Weird Fiction

This is the first collection of strange stories by contemporary writer Mark Samuels. The themes that thread through these nine accomplished stories are drawn from the great tradition of the twentieth-century weird tale, and they are suffused with a distinctly cosmopolitan European feel. Mark Samuels writes about the fundamental fears of modern life, especially the effects of isolation and the dislocation that city dwellers can experience in their inhospitable, man-made environment.

Welcome to a very special issue of Weird Tales. This issue celebrates the Bram Stoker Awards, the “Oscars” of the horror trade. They are presented every year by the Horror Writers Association (horror.org), a group founded in 1985 (and incorporated in 1987) by a collective of masters of that genre, including Joe R. Lansdale, Karen Lansdale, Robert McCammon, and Dean Koontz. This issue is packed with short stories, flash fiction, poems, and an essay—all written by past winners of the Bram Stoker Award.

Snake oil salesman Dr. Darius Darke and other "legends" of the Old West are called upon to fight a band of brain-eating bandits in a three-dimensionally-challenged box canyon. This story is a prequel to David Bain's full-length weird Western novel Riders Where There Are No Roads. David Bain is the author of Death Sight, the first novel in the Will Castleton psychic detective series, Gray Lake: A Novel Of Crime And Supernatural Horror and several short story collections.

Jason Palmer is broke, tired, desperate. When an old friend recommends him for a paid sleep study, he makes a choice that could change everything about his life. Soon, he has a paycheck, and a head full of questions. Why would a laboratory be operating out of an unmarked building in the middle of a small Kansas town? How do they already know so much about his life? What is The Gold Mine?

Weird things dwell in the hidden corners of Britain: subterranean beasts, extradimensional entities, resurrected ghouls, and spectral vampires. And there are weird places, too. Beyond the veil of the waking world, lie realms of secrets, domains of madness. So begins the saga, of Peter Van Melsen...

Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Stories is a collection of short stories by Bram Stoker, first published in 1914, two years after Stoker's death. Content: Dracula's Guest / The Judge's House / The Squaw / The Secret of the Growing Gold / The Gipsy Prophecy / The Coming of Abel Behenna / The Burial of the Rats / A Dream of Red Hands / Crooken Sands.

Deadly Reunion is a collection of short stories. The first story, Deadly Reunion, tells of five women who reunite at a school reunion. A few months later they are invited to one of the women's lakeside cabins for a girl's weekend. Unfortunately for them they have been lured into a trap, this reunion does not go well. Who's you Daddy is the story of two young children whose mother dies leaving them orphaned. Having never known who their father was or if he was even still alive, they run off in the hopes of finding some relatives to live with rather than being split up and placed in separate ...

Filled with haunting rats, inexplicable tension, and an appearance from Dracula himself, Stoker's short stories uphold his reputation from his previous works and allows new audiences to rediscover the master of horror. This collection includes "Dracula's Guest", "The Judge's House", "The Gipsy Prophecy", "The Coming of Abel Behenna", "The Burial of the Rats", "A Dream of Red Hands", "Crooken Sands", and "The Secret of the Growing Gold".

Here a quartermaster must discover why the human insists that the mass produced broom, identical down to the molecule to every other broom on the base, is the "wrong" broom, and why and how they expect him to fix it. Here aliens learn the meaning of "enough C4". Here a medic meets the challenge of understanding why a human thinks it can survive on chocolate cake.

Mr. Cooper's class is getting a pet! Alexia hopes it is something cool, like a snake. But is she ready to take care of the pet, or will it be one weird mess? Join A.J. and the gang from Ella Mentry School as they show young listeners why they attend the weirdest - and most fun! - school around.

Like every other grad student at Miskatonic University, Owen Merrill knows about the Great Old Ones, the nightmare beings out of ancient legend that H.P. Lovecraft unearthed from archaic texts and turned into icons of modern fantasy fiction. Then a chance discovery - a lost letter written by Lovecraft to fellow Weird Tales author Robert Blake - offers a glimpse into the frightful reality behind the legends, and sends Owen on a desperate quest for answers that shatters his familiar world forever.

Mia knows her family is very different than her best friend's. In the 1980s, the coastal fishing town of Prince Rupert is booming. There is plenty of sockeye salmon in the nearby ocean, which means the fishermen are happy and there is plenty of work at the cannery. Eleven-year-old Mia and her best friend, Lara, have known each other since kindergarten. Like most tweens, they like to hang out and compare notes on their crushes and dream about their futures. But even though they both live in the same cul-de-sac, Mia’s life is very different from her non-Indigenous, middle-class neighbor.

"Queen of the Black Coast" is one of the original Conan the Cimmerian (a.k.a. Conan the Barbarian) books, published in 1934. The story is set in the pseudo-historical Hyborian Age and concerns Conan becoming a notorious pirate and plundering the coastal villages of Kush alongside Bêlit, a head-strong femme fatale. Due to its epic scope and atypical romance, the work is considered an undisputed classic of Conan lore and is often cited by Howard scholars as one of his most famous tales!

Cameron Carson, member of the Geeks and Nerds United (GANU) club, has been secretly hooking up with student council president, cheerleader, theater enthusiast, and all-around queen bee Karla Ortega since the summer. The one problem—what was meant to be a summer fling between coffee shop coworkers has now evolved into a clandestine senior-year entanglement, where Karla isn’t intending on blending their friend groups anytime soon, or at all.

The end of the world is non-negotiable. How it happens is still up in the air. Ryan Smith was a boring guy. The only remotely interesting thing about him was the man in a suit that no one else could see. Always watching, always taking notes. Why? Because it's Ryan's job to supervise the end of the world. As the newly appointed guardian of a nanoverse, an object that gives him the power of a god, it's up to Ryan to try and save humanity, even though he can't save the world. Shockingly, not everyone is on board with the end of the world, especially Enki.

Delphi has spent years working at a vast and iconic theme park in California after fleeing a trauma in her rural hometown. But following the disturbing death of a beloved Hollywood starlet on the park grounds, Delphi is tasked with shuttering it for good. Meanwhile, two siblings with ties to the park exchange letters, trying to understand why people who work there have been disappearing. Before long, they learn that there’s a reason no one is meant to see behind its carefully guarded curtain.

When twelve-year-old Bab Sharkey finds a magical beard in the Egyptian desert, it attaches itself to his face, making him the Pharaoh and granting him strange powers. Bab also finds the friends he’s always needed: a pair of undead animals wrapped in bandages called Scaler the Fish Mummy and Prong the Ibis Mummy. But the previous owner of the Beard, the ancient and evil sorceress the Unpharaoh, is determined to get it back. Can Bab and his new Animal Mummy friends banish the Unpharaoh back to the Afterworld?

A. J. and Andrea are taking a class trip to the museum! Their museum guide has been warned that one of them might misbehave. But who will it be?

Interracial Gender Swap Curse Book 2 Tony Berne has been the target of gender swap magic and is now a beautiful black woman After confronting the stripper who cast the spell on him, he learns a little more about what it means to be a woman in the modern world. Using his new female body, he attempts a comeback as a singer, but it's different than what he expected. Will Tony (now named Tanya) be able to jumpstart his career as a female pop singer? Will Tamantha turn him back into a man? Even more important, does he want to be changed back into a man? Find out in Rap to Pop Gender Swap, book ...

Mr. Cooper's class is having a talent show. But A. J. has a problem - he doesn't have a talent! What will he do when the big day comes? Join A. J. and the gang from Ella Mentry School as they show young listeners why they attend the weirdest - and most fun! - school around.