Monster Fiction

Using forbidden Marrangha magic and the three stolen vapours, the evil sorcerer Zharradan Marr has created a creature....but for what purpose?

Listen and relive exciting tales from Highlights, now on audio! Learn about a boy at a Spanish market who knocks over a stand of avocados down a hill and makes guacamole and about a jungle that is full of terror at the thought that a monster could be lurking in the shadows, along with other stories.

Wounds is a confounding, strange, and utterly entrancing collection of six stories, including one new novella from Shirley Jackson Award-winning author Nathan Ballingrud. From the eerie dread descending upon a New Orleans dive bartender after a cell phone is left behind in a rollicking bar fight in The Visible Filth to the search for the map of hell in “The Butcher’s Table”, Ballingrud’s beautifully crafted stories are riveting in their quietly terrifying depictions of the murky line between the known and the unknown.

When a strange woman shows up outside our camp in the Wastes with monsters chained up to her RV, it feels like I’m the only one who actually wants to help them. That big, grey-skinned monster with the cage on his head and the chain hanging from his back—something is telling me I need to help him. I need to free him. But I have absolutely no idea how I’m supposed to do that, especially when he can’t even talk to me to tell me how. Collector Mary is finally leaving our camp to head back to her monster menagerie, so I do the only thing I can think of to help him: I go with her.

Rebekah Daniels is just your ordinary spunky 9 year old girl living in the small town of Curtis Bay...EXCEPT she is determined NOT to be ordinary at all! Her small town is filled with mysteries and Rebekah is sure that she, along with her best friend Mouse, will be able to solve every last one of them.

Life is finally going right for Lazarus Kerrigan, necromancer and Pale Horseman. Business is booming, and no gods have tried to kill him for a whole month. But the past is catching up to him. There's a serial killer on the loose in New Orleans, one that targets children and leaves behind only bones. When the case develops eerie similarities to his sister's murder, Laz knows the police are in over their heads. They need help, and the dead aren't talking. Well, except for the ghost of a 200-year-old pirate, and Laz doesn't like what he has to say.

Jack Miller has spent his entire nine years in the same house on the same street in the same town with the same best friend. One day, while delivering papers on his same ordinary paper route, Jack finds himself amidst a very unordinary world. A world where strange and silly monsters become his friends.In the final installment of "Jack's Big Secret" find out if Jack and Annabelle finally find and save Bellion.

Not too long ago, I was just Dominic Thompson, a former employee of an American marketing firm. I have Lilith, the goddess of the Infernal Realms, to thank for my new state in life. Now, she's returned to my dungeon, hoping to strip away what she gave to me. I won't simply roll over and let her take it. I like what I've built. Sure, she started me on my quest for domination, but where was she when I carved out my first dungeon room or built my first trap? Was she present when I enthralled my beautiful champions: the troll and the storm dungeon core?

Andrew hunts monsters as a member of the Non-Human Investigative Corps, and he's very good at his job. Unfortunately, the skills he honed to keep the peace aren't much use in the cutthroat world of city politics, and a recent civil ruling is forcing the integration of the once exclusively human NHIC!

The game has changed. After receiving a mysterious message from a famous Proxima developer, Chase Knowles takes a step toward an incredible future. With an important tournament coming up, everything seems to be working in his favor. But there are other forces at play, even if some of those forces are internal. Wanting more from his relationship with Lady C., Chase goes to extreme lengths to bring her digital form to New York City through an android shell.

Terrence Mack was born poor, grew up tough, and died hard. Waking up in a sea cave with nothing but the clothes on his back and a new bullet scar was enough to convince him that wherever his death had brought him, it wasn't paradise. His new world quickly proves to be a place of danger, magic, monsters, and - for Terry at least - women. Known on Celestine as a template, Terry's genes are key to the survival of the eldritch races. But the fiercely competitive eldritch don't typically leave their lovers alive long, and aren't accustomed to taking 'no' for an answer.

Mirabelle is part of a very unusual family. Between Uncle Bertram transforming into a ferocious grizzly bear and Aunt Eliza’s body being made entirely of spiders, it’s safe to say they are an extraordinary lot. To the human residents of Rookhaven Village, the family is a threat. So long ago, a treaty was reached between them - in return for sundries and supplies, the monsters won’t eat the townspeople - and an invisible glamour was set around the perimeter of the Manor to keep strangers out. But it also keeps Mirabelle and her family hidden from those who would do them harm.

For the first time in her life, Moriah has an open door of possibility before her. Recently divorced, she's free to do what she's always wanted. There's only one thing holding her back—the desire to have a child. Moon Blooded Breeding Clinic offers a unique service—trigger a heat and breed with a werewolf.

Winnie Wednesday’s future is looking bright. Hemlock Falls is no longer hunting the werewolf, she and Erica Thursday are tentative friends, and Winnie finally knows exactly where she stands with Jay Friday. With everything finally on track, Winnie is looking forward to the Nightmare Masquerade, a week-long celebration of all things Luminary. But as Luminaries from across the world flock to the small town, uninvited guests also arrive. Winnie is confronted by a masked Diana and charged with an impossible task—one that threatens everything and everyone Winnie loves.

Alchemist Zoe Faust is no stranger to magical mayhem, but when her boyfriend's new tea shop is vandalized and his special tea blends stolen, she plunges into a baffling mystery to save him. The clues lead Zoe and her gargoyle sidekick Dorian to an eerie mansion high in the Portland hills, filled with creeping carnivorous plants and enigmatic topiary monsters. When they stumble across a corpse in the conservatory that appears to have been killed by sinister shrubbery, an estranged member of the family is implicated in the murder.

Horror fans will get their thrills in this collection–from werewolves to vampires to zombies–all the time-worn horror baddies are there. But so are predators of a distinctly American variety–the horrors of empire, of intimate partner violence, of dispossession. And so too the monsters of Rogers’ imagination, that draw upon long-told Cherokee stories–of Deer Woman, fantastical sea creatures, and more.

The Shape of Water is set in Cold War-era Baltimore at the Occam Aerospace Research Center, which has recently received its most sensitive asset ever: an amphibious man captured in the Amazon. What unfolds is a stirring romance between the asset and one of the janitors on staff, a mute woman who uses sign language to communicate with the creature.

Victor Wolfe has roamed his country for twelve years now. Ever since leaving his tiny village to escape to a life that felt worthwhile, he has been traveling the lands, fighting battles, plundering old tombs, and bedding fierce adventuresses. It's been quite the life. But that all changes when he has an intimate encounter with a monster girl, a dryad who opens his eyes to the possibilities of pleasure that only monster girls can provide. Now he is headed north, towards the famed Hinterlands.

“Sharks are as timid as rabbits,” says a superintendent of the Coast Guard, dismissing the possibility that a shark could be the culprit in an unprecedented fatal attack at the Jersey Shore. It’s July, and swimming in the sea is a popular new pastime, but people up and down the East Coast are shocked and mystified by the swimmer’s death. A prominent surgeon at the shore, Dr. Edwin Halsey is the one who examines the victim, and the only one who believes the perpetrator was a shark—and that it will strike again.

Monster hunting isn’t as easy as it looks. And Jack should know. Because an ogre has just appeared in his garden and tried to eat his aunt. (She was the winner of the World’s Worst Aunt competition, but that’s not the point.) After (sort of accidentally) defeating the ogre, Jack finds himself apprenticed to a grumpy 200-year-old monster hunter called Stoop and heading off to Cornwall, where more ogres are causing havoc.