John Shirley

Darrell Schweitzer

Robert Silverberg

Donald Tyson

Caitlín R. Kiernan

Lois H. Gresh

Arthur C. Clarke

Harry Turtledove

Joseph S. Pulver

Michael Shea

William Browning Spencer

Jonathan Thomas

Melanie Tem

J. C. Koch

K. M. Tonso

Lesław Haliński

Maciej Machała

Szaleństwo Cthulhu

For years, members of the Harkness family have received helpful advice at key moments in their lives from a mysterious, persuasive stranger. His influence on the family seems slight at first. But before anyone realizes it, the strange man is leading them down a very dangerous--and terrifying--road. Original.

The Deceiver

A voice whispers in her ear at night, promising her a new life, urging her to let go of the reality she knows. The voice could only belong to one person, her brother Ethan, but his body, broken by drugs, lies cold in death. An invisible hand has opened the door for Lucy and her sisters and though Lucy questions her parents they have receded into their private existence where nothing can touch them. Lucy is quickly losing touch with her reality of white fences and pristine lawns. She is drawn beyond that door into the dark abyss where her brother waits and evil is hiding in the shadows. Each day the voice grows stronger, demanding that she journey far away to the place that stole her brother's mind and body. As the secret unfolds, the Prodigal emerges.

Prodigal

EYES OF THE WOLF, EYES OF THE WOMAN On a moonlit night in Denver a young girl runs – half transformed, half starving, half innocent. Behind her stretches a legacy of strong women, each possessed by the girl and the terror of the changing. Save her, or consume her. Four sisters lived in four houses. Now their female descendants, steeped in blood and sacrifice and rage, cling to their essence and their ancient rituals while Deborah, runaway, uninitiated, threatens their survival. The family of hunters hunts her down – racing on all fours through the streets of the city and the canyons, gripped by their own quarrels and regrets and their desperate, essential love for one another. They are driven by the need to run, to hunt, driven by the insistent itching of the hair that lies hidden between the flesh and the skin.

Wilding

Revenant

Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Nancy Holder

Sèphera Girón

Kelley Armstrong

Steve Rasnic Tem

Paul Kane

Ken Goldman

J. M. Frey

David McDonald

Daniel Sernine

Kathryn Ptacek

George Wilhite

Amy Grech

Steve Vernon

Richard Payne

Rebecca Bradley

Tobin Elliott

Erin Underwood

Pat Flewwelling

Gar and Judy Reeves-Stevens

Mary E. Choo

Morgan Dambergs

Ryan McFadden

Elaine Pascale

Christine Steendam

Nancy Kilpatrick has gathered together twenty-five original stories by Kelley Armstrong; Nancy Holder & Erin Underwood; Steve and Melanie Tem; Lois Gresh; Gar and Judy Reeves-Stevens; Daniel Sernine; Paul Kane; Sephera Giron; Kathryn Ptacek; Steve Vernon and others to look at the what-if’s of our expiring future.

Experiencing the awe of the miracle that we are.

Expiration Date

Male vampire Joel Desmodus stumbles on a generations-old-secret and is forced to kidnap a newborn boy, and to face his own complicity in his peoples' fearsome legacy. By the Bram Stoker award-winning author of P̀rodigal' and R̀evenent'.

Desmodus

Two haunting tales of love, loss, and family intertwine in a chilling story of how a family is bound together in the midst of incomprehensible tragedy, in a surreal novel that blends fiction and reality, in an expanded and re-imagined version of a story that won the Bram Stoker Award, International Horror Guild Award, and World Fantasy Award. Original. 22,000 first printing.

The Man on the Ceiling

He came from a long line of alkies, addicts, and ne'er-do-wells. Sobriety wasn’t enough—he needed a new life. In Out of the House of Darkness, we meet Neil as he works to make up for the decades he lost to severe alcoholism. This isn't a story about getting sober; it's about moving past mere sobriety and consciously creating a fulfilling life out of the shambles.

Out of the House of Darkness

Returning to her New Mexico village hometown to be with her dying father, Valerie is mesmerized by the mysterious and handsome Gabriel Luz, who tries to initiate Valerie into his dark world. Original.

Witch-Light

Alexander waits in his yellow-gray house in a yellow wood for his namesake daughter, the one who “of all my children ... has always stirred me most, with love, with rage and fear, with envy and disappointment.” He has summoned her. She is his prodigal child, and she is his scion, and it’s time. Alexandra left as soon as she turned eighteen, the only way she could keep from being swallowed up by her father, her only chance of having a life of her own. Alexandra grew up with her father’s voice in her head, his will on her in one form or another. Now, though she vowed she never would, she is going back. Because his voice came into her head, ordering her home. The longer Alexandra stays with her father in her childhood home, the stronger her suspicions that his control over her is more insidious than she knew. Her siblings are all oddly under his control, exactly what he made them, and she discovers evidence of what he has planned for her. “She fled to live her own life,” Alexander observes. “As if there ever were such a thing.”

The Yellow Wood

Twenty-year-old Valerie Kittridge is horrified to learn that her father has had a stroke. As an only child and with her mother dead, her father is all she has in the world, and she leaves her life as a film student in California to nurse her father back to health. On her wild, late-night car ride to Duerme, the small town in New Mexico where her father lives with his girlfriend, she is besieged with a host of strange and terrifying dark omens and flashbacks to her childhood. For there is something waiting for Valerie at Duerme, not just her stricken father, but an irresistible stranger who had saved her life many years ago?the man of her dreams. In Witch-Light, Nancy Holder and Melanie Tem collaborate on the second of their fascinating demon-lover stories. The first one, Making Love, was a sensual variation on the Frankenstein theme. Witch-Light is the mesmerizing story of a dark, mysterious, devastatingly handsome man named Gabriel, a bruja, or male witch, who draws Valerie into a twisted romance that will take her to the very edge of love and obsession. Full of the magic and mystery of the Southwest, Witch-Light is a bittersweet, compelling mix of romance, horror and fantasy, a dark journey into a strange and wonderful world of folk magic, superstition, and obsessive love that knows no bounds.

Reviving people from the past is not an unusual occurance among the aging residents of the Tides nursing home, but when the facility's administer begins to dig into her own elderly father's past, she uncovers evidence of a malevolent past wife who may have returned from long ago to destroy them all. Original.

The Tides

Blood Moon

Janet Berliner

What You Remember I Did is a Baby Boomer love story, full of the complications of adult life. Struggles such as estranged children, an ailing mother, an ex-husband, grandkids, and the kinds of deep secrets that life brings. For Nan Jenssen and Matthew Mullen, it's a recipe for passion and conflict. Nan is a middle-aged tennis coach at an upstate New York community college and spends her evenings watching old movies with her mother, who is slowly slipping into dementia. Then a co-worker sets Nan up on a date with Matt, the incoming poet-in-residence. He's handsome in a James Mason way and very intelligent, but Nan senses something beneath that surface. Of course, she's been sensing that with every man since her husband of more than twenty years confessed that he was gay and left her. In Matt's case, the secret he's hiding is that he has an estranged son who has accused him of abuse based on "recovered" memories. Since Matt won't talk about it, Nan finds the son's therapist and poses as a new patient to find out if the woman is brainwashing her patients, or if Matt really is abusive. What follows spins Nan's world out of control, and puts her own ailing mother's life in danger. All because the therapist has a secret so dark, she keeps it even from herself.

What You Remember I DId

Nothing is simple in fifteen-year-old Casey’s life. She has two families and two houses and two rooms of her own. Sometimes this makes her feel lucky, but other times she feels practically homeless. She also has a brother with Asperger’s. He’s interesting to have around, and she loves him very much, but he’s also complicated. And speaking of complicated, Casey discovers she's a time traveler. She’ll be doing her Algebra homework, or on her way to work at the restaurant, when suddenly she’s in some other time and place, in some other body, and she’s supposed to do something. Help somebody. Fix some problem. But how?

Absence

Singularity gathers award-winning writer Melanie Tem’s most important short fiction, highlighting her diversity and mastery of her art. The sixty stories collected here range from "Sitting with the Driver," a western with a dark woman at its center, to "Little Shit," a contemporary tale of a woman who uses her deceptive appearance and psychic power to trap those who prey on the helpless. The child in "Corn teeth" longs not only to become a part of an alien family, but also to become an alien. And in the title tale, a man studies singularities and strin theory to both understand and blind himself to the truth about the woman he loves. Although the story is not science fiction, its exploration of physics is as rigorous as that found in the best sf. Here you will find no triumphant warriors, no powerful and beautiful protagonists, no monsters from beyond the dark cold void or madmen bent on conquest. Tem's characters are mothers and siblings, orphans and lonely seniors. Her stories are often about family, and always about relationships. Even though Kelly is the only character in "Iced in," the bitter truth that lies at the story's heart is that she is doomed by her failure to maintain relationships. Melanie Tem's stories are often haunted by ghosts and monsters, ghosts and monsters revealed as all too human. In Singularity, she explores the love and terror that lie deep within all of us.

Singularity and Other Stories

Melanie Tem

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