Book picks similar to
Stage Five by Robert Brumm


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The Lady on the Road: An Urban Legend Short Story


Nick Herntier - 2019
    After leaving her friend's house, she decides she's going to prove to her brother that "The Lady on the Road " urban legend is just that...

Broken Monsters


Lauren Beukes - 2014
    As stranger and more disturbing bodies are discovered, how can the city hold on to a reality that is already tearing at its seams? If you're Detective Versado's geeky teenage daughter, Layla, you commence a dangerous flirtation with a potential predator online. If you're desperate freelance journalist Jonno, you do whatever it takes to get the exclusive on a horrific story. If you're Thomas Keen, known on the street as TK, you'll do what you can to keep your homeless family safe--and find the monster who is possessed by the dream of violently remaking the world. If Lauren Beukes's internationally bestselling The Shining Girls was a time-jumping thrill ride through the past, her Broken Monsters is a genre-redefining thriller about broken cities, broken dreams, and broken people trying to put themselves back together again.

Drynn


Steve Vera - 2013
    Seventeen years ago, five knights from Earth's magical twin, Theia, entombed Asmodeous the Pale, Lord of the Drynn, in Skip's town. Now that the dark god is free again, he's anxious to get back home and finish the war he began…to enslave all life. It begins with killing the knights who trapped him.Deprived of their magic, the knights fight back using whatever they can get their hands on, from samurai swords to assault rifles. Skip gets reluctantly drawn in to their struggle while Donovan Smith, the demi-god murderer whom Skip was after in the first place, plots to find the Lord of the Underworld and butcher him on his own.Together, these unlikely heroes might just save the world. If they don't kill each other first.

Speed of Light


Lee Baker - 2011
    He is destined to make history like John Glenn and Neil Armstrong. Pierce’s idyllic world screeches to a halt when, three weeks before the historic flight, his wife is killed in a tragic car accident.Determined to carry on with the groundbreaking flight in spite of his grief, Pierce is changed forever when, during the flight, his body is transformed into light. The shock of it all puts Pierce into a deep coma and when he wakes time is not relevant to his mind. Suddenly able to step into visions of the past, Pierce struggles to make sense of what he sees as he learns that his wife’s death was not an accident, but murder and her murderers are after him. As Pierce and the beautiful attorney, Vanessa Trace, sort through the bizarre attacks on Pierce and his vivid visions of the past, they cannot substantiate any evidence to his claims. In a frantic race to stay alive, Pierce and Vanessa find themselves matching wits with a conspiracy with seemingly endless resources and a police department convinced Pierce is a murderer, while at the same time they question whether or not Pierce himself is crazy.Standing out from traditional suspense novels, Speed of Light is fast-paced, intelligent and intricately layered with mind expanding concepts.

Flesh Worn Stone


John A. Burks Jr. - 2011
    With a good job, a loving wife, and happy and healthy sons, he has little to complain about. In a flash that life is ripped away and he is thrust into a world of violence and slavery beginning with a brutal home invasion. His sons are murdered in front of him and he and his wife Rebecca are then kidnapped, drugged, and taken to an uncharted tropical island where they awake on a pristine beach in the company of five strangers. The island is a playground of horror and the kidnapped are forced to participate in the Game, a modern-day rendition of the Coliseum of ancient Rome, where they must compete in acts of murder, rape, and self-mutilation for the amusement of an unseen wealthy elite. Contestants must survive the Game five times to earn their freedom from the island. Losers become the evening meal. Steven struggles to survive in a world where violence is not only accepted but cheered. He fights to hold on to his wife in a community where cannibalism is survival, brutality is affection, and living another day is at the expense of his own soul. Survival comes with a price, however, and he soon learns that not all of the players are there unwillingly and they’ve paid a steep price for the opportunity.

Matty: A Matt Turner Series Short


Michael Siemsen - 2013
    When a young girl is snatched on her way home from school, Matty's police detective father knows that every minute counts. For the first time - but not the last - Detective Roger Turner enlists his son's unique help.With over 130,000 copies sold, the Matt Turner Series launched author Michael Siemsen to bestseller status. The Dig (Book 1) and The Opal (Book 2) hint at the troubled psychometrist's shocking childhood, using his ability to "read" an object's history to help his father solve the worst kinds of crimes. Only now, with the short story Matty are we offered a firsthand glimpse into a young Matt's first case - tracking down a kidnapped girl named Joss Lynn Leland.

Haunting Obsession


R.J. Sullivan - 2010
    Daryl’s girlfriend, Loretta Stevens, knew about his geeky lifestyle when they started dating, but she loves him, quirks and all.Then one day Daryl chooses to buy a particularly tacky piece of memorabilia instead of Loretta’s birthday present. Daryl ends up in the doghouse, not only with Loretta, but with Maxine Marie herself. The legendary blonde returns from the dead to give Daryl a piece of her mind—and a haunting obsession he’ll never forget.

Monstrous Affections: An Anthology of Beastly Tales


Kelly LinkNalo Hopkinson - 2014
    Welcome to a world where humans live side-by-side with monsters, from vampires both nostalgic and bumbling, to an eight-legged alien who makes tea. Here you'll find mercurial forms that burrow into warm fat, spectral boy toys, a Maori force of nature, a landform that claims lives, and an architect of hell on earth. Through these, and a few monsters that defy categorization, some of today's top young-adult authors explore ambition and sacrifice, loneliness and rage, love requited and avenged, and the boundless potential for connection, even across extreme borders.Moriabe's Children / Paolo Bacigalupi --Old souls / Cassandra Clare --Ten rules for being an intergalactic smuggler (the successful kind) / Holly Black --Quick hill / M.T. Anderson --The diabolist / Nathan Ballingrud --This whole demoning thing / Patrick Ness --Wings in the morning / Sarah Rees Brennan --Left foot, right / Nalo Hopkinson --The Mercurials / G. Carl Purcell --Kitty Capulet and the invention of underwater photography / Dylan Horrocks --Son of abyss / Nik Houser --A small wild magic / Kathleen Jennings --The new boyfriend / Kelly Link --The woods hide in plain sight / Joshua Lewis --Mothers, lock up your daughters because they are terrifying / Alice Sola Kim

The Anatomy of Dreams


Chloe Benjamin - 2014
    When Sylvie Patterson, a bookish student at a Northern California boarding school, falls in love with a spirited, elusive classmate named Gabe, they embark on an experiment that changes their lives. Their headmaster, Dr. Adrian Keller, is a charismatic medical researcher who has staked his career on the therapeutic potential of lucid dreaming: by teaching his patients to become conscious during sleep, he believes he can relieve stress and trauma. Over the next six years, Sylvie and Gabe become consumed by Keller’s work, following him across the country.But when an opportunity brings the trio to the Midwest, Sylvie and Gabe stumble into a tangled relationship with their mysterious neighbors—and Sylvie begins to doubt the ethics of Keller’s research. As she navigates the hazy, permeable boundaries between what is real and what isn’t, who can be trusted and who cannot, Sylvie also faces surprising developments in herself—an unexpected infatuation, growing paranoia, and a new sense of rebellion.With stirring, elegant prose, “Chloe Benjamin has crafted an eerie, compelling first novel which, like the lingering effects of a vivid dream, resonates long past its finish” (Karen Brown, The Longings of Wayward Girls).

Who Goes There?


John W. Campbell Jr. - 1938
    Campbell classic about an antarctic research camp that discovers and thaws the ancient, frozen body of a crash-landed alien. The creature revives with terrifying results, shape-shifting to assume the exact form of animal and man, alike. Paranoia ensues as a band of frightened men work to discern friend from foe, and destroy the menace before it challenges all of humanity! The story, hailed as "one of the finest science fiction novellas ever written" by the SF Writers of America, is best known to fans as THE THING, as it was the basis of Howard Hawks' The Thing From Another World in 1951, and John Carpenter's The Thing in 1982. With a new Introduction by William F. Nolan, author of Logan's Run, and his never-before-published, suspenseful Screen Treatment written for Universal Studios in 1978, this is a must-have edition for scifi and horror fans!

The Hollow Man


Dan Simmons - 1992
    Louis, he follows a voice that is calling him to witness the stunning mystery at the heart of mortality.

Headhunter


Tim Curran - 2003
    A green hell where death waits behind every tree, in every pooling shadow, and in every mist-haunted hollow. Boobytraps and bullets, landmines and rockets. Mike McKinney went to write about the war, about the terror and frustrations, soldiers and people and a landscape forever altered by the conflict...but he ran across something even worse: a primeval horror straight out of the darkest Vietnamese folklore. A monstrosity that stalks human heads among the twisted, jungled hills of the Central Highlands. Now it is hunting him. And nothing can stop it.

The Ruins


Scott Smith - 2006
    Two young couples are on a lazy Mexican vacation–sun-drenched days, drunken nights, making friends with fellow tourists. When the brother of one of those friends disappears, they decide to venture into the jungle to look for him. What started out as a fun day-trip slowly spirals into a nightmare when they find an ancient ruins site . . . and the terrifying presence that lurks there.

Event


David L. Golemon - 2006
    Led by the valiant Major Jack Collins, they are dedicated to uncovering the hidden truths behind the myths and legends propagated throughout world history—from underground agencies and conspiracy theories to extraterrestrial life and UFOs. And now that a new, unspeakable threat has been revealed, humanity's greatest hope for survival lies with Collins and his crew.This time, the Group faces an enemy of remarkable strength and power. In order to ensure that history's errors never be repeated, the Group must team up with an unlikely ally to stop a deadly presence known only as the Destroyer of Worlds. Now, amid the desert wastelands of the American Southwest, the epic battle between two entities is about to begin….

Unkillable


Patrick E. McLean - 2010
    He doesn't have superpowers or supernatural forces on his side. He can be hurt. He can be maimed. The only thing he's got going for him is that he is Unkillable.