Urban Short Stories

Soar among the redwoods in this bite-sized adventure with Chloe, the recently divorced fairy inventor. She's the one who'll discover the encroaching zombie horde, but what will she do when she does? Come for the campy creature face-off. Stay for the inventiveness, adventure, romance, and intrigue. Torn between her handsome ex-husband and the brave and beautiful captain of the fairy guard, Chloe must fight to save her unborn young and the rest of the fairies.

The complete first installment of the Bruins' Peak Bears stories. Books one through five now with an extra book zero backstory! Book zero: Lily - The year is 1885, and the dusty little town of Iron Bark is just a stage stop on the vast frontier. Lily Cunningham steps off the coach to find a strange man greeting her. Luther Campbell is dapper, rich, and definitely interested in her, but Lily senses something sinister about him from her very first glance.

The (black) magical season is here - and whether it's a solstice seance gone demonically wrong with the incomparable Kim Harrison, a grossly misshapen Christmas with the remarkable Lynsay Sands, a blood-chilling-and-spilling New Year's with the wonderful Marjorie M. Liu, or a super-powered Thanksgiving with the phenomenal Vicki Pettersson, one thing is for certain: in the able hands of these exceptional dark side explorers, the holidays are going to be deliciously hellish!

Ever loved and lost? If presented with the chance to get it all back, would you consider it? Zach is a novelist who’d purposefully sequestered himself to a cabin in the lofty pine-filled hills. Yet, not everything is quite what it seems up there, as his revived wife becomes the last of his worries.

Entrapped within the luxurious confines of the Vertico condo complex, together with Ron and the rest of the staffers, expect to be dragged into a world of unnerved and unnerving characters. This mildly prosaic short story reeks of solitude, love (a dash), death, and possibly the supernatural? Are some curious cats luckier than others?

Come one, come all! The Carniepunk Midway promises you every thrill and chill a traveling carnival can provide. But fear not! Urban fantasy's biggest stars are here to guide you through this strange and dangerous world....

Alortia, an evil and cunning monster collects champions in his menagerie in the underworld. Who's next? Beowulf.

Black, like a select few other beings, is a soul reaper, whose sole predilection is to claim human souls. However, his life is turned upside down in a chance encounter with a human woman. Black’s memories of his past human life come flooding back to him. Will he continue to hunt human souls or will he turn against the authority and now hunt the hunters? This is the tale of the beginnings of Black’s journey as a changed reaper.

Take a trip into theheart of passion as seductive samba rhythms pulse in the warm evening breezes. Escape and savor these three scintillating stories set against the beautifulbackdrop of Brazil.... Two weeks in Rio - surely that's enough time for marketing VP Sydni Lawson to forge a lucrative merger. But instead of sweet-talking real estate mogul Gabriel St. James, she's being swept away by their sizzling and unexpected attraction.

Peter, Quinn, Romeo, and Sam are four (lame) shapeshifters (platypus, mosquito, piranha, sloth) who also happen to be best friends and members of a (terrible) garage band. But the local Battle of the Bands is happening on the full moon, and the boys are forced to turn to Sam's non-were (Goth) sister Natalie to help them out.

Luck has never favored River. She doesn't believe it exists, or she didn't believe until the night it came to her aid in the form of a stray dog. Now, she has company on her journey to find her biological father and try to stay out of the hands of the man who hunts her for the lucky charm she doesn't believe in.

Fearful Rock and Other Precarious Locales is the third volume of Night Shade Books' five volume "Selected Stories of Manly Wade Wellman." This volume is made up of eight novella length stories. It includes Wellman's "Judge Pursivant" and "Sergeant Jaeger" stories, as well as a lost classic from Strange Stories (1939).

A modern romance short story about teenagers from two minorities. They meet at an afternoon job. Both are poor and underprivileged. She balances his anger, and he provides safety and security. This short story of a relationship ended before its time.

Lucy has always known that she was different from the other kids in her home. Of course, it doesn’t help that she suffers from a recurring nightmare that wakes her up with a scream on her lips and sweat pouring down her back. The nightmare is driving her crazy. She’s too scared to sleep, she’s too tired to live, and she feels as though it’s never going to get better...until Daniel shows up, that is.

In this reincarnation story, Goovu and Katala’s destined life together is cut short by transatlantic slave traders, who were traitors and cousins from a couple of villages away. The couple’s home village was ravaged to smithereens. Five hundred years later, and in the present-day United States, could there be a chance for the two souls to reunite? After a fateful car accident sends a youth, Jason, into a coma, the young man begins to remember a past life, which now haunts him to seek out the woman of his actual dreams.

This short story unfolds as journal entries. The journal’s author takes you through his grief stricken teenage life, having lost his girlfriend to the afterlife. The lad uncovers something fascinating about the magical book that he’d found in his attic, but what are the consequences to all this newfound power?

Scott is devastated when his wife is horrifically struck and killed by a car on their Caribbean honeymoon. In desperation, he gives into his grief and listens to a mysterious suggestion from a morgue janitor that he could have his wife "cured of death". Against all of his reservations and common sense, he feels he has nothing left to lose, but what he finds is that there are unnatural things worse than death.

Ossie and Baxter are on a mission. They've been sent to conduct a membership interview with Yancey Allyson, the latest applicant to The Society of Super Powered Heroes. But what will they do when they discover that Mr. Allyson is a little bit...unorthodox?

Before writing the Conan stories, Robert E. Howard wrote an alternate history of the world that included the origins of the various races and countries that formed the background of his most famous heroic character. This history shows where the Cimmerians originated and the tribes they fought to establish their kingdom. How did the backward skin-wearing Picts overrun an empire? The answers are here. Fans of the Conan stories will enjoy this grand view of the history of the Hyborian Age.

In the dark corners of an obscure bookshop, where forgotten tales gathered dust and whispered secrets, there lay a peculiar collection. It was a compendium of bizarre and unsettling tales, shrouded in mystery and curiosity, known only as the “Uncollected Oddities.” Many claimed that these macabre stories were the creation of Edgar Allan Poe himself, his lost works banished from the public eye.