writer of short stories, his contribution to the landscape of our nightmares is unequalled. The Howling Man is the definitive collection of Beaumont's most haunting work. Here are the classics - "The Hunger," "Miss Gentilbelle," "Free Dirt," along with five never-before-published stories. The Howling Man features introductions by Robert Bloch, Dennis Etchison, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Roger Corman, Richard Matheson and many other masters of horror and dark fantasy. They offer illuminating tributes to Beaumont - as a friend, a colleague, and a man whose dark magic left an indelible stamp on modern horror fiction, and on their own imaginations.
Touch
Claire North - 2015
But when reaching out to the murderer for salvation in those last dying moments, a sudden switch takes place.Now Kepler is looking out through the eyes of the killer himself, staring down at a broken and ruined body lying in the dirt of the alley.Instead of dying, Kepler has gained the ability to roam from one body to another, to jump into another person’s skin and see through their eyes, live their life — be it for a few minutes, a few months or a lifetime.Kepler means these host bodies no harm — and even comes to cherish them intimately like lovers. But when one host, Josephine Cebula, is brutally assassinated, Kepler embarks on a mission to seek the truth — and avenge Josephine’s death.
Technomancer
B.V. Larson - 2012
And then Quentin Draith wakes up in a private sanatorium, severely injured and with no memory of who he is. Are these strange incidents related? And if so, how deadly are the answers?Draith doesn’t know who he is, but after escaping he slowly learns what he is. An investigator and blogger specializing in the supernatural, he begins to piece together his life—and the accident that took away his memories. He discovers that he is a special breed, a person with relatives of great age and power, all of whom mistrust or even hate him. And when he falls under suspicion for a series of murders involving seemingly mundane objects, Quentin’s search for the truth behind his identity becomes a desperate race to clear his name.Bristling with energy and almost unbearable suspense, Technomancer: Unspeakable Things #1 is the first in best-selling author B. V. Larson’s thrilling new series that will draw you to the edge of your seat and chill you to the bone.
The Traveler
John Twelve Hawks - 2005
A world that exists in the shadows of our own. A conflict we will never see. One woman stands between those determined to control history and those who will risk their lives for freedom.A world that exists in the shadows of our own.A conflict we will never see.One woman stands between those determined to control history and those who will risk their lives for freedom.Maya is hiding in plain sight in London. The twenty-six-year-old has abandoned the dangerous obligations pressed upon her by her father, and chosen instead to live a normal life. But Maya comes from a long line of people who call themselves Harlequins—a fierce group of warriors willing to sacrifice their lives to protect a select few known as Travelers.Gabriel and Michael Corrigan are brothers living in Los Angeles. Since childhood, the young men have been shaped by stories that their late father was a Traveler, one of a small band of prophets who have vastly influenced the course of history. Travelers are able to attain pure enlightenment, and have for centuries ushered change into the world. Gabriel and Michael, who may have inherited their father's gifts, have always protected themselves by living “off the Grid”—that is, invisible to the real-life surveillance networks that monitor people in our modern society.Summoned by her ailing father, Maya is told of the existence of the brothers. The Corrigans are in severe danger, stalked by powerful men known as the Tabula—ruthless mercenaries who have hunted Travelers for generations. This group is determined to inflict order on the world by controlling it, and they view Travelers as an intolerable threat. As Maya races to California to protect the brothers, she is reluctantly pulled back into the cold and solitary Harlequin existence. A colossal battle looms—one that will reveal not only the identities of Gabriel and Michael Corrigan but also a secret history of our time.Moving from the back alleys of Prague to the heart of Los Angeles, from the high deserts of Arizona to a guarded research facility in New York, The Traveler explores a parallel world that exists alongside our own. John Twelve Hawks' stunningly suspenseful debut is an international publishing sensation that marks the arrival of a major new talent.
Contagion
Erin Bowman - 2018
It got in usAfter receiving an urgent SOS from a work detail on a distant planet, a skeleton crew is dispatched to perform a standard search-and-rescue mission.Most are dead.But when the crew arrives, they find an abandoned site, littered with rotten food, discarded weapons...and dead bodies.Don't set foot here again.As they try to piece together who—or what—could have decimated an entire operation, they discover that some things are best left buried—and some monsters are only too ready to awaken.
Cold Storage
David Koepp - 2019
He contained it and buried it in cold storage deep beneath a little-used military repository.Now, after decades of festering in a forgotten sub-basement, the specimen has found its way out and is on a lethal feeding frenzy. Only Diaz knows how to stop it.He races across the country to help two unwitting security guards—one an ex-con, the other a single mother. Over one harrowing night, the unlikely trio must figure out how to quarantine this horror again. All they have is luck, fearlessness, and a mordant sense of humor. Will that be enough to save all of humanity?
Reaper's Run
David VanDyke - 2013
But the breakthrough that heals her war injuries is exactly what the government desperately wants to hide - by any means necessary. Hunted, she must cross an America wracked by strife, to try to find a family who may already be dead.Reaper's Run is an origins story and apocalyptic novel, the beginning of one warrior's journey from tactical cop to freedom fighter and beyond. It leads the reader into the acclaimed Plague Wars science fiction series.This book contains a bonus post-apocalyptic novella by prolific author Ryan King.The Plague Wars Series:- The Eden Plague- Reaper's Run- The Demon Plagues- The Reaper Plague- The Orion Plague- Comes the Destroyer - Plague Wars #5, forthcoming Summer 2013Stellar Conquest Series:- Planetary Assault - contains First Conquest: Stellar Conquest Book 1- Desolator: Book 2- Tactics of Conquest: Book 3 (Fall 2013)PG-13 for language, violence and adult situations (non-explicit)See more from this author at davidvandykeauthor.comThis book is free of Digital Rights Management (DRM)
77 Shadow Street
Dean R. Koontz - 2011
I live in the Pendleton as surely as I live everywhere. I am the Pendleton’s history and its destiny. The building is my place of conception, my monument, my killing ground. . . .The Pendleton stands on the summit of Shadow Hill at the highest point of an old heartland city, a Gilded Age palace built in the late 1800s as a tycoon’s dream home. Almost from the beginning, its grandeur has been scarred by episodes of madness, suicide, mass murder, and whispers of things far worse. But since its rechristening in the 1970s as a luxury apartment building, the Pendleton has been at peace. For its fortunate residents—among them a successful songwriter and her young son, a disgraced ex-senator, a widowed attorney, and a driven money manager—the Pendleton’s magnificent quarters are a sanctuary, its dark past all but forgotten.But now inexplicable shadows caper across walls, security cameras relay impossible images, phantom voices mutter in strange tongues, not-quite-human figures lurk in the basement, elevators plunge into unknown depths. With each passing hour, a terrifying certainty grows: Whatever drove the Pendleton’s past occupants to their unspeakable fates is at work again. Soon, all those within its boundaries will be engulfed by a dark tide from which few have escaped.Dean Koontz transcends all expectations as he takes readers on a gripping journey to a place where nightmare visions become real—and where a group of singular individuals hold the key to humanity’s destiny. Welcome to 77 Shadow Street.