When Jim''s big brother Jack is released from prison, the brothers-along with their broken father and Jack''s menacing best friend-decide to charter an ocean fishing boat to celebrate Jack''s new freedom. Once the small crew is far out to sea, however, a mutant species rises from the deep abyssal darkness to terrorize the vessel and its occupants. As the horror of their situation becomes clear, the small group must find a way to fend off the attack and somehow, someway, return to safety; but as the strange parasitic creatures overrun them, they must use more extreme-and deadly-measures to survive.
In this debut collection of body-horror fairy tales and mid-apocalyptic Catholic cyberpunk, memory and myth, loss and age, these are the tools of storyteller Jarboe, a talent in the field of queer fabulism. Bodily autonomy and transformation, the importance of negative emotions, unhealthy relationships, and bad situations amidst the staggering and urgent question of how build and nurture meaning, love, and safety in a larger world/society that might not be "fixable." Winner of the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror.
Even the worst of us need someone to come home to. And Jacob Mallory is the worst of all. Jake, a thrill-seeking psychopathic serial killer, has lived under the radar for years, operating within the city of New York, making kill after kill and emboldened by his lack of capture. But Jake has one big surprise coming his way. When he gets a call from the hospital to pick up a vulnerable patient, one who claims that Jake is his emergency contact, he feels like he's won the lottery. But is there more to Nathan McGuire than meets the eye? And will this supposedly vulnerable young man make or break the city's most notorious uncaught killer? This satirical horrormance will have you rooting for the bad guy as he makes space in his heart for something more. Even if that something proves to be his undoing. Everybody needs someone to come home to, and what is life without family? The family you choose is the one you deserve.
Hoping to escape the drama back home, twenty-something Ophelia arrives by elevated train in a densely packed neighborhood of a nameless Midwestern city. Jilted by a girlfriend, she walks to a nearby park on the lake - Hollywood Beach - where crowds of unsupervised kids and gay men pack up for the evening and leave her alone. Ophelia walks out on the pier, nervous because she cannot swim. As she shotguns the rest of her beers and reflects on the many catastrophes of her life. On the horizon, a massive shark, miles long, surfaces. As Ophelia stares, the creature dives, sending out huge waves that drench her. And change her life.Ophelia is drawn into a crowd of artistic post-college kids in the apartment building. And while she finds them charming and clueless, through them, she can forget her past. The most intriguing of her neighbors is another newcomer named Clyde, whose energy is infectious. When they return to the beach, Clyde invites Ophelia to move in with her until they find her a job. Ophelia agrees, and they kiss. But while Ophelia is happy to enjoy everyday life in the City, she soon realizes that Clyde and her other friends are restless and antsy, wanting to move out into the world and try new things. While the gigantic shark lurks in the lake's waters, Ophelia struggles to navigate life. Will she ever learn to swim?
Last week, did you tell your best friend why the King of Cryptopolis has gone insane and why he ordered his guards to behead him? Do you know the secret of the black magician Aleister Crowley-how he wrote of the moonchild, an ethereal spirit to be placed in a barren womb? Have you ever heard of Arson Hoover and the Worldwide Church of Appliantology? If you answered no to any of these, you're clearly misinformed about the newest collection of dark and fantastical stories by Robert Guffey. How would you even survive Casual Day at work? When the tattoos begin to pile up on your flesh like unlucky cars drawn to an accident on the freeway, don't come crying to me-I am just the back cover of a book, after all--but look for the answers inside me, inside Guffey's head, which I have chopped off and bound in paper.
What happens when we go looking for trouble? Delights or dismay? Many horror stories and films, as do plenty of hook-ups, begin with this premise. When you can't sleep and begin browsing Grindr or Scruff, why not invite the guy without a face pic who has been taunting you to come over? Dancing at the club? The fierce-looking man gesturing with a shake of his head to the back alley door seems promising. How about picking up a hitchhiker late at night on a lonely road? The allure of trouble is the forbidden fruit at the finale and the pleasure of abandoning good judgment for this win. And one of the more enticing pursuits for us sodomites is rough trade, those men, young and old, who could answer one wrong move on your part with violence. The stories in Brute are a collection of some things old, some things new, somethings scary, and somethings to leave you black and blue.
In 2079, Stevven Pane (they/them) operates an unsanctioned GreenRoof, an urban garden atop a condemned apartment on the coast of South Carolina. The city seeks to evict Stevven, along with nine-year-old Eli, "Earther" Gino, gossip magazine journalist Barbara, and BluBerry, a sentient plant. When this motley crew is forced to navigate a neoliberal cyberpunk urban landscape, miles of abandoned highways riddled with oil cults and cannibals, and swamps of uncanny critters in the hopes of reaching a new home, the last place Stevven ever trusted is the University grounds nestled in the foothills of Tennessee.
In this new collection from Shirley Jackson Award-winning author Christopher Barzak, discover stories where fairy tales, gothic narratives, and classic monster stories are transformed into new wonders. A princess who yearns only for freedom dances her nights away at clubs in defiance of tradition. A young man plots revenge on his murderer from the underworld. Two friends discover a goblin market where they are offered the fruit of forbidden love. On the streets of London, a man destroys a little girl's life in an instant. The caretaker for a woman confined to her room frees her from the circumstances that have bound her. A maid at an inn discovers the powerlessness and power of invisibility. A teenager, locked into Kensington Gardens after closing time, is brought face to face with the reality of a childhood icon. A man is born, grows up, and dies, all within the span of a day. A bank clerk determines to save himself and his friend from the destinies their overbearing fathers have made for them. From the Brothers Grimm to Kafka, Barzak imaginatively traverses the history of the dark and the fantastic and returns with new tales for an ever-changing world.
An unnamed city in 2020: Haunted Texan journalist Devon meets genderqueer emancipated teen Garrett over tear gas. This pair needs to survive the riots and struggle with the intensity of emotions from being young, passionate, and political outlaws.
Bones of extinct species wander a campground, stalking a group of friends in love with the same woman. The object of their affection seeks solace with a couple in a world with rain that kills. In a world where men are almost extinct, a daughter struggles to connect with her father during a camping trip amid skeletal mammoths. Returning to her repressed hometown, a woman transforms into a man-eating monster when she returns. An engineer who constructs hearts for artificial people finds herself drawn to the most damaged models lurking in the subways. Her successor, a robot assassin, avenges women wronged and ruined by capitalism. Journey to the liminal space with acclaimed author Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam where interconnected stories span from past to future among the dead and the living.
Morris came to Manderlay Colony to write, to share his truth, and create something literary. But on his last night in the quiet, small town, a series of events leave him trapped, with shrinking funds and no sure means of escape. As the hours and days pass, the beer bottles pile up on the bar counter, and as he confronts a man from his past, his sense of self is challenged. Jonathan Harper's debut novel is snarky, at times brutal, exploration of the modern man who stands at the mouth of a tunnel, knowing that what's inside will change him, and not always for the better.
From the backdrop of an impoverished steel-working community in working-class Hamilton, Ontario, in the 1970s, To Refrain From Embracing follows the trials faced by a small family after suicide-attempt results in 33-year-old veteran Ted being checked into the Hamilton Psychiatric Hospital. His wife Gloria struggles with family finances and growing worries related to the well-being of their 10-year-old son Josh while also re-embracing her Indigenous identity through encounters with a local steelworker and remembrances of her mother. Josh, meanwhile, struggles with his nascent sexuality, lack of acceptance from his peers, and fears about his father's mental health, all while entering into a friendship with a troubled neighbourhood teen.To Refrain From Embracing is an immersive, naturalistic, and darkly comedic exploration of a family pushed up against personal and societal precepts of class, race, and sexuality.
When a plane goes missing in mysterious circumstances, Devin Stacy, a freelance necromancer-er, contingency communication specialist-finds the National Transportation Safety Board needs his special abilities. Using his unique arcane skill to touch base with a dead pilot, Captain White, Stacy must discover the truth about a horrifying flight gone awry, even under enormous pressure from the NTSB, as the missing plane blips on and off of their radar.
Fourteen unsettling and eerie speculative shorts that draw on the richness of folk and fairy tales. Genies, one-eyed sheep, and automatons, among other oddities, populate these pages and so populate the reader's imagination. Weird fiction author Schaller includes a section of story notes that reveals his inspiration for each tale.
James Fitzgerald likes his life the way it is. He has a stable academic career teaching American literature; a comfortable townhouse in Brooklyn; a satisfying, open marriage with his partner of fifteen years; a sweet and playful young boyfriend; and a recently-published, well-received novel about a famous early-twentieth-century Harvard professor. But his poise is shattered when a woman appears at a book signing bearing a surprise gift: an unsent letter from her brother Gregory, James' first boyfriend and-ever since Gregory's sudden death twenty-five years ago-the dark gravitational center of James' intellectual and emotional life. What follows is a near hallucinatory night of soul-questioning as James, wandering the streets of New York, re-examines his stormy, life-altering relationship with Gregory, a charismatic, self-destructive activist and writer and the real impetus behind James' new novel.Rapidly shifting between the late 1980s, when AIDS cut a deadly swath through the gay community, and the dawn of the Trump era where social media and political polarization threaten another kind of death sentence, American Scholar tells the story of a man driven to discover but afraid to know the truth about himself and his loves past and present.
Eurydice is dead, and there's no rest in the Afterlife. The place is a college filled with classes like Hauntings, Controlled Baking Disasters, and Threads of Fate. When Eurydice was alive, she tried to find her voice in her music, in romance, and in her friends. While creating a suite of destruction that eventually led her to, well, being dead. Now, here among the shades (and newer, more ghostly, friends), Eurydice has to come to terms with the life she left behind: mostly in the enfant terrible boyfriend who put her here. The infamous Orpheus. Clever and brutal and hilarious, Jordan Kurella's novella is a mythic read. A finalist for the Nebula Award for Novella!
James Blackthorn is a solid company exo-geologist stationed at an automated mining facility on a newly discovered planet of Zil. It's his duty, or so he thinks, to spend the brutally hot summer months helping to test an experimental drug on an indigenous reptilian volunteer, Aveliin-one that blocks her species' natural hibernation cycle and will prepare them for integration into Concur Unlimited. As the planet bakes, the two have plenty of time to waste, so they share their cultures-which, for James, involves watching old films and playing classic games. And this close relationship becomes romantic. As they grow closer, there's more at stake than the happily-ever-after of one human and one Zill. But the course of true love never did run smoothly for anyone in heaven or Earth or Zil.
Ghosts and weird mourners, horrible teenagers and disgraceful instructors. Haunted prisoners and sea folk taken from the shore. H. Pueyo's evocative writing takes notice that the dead, like memories, are often closer than we think, and the guilty are often ignorant of the damage done and astonished when they themselves suffer. This debut collection offers Pueyo's stories in both English and Portuguese to celebrate the author's heritage.
Within these pages, the authors (ranging from the bestselling and award winning to exciting new comers in the beginning of their careers) have thrown off the crusty, dank, and old trapping to bring us stories from around the world that transcend what we might think of "the typical" mummy story. Only one of these tales is set in Egypt. These wrapped spirits are not back from the dead to find lost loves or enact revenge and neither are they merely shambling, slow moving, physical threats. Prepare to be frightened by what Braum has unwrapped!
Josh Moore lives with his family on the 'wrong side' of Hamilton, a gritty industrial city in southwestern Ontario. As a young boy, Josh plots an escape for a better life far from the steel mills that lined the bay. But fate has other plans and Josh discovers his adult life in Toronto is just as fraught with as many insecurities and missteps as his youth and he soon learns that no matter how far away he might run, he will never be able to leave his hometown behind. Jeffrey Luscombe's debut novel of repressed sexuality, family tension, and gritty locale will enthrall readers.
In this gripping science-fiction novella: Amur grew up among the Nosi, a matriarchal society where decisions are enforced through violence, until he was chosen by Dorone and taken to live among the elderim, beings of immense power. Stripped of family, increasingly at odds with his own drug-altered body and mind, Amur now lives by the sea, where he hones his fighting skills and contemplates revenge against his former lover. He enlists the aid of a magical hound, hoping to pit her against his enemy. But loyalties will be tested before Amur can face Dorone once more.
Forget Arkham and Dogpatch, Yoknapatawpha County and Hooterville, forget what guidebooks might allege, because the weirdest town to be found in the Western Hemisphere is Redgunk, Mississippi. For over twenty years, author William Eakin has been spinning tales of this a backwater place, where strange encounters are more than local gossip and the kudzu hides all manner of creatures and adventures. Redgunk is a small town where visitors can pay a few cents to see real-life mummy behind the Corner Liquor Store and Gas for just 50 cents, or hear good ol'' boys and girls talking about alien abductions and the sighting of mermaids and monsters.
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