The Ninth Configuration is set in a remote castle which the US government is using as a military asylum. A Marine Corps psychiatrist with a crisis of faith encourages his patients to enact their fantasies as part of their therapy. However, he proves himself to be more deeply disturbed than at first appears and finally sacrifices himself to save one of his patients.

Welcome to my horror fest. How scary can Flash Fiction get? Why not judge for yourself. In these short tales of the macabre I bring the Gothic into the modern. But a warning: there's no blood or gore here. I try to freeze it instead.Pick-me-up, a young adult problem novel, tells a heroic story of Katelyn fighting back against the dysfunctions of her family and her friends. While she tries to live in the right, Katelyn falls into her own problems when she hooks up with a boy full of trouble and his own addictions. This rural-Iowa teenager keeps making decisions that would lead her to the same fate of her two high school dropout sisters. Katelyn fails classes, skips school, and at one point ends up with reserved seating in the Principal's office. Katelyn’s friends back away as she begins to live up to the troubled legacy left by her family. Home life proves no better. Katelyn’s dad disappears and ends up in jail, again. The fragile relationship she has with her mother nearly breaks as Katelyn is dumped with the responsibility of caring for all her older sister’s abandoned children. Katelyn gets her own pick-me-up in the form of a charming older boy with a criminal history. Her friends and scene change as she follows him back into his bad habits. Just as she keeps faith in her family, she keeps giving Tim another chance. Only after she suffers because of her misguided love does she start to take care of herself. She's able to salvage her dignity and rebound to break the dropout streak in her family.

From the moment Rachel's family takes in her orphaned cousin Julia, strange things start to happen. Rachel grows suspicious but soon finds herself alienated from her own life. Julia seems to have enchanted everyone to turn against her, leaving Rachel on her own to try and prove that Julia is a witch. One thing about Julia is certain-she is not who she says she is, and Rachel's family is in grave danger.

All Abigail ever wanted was to be happy.For as long as she could remember, Abby has always been teased for having an imaginary friend she calls "Maxwell". As it turns out, Maxwell is much more than the product of a young girl's over-active imagination.The Shining West, free from the yoke of the Loszian Empire, has long stood as a beacon of freedom, guarding its people from the evils of the Loszians. Aquis is the largest of the Western Kingdoms, ruled by its benificent Queen Erella, High Priestess to Garod, leader of the gods of light.The son of a farmer in the bountiful kingdom Aquis, Cor Pelson had always been different. Shortly after he was born came the horrific coughing attacks, and his skin changed color to a gray reminiscent of the grave. He is a Dahken, a race the Loszian necromancers fear, reviled by the Western priests, and thought extinct by both. As a child, strangers entered his life, even if only briefly, and drove home that there are those that would bend him to their wills. Frightened and determined to protect those he loves, Cor steals away from home. He finds that the world is not the good, safe place that his parents taught him of, but in fact is a cruel, brutal place where blood flows readily and the ability to protect himself is paramount.He finds, even on the open sea, that those who would control the power within his blood follow him, intent on inflicting harm upon those around him. He must learn to tap the power within his blood to find his own path, take revenge and build a new world for his kind.

At a quiet restaurant in an unnamed city a man and a woman sit across from each other. She is distraught. He is quickly drunk. Neither can stop thinking of what they've just seen - a deed so brutal, so terrible as to leave the woman in tears. Was it a moment of meaningless urban violence or was it something more?At a quiet restaurant in an unnamed city a man and a woman sit across from each other. She is distraught. He is quickly drunk. Neither can stop thinking of what they've just seen - a deed so brutal, so terrible as to leave the woman in tears. Was it a moment of meaningless urban violence or was it something more? From the author of the dark short story Hide and Seek and the bestselling novella The Sickroom comes a tale about the things we do for love and the devilish monkey that dwells within us all.

It was Billy McTavish's first sea voyage.He had signed on to the serve as convoy escort on the THISTLE a Royal Canadian Navy corvette.Through U-Boat attack and Luftwaffe bombing runs, Billy had thought he had seen all of the horror that the Atlantic could offer a young Canadian sailor.But Big Jimmy Noonan had other ideas...It was Billy McTavish's first sea voyage.He had signed on to the serve as convoy escort on the THISTLE a Royal Canadian Navy corvette.Through U-Boat attack and Luftwaffe bombing runs, Billy had thought he had seen all of the horror that the Atlantic could offer a young Canadian sailor.But Big Jimmy Noonan had other ideas...]***WHAT FOLKS ARE SAYING ABOUT STEVE VERNON'S WRITING! "If Harlan Ellison, Richard Matheson and Robert Bloch had a three-way sex romp in a hot tub, and then a team of scientists came in and filtered out the water and mixed the leftover DNA into a test tube, the resulting genetic experiment would most likely grow up into Steve Vernon." – Bookgasm "Steve Vernon is something of an anomaly in the world of horror literature. He's one of the freshest new voices in the genre although his career has spanned twenty years. Writing with a rare swagger and confidence, Steve Vernon can lead his readers through an entire gamut of emotions from outright fear and repulsion to pity and laughter." - Cemetery Dance "Armed with a bizarre sense of humor, a huge amount of originality, a flair for taking risks and a strong grasp of characterization - Steve's got the chops for sure." - Dark Discoveries “Steve Vernon is a hard writer to pin down. And that’s a good thing.” – Dark Scribe Magazine "This genre needs new blood and Steve Vernon is quite a transfusion." –Edward Lee, author of FLESH GOTHIC and CITY INFERNAL “Steve Vernon is one of the finest new talents of horror and dark fiction" - Owl Goingback, author of CROTA "Steve Vernon was born to write. He's the real deal and we're lucky to have him." - Richard Chizmar

Franklin Butcher is a recently divorced, hard-drinking cop in a small town. What starts off as the simple disappearance of a local man grows into something larger when his own partner goes missing, drawing him into an unseen world of gods and monsters. Meanwhile, a new couple in town begins to learn the deadly secret hidden in their house.Book One of The Obscured, a Dark Urban Fantasy series.Franklin Butcher is a recently divorced, hard-drinking cop in a small town. What starts off as the simple disappearance of a local man grows into something larger when his own partner goes missing, drawing him into an unseen world of gods and monsters. Meanwhile, a new couple in town begins to learn the deadly secret hidden in their house.This is Book One of The Obscured, a bold new series about hidden worlds, the monsters they hold, and the heroes who are destined to save us.Description for The Obscured series:Imagine parallel worlds. Places filled with gods and monsters both large and small, creatures that would terrify the normal person. Imagine these creatures hate each other, and want nothing more than to destroy each other, to take over each others worlds until only one species remains on top.Now imagine the only way they can get to each other is through us.

*It all begins and ends with The Argument: Free will is an illusion. The soul? Merely neurons firing. * Someone is determined to prove the truth of The Argument, no matter who has to die. Psychology professor Tom Bible is surprised to find the FBI on his doorstep, asking for help analyzing the prime suspect in a series of gruesome murders.  That?s not what Tom does?he?s just a teacher, not a profiler.  But in this case, the FBI feels Tom has special knowledge.  The suspect is his best friend Neil Cassidy. Using the neuroscience he developed at the NSA, Neil can control the human brain. With just the flip of a switch, he can manipulate pain, pleasure, faith, morality....even love. He taunts the FBI with videos, forcing them to watch as his victims destroy themselves at the direction of their captor. He leaves no clues and the FBI cannot predict his next victim. Only Tom Bible has insight into his mind.

A zombie outbreak in an office block strands three plucky employees on the tenth floor. To escape, they must fight their way down through hundreds of flesh-craving ex-colleagues.DEAD END JOB is a darkly comic horror story full of monsters, gore and misadventure.A call centre employee, a security guard and a receptionist find themselves trapped on the tenth floor of their remote office block...in the middle of a mysterious zombie outbreak.Can they fight their way past hundreds of hungry, flesh-craving mouths? Can they figure out who or what is behind the outbreak?-DEAD END JOB is a darkly comic horror story full of monsters, gore and misadventure.

What does a small town theater in Montana have in common with a medieval Underground city? A guy named Hector. Read and find it why.Have you ever read a book and thought, "gee I'd really like to know more about all those background characters!" Well we here at Team Pop Culture thought of that; because we're awesome, and we've got you covered. Behold, the Everything Sucks series! All of these short stories are stand-alones, and will make sense even if you haven't read the novel "Pop Culture Sucks, Manifesto of a Vampire" (*cough* it's a great book though *cough*)The series will either introduce you to, or expand on, various characters from the Pop Culture Universe. You'll get peeks at things like: Iris's time in the Underground Gary's life in the late 1940's Stitch, the Speakeasy barkeep And many all new charactersSo whether you're familiar with these guys or not, this is a series you should check out!

Times are tough for 13-year-old Christian Marks. Wanting only to escape his troubled life, Christian takes to the nearby woods with his loyal pet, a headstrong beagle named Barney. But the forest proves no refuge when boy and dog stumble upon a murdered mountain biker, and soon find themselves hunted by a local legend who may be something more than human.Times are tough for 13-year-old Christian Marks. His parents are getting divorced, and even more unsettling, his suicidal father claims to have been issued dire warnings from the afterlife from Christian's recently deceased grandmother. Wanting only to escape his troubled life, Christian takes to the nearby woods with his loyal pet, a headstrong beagle named Barney. But the forest proves no refuge when boy and dog stumble upon a murdered mountain biker, and soon find themselves hunted by a local legend who may be something more than human.

Prior to the first American Publication of Brian Lumley's ground-breaking, dead waking, best-selling Necroscope ® in 1988--the first novel in a long-lived, much-loved series--this British author had for twenty years been earning an envious reputation writing short stories, novellas, and a series of novels set against H. P. Lovecraft's cosmic Cthulhu Mythos backdrop. In addition and for a further twenty years Lumley's non-Mythos Fantasy, SF, and Horror stories have been appearing on a regular basis in some of the world's most famous publications; for example The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Weird Tales, along with anthologies such as Karl Edward Wagner's Year's Best Horror Stories, Charles L. Grant's Final Shadows, and Kirby McCauley's Frights, among others. With his multiple-award-winning literary career now spanning over four decades, Lumley continues to write his superior fictions, examples of which from each of those decades can be found in this current collection, where Weird Tales itself is represented by no less than five stories! And so, to complete a trilogy of volumes begun with the Lovecraft-inspired The Taint and Other Novellas, and followed by Haggopian and Other Stories, Subterranean Press is now proud to offer No Sharks in the Med and Other Stories, a handpicked collection of Brian Lumley s best macabre tales...

Harlan Ellison's masterwork of myth and terror as he seduces all innocence on a mind-freezing odyssey into the darkest reaches of mortal terror and the most dazzling heights of Olympian hell in his finest collection. Deathbird Stories is a collection of 19 of Harlan Ellison's best stories, including Edgar and Hugo winners, originally published between 1960 and 1974. The collection contains some of Ellison's best stories from earlier collections and is judged by some to be his most consistently high quality collection of short fiction. The theme of the collection can be loosely defined as God, or Gods. Sometimes they're dead or dying, some of them are as brand-new as today's technology. Unlike some of Ellison's collections, the introductory notes to each story can be as short as a phrase and rarely run more than a sentence or two. One story took a Locus Poll Award, the two final ones both garnered Hugo Awards and Locus Poll awards, and the final one also received a Jupiter Award from the Instructors of Science Fiction in Higher Education (discontinued in 1979). When the collection was published in Britain, it won the 1979 British Science Fiction Award for Short Fiction. His stories will rivet you to the floor and change your heartbeat...as unforgettable a chamber of horror, fantasy and reality as you'll ever experience. -Gallery "Brutally and flamboyantly shocking, frequently brilliant, and always irresistibly mesmerizing." -Richmond Times-Dispatch

When the life you wanted has crumbled beneath your fingers, there’s nothing left to do but pick up the pieces and soldier on. You’ve done this before. But what happens when you no longer feel like yourself anymore? When fires spontaneously start-up around you, when you hear growling coming from underneath your bed, and you no longer recognize your face in the mirror. What happens then? Ghost-hunter Perry Palomino doesn’t have much time to find out. Now, the evil she used to hunt is a lot closer to home. It’s inside of her, taking over her life bit-by-terrifying bit, and there’s only one person who can help her. If part of her doesn’t kill him first.