Keep the underground, underground

Return to the Black Farm is a direct sequel that follows Nick as he is forced to confront the aftermath of his actions.

After the loss of a child along with a slew of agonizing misfortunes, Nick and Jess decide to end their lives. Unable to cope with the misery that fills their days, they commit one last act together and die in loving relief. But when Nick wakes up, he soon realizes that death isn't the gentle darkness he expected. Panicked and horrified, he struggles to understand the twisted abominations and hellish world he's now trapped in.

The cornerstone of private investigation—insurance fraud. Doing it, obviously. And then there’s the taxi job. Run someone to the airport while being chased by who knows what? Mix that in with drugs, party boats, and the Virgin Mary, and you’ve got a pretty standard day for one Mr. Cole. All for a lousy paycheck. Full of infanticide, evisceration, sadists, and snuff, Alex Cole is part private detective, part mercenary...all sick f--k. Cole Investigations is open—once more—for business.

It was supposed to be easy money. A temp job as a night guard on some deserted island. But why wouldn't anyone tell me what I'd be guarding? Do you know what a Body Farm is? I didn't, either. Apparently it's a research facility where decomposition can be studied in a variety of settings. How, you ask? By letting a bunch of corpses lay out and rot. Yeah. Fun stuff. But that doesn't explain the voices I'm hearing over the radio. Or the strange lights I've been seeing outside. Or why some of the bodies have this funny habit of disappearing when I'm not looking. And it definitely doesn't ...

Alex hates missing person’s cases. Unless they’re easy money. Anything is good when there’s easy money. Then there’s the delivery job. Get a box and hand deliver it to some rich jerk-off. Deal with another private investigator almost as skeezy as himself. And after all that there’s the Event. That’s sure to have a really, really, bad ending.

Some girls are fearful, others are brave. One girl’s a princess, the next one a slave. But all girls are equal when they’re down in this cave, until just one is left standing—The Prettiest Girl in the Grave.

It was a killer year for horror fiction of the harder kind. Authors, editors, and publishers presented readers with some startling works of horrific imagination, stories graphic in the extreme yet with subtleties suggesting larger meanings, tales that explore humanity by plumbing depths of soulless inhumanity and, in some cases, outright depravity. The stories here represent the best of them, disturbing tales that dig deep and take you into the dark heart of horror itself, unrelenting and unapologetic.