Dark Fantasy Short Stories

The duty had fallen to Cor to take his nephew Daron to the top of the Pinnacle, for no one else dared. The hard part was making a game out of it so that the boy would not suspect. Some lies were necessary for the greater good, after all. Weren't they?

Three veteran hunters are on the trail of a supernatural creature. It is a simple tracking mission, promising easy money. But things go horribly wrong, and the mercenaries realize too late that they are facing one of the deadliest creatures known to man. Embroiled in a desperate fight for survival, their doom may well await them.

In a land of forbidden magic, a mysterious cave holds both riches and danger for three adventurers who discover a mighty treasure and a terrible secret.

Five knights tell stories of ancient lands, madness, and terrifying monsters...but no one can top Knight Elric's tale of the Land of Hershel, a monstrous swamp filled with horrifying creatures and an ever-present threat. If you stop moving, you drown. "In the Land of Hershel" is a short story set in the thrilling world of SunRider.

Sometimes the world is a very dark place. You know the magic is still out there, but it feels distant or displaced. Voices in the Darkness is an attempt to create a link, to bring some of those voices together in a single work of art. Six award-winning authors lent their talent to this work. The stories are unique and dark, filled with wonder and emotion.

This novel collects the five novellas in the Succubus Schemes series into an episodic novel. Helen and Amy, the heroines from The Succubus Apprentice, have now graduated from apprentices and are pursuing their new careers of mage and succubus respectively. They start off trying to steal an egg from a pterodactyl's nest, and from there go on to serve as bodyguards for a dark elf, try to fix a couple of other supernatural relationships for their friends, and then run a scam on the most powerful corporation in the world with the help of some very unreliable allies.

What exactly is the difference between a love letter and a suicide note? Is there really any difference at all? These might be the questions posed by Dear Sweet Filthy World, Caitlin R. Kiernan’s 14th collection of short fiction, comprising 28 uncollected and impossible-to-find stories. Here are 28 tales of apocalypse and rebirth, of miraculous transformation and utter annihilation. Here is the place where professing your undying devotion might be precisely the same thing as signing your own death warrant or worse.

Nadia Moran is an illegal wizard, an expert thief, and an occasional killer. Riordan MacCormac is an assassin of the Family, a legendary band of assassins bonded to Shadowmorph symbionts. And unless Nadia and Riordan work together, the creatures of the Shadowlands will devour them both....

Clock the Chaos Mage. A stranger out of time, hidden in the folds of shadow. He is the guardian of Coney Island's supernatural borderlands, and the only thing standing between our reality and the demons that thirst to destroy it. Clock's Watch. An anthology of heroic dark fantasy and terror.

Drawn from the myths and histories of the American Midwest, Piasa: Rite of Talons combines the legend of the Piasa dragon-bird with the Cahokia Mound City. A dark pact is made between the royal line of Ouatoga and the man-eating monster. What horrible price must be paid to ensure the prosperity of the Mound City? Who is the true enemy of the progress of mankind?

Sergeant Jacob Knox leads the Head Knockers, a unit of scout-saboteurs in the war against the Dread Duke and his armies. They are the favorite squad among Captain Brighton's Stormwalkers, until an ambush by shapeshifters kills the Captain, half the company, and Knox's best men. Now the new Captain has new orders: he's sending the Head Knockers to investigate an abandoned village, the possible source of the attack.

The police take Terrell Boyd to Malcolm Bliss Mental Hospital. Diagnosis: Schizophrenia, paranoid type. Can the paranormal powers he claims really work? What if Jesus Christ returns to Earth the second time, only to have the world drive him insane? Unavailable for over 30 years, until now. This short story first appeared in the July 1982 issue of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone Magazine.

Heaven's Burning God gave Ted Erickson the power to freeze the sinful, so why does his own body keep growing numb? A prostitute. A dirty bum. They can't survive Ted's growing ability to exhale cold air from the Ninth Circle of Hell. So how can the suicidal teenager next door keep singing? At first Ted Erickson doesn't understand how or why he can freeze things just by blowing on them. He believes God gave him a mission to clean up the world of sinners.

In this short story, paranormal detective Will Castleton gets a phone call in the middle of the night that appears to be about his girlfriend - who happens to by lying in a catatonic state in the hospital. But within an hour Will is thrust into an investigation involving vengeful spirits and a decades-old murder.

Imagine your life as a vampire. How would you survive? What would you eat? How could you handle yourself around other humans who have beating hearts? How would you face the one you really love? Would you tell them that you are a vampire? Would you change them? Or would you lead them on with a web of lies?

The mind of Roland Yeomans is a wonder-filled carnival of delight and terror that stretches from the mysterious forests found bordering civilization to the coldest reaches of alien dimensions. Yet all his work is united by one common thread: a vivid and profound understanding of the vast sea of emotions that bring strength and mythic resonance to our frail species. Roland Yeomans' characters may find themselves anywhere and anywhen.

O.J. Simpson in an alternate reality and blind ninjas ushering in the apocalypse are just two of the beautifully written tales in this seminal work of art, from the mind of a human being the likes of which God and the devil wholeheartedly agree upon. While drenched in comedy, Laughter's Cold Shadow takes on the darkest of subject matter: murder, rape, racism, the nuclear family, ninjas, Nazis, zombies, police brutality, drug cartels, hedonism, psychopathy, and more.

When an American man discovers that he's the last descendant of the De la Poer family, he travels to England to take over their crumbling estate. Accompanied only by his cat, the man follows the incessant sound of rats to a dark place beneath the estate, unearthing horrible, dark, gruesome secrets about his ancestors and the type of activities they partook in. Taken by madness, the man falls into a dark pit of despair and commits unthinkable crimes. This jarring story from a renowned writer of horror fiction utilizes fear-inducing themes to entice its audience.

Lovecraftian themes abound in the tales of an intern at a madhouse and an illiterate madman. Slater, the madman whose unspeakable crimes led him to the madhouse, is continuously awakened in this story by surprisingly literate hallucinations of a glowing entity seeking revenge. Inspired by Slater’s uneducated background and the telepathic machine that he had made in his yesteryear, the intern delves deep into Joe Slater - who is receiving telepathic messages from a being of light.

When God descends to earth as a Dinka woman from Sudan and subsequently dies in the Darfur desert, the result is a world bizarrely new yet eerily familiar. In Ron Currie's provocative, wise, and emotionally resonant novel we meet God himself; the Dinka woman whose mortality He must suffer when He inhabits her body; people all over the world coping with the devastating news of God's demise.