Viator


Lucius Shepard - 2004
    They've become obsessed with Viator to the point that the world beyond seems of consequence only as it relates to the ship. When their putative leader, Thomas Willander, is afflicted by a series of disturbing dreams, he concludes that something on board may be responsible for their erraticism. He seeks the help of a woman in the nearby village of Kaliaska and together they initiate an investigation into the history of Viator, hoping to learn, among other things, why the ship was run aground and who was the mysterious man who hired the four. But their efforts may be too late. The men, whose eccentrities are now verging on the insane, show no sign of intending to abandon their new home, compelled by Viator's eerie allure. To make matters worse, winter will soon be setting in, ominous incidences of sound and light are issuing from the forest surrounding the ship, and Willander's dreams may be coming true...Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.

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

Books of Blood: Volumes One to Three


Clive Barker - 1984
    For those who already know these tales, the poignant introduction is a window on the creator's mind. Reflecting back after 14 years, Barker writes: I look at these pieces and I don't think the man who wrote them is alive in me anymore.... We are all our own graveyards I believe; we squat amongst the tombs of the people we were. If we're healthy, every day is a celebration, a Day of the Dead, in which we give thanks for the lives that we lived; and if we are neurotic we brood and mourn and wish that the past was still present. Reading these stories over, I feel a little of both. Some of the simple energies that made these words flow through my pen--that made the phrases felicitous and the ideas sing--have gone. I lost their maker a long time ago. These enthusiastic tales are not ashamed of visceral horror, of blood splashing freely across the page: "The Midnight Meat Train," a grisly subway tale that surprises you with one twist after another; "The Yattering and Jack," about a hilarious demon who possesses a Christmas turkey; "In the Hills, the Cities," an unusual example of an original horror premise; "Dread," a harrowing non-supernatural tale about being forced to realize your worst nightmare; "Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament," about a woman who kills men with her mind. Some of the tales are more successful than others, but all are distinguished by strikingly beautiful images of evil and destruction. No horror library is complete without them. --Fiona Webster

Reality and Other Stories


John Lanchester - 2020
    "Signal," an eerie story of contemporary life and the perils of technology, was a sensation among readers—and since then Lanchester has written several more.Reality and Other Stories gathers the best of these, taking readers to an uncanny world familiar to fans of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror. Household gizmos with a mind of their own. Mysterious cell-phone calls from unknown numbers. Reality TV shows and the creeping suspicion that none of this is real…Reality and Other Stories is a book of disquiet that captures the severe disconnection and distraction of our time.

The Altar In The Hills and Other Weird Tales


Brandon Barrows - 2014
    Lovecraft, the most-fevered mind of 20th century horror and weirdness! These weird tales blend horror, science-fiction and fantasy to weave stories of darkness and terror that will alternately leave you checking dark spaces for hidden horrors and wondering at the nature of reality itself. From the horror/mystery of The Altar in the Hills to the private confessions and revelations of one of mankind's most brilliant minds in Through the Ether, these seven stories bring with them Old Gods, strange twists and interesting characters that will both surprise and delight fans of horror fiction.

Spaceships and Spellcasters


Glynn Stewart - 2018
    A mage cop on his first assignment learns the world isn't as black and white as hopedA jump mage and a starship with matching needs turn out to be a magnet for troubleDigging in 1940s New York City awakens a monster--and brings in the elite of the FaeThe protected heir of an interstellar dictatorship is called to a battle no one expected him to fightAn explosive collection of four novellas from science fiction and fantasy author Glynn Stewart, spanning his ONSET, Starship's Mage, Changeling Blood and Exile universes, including two brand new urban fantasy novellas.  Includes:ONSET: Murder by MagicStarship's Mage: Episode 1Fae, Flames and FedorasAshen Stars

Funny Science Fiction


Alex ShvartsmanShaenon Garrity - 2015
    Fiction by Hugo and Nebula award winners and nominees as well as talented newcomers. Stories were selected by the Unidentified Funny Objects series curator Alex Shvartsman.

Her Body and Other Parties: Stories


Carmen Maria Machado - 2017
    While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store's prom dresses. One woman's surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And in the bravura novella Especially Heinous, Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we naively assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgangers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes.Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.The husband stitch --Inventory --Mothers --Especially heinous --Real women have bodies --Eight bites --The resident --Difficult at parties

World Glimpses: Parasite


Sara King - 2014
    In Planetside and Opening Night at the Naturals Preserve, you get to look into her upcoming new world of After Earth. In Parasite, for which this edition is titled, you have the chance to read into some of the background and history of one of the brilliant characters from Sara's Millennium Potion series, of which you can find the first novel, Wings of Retribution, right here on Amazon!

The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories


Peter HainingElizabeth Bowen - 2007
    Wodehouse, John Steinbeck, and Ian Rankin

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos


Jim TurnerFritz Leiber - 1990
    His chilling mythology established a gateway between the known universe and an ancient dimension of otherworldly terror, whose unspeakable denizens and monstrous landscapes - dread Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, the Plateau of Leng, the Mountains of Madness - have earned him a permanent place in the history of the macabre.In Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, a pantheon of horror and fantasy's finest authors pay tribute to the master of the macabre with a collection of original stories set in the fearsome Lovecraft tradition.Contents:- Iä! Iä! Cthulhu Fhtagn! (1990) by Jim Turner [as by James Turner] - The Call of Cthulhu (1928) by H.P. Lovecraft- The Return of the Sorcerer (1931) by Clark Ashton Smith- Ubbo-Sathla (1933) by Clark Ashton Smith- The Black Stone (1931) by Robert E. Howard- The Hounds of Tindalos (1929) by Frank Belknap Long- The Space-Eaters (1928) by Frank Belknap Long- The Dweller in Darkness (1944) by August Derleth- Beyond the Threshold (1941) by August Derleth- The Shambler from the Stars (1935) by Robert Bloch- The Haunter of the Dark (1936) by H.P. Lovecraft- The Shadow from the Steeple (1950) by Robert Bloch- Notebook Found in a Deserted House (1951) by Robert Bloch- The Salem Horror (1937) by Henry Kuttner- The Terror from the Depths (1976) by Fritz Leiber- Rising with Surtsey (1971) by Brian Lumley- Cold Print (1969) by Ramsey Campbell- The Return of the Lloigor (1969) by Colin Wilson- My Boat (1976) by Joanna Russ- Sticks (1974) by Karl Edward Wagner- The Freshman (1979) by Philip José Farmer- Jerusalem's Lot (1978) by Stephen King- Discovery of the Ghooric Zone (1977) by Richard A. LupoffCover illustration by John Jude Palencar

Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural


Herbert A. WiseWalter de la Mare - 1944
    Represented in the anthology are such distinguished spell weavers as Edgar Allen Poe ("The Black Cat"), Wilkie Collins ("A Terribly Strange Bed"), Henry James ("Sir Edmund Orme"), Guy de Maupassant ("Was It a Dream?"), O. Henry ("The Furnished Room"), Rudyard Kipling ("They"), and H.G. Wells ("Pollock and the Porroh Man"). Included as well are such modern masters as Algernon Blackwood ("Ancient Sorceries"), Walter de la Mare ("Out of the Deep"), E.M. Forster ("The Celestial Omnibus"), Isak Dinesen ("The Sailor-Boys Tale"), H.P. Lovecraft ("The Dunwich Horror"), Dorothy L. Sayers ("Suspicion"), and Ernest Hemingway ("The Killers"). "There is not a story in this collection that does not have the breath of life, achieve the full suspension of disbelief that is so particularly important in [this] type of fiction," wrote the Saturday Review. With an introduction and notes by Phyllis Cerf Wagner and Herbert Wise.

All the Fabulous Beasts


Priya Sharma - 2018
    writer Priya Sharma, All the Fabulous Beasts collects 16 stunning and monstrous tales of love, rebirth, nature, and sexuality. A heady mix of myth and ontology, horror and the modern macabre.

Three Moments of an Explosion


China Miéville - 2009
    Destroyed oil rigs, mysteriously reborn, clamber from the sea and onto the land, driven by an obscure but violent purpose. An anatomy student cuts open a cadaver to discover impossibly intricate designs carved into a corpse's bones—designs clearly present from birth, bearing mute testimony to . . . what?Of such concepts and unforgettable images are made the twenty-eight stories in this collection—many published here for the first time. By turns speculative, satirical, and heart-wrenching, fresh in form and language, and featuring a cast of damaged yet hopeful seekers who come face-to-face with the deep weirdness of the world—and at times the deeper weirdness of themselves—Three Moments of an Explosion is a fitting showcase for one of our most original voices.

Spot and Smudge


Robert Udulutch - 2017
    The Spot and Smudge series explores the love of a unique family, the loyalty of their very special dogs, and the perils of underestimating them. These smart, imaginative stories weave together elements of horror, thriller, mystery, espionage, crime, medical drama, and genetic engineering. Note: This series contains some colorful language and mature themes. "Shove over brother, let me show you the proper bloody way to strangle someone." The Hogans weren’t looking to start a war. They just wanted to leave their troubles behind, move closer to grandma, and let their kids adopt some damn puppies. But their quaint new town is harboring some gruesome secrets… …and their strange new pups are not what they appear to be. There’s a dark connection between these mysterious orphaned canines and the town’s twisted criminals…and that connection is dragging the Hogans into a ruthless fight they aren’t prepared to win. But the grit of a devoted family, like the loyalty of a faithful pair of dogs, shouldn't be underestimated… …Especially when those cunning dogs are the most significant leap forward in the forty million years of canine evolution.