Weird Fiction

If you’ve just fallen into this beguiling treasure, then it’s in your best interest to just spank yourself and throw this book back in the vault where you found it. Because once opened, fabulous words that grow into sentences and paragraphs and stories will leave you with a massive rock-solid sense of the surreal. Leave now and we can both forget about this momentary plunge of lusciousness your eyes were about to feast on. Go! Prevail upon the legendary badassery life that is yours elsewhere. You have been thanked for your no-obligation, risk-free read of this secure blurb and I wish ...

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.

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 ...

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.

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.

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...

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.

When Salem Roanoke took a job near his family's new home as a hired hand in the Texas Hill Country, he anticipated learning the rancher's trade. A series of strange events, shocking murders, and unholy revelations divert him down another path. This terrifying trajectory puts him directly into the middle of a struggle between monsters, magic and men.

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.

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!

Danny Cohen and Calvin Waffle are two very different kids. Danny likes playing baseball; Calvin enjoys strange experiments. Danny follows the rules at school; Calvin tries to drive his teacher crazy. Danny and Calvin decide to team up for the big jelly bean experiment. Will it lead to trouble? Maybe. Will they have fun trying? You can count on it.

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.

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.

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".

A.J. and his friends are having a sleepover in the playground by Ella Mentry School. There’s a campfire with plenty of yummy marshmallows, weird songs, and twinkling stars—what could be better? Ryan, Alexia, Michael, Andrea, Neil, Emily, and A.J. each get a turn to make up a silly, scary story. But what’s that lurking in the woods? Could it be some kind of weird monster? Did the kids’ creepy tales awaken something truly terrifying?

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?

Interracial Gender Swap Magic! Tanya/Tony continues his life as a woman, amazed his pop music career as a beautiful black woman is a hundred times better than his life as a white male rapper. But is everything as good as it seems? What happens after Tanya sleeps with two very popular kings of hip hop? Will he be able to escape from Tamantha? Does he even want to anymore or is he enjoying his life as a woman too much? Find out in Return to Sender Gender Bender, book four of the Becoming a Thug Wife Interracial Gender Swap erotica series. LENGTH: This Gender Bender Story is 5,900 words in ...

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?