Fantasy Patrick

The pulse hits without warning. In one harrowingly destructive instant, a mysterious seismic pulse in the Scottish Highlands rips away all semblance of global security. When peace is shattered, fear takes over. The stakes rise without mercy. As the pulse's chaos spreads across the world, it becomes painfully clear that Piper McCarthy - a child born like no other - might hold humanity's only hope of averting total disaster.

Sometimes the only way out is to fall further in…

As Earth's leaders gather to usher in a new era of interplanetary cooperation, a remarkable discovery in the skies above New Kerguelen threatens to destroy the peace on both worlds....

In the clear blue skies above Long Island, two airplanes collide. Tony Stark watches the scene in horror and wishes he had the technology that is almost within his reach - a new hyperintelligent instant control system that could have given the aircraft advance warning. But Stark, an obsessive, increasingly troubled recluse, doesn’t know that his invention has been compromised.

The best-selling Extinction Cycle series by Nicholas Sansbury Smith first introduced listeners to a world ravaged by an engineered virus that turned men into monsters. Humanity's only hope was not a cure, but another bioweapon. When deployed it killed 90 percent of the infected, but the remaining 10 percent transformed into even more terrifying creatures called Variants. Here's a collection of Extinction Cycle short stories that explore the human spirit and the fight for survival in the face of overwhelming odds from some of the leading voices in the post-apocalyptic genre.

Recent events have proven too much for Cha Ming. His heart is broken, and his soul is shattered. He cannot move. He cannot speak. His friends worry for his safety. Soul trauma is difficult to heal at the best of times, and to do so, the Monkey King calls in an expert. He sends Cha Ming to the Heartforge Realm, the place where legends are born and heroes are made.

Life for Cha Ming is a daily grind. A rat race where people don’t make any real decisions. When he asks the universe for something more, fate itself answers his prayer. A talisman brush older than time itself sends him to another world, where magic, fortune, and danger await. Now, the world is at his fingertips. He has a new life, a new body, and can wield the five elements. It’s too bad his new home is a place where might makes right, and immortal cultivators and demons fight at the drop of a hat. But where the divine brush goes, danger follows.

When the dead rose, Ryan Maxwell planned on waiting the apocalypse out in the massive Bunker he built after winning the lottery. In the eight months since Z-Day the Maxwell family and their friends have not only NOT stayed hidden away, they have searched the country for loved ones and taken hundreds into their safe Haven. The discovery of electromagnetic "ghosts" directing some of the undead changed the apocalypse landscape beyond anyone's imagination. But the further discovery of science that can possibly eliminate that threat may lead them down a more dangerous path.

Vesta Colony has a problem, aliens are snatching men until they disappear for good. Humanity's defensive forces are stretched too thin to help a distant outpost, and so, the desperate founders, as well as their investors, are given the bad option of recruiting the worst while bribing the rest. When Alex's wife was murdered, he turned full vigilante. After years of having a sterling record, he found himself willingly incarcerated to exact his vengeance. His incarceration eats at his soul until an offer too good to refuse from Vesta Colony changes his fate.

Loch is seeking revenge. It would help if she wasn’t in jail. The plan: To steal a priceless elven manuscript that once belonged to her family, but is now in the hands of the most powerful man in the Republic. To do so, Loch - former soldier, former prisoner, and current fugitive - must assemble a crack team of magical misfits that includes a cynical illusionist, a shape shifting unicorn, a repentant death priestess, a talking magical war hammer, and a lad with seemingly no skills.

He has no voice or name, only a rank, Eighth. He doesn't know the details of the mission, only the directives that hum in his mind. Dart the humans. Leave them where they fall. His job is to protect his Offside. Let her do the shooting. Until a human kills her...

The New World tells of Viola's journey to the New World, brilliantly capturing the hope and fear of settlers in search of a new life. Patrick Ness says that he wrote it "as a huge and deeply-felt thank you to readers. I've had so many questions about Viola and what her life was like before that I couldn't resist the opportunity to reveal just a little bit extra.

Vesta Colony has a problem: Aliens are snatching men until they disappear for good. Humanity's defensive forces are stretched too thin to help a distant outpost, and so, the desperate founders, as well as their investors, are given the bad option of recruiting the worst while bribing the rest.

In one harrowingly destructive instant, a mysterious seismic pulse in the Scottish Highlands rips away all semblance of global security. Complacency grew in the years since Dan McCarthy brought humanity into contact with intelligent aliens, but those days are gone. When peace is shattered, fear takes over.

A violent storm sweeps through California, taking on a life of her own. Making her way from the Pacific Coast, she gains momentum as she approaches the Sierra and transforms into a blizzard of great strength, covering mountain ranges and roads with twenty feet of snow. Originally published in 1941, Storm is a rare combination of fiction and science by a master storyteller, drawing upon a deep knowledge of geography, meteorology, and human nature.

A year and a half ago, Ryo and Aras defeated their enemy, ending the conflict between the winter country and the summer lands. But with all his important secrets revealed in that struggle, Lord Aras now faces a new challenge in dealing with his own countrymen.

Ajaya is back in the Zone again - training soldiers to survive the unsurvivable, and using his time inside to hunt for answers of his own. And what he finds reaches far, far outside Manhattan. Human life has been extinguished from the Zone, but what's brewing there is far from satisfied. Racing to contain the danger, Ajaya must protect his own from threats in every direction, both outside and inside the deadliest Borough on the planet.

When a massive meteor lights up the sky over the remote island of Kerguelen, the world holds its breath. In Birchwood, Colorado, Dan McCarthy gets to work. Following his incredible experiences of the previous year, Dan knows this was no natural occurrence. The Messengers are back - to finish what they started - and they didn't come all this way for nothing....

Barrett Bradshaw was living the life for a while. As the de facto leader of House Dragon at Nosferatu Academy, his peers and teachers alike held high hopes for him. That was largely because of who his rather famous father turned out to be. Sure, everyone at the academy was the scion of some family of demihumans or another, but only Barrett had an archangel for a parent.

Captain Galvin Quintos, along with his irreverent crew, is back and facing his most harrowing enemy yet. As the battle within the Eta Carinae Star System rages on with the Varapin, Quintos is forced to make a deal with the devil, one Commander Dunft Choob. Sure, Quintos has saved the pirate world of Haven—but at a heavy price. Oblivion, the most powerful warship in the known galaxy, will be reluctantly returned to the Varapin ghouls.

Gideon Gull leads a double life: one as a talented young bard at the Rhapsodic College, the other as a student of the Shadow School, where Taldor's infamous lion blades are trained to be master spies and assassins. When a magical fog starts turning ordinary people into murderous mobs along the border between Taldor and Gideon's home nation of Andoran, it's up to him and a crew of daring performers to solve the mystery before both nations fall to madness and slaughter.