Horror Fiction Fantasy

For his entire life, Charley Sutherland has concealed a magical ability he can't quite control: He can bring characters from books into the real world. His older brother, Rob - a young lawyer with a normal house, a normal fiancee, and an utterly normal life - hopes that this strange family secret will disappear with disuse, and he will be discharged from his life's duty of protecting Charley and the real world from each other. But then, literary characters start causing trouble in their city, making threats about destroying the world...and for once, it isn't Charley's doing.

Lestat speaks. Vampire-hero, enchanter, seducer of mortals - for centuries he has been a courted prince in the dark and flourishing universe of the living dead. Lestat is alone. And suddenly, all his vampire rationale - everything he has come to believe and feel safe with - is called into question. In his overwhelming need to destroy his doubts and his loneliness, Lestat embarks on the most dangerous enterprise he has undertaken in all the danger-haunted years of his long existence.

These stories present electric messiahs, identity constructs, the Beatles, and even a nuclear Armageddon, which serve as comic foils for Lain's everyman characters. Here is an America where packets of Sea Monkeys arrive in the mail containing secret messages, and the girl next door can breathe underwater. With Last Week's Apocalypse, Douglas Lain arrives with a punch line and a warning.

What do you do after you’ve saved the world and nobody believes you? Amber is a teenage runaway, hiding out in Los Angeles, who is also a daughter of the wolf kind. And, not long ago, she had her own personal demon. Richard was her servant, her lover, and a hellish force bound to the Earth against his will. Together they turned back the World Snake that threatened to destroy the city and she had granted Richard his freedom. Now Amber is alone, but nobody accepts that she has truly shed her demon.

The Earth is dying. Humanity - over-breeding, over-consuming - is destroying the very planet they call home. Multinational corporations despoil the environment, market genetically modified crops to control the food supply, and use their wealth and influence and private armies to crush anything, and anyone, that gets in the way of their profits. Nothing human can stop them. But something unhuman might. Once they did not fear the sun. Once they could breathe the air and sleep where they chose.

Amityville baywoman Ellie West fishes by day and bootlegs moonshine by night. It's dangerous work under Prohibition, but Ellie's desperate to see her brother go to college. So desperate that when wealthy strangers ask her to procure libations for an extravagant party, Ellie sells them everything she has, including some booze she acquired under unusual circumstances. What Ellie doesn't know is that this booze is special. Distilled from foul mushrooms by a cult of diabolists, those who drink it see terrible things - like the destruction of Long Island in fire and flood.

Occult investigator Quincey Morris and his "consultant", white witch Libby Chastain, are hired to free a family from a deadly curse that appears to date back to the Salem witch trials. Fraught with danger, the trail finds them stalking the mysterious occult underworlds of Boston, San Francisco, New Orleans, and New York, searching out the root of the curse. After surviving a series of terrifying attempts on their lives, the two find themselves drawn inexorably towards Salem itself - and the very heart of darkness.

"Perfect deadpan marks the opening of Ali Simpson’s The Monster'" writes Susan Merrell of The Southampton Review in her introduction to this issue of Recommended Reading.

Russia's Ural Mountains hide a deadly secret: a supernatural portal to the country of the vampires. Soviet scientists and ESP-powered spies, in a secret military base, study the portal - and the powerfully evil creatures that emerge from it, intent on ravaging mankind. When Jazz Simmons, a British agent sent to infiltrate the base, is captured by the KGB espionage squad and forced through the portal, his last message tells Harry Keogh, the Necroscope, that the vampires are preparing for a mass invasion.

It's been exactly 10 years since the murders at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, and Charlotte (Charlie for short) has spent those 10 years trying to forget. Her father was the owner of Freddy Fazbear's Pizza and the creator of its four adult-sized animatronic animals, and now Charlie is returning to her hometown to reunite with her childhood friends on the anniversary of the tragedy that ripped their town apart.

Strange things exist on the periphery of our existence, haunting us from the darkness looming beyond our firelight. Black magic, weird cults, and worse things loom in the shadows. The Children of Old Leech have been with us from time immemorial. And they love us.... Donald Miller, geologist and academic, has walked along the edge of a chasm for most of his nearly 80 years, leading a charmed life between endearing absent-mindedness and sanity-shattering realization. Now, all things must converge.

The mist is full of evil things—dark, twisted beings that think only of their own hunger—but Clare has clawed her way through. She and Dorran are alive against all odds, though relief is only temporary. Dorran is sick, and declining fast. The only way to save him lies in the mysterious Evandale Research Station, supposedly one of the few remaining places safe from the predators that lurk in the shadows. But the station is a three days' journey away, and it's unlikely their small group can endure that long out in the dark.

A striking red-head, 20-something Jody is attacked and transformed into a vampire while walking home one night in downtown San Francisco. Befriending 19-year-old Tommy, Jody tries to understand her new undead life, but trouble finds her when the cops start suspecting Tommy of being a local bloodsucking serial killer.

Killing the sadistic warlord known as the Dog Tongue took everything Gus Berry had, including the woman he loved. Now, all he wants is to get away from the bloody scene of their final showdown. But when he heads west in a stolen truck, a brutal snowstorm forces him to turn back—and seek refuge in the Dog Tongue’s former headquarters. Though it’s littered with human carnage, the abandoned luxury hotel has a lot to offer a guy like Gus. But in addition to soft beds and working toilets, he encounters still-lurking dangers both living and undead.

"[ Memnoch] is one of Rice's most intriguing and sympathetic characters to date. . . . Rice ups the ante, taking Lestat where few writers have ventured: into heaven and hell itself. She carries it off in top form."( The Seattle Times)

He was born an outsider, like the rest of his family. Poor yet resilient, he lives in the shadows with his aunt Libby and uncle Darren, folk who stubbornly make their way in a society that does not understand or want them. They are mongrels, mixed blood, neither this nor that. The boy at the center of Mongrels must decide if he belongs on the road with his aunt and uncle or if he fits with the people on the other side of the tracks.

Miracles are happening. Pray to God they stop. In the dead of winter, on a highway in Quebec, a man crashes his car and survives. In New York, a homeless person is run over by a bus and lives. In Tokyo, a teenager jumps off a high rise building and fails in taking her own life. All over the world, miracles like these transpire, and people breathe a sigh of relief. But for the next week, some people will begin to suspect a terrible truth. A handful will even search for it. One man will find it. And in seven days, all hell will break loose.

Hannah Evans startles awake, covered in gore, in a place she doesn't know. Captured and restrained in the hands of strangers, she struggles frantically to remember who she is. And then she sees the needle she was injected with...and the bodies. Before long, she's thrust into a desperate struggle to survive. Navigating a crumbled landscape, fighting for her breath and her humanity, Hannah clings to the shallow hope that her family is still alive.

Only Thomas Ward is left. He's the last hope; the last apprentice. Can Thomas succeed? Will he learn the difference between a benign witch and a malevolent one? Does the Spook's warning against girls with pointy shoes include Alice? And what will happen if Thomas accidentally frees Mother Malkin, the most evil witch in the county?

The post-Katrina New Orleans of The City of Lost Fortunes is a place haunted by its history and by the hurricane's destruction, a place that is hoping to survive the rebuilding of its present long enough to ensure that it has a future. Street magician Jude Dubuisson is likewise burdened by his past and by the consequences of the storm, because he has a secret: the magical ability to find lost things, a gift passed down to him by the father he has never known - a father who just happens to be more than human.