Thousands of miles away, an FBI agent investigates a fatal plane crash in Minneapolis and makes a gruesome discovery. Unusual seismic patterns register in a Kanpur, India earthquake lab, confounding the scientists there. During the same week, the Chinese government “accidentally” drops a nuclear bomb in an isolated region of its own country. As these incidents begin to sweep the globe, a mysterious package from South America arrives at a Washington, D.C. laboratory. Something wants out. The world is on the brink of an apocalyptic disaster. An ancient species, long dormant, is now very much awake.

    P. Lovecraft, published his first story, the monstrosities that crawled out of his brain have become legend: the massive, tentacled Cthulhu, who lurks beneath the sea waiting for his moment to rise; the demon Sultan Azathoth, who lies babbling at the center of the universe, mad beyond imagining; the Deep Ones, who come to shore to breed with mortal men; and the unspeakably-evil Hastur, whose very name brings death. These creatures have been the nightmarish fuel for generations of horror writers, and the inspiration for some of their greatest works.This impressive anthology celebrates Lovecraft's most famous beasts in all their grotesque glory, with each story a gripping new take on a classic mythos creature and affectionately accompanied by an illuminating illustration. Within these accursed pages something unnatural slouches from the sea into an all-night diner to meet the foolish young woman waiting for him, while the Hounds of Tindalos struggle to survive trapped in human bodies, haunting pool halls for men they can lure into the dark. Strange, haunting, and undeniably monstrous, this is Lovecraft as you have never seen him before.Contents"Only the End of the World Again" by Neil Gaiman"The Bleeding Shadow" by Joe R. Lansdale"Love is Forbidden, We Croak & Howl" by Caitlín R. Kiernan"Bulldozer" by Laird Barron"A Quarter to Three" by Kim Newman"Inelastic Collisions" by Elizabeth Bear"That of Which We Speak When We Speak of the Unspeakable" by Nick Mamatas"Red Goat Black Goat" by Nadia Bulkin"Jar of Salts" and "Haruspicy" by Gemma Files"Black is the Pit From Pole to Pole" by Howard Waldrop and Steven Utley"I've Come to Speak with You Again" by Karl Edward Wagner"The Sect of the Idiot" by Thomas Ligotti"The Dappled Things" by William Browning Spencer"The Same Deep Waters as You" by Brian Hodge"Remnants" by Fred Chappell"Waiting at the Cross Roads" by Steve Rasnic Tem"Children of the Fang" by John Langan

    Hendee created an engrossing mix of “intrigue, epic fantasy, and horror.”* Now, they present a bold new series set in the same world, where the destinies of two hunters shaped by the shadows of their pasts are about to collide... In the dark reaches of the eastern continent, Tris Vishal travels from village to village, using his power to put unsettled spirits to rest. He works alone, having learned that letting people close only leads to more death. Still, he finds himself accepting the help of the Móndyalítko woman who saves his life—a woman whose gifts are as much a burden as his own. Mari Kaleja thirsted for vengeance since the night her family was taken from her. She has searched far and wide for the one she thinks responsible, known only as “The Dead’s Man.” But before she can kill him, she has to be sure. Mari hopes traveling with Tris will confirm her suspicions. But as they embark on a hunt where the living are just as dangerous as the dead, she learns the risks of keeping your enemy close... Because it’s no longer clear who is predator and who is prey.

    Parker's newest novella Mightier than the Sword presents itself as a translated oddity of a document called "Concerning the Monasteries". But in true Parker style, this novella is instead a sprightly, riveting tale that reveals secret upon secret, building to an ending at once perfect and perfectly unpredictable.An Imperial legate is called into see his aunt, who just happens to be the empress running the civilized world while her husband's in his sick bed. After some chastisement, she dispatches her nephew to take care of the dreaded Land and Sea Raiders, pirates who've been attacking the realm's monasteries.So begins a possibly doomed tour of banished relatives and uppity royals put in charge of monasteries like Cort Doce and Cort Maleston, to name a few. While attempting to discover the truth of what the pirates might be after, the legate visits great libraries and halls in each varied locale and conducts a romance of which he knows - but doesn't care - his aunt will not approve. With enough wit and derring-do (and luck), the narrator might just make it through his mission alive... or will he?Cover illustration by Vincent Chong

    Those who survived share the world with what are known as hollow-heads: creatures who are no longer fully human. A man and a pregnant teenager arrive at the gate and are welcomed into the town. They begin to settle in when suddenly both are murdered by an unknown assailant. In the course of investigation, Chief Edison discovers that the girl was fleeing a life of sexual slavery, and that some members of the Atlanta community were complicit in the human trafficking network that had ensnared her. In retaliation for Edison’s discoveries, agents of the network abduct the stepdaughter of the town’s mayor. Sam Edison and three companions track the kidnappers to Athens, Georgia, where they discover that the entire city is engaged in human trafficking. By the time Edison has recovered the kidnapped girl, the other three rescuers have been killed, leaving Edison alone to bring the mayor’s stepdaughter home. Further complicating their return is Sam’s realization that a prominent member of the community is in truth the ringleader of the slave-trading network. Against such great odds, will Sam ever make it to Little Five alive?

    Determined to improve life for her and her son, Christopher, she flees an abusive relationship in the middle of the night with her child. Together, they find themselves drawn to the tight-knit community of Mill Grove, Pennsylvania. It's as far off the beaten track as they can get. Just one highway in, one highway out.At first, it seems like the perfect place to finally settle down. Then Christopher vanishes. For six long days, no one can find him. Until Christopher emerges from the woods at the edge of town, unharmed but not unchanged. He returns with a voice in his head only he can hear, with a mission only he can complete: Build a treehouse in the woods by Christmas, or his mother and everyone in the town will never be the same again.Twenty years ago, Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower made readers everywhere feel infinite. Now, Chbosky has returned with an epic work of literary horror, years in the making, whose grand scale and rich emotion redefine the genre. Read it with the lights on.

    Now four years later, as she steps out from the fallout shelter and into a zombie-infested world, he’s the only thing on her mind. Thanks to her father Peyton is now built to survive: with razor tipped nails, ocular implants and cybernetics that make her stronger, faster, and able to protect herself in a world filled with monsters. Yet all the weapons in the world can’t protect her heart when she runs into Chris again. The once sweet boy of her childhood has now grown into a tortured man--still furious at her for breaking his heart and never telling him why. Now the two of them find themselves on the run, forced to fight their way down the monster strewn east coast to reach the last human outpost on Earth: Walt Disney World. Can they find a way to let go of old hurts and regain the love they lost--all while attempting to save what’s left of the human race?

    But what she finds is a place wrought with mystery, shady dealings, and more instability than she anticipates. The Starborn Ascension takes place 57 years before The Starborn Uprising, and can be read independently.

    . . Circumstances: a piece of evidence that indicates the probability or improbability of an event . . . Barbara Everette, homemaker living in a small town in Mississippi, had the perfect life. Perfect husband, perfect children, perfect house, perfect Christian Faith. She cooked and cleaned perfectly and managed all of the chores of the modern suburbanite, toting the kids, running the PTA, teaching kung-fu in the local dojo . . . Perfectly. But perfection has a price and the day came when Barbara snapped. She simply had to have "one weekend off." God had to grant her that much. It said no where that she was a slave. Waving goodbye to her hapless, entirely undomestic husband, she set out on the quest for a weekend of peace and maybe some authentic Cajun food. Detective Sergeant Kelly Lockhart, New Orleans Homicide, had a perfect record on his latest case: not a single suspect. And there should be at least five or six, given the DNA traces on the many bodies. Furthermore, his sole really outstanding clue, a mysterious fish scale, had disappeared into the recesses of the FBI Crime Lab. But the old fortune-teller was sending him into the bayou, down in the land of authentic Cajun food, on the track of a mysterious pimp with the admonition to "watch for the Princess." Or die. Barbara and Kelly were heading to a rendezvous that might be fate and might reveal the hand of God. There was more cooking in the swamps than jambalaya. Unknown to either, the mystery of the Bayou Ripper had Special Circumstances.

    Melding supernatural horror with hardboiled noir, espionage, and a scientific backbone, Barron’s stories have garnered critical acclaim and have been reprinted in numerous year’s best anthologies and nominated for multiple awards, including the Crawford, International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy awards.Barron returns with his third collection, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. Collecting interlinking tales of sublime cosmic horror, including “Blackwood’s Baby”, “The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven”, and “The Men from Porlock”, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All delivers enough spine-chilling horror to satisfy even the most jaded reader.

    He has no idea how long he has been imprisoned there by the roaches. Every resident has a similar memory of the journey to Ubo: a dream of dry, chitinous wings crossing the moon, the gigantic insects dropping swiftly over the houses of the neighborhood, passing through walls and windows as if by magic, or science. The creatures, like a deck of baroquely ornamented cards, fanning themselves from one hidden world into the next. And now each day they force Daniel to play a different figure from humanity's violent history, from a frenzied Jack the Ripper to a stumbling and confused Stalin to a self-proclaimed god executing survivors atop the ruins of the world. The scenarios mutate day after day in this camp somewhere beyond the rules of time. As skies burn and prisoners go mad, identities dissolve as the experiments evolve, and no one can foretell their mysterious end.

    Tourists travel miles to marvel at its miracle crops, including the shimmering, iridescent wheat of Wren’s family farm. Until five months ago.That’s when the quicksilver mercury blight first surfaced, poisoning the farms of Hollow’s End one by one. It began by consuming the crops--thick, silver sludge bleeding from the earth. Next were the animals. Infected livestock and wild creatures alike staggered off into the woods by day—only to return at night, their eyes, fogged white, leering from the trees.Then, the blight came for the neighbors.Wren is among the last locals standing. And the blight has finally come for her, too. Now, the only one she can turn to is the last person she wants to call: her ex, Derek. They haven’t spoken in months, but Wren and Derek still have one thing in common—Hollow’s End means everything to them. Only there’s much they don’t know about their hometown and its renowned miracle crops. And they’re about to discover that miracles aren’t free.Their ancestors have an awful lot to pay for, and Wren and Derek are the only ones left to settle old debts.

    She’s survived countless strikes, but her craving to connect to the energy in storms endangers her life and the lives of those around her.Los Angeles, where lightning rarely strikes, is one of the few places Mia feels safe from her addiction. But when an earthquake devastates the city, her haven is transformed into a minefield of chaos and danger. The beaches become massive tent cities. Downtown is a crumbling wasteland, where a traveling party moves to a different empty building each night, the revelers drawn to the destruction by a force they cannot deny. Two warring cults rise to power, and both see Mia as the key to their opposing doomsday prophecies. They believe she has a connection to the freak electrical storm that caused the quake, and to the far more devastating storm that is yet to come.Mia wants to trust the enigmatic and alluring Jeremy when he promises to protect her, but she fears he isn’t who he claims to be. In the end, the passion and power that brought them together could be their downfall. When the final disaster strikes, Mia must risk unleashing the full horror of her strength to save the people she loves, or lose everything.