A bloodsucker discovers he’s not the only monster stalking the streets of Victorian London, when his nightly search for sustenance brings him face-to-face with the city’s most notorious butcher – Jack the Ripper. A short story from our Spectres horror line.

Sometimes, it’s the uninvited guests that make a dinner party more memorable…

John wants to turn his life around, and that starts with a marriage proposal to his girlfriend. All that’s standing between him and this act is a simple journey on the London Underground. Except that this journey will be anything but simple.

Strange old ladies, apathetic passengers, a nervous Asian man and a deepening sense of unease are all obstacles to overcome, but will John gain redemption and an easy passage? Or, will this train ride lead to somewhere darker, dimmer and altogether horrifying?

A short work of horror from our Spectres line.

Lee and his Grampa Myles share a rare and deadly secret. Most of the time, they’re able to control it. But once, when Grampa was younger, it got away from him. Ever since that day, something has been eating at his insides. Now, Lee faces his own deadly moment. Will he be able to resist the temptation? A short story from our Spectres horror line.

Many people own pets. Some people are owned by their pets. And a few, like elderly widower Rolf Stenstrom, take the concept of animal care to the extreme.

A short work of horror from our Spectres line.

Amelia City, Iowa. Like any fair-sized American town, the folks of Amelia know plenty of folklore and urban legends surrounding the place they call home. Unlike elsewhere, however, folks here quietly understand something more.
They know that in Amelia City, those myths have a habit of being true more often than not. They know that there really is something going bump in the night—and it just might rip them apart if it finds them.
Discover just some of those legends in this collection, which includes entries from the acclaimed Roads Through Amelia series by Joshua T. Calkins-Treworgy.

Bing Crosby’s rendition of the song “White Christmas” by Irving Berlin has long been a holiday classic. The snow that begins to fall this Christmas Eve, however, is NOT the sort most people would have been dreaming of.

A short work of holiday horror from our Spectres line.

Marcus wakes up in a surreal state of urgency and foreboding. Something is wrong, yet he can’t perceive exactly what. As he makes his way through the morning getting ready for work, little things begin to add up like clues to a horrible truth that awaits him. Will the dream hold up or fall? Will life? A short work of surreal literature from our experimental line The Lab.

Miss Virginia Locks has a date tonight, but something is wrong. She finds herself standing outside her home without any knowledge of how she got there. But what waits for her once she is back inside, a crawling, gasping thing, is even more unsettling. A short story.

Hack Ward thought he had found a niche market for his skills as a private investigator when Hollywood came to Detroit. When washed up director Will Peyton gets pegged to direct a low-brow family comedy starring a chimp and a perpetual bad-girl pop star, Hack gets brought in by Peyton to keep an eye on starlet Haley Goslin. It’s not because Peyton is concerned about her image; it’s because Peyton is in love with the younger woman and doesn’t want her fooling around on him.

It isn’t long, however, before events on the set start turning sinister. Hack is on hand the day the chimp has a psychotic episode and attacks Haley. Saving her life sets off a chain of events that bring Hack and Haley closer together and puts them in more and more danger. On the morning she gets called into the set to shoot some additional footage, they have no idea they are getting called into a trap.

When it comes to murder, which is the more dangerous animal? Chimp … or man?

When John Bell tells his family that he saw zombies crossing their farm one October night, he asks them the keep it quiet so as to not cause a panic. But when his first daughter, Cecelia, draws a picture of the zombies in school, the cat’s out of the bag.

Now, some in the conservative little town want the little girl expelled. Some want to exploit the zombies for publicity. The media outlets catch wind of it and are in a feeding frenzy. All John wants is to keep the town from descending into chaos. One thing’s for sure – when the townsfolk descend on the Bell household to see the zombies for themselves, they’re going to get a lot more than they bargained for.

A new work of horror short fiction from the Derringer-nominated author of Ballistic and The God of Speed.
Nine-year-old Kayla suffers from horrible dreams, along with the nagging fear that monsters will come for her in the night. Employees of the Stafford Sleep Clinic think they know better, until an astonished technician discovers that beyond all of the machines, wires, and monitors he trusts so completely, the little girl’s fears may not be imaginary after all.

Australia. The Outback. It was a cracked, red land. A cruel land, where tusked predator and prey locked in a cycle that predated man. It was in that land that the American conservationist, Beth Taylor, vanished. And where her husband must go to avenge her, to find the men who killed her, discover the way she was killed—and ultimately to learn the primitive ways of the razorback, the cruelest predator of all. Only then would he know who. And how. And why. If he survived….

 

Rebellious teen Robin “Robbie” Willette thinks her life sucks.

Her grades aren’t the greatest. Her dad hates her “older” boyfriend. And her mom keeps Robbie on a short leash after her straight A, perfect, older sister gets pregnant and has a baby. As the tension builds in her family, Robbie runs away with her boyfriend Lane only to wind up sleeping on the sofa of her ostracized sister.

But it’s not all that bad. Robbie has a taste of independence. She’s working on getting her diploma through night school. She has a job–not a great one but it’s legit. And she’s finally beginning to figure out that her relationship with Lane is a dead end. For the first time in a long time, Robbie Willette is getting her life together.

Just as her life is improving, the world around her begins to crumble. Literally. A plague crawls over the planet, mutating humans into blood-lusting zombies that help spread a deadly fungus. It isn’t long before society collapses. In fact, in less than a year, all of society’s norms are gone. Robbie quickly finds herself separated not only from her family, but from all humanity. Hoping to reunite with her sister and niece, Robbie sets off with the most loyal companion she’s ever had: a yellow Labrador she names Yuki.

The road she travels is not easy. She must confront personal fears, untrustworthy humans, and aggressive mutants. Will Robbie fulfill her dream of finding her family, or is the world just too dangerous a place to discover what she needs most–hope?

Travis Coble didn’t kill and eat his family. At least that’s what a jury decided twenty years ago. But like Lizzie Borden, Travis Coble was branded guilty by an angry public and consigned to a life of suspicious whispers and sidelong stares. Now, Professor Dick Myers wants to clear Travis’s name once and for all. An interview with the reclusive mountain man would not only bring Myers fame—it could save his job.

But Myers will find more than a good story in Coble’s isolated shack in the Smoky Mountains. He will find the truth about what happened twenty years ago…and the true meaning of horror.

A new work of terror from the author of the worldwide bestseller Old Order.

When the townspeople hire The Ghost Hunter to tell them whether or not a spectre haunts a mansion on the edge of town, they get more than they bargained for. In the end, the town would have been wiser to have read the fine print. A work of short horror from our Spectres line and the author of The Clarent Pin.

Libby has devoted her life to Mia ever since their parents died. Now Mia’s marriage to Rob threatens all Libby’s big plans for little sis, making it very hard to be happy for the couple. So far, Jake, big brother of the groom, has ignored Libby’s pleas for help derailing the wedding train. In fact, he’s actually footing the bill for their siblings’ last-minute Christmas nuptials. And though Jake is good looking, smart, and funny, Libby is determined not to like him.

When a winter whiteout results in a lodging crunch, Jake volunteers to share a room with Libby, who can’t say no without making a scene. It’s only when they’re alone that she learns he has an ulterior motive for choosing this particular Ozark Mountain hotel for the honeymoon. Jake, host of a paranormal television show, hopes they’ll be visited by the ghost supposedly haunting the old building. He’s even focusing his video camera toward the bed he has graciously turned over to Libby. A ghost? Really? This cinches it. The guy is not only self-serving, he’s clearly bonkers.

But sometimes things aren’t what they seem. A wedding that closes one door might open several others. And the guy who comes off as a jerk? Well, he could actually be kind of cool. As for the ghost Libby doesn’t believe in…maybe he’s only dropping by to nudge her in the right direction.

October 1912

Deputy Matt Hargreaves is assigned to serve a warrant miles from home, but a simple mission soon goes tragically wrong, and a father and child lay dead. Consumed with guilt, Hargreaves flees from the carnage and begins a downward spiral leading to gut-wrenching hallucinations and a strange passage through an alternate reality.

At the same time, Jody Simms is transporting a prisoner. As they pass through an abandoned mining site with a grim history, Simms spills a sick fantasy to his prisoner before realizing his now-revealed secret could destroy him. There’s only one answer to his dilemma: a loaded pistol in a box under the seat.

Not far away, a train is crossing the badlands. Among the passengers is Rachel Adler, a stubborn young woman who has spent her childhood in an insane asylum. Now, she has fled Montreal high society and is determined to see the Old West. Her precognitive mother has warned Rachel that a demonic force awaits her in the wilderness, and Rachel’s rail journey will soon lead her to a devil of a man with a plan of his own.

So begins The Phantom of Witch’s Tree, a novel that shatters all the shoot-’em-up conventions of the traditional western as it shifts seamlessly between dark fantasy, horror and the supernatural, unleashing a wild ride through an Old West never before experienced.

What had happened to her own daughter? Where had this child come from, the mother wondered. Who was she? Why did she sit for hours staring at her baby brother, contemplating…who knew what?
It was enough to drive you mad…especially, if you had a history of madness. But the doctors had assured her that was all behind her, a thing of the past…
Wasn’t it?
A short story.

The old inn sits by a lake in an ancient forest, shrouded in mystery. Outside, a restless willow thrashes its limbs and, for a fleeting moment, a woman seems to dance in the mist. A trick of the light? Or a villi, perhaps, one of the sirens of legend, who tempt the unfaithful lover to his doom? A man would be a fool to venture out into that night–but the sultry Magda may be waiting for him, an invitation he is unable to resist. And it’s only mist, isn’t it…?
A short story.