Late-February 2010
General Slocum’s Gold (2007 Bram Stoker Award Nominee for Long Fiction)
By: Nicholas Kaufmann / Digital Release
Sackett is no ordinary thief. He was born with strange abilities, powers he uses to pull off dangerous and unusual heists. Fresh out of Rikers and eager to get back in the game, he’s got his eye on a fortune in gold rumoured to be buried on a deserted island in New York’s East River. It should be the easiest job he’s ever pulled. But North Brother Island isn’t as deserted as he thought. The dead are waiting beneath the waves, waiting for Sackett, waiting to protect their treasure.
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March 2010
A Beckoning of Shadows
By: John Grover / Edited by Liz Skalka / Digital Release
John Grover weaves 16 tales of darkness and the supernatural in his solo collection. Come witness as a child’s toy reveals the darkest of secrets, where a stranger’s corpse will not let a rock musician find peace or where a secluded religious community faces its own demons. From the author of Terror in Small Doses, Shadow Tales and Space Stations and Graveyards comes his latest journey into terror. A Beckoning of Shadows beckons for you!
Just Like Hell
By: Nate Southard / Digital Release
Dillon has the world on a string. With a record-breaking football season and several scholarship offers in his pocket, he can write his own future. But Dillon has a secret, something he’s never told the rest of his team. Even his best friends don’t know. They might not understand. They might overreact. Now the secret is out. Maybe that’s why Dillon just woke up in the trunk of a car. And maybe that’s why Dillon is about to go through something Just Like Hell.
The Turtle Boy (2004 Bram Stoker Award Winner for Long Fiction)
By: Kealan Patrick Burke / Digital Release
School is out and summer has begun. For eleven year old Timmy Quinn and his best friend Pete Marshall, the dreary town of Delaware Ohio becomes a place of magic, hidden treasure and discovery. But on the day they encounter a strange young boy sitting on the bank of Myers Pond – a pond playground rumor says may hide turtles the size of Buicks – everything changes. For it soon becomes apparent that dark secrets abound in the little community, secrets which come cupped in the hands of the dead, and in a heartbeat, Timmy and Pete’s summer of wonder becomes a season of terror, betrayal and murder.
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April 2010
Love, Sex and Other Horrors
By: Mark Zirbel / Digital Release
LOVE…A man enters his ex-girlfriend’s basement, trying to reclaim what’s caged down there. Lovers young and old alike gather to watch the flight of the mysterious birdmen. The perfect date leaves a man stranded on a desert island — but he’s not alone.
SEX…A hardcore professional wrestler goes toe to toe with a sexy self-mutilator. A pair of gearheads discover just how far they’re willing to go to keep their muscle cars running. A foot fetishist learns that some fantasies are better left unexplored.
AND OTHER HORRORS…A father is tormented by his son’s placenta. A troupe of body suspension performance artists threatens to unleash an ancient evil. A haunted kitchen drawer drives a renter to the brink of madness.
LOVE, SEX & OTHER HORRORS BY MARK ZIRBEL
Relationships gone bad — very bad! Tales of erotic terror! The funny, the surreal, and the downright creepy! All of this and more awaits you in LOVE, SEX & OTHER HORRORS, a collection of dark fiction from Mark Zirbel.
The Hides (2005 Bram Stoker Award Nominee for First Novel)
By: Kealan Patrick Burke / Digital Release
Burke (Turtle Boy) offers a new twist on the by-now familiar “I see dead people” subgenre in this fast-paced horror novella. Ohio teenager Timmy Quinn has the mysterious ability to see murder victims, and to share those visions with the murderers. Quinn does not seek to run from his burden, but when his parents divorce, he agrees to his father’s request to join him in their ancestral Ireland community, a small seafaring town. Sure enough, gory ghosts appear, leading him to wonder who was responsible for their deaths.
Vessels
By: Kealan Patrick Burke / Digital Release
On a remote island off the coast of Ireland, an unpiloted boat drifts ashore, watched by a man to whom the dead are something to be feared… In a small stone chapel that stands hunkered against the vicious island winds, a woman whispers a frantic prayer to the gathering dark as something pale and dreadful scratches at the window. A young girl in love races to the shore to meet her lover and finds something monstrous instead… And in a confessional, a dead man waits to tell his sins… A gunshot in a church in Los Angeles leads Tim Quinn halfway around the world and into a nightmare, for on Blackrock Island, he will find love, murder and madness, and discover an earth-shattering truth about the Curtain, and those who hide behind it.
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May 2010
Terror in Small Doses
By: John Grover / Edited by D.W. Barnett / Digital Release
Horror Junkie? Get your quick fix with “Terror in Small Doses”, guaranteed to chill you to the bone with such frights as Black Out, Conjurer and Release Me. 6 flash tales of darkness and the supernatural to satisfy your every craving.
Ravenous Ghosts
By: Kealan Patrick Burke / Digital Release
They walk undetected through the veils of the rational world. . .
Their exsistence is unproven. . .
Their purpose is unknown. . .
And their hunger is insatiable.
With these sixteen nerve-grinding tales, auhtor Kealan Patrick Burke takes you over the threshold to a place where a man can make brds fall from the sky, the future can be found in the pages of a comic book, fairy tale creatures are very real . . . and the ghosts are hungry.
Currency of Souls
By: Kealan Patrick Burke / Digital Release
Burke expands on the bar-tale theme of his 2005 anthology, Taverns of the Dead, in a gripping horror novel whose motley cast of characters drink the evening away in a seedy bar, Eddie’s Tavern, in a dying town called Milestone. Each is stained by—and may even have caused—an ugly death that still haunts him or her. Reverend Hill acts as judge and jury, ordering the barflies to go punish others in order to make restitution for their past sins. But then someone torches the bar, revealing the true evil crouched at the core of this beer-soaked corner of hell. Sheriff Tom Turner, who just wants “things to be the way they were before my wife died… before we all ended up here as slaves to our sins,” bargains to save the town, but the cost may be too much to bear. At the haunting conclusion, escape proves only a brief respite from damnation.
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June 2010
Stained (2004 Bram Stoker Award Winner for First Novel)
By: Lee Thomas / Digital Release
A madman. A secret, generations old. Another missing boy. They called the sadistic killer The River Rat, and he’d struck again. In a desperate search for his neighbor’s son, Ted Lewis came face to face with the killer and survived, but his life was irrevocably altered. The residents of Marchand, Louisiana believed they were safe. The murderer had been captured and was behind bars. But the nightmare wasn’t over yet. Because on that summer night, something passed between the two men. Memories of brutality and phantoms of countless victims torment Ted. His normal life is shattered, and he struggles to fight a growing presence that threatens to leave his soul stained forever.
Restore From Backup
By: J.F. Gonzalez, Michael Oliveri / Digital Release
Lyle Harrelson is in a jam. He’s been laid off, the bills are piling up, and he can’t even afford to get his sick daughter to the doctor. Then his old college buddy Carl calls. Carl has a lead on a new job with great pay, solid benefits, and an immediate opening. Carl pounces on the opportunity. He has no idea what he’s getting into. His co-workers are secretive. His boss is a stone cold bitch. And when he wonders exactly what it is Kaiser Development Systems does, nobody will give him an answer. Carl calls him again, this time warning him to stay away from Kaiser. Moments later, Carl is dead. Lyle wants to know why. He tries to learn more about Kaiser: who they are, what they do, what the strange data on the servers he manages is for. But he’s made a mistake. And then the real trouble begins. “Restore From Backup” is a cautionary tale of the careful balances that exist between nature, magic, and technology… and the forces that bring them together.
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July 2010
Damage
By: Lee Thomas / Digital Release
In the suburban community of Pierce Valley the laws of nature are breaking down. The skies above the city are black with storm. Emotions are bent and shattered. A man suffers blackouts, waking to find bizarre symbols he’s constructed during his sleep. A woman commits acts of atrocity at the behest of an unlikely messenger. A mother soothes her daughter, a child that died years ago. Neither the living nor the dead can escape this place. Somethings dark is emerging from Pierce Valley … And it’s bringing DAMAGE.