(Short Story) When an ancient creature tries to steal your last breath, the consequences can be...severe.(Short story) When an ancient creature tries to steal your last breath, the consequences can be...severe.

Five years after they barely escaped an explosion that destroyed their homes, the survivors decide it's time to return above ground. However, one little girl's prophetic dreams speak of danger above. What is waiting for them behind the door to the civilization they left behind many years ago?A group of scientists are stationed on a planet when a deadly explosion threatens to destroy everything. Luckily one little girl has the power to see the danger in her dreams and they are quickly able to move underground before disaster strikes, while leaving many of the natives behind.Five years later, they're still underground and running out of food. Panic overtakes the small community of survivors and they push for action. The same little girl warns of danger waiting for them back above ground, but desperation takes hold and no one will listen to her. What is waiting for them behind the door to the civilization they left behind many years ago?

Three Stories -1) Venom (From the Night Roamers Series) by Kristen Middleton2) The Eternals by Kristie K. Shafer3) Blur (Night Roamers) Book One by Kristen MiddletonWarning - this anthology contains adult content and is meant for readers 17 and older.Dark Dreams.... a vampire anthology.Three Stories -1) Venom (From the Night Roamers Series) by Kristen Middleton2) The Eternals by Kristie K. Shafer3) Blur (Night Roamers) Book One by Kristen MiddletonVenom -When Melody Williams goes missing after a concert at Club Nightshade, her eighteen-year-old cousin, Chelsey Fairfax, sneaks into the club to find answers. Little does she know that some mysteries are better left hidden.Meanwhile, Venom is in town, a hot new band from Europe, and the owner of Club Nightshade wants them there permanently...The Eternals.Rani's world is shattered when Tyler, one of her good friends, reveals a horrifying secret, and then disappears without a trace. Later, she meets a mysterious stranger who steals her heart and sweeps her off of her feet. Little does she know that he has his own dark secrets, ones that threaten her very existence...

Fitz and Leni are investigating the strange happenings in their city. The authorities say it's a superbug but these young amateur sleuths team up to find that it's much more than that and that tragedy awaits.A group of men on a mission in the far reaches of space crash land on a savage planet, Earth. The only way their kind can survive here is to drink the blood of humans, which they take no pleasure in. On Earth they are known as "vampires". The youngest member of the group, Shae, encounters a teenage girl named Abigail, who challenges the group's loyalties to each other, endangers their survival, and steals Shae's heart.

When his football career seems to be going down the tubes, Steve Starks moves his family to the Arizona desert for peace and quiet. He soon finds that his new home is harboring bats in the attic, only these are not of the ordinary variety and they find themselves in a fight for survival."Fast Fears" is a scary chapter book, or novella, series for readers of all ages. Some scenes may be too frightening for small children.

London is dirty, distant and dangerous ... but that’s where orphan Tom Falconer is heading. And he’s got a whole assortment of vicious criminals hot on his heels. Tom is helpless and alone until he meets Moll Cutpurse, a thirteen-year-old pickpocket. Together they find themselves chased across the city by the murderous Ratsey. But it’s only on the first night of a new play – The Devil and his Boy – that Tom realizes that the fate of the Queen and indeed the entire country rests in his hands.

It is 1962, and Elisa Esposito—mute her whole life, orphaned as a child—is struggling with her humdrum existence as a janitor working the graveyard shift at Baltimore’s Occam Aerospace Research Center. Were it not for Zelda, a protective coworker, and Giles, her loving neighbor, she doesn’t know how she’d make it through the day. Then, one fateful night, she sees something she was never meant to see, the Center’s most sensitive asset ever: an amphibious man, captured in the Amazon, to be studied for Cold War advancements. The creature is terrifying but also magnificent, capable of language and of understanding emotions…and Elisa can’t keep away. Using sign language, the two learn to communicate. Soon, affection turns into love, and the creature becomes Elisa’s sole reason to live. But outside forces are pressing in. Richard Strickland, the obsessed soldier who tracked the asset through the Amazon, wants nothing more than to dissect it before the Russians get a chance to steal it. Elisa has no choice but to risk everything to save her beloved. With the help of Zelda and Giles, Elisa hatches a plan to break out the creature. But Strickland is on to them. And the Russians are, indeed, coming.

The Chairman has been killed and now Lilith, Satan's Consort sits on the vampire throne as the Vampire Council’s new Chairwoman.   She raises all the dark covens—calling every major dark witch and warlock to do her bidding.   Her goal is to distract the team members, while the unborn heir to the Dark Realms awaits his own birth.   All Lilith needs now is Damali's newly discovered angelic powers to make that come to past.   That will allow her evil progeny to walk through the veil between worlds and take his throne as the true Anti-Christ. Damali and her crew race to stop Lilith. However, raising not only the dark covens, but all vampires that had not been slain by Damali, puts the world out of balance and kicks off the Armageddon.

A psychological thriller: It’s the spring of 2013, the time of the great Zombie Apocalypse. Upper Manhattan is the last area to fall and mystery writer, Christine Chambers and her kitty take refuge inside the Cloisters museum. Hiding in the castle, surrounded by iron gates, steep ramparts, and secret passages, she is soon joined by a madman, hungry animals, and evolving zombies.A psychological thriller: It’s the spring of 2013, the time of the great Zombie Apocalypse. Upper Manhattan is the last area to fall and mystery writer, Christine Chambers packs up her kitty and decides to flee. With nowhere to go, she takes refuge inside the Cloisters museum. This castle-like structure, part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is set atop a huge acreage, with steep drops from the ramparts to the mighty Hudson River below. Surrounded by iron gates it seems to be zombie proof. But she is soon joined by a madman.With zombies outside and a dangerous serial killer within, she desperately spends her days and nights hiding inside the castle, which is riddled with underground tunnels and secret passages. Before long, hungry animals find their way inside and, it seems, the zombies are evolving. This plot keeps to the historical and structural reality of the Cloisters, and as close as the author can manage to serial killer profiles.

Within their family, The Hunt is a rite of passage. It is a rite of manhood. It is a darkly terrifying and morbid family tradition that has been handed down from father to son for generations.Gerald was a proud man. Proud of his family heritage, of the life he'd built for his own family, and proud of his son who, on the verge of manhood, was turning out to be everything he could have hoped for. He wanted nothing but the best for his son, Scott.But Gerald is finding that letting his only son go off into the world to make his own way and be his own person is harder than he thought it would be. But he knows that it would be far worse to hold him back. On his fifteenth birthday, Gerald and Scott head out into the woods to enjoy one of the last hunts they may have together as father and son.Welcoming Scott into manhood requires him to make his first solo kill on The Hunt. It's a family tradition that Gerald takes very seriously and not wanting to be the one to destroy a time honored tradition, is the only thing he's ever asked of his son. Within their family, The Hunt is a rite of passage. It is a rite of manhood. It is a darkly terrifying and morbid family tradition that has been handed down from father to son for generations.

With this outrageous new novel, China Miéville has written one of the strangest, funniest, and flat-out scariest books you will read this—or any other—year. The London that comes to life in Kraken is a weird metropolis awash in secret currents of myth and magic, where criminals, police, cultists, and wizards are locked in a war to bring about—or prevent—the End of All Things. In the Darwin Centre at London’s Natural History Museum, Billy Harrow, a cephalopod specialist, is conducting a tour whose climax is meant to be the Centre’s prize specimen of a rare Architeuthis dux—better known as the Giant Squid. But Billy’s tour takes an unexpected turn when the squid suddenly and impossibly vanishes into thin air. As Billy soon discovers, this is the precipitating act in a struggle to the death between mysterious but powerful forces in a London whose existence he has been blissfully ignorant of until now, a city whose denizens—human and otherwise—are adept in magic and murder. There is the Congregation of God Kraken, a sect of squid worshippers whose roots go back to the dawn of humanity—and beyond. There is the criminal mastermind known as the Tattoo, a merciless maniac inked onto the flesh of a hapless victim. There is the FSRC—the Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime Unit—a branch of London’s finest that fights sorcery with sorcery. There is Wati, a spirit from ancient Egypt who leads a ragtag union of magical familiars. There are the Londonmancers, who read the future in the city’s entrails. There is Grisamentum, London’s greatest wizard, whose shadow lingers long after his death. And then there is Goss and Subby, an ageless old man and a cretinous boy who, together, constitute a terrifying—yet darkly charismatic—demonic duo. All of them—and others—are in pursuit of Billy, who inadvertently holds the key to the missing squid, an embryonic god whose powers, properly harnessed, can destroy all that is, was, and ever shall be.

To serial slayer Andrew Compton, murder is an art, the most intimate art. After feigning his own death to escape from prison, Compton makes his way to the United States with the sole ambition of bringing his "art" to new heights. Tortured by his own perverse desires, and drawn to possess and destroy young boys, Compton inadvertently joins forces with Jay Byrne, a dissolute playboy who has pushed his "art" to limits even Compton hadn't previously imagined. Together, Compton and Byrne set their sights on an exquisite young Vietnamese-American runaway, Tran, whom they deem to be the perfect victim. Swiftly moving from the grimy streets of London's Piccadilly Circus to the decadence of the New Orleans French Quarter, and punctuated by rants from radio talk show host Lush Rimbaud, a.k.a. Luke Ransom, Tran's ex-lover, who is dying of AIDS and who intends to wreak ultimate havoc before leaving this world, Exquisite Corpse unfolds into a labyrinth of murder and love. Ultimately all four characters converge on a singular bloody night after which their lives will be irrevocably changed — or terminated. Poppy Z. Brite dissects the landscape of torture and invites us into the mind of a killer. Exquisite Corpse confirms Brite as a writer who defies categorization. It is a novel for those who dare trespass where the sacred and profane become one.

Witness a first-person view of a changed world. A solitary survivor hides in a mountain above the city, living in a trailer with the door and windows duct-taped shut. Outside, a virulent disease has killed off most humans. Those who lived have become something else. Survival in this new world comes down to two, simple rules: stay quiet and protect the air. But one day, everything is threatened.Witness a first-person view of a changed world. A solitary survivor hides in a mountain above the city, living in a trailer with the door and windows duct-taped shut. Outside, the air is poisoned with a virulent disease that has killed off most humans. Those who lived have become something else. Something that hunts and kills. Survival in this new world comes down to two, simple rules: stay quiet and protect the air. It's an obsessive and regimented life, but one day a visitor comes up the mountain that threatens everything.Part I of a can't-miss series. Part II out now.

After the battle at Masada, the Neteru team returns to San Diego believing forty-thousand demons had been eradicated and that Lilith's spawn has been killed. But somehow the treacherous little creature got away. Just as had been prophesized at the dawn of the Armageddon, the anti-Christ has been born and will soon rise to power. Rewarded for her creation, Lilith is given the daylight bite and power to make Councilmen day-walkers. Having Fallon Nuit and Sebastian able to withstand sunlight is a huge problem, especially when they are adding new master vampires at recordbreaking levels. Meanwhile the dark realms are healing and adding to what had previously been wiped out—feeding off the dark energy of the newly created anti-christ who is only waiting to emerge.

Just when Dr. land was about to give up on his dream his luck changed, but this expedition was going to be his last when he entered the tomb of King Necron."I can't believe I've been an Archaeologist all these years and all I have to show for the thirty plus years is a couple dinosaur bones. I feel I've been nothing, but a disgrace to all archaeologists abroad. When will my luck change?" said a sad Dr. Moreland.Sometimes when we are at our lowest points in life some kind of intervention steps in and our luck changes, and that's what is about to happen to Dr. Moreland the moment he pulls his revolver from his desk, and points the gun to his head. Just as he pulled trigger, and closed his eyes, and nothing happened the door of his study burst open with the news he had been waiting for all these years. A young ambitious student of Dr. Moreland's said "Dr. Moreland! Dr. Moreland!" as he gasped for air."What is it? Can't you see you interrupted me, I was about to end my worthless life, this better be good," explained Dr. Moreland in frustration."You're not going to believe this, but a good friend of mine was on an expedition in Egypt and was told by some old man that said he can lead us to King Necron's tomb.""What do you need me for? There are many well qualified archeologists that were more successful than I.” “Why don't you go now and let me try again? Maybe this time I'll succeed,” replied Dr. Moreland in a sad tone of voice."Didn't you tell no matter me how frustrating it can be in this business to keep on trying because when you least expect it your luck can change in an instant?" explained the eager student."Yes, I said those words, but I only said it so you wouldn't end up like me old and broke with nothing to show for it," as the doctor laid his head down on his desk sobbing."Dr. Moreland, don't destroy what you instilled in me. Wipe those tears dry, and let's get on the next plane to Egypt, and make history. I'll make a deal with you if I'm wrong I'll end my life as well. Come on! Come on! What do you say?""Ok! Ok!" then the doctor placed his revolver in his suitcase for protection when he and his colleague arrived in Egypt. The doctor got on the phone and scheduled their flight to Egypt.The student helped Dr. Moreland in rounding up more students to help with the expedition.Later that afternoon, Dr. Moreland and his team of wannabe archaeologists were on a plane heading towards the greatest find ever and a curse that would be unleashed when the tomb of King Necron was opened.