Comfort Me with Apples


Catherynne M. Valente - 2021
    Her perfect husband. She can feel it in her bones. He is perfect. Their home together in Arcadia Gardens is perfect. Everything is perfect.It's just that he's away so much. So often. He works so hard. She misses him. And he misses her. He says he does, so it must be true. He is the perfect husband and everything is perfect.But sometimes Sophia wonders about things. Strange things. Dark things. The look on her husband's face when he comes back from a long business trip. The questions he will not answer. The locked basement she is never allowed to enter. And whenever she asks the neighbors, they can't quite meet her gaze...But everything is perfect. Isn't it?

Starr Creek


Nathan Carson - 2016
    Set in 1986 rural Oregon, Starr Creek features Heavy Metal teens, Christian biker gangs, and hopped up kids on 3-wheeled ATVs. They all collide when strange occurrences unveil an alien world inhabiting the Oregon woods.

The Vegan Revolution... with Zombies


David Agranoff - 2010
    Hipsters can now enjoy bacon without guilt. Thanks to a new miracle drug the cute little pig no longer feels a thing as she is led to the slaughter. The only problem? Once the drug enters the food supply anyone who eats it is infected. From fast food burgers to free-range organic eggs, eating animal products turns people into shambling brain-dead zombies - not even vegetarians are safe! In Portland, Oregon, vegans, freegans, abolitionists, hardliners and raw fooders have holed up in Food Fight, one of the country's premier vegan grocery stores at the vegan mini-mall. There they must prepare for their final battle to take back the city from the hordes of roaming undead. Will vegans filet the flesh-eaters or will they become zombie chow? When there's no more meat in hell, the vegans will walk the earth.

Waking the Moon


Elizabeth Hand - 1994
    John the Divine. It is a strange place of brooding shrines and gleaming towers, guarded by stone angels. For Sweeney, college is a time to experiment with sex, to explore new friendships. It is a time of freedom and discovery--until she makes the wrong discovery.

The King in Yellow and Other Horror Stories


Robert W. Chambers - 1970
    A treasured source used by almost all the significant writers in the American pulp tradition — H. P. Lovecraft, A. Merritt, Robert E. Howard, and many others — it endures as a work of remarkable power and one of the most chillingly original books in the genre.This collection reprints all the supernatural stories from The King in Yellow, including the grisly "Yellow Sign," the disquieting "Repairer of Reputations," the tender "Demoiselle d'Ys," and others. Robert W. Chambers' finest stories from other sources have also been added, such as the thrilling "Maker of Moons" and "The Messenger." In addition, an unusual pleasure awaits those who know Chambers only by his horror stories: three of his finest early biological science-fiction fantasies from In Search of the Unknown appear here as well.

North American Lake Monsters


Nathan Ballingrud - 2013
    Monsters, real and imagined, external and internal, are the subject. They are us and we are them and Ballingrud's intense focus makes these stories incredibly intense and irresistible.These are love stories. And also monster stories. Sometimes these are monsters in their traditional guises, sometimes they wear the faces of parents, lovers, or ourselves. The often working-class people in these stories are driven to extremes by love. Sometimes, they are ruined; sometimes redeemed. All are faced with the loneliest corners of themselves and strive to find an escape.Nathan Ballingrud was born in Massachusetts but has spent most of his life in the South. He worked as a bartender in New Orleans and New York City and a cook on offshore oil rigs. His story "The Monsters of Heaven" won the inaugural Shirley Jackson Award. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with his daughter.

Bigfoot Crank Stomp


Erik Williams - 2013
    The whole time I was reading it I was PISSED that I hadn't thought of it."--EDWARD LEE, author of HAUNTER OF THE THRESHOLD and HEADERBigfoot is real and he's addicted to meth!It should have been so easy. Get in, kill everyone, and take all the money and drugs. That was Russell and Mickey's plan. But the drug den they were raiding in the middle of the woods holds a dark secret chained up in the basement. A beast filled with rage and methamphetamine and tonight it will break loose.Nothing can stop a sasquatch on a drug-fueled rampage. And before the sun rises, there is going to be a lot of dead cops and junkies.

The Ghost Pirates


William Hope Hodgson - 1909
    . . is a powerful account of a doomed and haunted ship on its last voyage, and of the terrible sea-devils (of quasi-human aspect, and perhaps the spirits of bygone buccaneers) that besiege it and finally drag it down to an unknown fate. With its command of maritime knowledge, and its clever selection of hints and incidents suggestive of latent horrors in nature, this book at times reaches enviable peaks of power." -- H.P. Lovecraft

My Best Friend's Exorcism


Grady Hendrix - 2016
    But when they arrive at high school, things change. Gretchen begins to act….different. And as the strange coincidences and bizarre behavior start to pile up, Abby realizes there’s only one possible explanation: Gretchen, her favorite person in the world, has a demon living inside her. And Abby is not about to let anyone or anything come between her and her best friend. With help from some unlikely allies, Abby embarks on a quest to save Gretchen. But is their friendship powerful enough to beat the devil?

White Is for Witching


Helen Oyeyemi - 2009
    Lily is gone and her twins, Miranda and Eliot, and her husband, the gentle Luc, mourn her absence with unspoken intensity. All is not well with the house, either, which creaks and grumbles and malignly confuses visitors in its mazy rooms, forcing winter apples in the garden when the branches should be bare. Generations of women inhabit its walls. And Miranda, with her new appetite for chalk and her keen sense for spirits, is more attuned to them than she is to her brother and father. She is leaving them slowly -Slipping away from them -And when one dark night she vanishes entirely, the survivors are left to tell her story."Miri I conjure you "This is a spine-tingling tale that has Gothic roots but an utterly modern sensibility. Told by a quartet of crystalline voices, it is electrifying in its expression of myth and memory, loss and magic, fear and love.

The Willows


Algernon Blackwood - 1907
    Throughout the story Blackwood personifies the surrounding environment—river, sun, wind—and imbues them with a powerful and ultimately threatening character. Most ominous are the masses of dense, desultory, menacing willows, which "moved of their own will as though alive, and they touched, by some incalculable method, my own keen sense of the horrible.""The Willows" is one of Algernon Blackwood's best known short stories. American horror author H.P. Lovecraft considered it to be the finest supernatural tale in English literature. "The Willows" is an example of early modern horror and is connected within the literary tradition of weird fiction.

The Tomb


H.P. Lovecraft - 1917
    P. Lovecraft written in June 1917 and first published in the March 1922 issue of The Vagrant. It is the first work of fiction that Lovecraft wrote as an adult."The Tomb" tells of Jervas Dudley, a self-confessed day-dreamer. While still a child, he discovers the entrance to a mausoleum, belonging to the family Hyde, whose nearby family mansion had burnt down many years previously. The entrance to the mausoleum is padlocked and slightly ajar. Jervas attempts to break the padlock, but is unable. Dispirited, he takes to sleeping beside the tomb. Eventually, inspired by reading Plutarch's Lives, Dudley decides to patiently wait until it is his time to gain entrance to the tomb.One night, several years later, Jervas falls asleep once more beside the mausoleum. He awakes suddenly in the late afternoon, and believes that a light has been latterly extinguished from inside the tomb. Taking leave, he returns to his home, where he goes directly to the attic, to a rotten chest, and therein finds the key to the tomb.Once inside the mausoleum, Jervas discovers an empty coffin with the name of Jervas Hyde upon the plate. He begins, so he believes, to sleep in the empty coffin each night as its name matches his. He also develops a fear of thunder, and is aware that he is being spied upon, under his father's orders.One night, against his own better judgement, Jervas sets out for the tomb on an overcast night, a night threatening to storm. As he approaches the tomb, he sees the Hyde mansion restored to its former state there is a party in progress, to which he joins, abandoning his former quietude for blasphemous hedonism.During the party, lightning strikes the mansion, and it burns. Jervas loses consciousness, having imagined himself being burnt to ashes in the blaze.He is awoken, screaming and struggling, to find himself being held by two men, his father in attendance. A small antique box is discovered, having been unearthed by the recent storm. Inside is a porcelain miniature of a man, with the initials J.H. Jervas fancies its face to be the mirror image of his own.He begins jabbering that he has been sleeping inside the tomb. His father, saddened by his son's mental instability, tells him that he has been watched for some time and has never gone inside the tomb, and indeed, the padlock is rusted with age. Jervas is removed to a room with barred windows, presumed mad.He then asks his servant Hiram, who has remained faithful to him despite his current state, to explore the tomb a request which Hiram fulfils. After breaking the padlock and descending with a lantern into the murky depths, Hiram return to his master and informs him that there is, indeed, a coffin with a plate which reads 'Jervas' on it. Jervas then states that he has been promised to be buried in that vault and coffin when he dies and thus ends the previous narration.

All's Well


Mona Awad - 2021
    The accident that ended her burgeoning acting career left her with excruciating, chronic back pain, a failed marriage, and a deepening dependence on painkillers. And now she’s on the verge of losing her job as a college theater director. Determined to put on Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, the play that promised, and cost, her everything, she faces a mutinous cast hellbent on staging Macbeth instead. Miranda sees her chance at redemption slip through her fingers.That’s when she meets three strange benefactors who have an eerie knowledge of Miranda’s past and a tantalizing promise for her future: one where the show goes on, her rebellious students get what’s coming to them, and the invisible, doubted pain that’s kept her from the spotlight is made known.With prose Margaret Atwood has described as “no punches pulled, no hilarities dodged...genius,” Mona Awad has concocted her most potent, subversive novel yet. All’s Well is the story of a woman at her breaking point and a formidable, piercingly funny indictment of our collective refusal to witness and believe female pain.

The Brothers Crunk


William Pauley III - 2010
    After discovering a mutilated robot corpse in the middle of the desert, Divey mysteriously transforms into something abominable, setting a bizarre series of events into motion. Reynold follows his brother into the dark underworld of Tokyo, where there are no rules and old video game accessories are used as real weapons. Please consult a doctor if you experience any of the following symptoms while reading: convulsions, eye or muscle twitching, altered vision, involuntary movements, disorientation, or loss of awareness.

Shadowed Souls


Jim ButcherAnton Strout - 2016
    Anderson, and Rob Thurman—nothing is as simple as black and white, light and dark, good and evil..Unfortunately, that’s exactly what makes it so easy to cross the line.In #1 New York Times bestselling author Jim Butcher’s Cold Case, Molly Carpenter—Harry Dresden’s apprentice-turned-Winter Lady—must collect a tribute from a remote Fae colony and discovers that even if you’re a good girl, sometimes you have to be bad...New York Times bestselling author Seanan McGuire’s Sleepover finds half-succubus Elsie Harrington kidnapped by a group of desperate teenage boys. Not for anything “weird.” They just need her to rescue a little girl from the boogeyman. No biggie.In New York Times bestselling Kevin J. Anderson’s Eye of Newt, Zombie P.I. Dan Shamble’s latest client is a panicky lizard missing an eye who thinks someone wants him dead. But the truth is that someone only wants him for a very special dinner...And New York Times bestselling author Rob Thurman’s infernally heroic Caliban Leandros takes a trip down memory lane as he deals wih some overdue—and nightmarish—vengeance involving some quite nasty Impossible Monsters .ALSO INCLUDES STORIES BYTanya Huff * Kat Richardson * Jim C. Hines * Anton Strout * Lucy A. Snyder * Kristine Kathryn Rusch * Erik Scott de Bie *From the Trade Paperback edition.