V. Larson! This 60,000 word book is an Anthology of short stories. Most are Science Fiction mixed with Horror. Others might be called Dark Fantasy... Many have been published previously in various magazines.The Barrier – What does it take to go faster than light?Symptoms of Godhood – How far can you modify a body and still call the results human?Discharged – A long war and an even longer stay in an automated hospital.Teeth at Bedtime – Technology follows us everywhere.The Insect Requirement – Great sacrifices are required for Earth’s early colonists.Blind Eyes – If we can design our own children, how far will we go?TA96 – Do our genes belong to us?Zundra’s Movies – A future where video is created with the mind, and insanity is fun to watch.Pinball – A young man builds his own watchdog.Love Aboard the Kamadeva – A love triangle between two desperate souls and a digital mirage.Starplay – A window into the universe becomes a door.The One-Way Gang – Leaving Earth is easy, but you can never come back.Rusted Metal – What has spent the last century in the basement?Lunar Lotto – Death comes instantly to outlaws in vacuum.The Rollers – Crime has been mostly eliminated by removing all forms of cash... Mostly.

    Charting the glorious decade that spans Halo: Combat Evolved to Halo: Reach, Halo: The Great Journey is a lavish and spectacular review of ten years of groundbreaking game art brought together in one place as never before. Halo: The Great Journey is the ultimate gallery of the Halo universe - from characters to weapons and much more; with sketches and concept art by acclaimed artists such as Ashley Wood, the detailed interiors and sweeping landscapes of Alex Chu, and Frank Capezzuto's breathtaking spacescapes. In addition there is art from Halo: Legends - the anime DVD - book covers, comic pages, marketing images and more; plus an introduction from "the face of Halo," Frank O'Connor. A celebration of visual splendor - from the Spartans themselves to the breathtaking vistas of dawn breaking on an alien world - Halo: The Great Journey is dramatic, grandiose and utterly awesome.

    This rich collection, filled with interviews, essays, and color reproductions of testosterone-heavy thirty-five-cent magazines with names like Man's Exploits, Rage, and Escape to Adventure (to name a few), illustrates the culture created to help veterans confront the confusion of jobs, girls, and the Cold War on their return from World War II and the Korean War.Contributions from the original men's magazine talent like Bruce Jay Friedman, Mario Puzo, and Mort Künstler bring the reader inside the offices, showing us how the writers, illustrators, editors, and publishers put together decades of what were then called "armpit slicks." Reproductions of original paintings from Norman Saunders, Künstler, and Norm Eastman are featured within, and Bill Devine's annotated checklist of the many thousands of adventure magazines is essential for collectors of the genre.The expanded paperback edition includes wartime illustrations and advertisements from mass-produced magazines that preview the xenophobia and racist ideas later seen throughout men's adventure magazines of the '50s and '60s.

    Now, The View from the Cheap Seats brings together for the first time ever more than sixty pieces of his outstanding nonfiction. Analytical yet playful, erudite yet accessible, this cornucopia explores a broad range of interests and topics, including (but not limited to): authors past and present; music; storytelling; comics; bookshops; travel; fairy tales; America; inspiration; libraries; ghosts; and the title piece, at turns touching and self-deprecating, which recounts the author’s experiences at the 2010 Academy Awards in Hollywood.

    Lovecraft and his circle. Marina Willett, M.D., has a problem. Her husband, Charlie, has become obsessed with H.P. Lovecraft, in particular with one episode in the legendary horror writer's life: In the summer of 1934, the "old gent" lived for two months with a gay teenage fan named Robert Barlow, at Barlow's family home in central Florida. What were the two of them up to? Were they friends--or something more? Just when Charlie thinks he's solved the puzzle, a new scandal erupts, and he disappears. The police say it's suicide. Marina is a psychiatrist, and she doesn't believe them.A tour-de-force of storytelling, The Night Ocean follows the lives of some extraordinary people: Lovecraft, the most influential American horror writer of the 20th century, whose stories continue to win new acolytes, even as his racist views provoke new critics; Barlow, a seminal scholar of Mexican culture who killed himself after being blackmailed for his homosexuality (and who collaborated with Lovecraft on the beautiful story The Night Ocean); his student, future Beat writer William S. Burroughs; and L.C. Spinks, a kindly Canadian appliance salesman and science-fiction fan -- the only person who knows the origins of The Erotonomicon, purported to be the intimate diary of Lovecraft himself.As a heartbroken Marina follows her missing husband's trail in an attempt to learn the truth, the novel moves across the decades and along the length of the continent, from a remote Ontario town, through New York and Florida to Mexico City.The Night Ocean is about love and deception -- about the way that stories earn our trust, and betray it.

    Urban explorer and photographer Becca Philips was raised in the shadow of Miskatonic University, steeped in the mysteries of her late grandmother’s work in occult studies. But what she thought was myth becomes all too real when cultists unleash terror on the city of Boston. Now she’s caught between a shadowy government agency called SPECTRA and the followers of an apocalyptic faith bent on awakening an ancient evil.As urban warfare breaks out between eldritch monsters and an emerging police state, she must uncover the secrets of a family heirloom known as the Fire of Cairo to banish the rising tide of darkness before the balance tips irrevocably at the Red Equinox.

    Journey through this anthology of science fiction stories and poems inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Listen to the stars that whisper and drive a crew mad. Worship the Tloque Nahuaque as he overtakes Mexico City. Slip into the court of the King in Yellow. Walk through the streets of a very altered Venice. Stop to admire the beauty of the flesh-dolls in the window. Fly through space in the shape of a hungry, malicious comet. Swim in the drug-induced haze of a jellyfish. Struggle to survive in a Martian gulag whose landscape isn't quite dead. But, most of all, fear the future.Featured authors include: Nick Mamatas, Ann K. Schwader, Don Webb, Paul Jessup, E. Catherine Tobler, A.C. Wise, and many more.

    Comments and anecdotes by the artist and the editors, along with testimonials from graphic-art luminaries Dave Stevens, Bruce Timm, and Bernie Wrightson, flesh out this portrait of the artist.

    Keep up with the ever-expanding Marvel Universe with the new edition of DK's best-selling Marvel Encyclopedia, featuring an introduction by Marvel Comics supremo Stan Lee. Updated and expanded, this definitive Who's Who of Marvel Comics reveals vital info and secret histories of more than 1200 classic and brand new Marvel characters, and provides the lowdown on recent key events including Civil War 2, Secret Empire, and Infinity Countdown.From iconic teams such as the Avengers, X-Men, and Guardians of the Galaxy to fan favourites Black Panther, Deadpool, and Captain Marvel to rising stars Amadeus Cho, Squirrel Girl and the Exiles, every significant Marvel character is showcased with the latest comic artwork. Meticulously researched, expertly written, and stunningly illustrated, the Marvel Encyclopedia boasts newly commissioned cover art by one of Marvel's hottest up-and-coming talents. This unique, in-depth, and accessible encyclopedia is an indispensable guide to Marvel Comics that devoted fans and newcomers alike will return to time and again.

    Strange light fixtures. Mutant cockroaches. There are some odd things about Nate’s new apartment.Of course, he has other things on his mind. He hates his job. He has no money in the bank. No girlfriend. No plans for the future. So while his new home isn’t perfect, it’s livable. The rent is low, the property managers are friendly, and the odd little mysteries don’t nag at him too much.At least, not until he meets Mandy, his neighbour across the hall, and notices something unusual about her apartment. And Xela’s apartment. And Tim’s. And Veek’s. Because every room in this old Los Angeles brownstone has a mystery or two. Mysteries that stretch back over a hundred years. Some of them are in plain sight. Some are behind locked doors. And all together these mysteries could mean the end of Nate and his friends. Or the end of everything...

    

    Madness. Transhumanism.This is the dawn of posthumanity. Some things can’t be unlearned. Gleaming labs whir with the hum of servers as scientists unravel the secrets of the universe. But as we peel away mysteries, the universe glances back at us. Even now, terrors rise from the Mariana Trench and drift down from the stars. Scientists are disappearing—or worse. Experiments take on minds of their own. Some fight back against the unknown, some give in, some are destroyed, and still others are becoming… more. The human and inhuman are harder and harder to distinguish. Mankind is changing, whether it wants to or not, with brand new ways of thinking. What havoc is wreaked by those humans trying to harness and control their discoveries? As big science progresses and the very fundamentals of this universe are understood, what stories are being hushed up? Of course, the Old Ones laugh at our laws, scientific and otherwise. These are transhumanist near-future science fiction tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. These are tales of more than merely cosmic dread. They exist in our world of the next couple years. This is the era of big science and—what is that? We’ll be right back. ​​

    From a ruined chemical weapons bunker in Iraq to a shallow grave in California's San Andreas Fault, the lines are drawn for a shadow war that will decide who, or what, will inherit the earth and reign as the next dominant species. The escalating conflict engulfs the lives of three born survivors: a broken veteran of the Gulf War; a fiercely independent young nurse dying of cancer; and a brilliant novice FBI agent. Plunged into an arena where the stakes are survival or extinction, each must choose a side: between a militia of rogue government scientists and an enigmatic messiah who holds the cure for death itself, and the key to a new form of life. Trapped in a genocidal war the government will do anything to conceal, where top-secret military technologies vie with the primal power of evolution unleashed, they will struggle to understand and stay alive...and stay human.

    You've sneaked a peek at the supermarket checkout. Where else could you find the scoop on which senators are aliens, or Saddam and Osama's torrid love affair? Serious newshounds know the Weekly World News (which counts over a million beings as readers) broke the story that Elvis still lives, but it also has exclusives on what kind of pizza was served at Jesus' last supper, who's the father of the Loch Ness monster's baby, and (of course) the various escapades of Bat Boy, the half man/half bat found in a West Virginia cave almost 15 years ago. For the dedicated follower of the fantastic, and for the uninitiated too, Bat Boy Lives! contains all these vital dispatches and much more. Because the truth...is in here.

    Talk about the horse's mouth! This book is long overdue."- Peter Straub "Lovecraft opened the way for me, as he had done for others before me -- Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, and Ray Bradbury among them. The reader would do well to remember that it is his shadow, so long and gaunt, and his eyes, so dark and puritanical, which overlie almost all of the important horror fiction that has come since."- Stephen King "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear."- H.P. Lovecraft  In 1927, Howard Philips Lovecraft published a 30,000-word essay titled "Supernatural Horror in Literature." In it, the father of American horror writing  whose tales  presented one of the earliest scholarly studies of the supernatural in fiction, defined the horror story as one in which "a certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present." Those authors discussed in Lovecraft's seminal essay were used as the basis for the 1993 anthology H.P. Lovecraft's Book of Horror, edited by Dave Carson and Stephen Jones. With H.P. Lovecraft's Book of the Supernatural, Jones uses that same essay as inspiration for a new anthology of nineteen new selections, each preceded by an excerpt from Lovecraft. Included here are works from authors as varied as Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, and Robert Louis Stevenson. While these stories maycarry a classical pedigree, their contents remain just as chilling and disturbing as anything cooked up by modern-day horror writers. The book also includes a short essay from Lovecraft himself, "Notes on Writing Weird Fiction," in which he lays out tips and rules for mastering the form.