Book picks similar to
The Knife Dance by Michael Cisco
weird
weird-fiction
dim-shores
horror-dark-fantasy
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 Resurrectionist: The Lost Work of Dr. Spencer Black
E.B. Hudspeth - 2013
A city of gas lamps, cobblestone streets, and horse-drawn carriages—and home to the controversial surgeon Dr. Spencer Black. The son of a grave robber, young Dr. Black studies at Philadelphia’s esteemed Academy of Medicine, where he develops an unconventional hypothesis: What if the world’s most celebrated mythological beasts—mermaids, minotaurs, and satyrs—were in fact the evolutionary ancestors of humankind? The Resurrectionist offers two extraordinary books in one. The first is a fictional biography of Dr. Spencer Black, from a childhood spent exhuming corpses through his medical training, his travels with carnivals, and the mysterious disappearance at the end of his life. The second book is Black’s magnum opus: The Codex Extinct Animalia, a Gray’s Anatomy for mythological beasts—dragons, centaurs, Pegasus, Cerberus—all rendered in meticulously detailed anatomical illustrations. You need only look at these images to realize they are the work of a madman. The Resurrectionist tells his story.
Daughter of Hounds
Caitlín R. Kiernan - 2007
Stolen from their cribs and concealed in shadows to be raised by ghouls, they are now changelings in service to the creatures who rule the world Below and despise the world Above. Any human contact is strictly forbidden and punishment is swift and severe for those who disobey. Raised by her widower father, Emmie Silvey has a precocious personality and striking yellow eyes that have left her a solitary child. But that changes when two women enter her life-one who stalks her, one who haunts her dreams- both insisting that her entire life is a lie and warning her of an encroaching darkness.
Topher Nightshade vs. The Camp of The Undead Apocalypse
Drew Hayes - 2014
That was, of course, because they didn’t know that Camp Tekonichia was home to boundless spirit energy, three very bored ghosts, and a powerful magic spell on the verge of completion. Now, these three will have to race against time and an ancient evil trying to stop the whole world from turning into a haven for restless spirits. Aided only by a mysterious medium and the camp’s resident ghosts, none of them have a clue how they’re supposed to save the world. Especially since they only have until sunrise to do it.
Winter Wyvern
Todd McCaffrey - 2019
Would a dying dragon change her fate? On the outskirts of the capital, sixteen-year old Krea, is fighting to survive. She’s bullied, attacked, and some say she’s cursed. She doesn’t believe them. This girl is a fighter. In a meadow, surrounded by blue flowers, a dragon fights for her life and a chance at immortality. There’s just one problem, she needs a new twin soul. When Krea finds Wymarc, the dragon makes an offer. Is the dragon’s gift going to change her life for the better or send her to her doom? You’ll love this fantasy for its characters you care about, meddlesome gods, and the brilliant story craft. Get it now.
Delta Green: Extraordinary Renditions
Shane Ivey - 2015
"PAPERCLIP" by Kenneth Hite. "A Spider With Barbed-Wire Legs" by Davide Mana. "Le Pain Maudit" by Jeff C. Carter. "Cracks in the Door" by Jason Mical. "Ganzfeld Gate" by Cody Goodfellow. "Utopia" by David Farnell. "The Perplexing Demise of Stooge Wilson" by David J. Fielding. "Dark" by Daniel Harms."Morning in America" by James Lowder. "Boxes Inside Boxes" and "The Mirror Maze" by Dennis Detwiller. "A Question of Memory" by Greg Stolze. "Pluperfect" by Ray Winninger. "Friendly Advice" by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan. "Passing the Torch" by Adam Scott Glancy. "The Lucky Ones" by John Scott Tynes. "Syndemic" and an introduction by Shane Ivey. These stories are recommended for mature readers.
Excerpted from the introduction:
We know a program called Delta Green really existed. You can find a couple of references to it in documents uncovered by Freedom of Information Act requests. Delta Green was a psychological operations unit in World War II, created to take advantage of the bizarre occult beliefs of Axis leaders. The public documents, which may have been released with the name unredacted by mistake, don’t say whether it had any success. The OSS was shut down after the war. Many of its people helped launch the CIA in 1947. We can only speculate whether the OSS’s lessons from Delta Green informed the CIA’s notorious psychological operations in the coming decades. Conspiracy theorists have done more than speculate. Delta Green came back as a secret project to track down Nazis after the war, they say. Delta Green brought federal agents, spies, and special forces together for missions too secret even for the CIA. Delta Green was the precursor and rival to Majestic-12, the U.S. government conspiracy that allied itself with aliens after Roswell. Delta Green fights otherworldly monsters and evil sorcerers under the cover of the Global War on Terror. Once you climb into the rabbit hole, the fall never ends. In this book we turn up tales from the rabbit hole: Delta Green case histories rendered as short stories. They begin in the Dust Bowl, with a Naval intelligence unit supposedly called “P4” and memories of the abandoned New England town of Innsmouth (another bottomless well of conspiracy theories). They look at the days after World War II when secret agents pursued Nazis all over Europe, the early CIA attempted its first infamous schemes, and anticommunist witch-hunts seized on American terrors back home. They bring us through the Cold War desperation of the Seventies and Eighties, when America was shocked by its own crimes and Delta Green allegedly went underground again. And they come to the present day, and a Delta Green divided after it rebuilt itself in the secret government—but many old outlaws refused to trust the new order.
A Protocol for Monsters
John Birmingham - 2016
When an oil rig drills too deep under the Gulf of Mexico it breaks the capstone separating our world from the UnderRealms - home to monsters, daemons and dark magiks. The nightmares of our long ago come flooding back into the world where they are met by automatic weapons fire, heating seeking missiles (they're hell on dragons, don'tcha know) and one drunken, dissolute son of a bitch called Dave. But this is not Dave's story. This is the story of the poor bastards who had to put up with him while he saved the world and acted like a jerk.
Toplin
Michael McDowell - 1985
With every revelation of the narrator's bizarre lifestyle and unusual acquaintances, the reader is less sure of what can be believed, until the line between actuality and fantasy disappears completely. McDowell has crafted an explicit and unusual nightmarish vision of contemporary urban life that embraces the range of social and sexual maladjustment. The narrator's calm, understated recitation of the unsavory events only heightens the horror; the fine illustrations match the surrealistic mood perfectly. An offbeat, puzzling, and disturbing work that should interest even the most jaded fans of horror fiction.
American Blood: A Vampire's Story
Gregory Holden - 2009
That was over nineteen hundred years ago and the American government is tracking her.Here is the story of an administration during its eighth and final year in office looking for a way to salvage its legacy by finding and killing the world's most wanted terrorist. For seven years America has failed to accomplish this mission and now, desperate and beset by scandal, the government hatches a covert plan to capture, and then coerce, the world's first vampire into locating and killing the Sheikh.The government's lead researcher, a competent molecular biologist, begins to uncover the secrets of this remarkable and deadly creature. But as his research moves forward he discovers that instead of finding a remorseless killer driven to feed on humankind, the female vampire is a being who desires companionship and love.It is when they are sent to the Pashtun Belt on the mission to find and assassinate the Sheikh that the researcher and the vampire, facing death, make the ultimate sacrifice for each other.
Dragon Prince
Kelly N. Jane - 2020
Jane and Ashley McLeo take you into a supernatural world that exists right under your nose.Coffee house waitress wasn’t on my list of life-long goals, but it paid the bills. The only thing that really mattered was keeping a low profile.Dead-end jobs where no one paid attention made it easier to avoid awkward questions like, “what do you mean you hear voices inside your head?” No, I didn’t need to end up like Mom. I’d pay our bills no matter what to keep from living on the streets.Everything was going as well as it could, until a hulking man carrying a giant red murse showed up at work. Strange, but hot as hell, he was far too intense for my liking. But just my luck, his was the next weirdo voice that invaded my mind.I tried to ignore him, but when a different creepy guy mentally issued threats against the muscled man, I had to warn him. Didn’t I? After that, things went nuts and now I’m in the middle of a supernatural mission I don’t understand. The weird thing is that for the first time in my life I finally feel like I might fit in someplace—I just need to live long enough to find out why that is.
Southern Gods
John Hornor Jacobs - 2011
The mysterious blues man’s dark, driving music–broadcast at ever-shifting frequencies by a phantom radio station–is said to make living men insane and dead men rise.Disturbed and enraged by the bootleg recording the DJ plays for him, Ingram follows Hastur’s trail into the strange, uncivilized backwoods of Arkansas, where he hears rumors the musician has sold his soul to the Devil.But as Ingram closes in on Hastur and those who have crossed his path, he’ll learn there are forces much more malevolent than the Devil and reckonings more painful than Hell...In a masterful debut of Lovecraftian horror and Southern gothic menace, John Hornor Jacobs reveals the fragility of free will, the dangerous power of sacrifice, and the insidious strength of blood.
Amphibian
Christina Neuwirth
Rose Ellis arrives at MoneyTownCashGrowth one morning to find that the entire fourth floor has been flooded with water, in a desperate attempt to improve productivity. As the water steadily rises, her working situation becomes more and more absurd…
The Private Life of Elder Things
Adrian Tchaikovsky - 2016
But what happens where the human world touches the domain of races ancient and alien? Museum curators, surveyors, police officers, archaeologists, mathematicians; from derelict buildings to country houses to the London Underground, another world is just a breath away, around the corner, watching and waiting for you to step into its power. The Private Life of Elder Things is a collection of new Lovecraftian fiction about confronting, discovering and living alongside the creatures of the Mythos.
The Uncanny Valley: Tales from a Lost Town
Gregory Miller - 2011
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.