Psychological Science

Seven strange stand-alone tales involving unusual people caught in disturbing circumstances are presented in this collection.

Rita, professora universitária, começa a ter visões de uma realidade paralela, como se estivesse o tempo todo mergulhada num aquário. Em casa, no trabalho ou na rua, ela se vê rodeada por seres aquáticos e especialmente pelo "grande peixe", uma criatura fantasmagórica que a persegue, mas que ninguém mais enxerga. Como se não bastasse, sua pele é tomada por escamas aos poucos, de forma dolorida e fantástica. Brânquias surgem em seu corpo, e isso pode significar o início ou o fim de uma jornada.

Rick Timber was a small-time con-artist living in either high-end hotels or out of his car. He was a loner. Who needs friends when you have split personalities to keep you company? One of Rick's alter egos, Tim Bricker, was fearless. He had an eye for curvy women and nerves of steel when it came to the short con. Tim wasn't afraid to put Rick into dangerous, even deadly circumstances. Egor, on the other hand, was more cynical, always looking for a fight. Rick created the characters to help him, but now they seemed more interested in helping themselves.

Jon Gunnarson never meant to transform humanity. He just wanted a normal life. A life where he doesn't absorb other people's emotions, lose himself, and have to live like a hermit. So he jumps at the chance to help develop a scam telepathy app because it will get him to Bhutan, where he hopes an old friend will teach him how to disconnect. The problem is, working with others is the least of his worries because Jon and Ella unwittingly trigger the onset of mass telepathy. As if that isn't enough, they must run for their lives when they discover a way Venn can avoid arrest.

When Jared refuses to kill for his gang, they beat him nearly to death. Comatose, his world splits in two. In one, Jared battles to wake from unconsciousness. In the other, he becomes a ruthless gang member known as J-Rock. After three years in darkness, Jared finally opens his eyes and is bombarded by visions of the horrible crimes J-Rock is committing in a parallel world. As Jared struggles to wake, he realizes his soul has been switching places with his criminal counterpart. Jared must find a way to eliminate J-Rock before the next switch.

Dr. Leonard Wise, now an associate professor of parapsychology at Garden State University, is requested by a pair of grieving parents to examine the case of their deceased grown son. Harold Stoller was depressed and had thrown himself from the roof of his palatial home. Was it due to his unhappiness, or was he seduced by a female spirit, a succubus, that tempted him to his doom? As Leonard seeks answers, he comes in conflict with Dr. Anika Vanya, a specialist in unusual hypnotherapy. Was Harold’s death merely an accident, or did she program him to destroy himself?

Twelve-year-old Spencer embarks on a hunting trip with his abusive father, until a tragic accident leaves him alone and lost, deep in the woods. After a horrific bear encounter, Spencer stumbles upon Stu, a bald man who refers to the forest as his domain and claims it's inhabited by otherworldly creatures he calls "the crazies". Next thing he knows, Spencer is locked up in Stu's cabin. But is it imprisonment or salvation?

In a reimagined contemporary Edinburgh, where a tectonic fault has opened up to produce a new volcano in the Firth of Forth, and where tremors are an everyday occurrence, volcanologist Surtsey makes a shocking discovery. On a clandestine trip to new volcanic island The Inch, to meet Tom, her lover and her boss, she finds his lifeless body and makes the fatal decision to keep their affair, and her discovery, a secret. Desperate to know how he died, but also terrified she’ll be exposed, Surtsey’s life quickly spirals into a nightmare when someone makes contact - someone who claims to know what she’s done....

By the end of the Corporate War, Dallas Blake had lost everything: his wife, his daughter, his whole family. He was a man in need of far more than just a new beginning. What Dallas needed was a resurrection. Dallas went to the Union Fleet space docks to buy a war-surplus scout-class ship. Instead, he unknowingly buys the Tesseract, a ship with many secrets. It does not take Dallas long to find out that its crew of artificials seems way more human than they should be and every bit as much in need of a resurrection as Dallas.

When his wife, Hannah, is found dead on the road near the carcass of a fawn, Rod Demsey sets out on a journey to find her killer (with his dog who seems to be able to communicate with spirits). His grief causes his faith to wither until an unexpected turn brings Rod face-to-face with the only person who can tell him what really happened to his wife.

Few writers have attempted to explore the natural history of a particular animal by adopting the animal's own sensibility. But Verlyn Klinkenborg, with his deeply empathetic relation to the world around him, has done just that, and done it brilliantly, in Timothy; or Notes of an Abject Reptile.

Ex-GI Will Gardestang just wanted to go to college on the GI Bill and get on with his life. After a chance meeting, he befriends Tommy Gatchell and Rico Challoner, two young men who share his love for philosophical debate, and soon all three participate in an ESP experiment. After Will and Rico display apparent psychic abilities, Rico begins to become panicky and in short order is killed before their eyes, seemingly long distance by his superiors in a devil-worshipping cult. Enraged over the death of their friend, Will and Tommy vow to track down the killers and unmask their diabolic plans.

Laid low by a tropical disease and an accompanying malaise, Crispin Clare returns to his ancestral home in East Anglia. Local folklore seeps into his fever dreams and into his writing, and the lines between reality and myth soon start to blur. In this finely woven tale of illness and recovery, family and fable, Randolph Stow creates a unique, imaginative landscape, populated by figures from old English myths and legends, and from Clare’s present.

Once in a while, a first novel arrives like a bolt of lightning, commanding attention with an explosion of power, grace, and light. Flying in Place is such a book. As unflinching as The Lovely Bones, as startling as Beloved, it is a work to bear witness - with bravery and compassion - for the experience of millions of readers and their loved ones. Emma is 12, a perfectly normal girl, in a perfectly normal home. With a perfectly normal father...who comes into her bedroom every night in the hours before dawn. Emma will do anything to escape.

What is it that drives a man from the light and into the dark? What force has the ability to take a man from sound of mind to muddled and confused in less than a year's time? Nick Hines wishes he knew because he has just completed the trip from husband and family man to convicted wife killer, child killer, and suspect in the investigation into the accidents that took his own two children's lives. In less time than it takes to wean a puppy, Nick has gone from sane to crazy, unable to distinguish fantasy from reality.

When successful Psychotherapist, Theodore Bond, discovers that two of his patients are appearing in each other's night terrors, yet they've never met he decided to use Past Life Regression, and the detail of their nightmares is shocking.

Distinguished for his talents as a rat killer, the nameless protagonist of Hye-young Pyun's City of Ash and Red is sent by the extermination company he works for on an extended assignment in C, a country descending into chaos and paranoia, swept by a contagious disease and flooded with trash. No sooner does he disembark than he is whisked away by quarantine officials and detained overnight. Still worse, when he finally manages to reach an old friend, he is told that his ex-wife's body was found in his apartment and that he’s the prime suspect.

Memes have been part of computer-assisted communication almost since the development of the first consumer browser (the "World Wide Web") in 1990. This book seeks to explain how memes influence societies and cultures beyond the confines of social networking services. It will begin by reviewing the fundamental definitions that frame discussions about memes in popular culture and academic research. There will be a connection between theoretical concepts about memes and the memetic content itself.

A man finds himself the subject of interrogation related to a break in at his home. Or does he? The line between reality and insanity is easily blurred and razor thin for Marv Stillman. Two best friends join one another on yet another adventure, this time to the furthest remote corner of the Rocky Mountains. They seek evidence of an ever-elusive beast.

Time: 2047. Place: Washington DC. A loner. A teacher. A killer. A preacher. On the streets of the capital city, four lives may be about to collide. And if they do, a nation once regarded as “the greatest country in the world” will begin to self destruct. President Sally W. Campbell can see the danger coming. But can her plan to end America's misery come to fruition before it's too late? The power, of course, is not in her hands. The power lies in the hands of those who control the narrative to the American people: the media.