Showing results by narrator "Sophie Amoss" in All Categories

It's 2037, and the United States government is on the brink of collapse amid rebel uprisings and aggressive political maneuvering turning the country into an active war zone. In a nation where opportunity is sequestered behind doors open only to the privileged, joining the Army seemed like James Trent’s best option. He just never thought he’d actually see combat. Now Trent finds himself on the front lines of a second American Civil War, fighting for a cause he’s not sure he even believes in.

Natalie Chan gained her corporate citizenship but barely survived the battle for Tribulation. Now corporate has big plans for Natalie. Horrible plans. Locked away in Natalie’s missing memory is salvation for the last of an alien civilization and the humans they tried to exterminate. The corporation wants total control of both - or their deletion.

Twelve stories: A young girl, desperate for a way out of her small town, finds support in an unlikely place. A ranger working along the Blue Ridge Parkway realizes that the dark side of the job, the all-too-frequent discovery of dead bodies, has taken its toll on her. Haunted by his past, and his future, a tech sergeant reluctantly spends a night with his estranged parents before being deployed to Afghanistan. Nearing 50 and facing new medical problems, a woman wonders if her short stint at the local chemical plant is to blame.

Alice Mayfair, Millie Maximus, Jessica Jarvis, and Jeremy Bigelow face their biggest challenge yet when exposure of the sacred, secret world is threatened by a determined foe, someone with a very personal reason to want revenge against the creatures who call themselves the Yare. The fate of the tribe and its members’ right to live out peacefully in the open is at stake. Impossible decisions are made, friendships are threatened, secrets are revealed, and tremendous courage is required. Alice, her friends, and her frenemies will have to work together.

Hayley always has a crush. The problem is, her crushes never like her back. After her latest unrequited love—a girl from her basketball team—gets a boyfriend, she decides she’s done falling for girls who are unavailable. Her best friend, Talia, wants romance too, but rarely gets crushes on anyone, and she’s tired of watching Hayley get her heart stomped on over and over. So the two girls make a pact: they’ll help each other find summer love by putting themselves in situations that always lead to romance in movies.

A vast caravan of RVs roams the United States. A girl grows a unicorn horn, complicating her small-town friendships and big city ambitions. A young lady on a spaceship bonds with her AI warden while trying to avoid an arranged marriage. In Allegra Hyde’s universe nothing is as it seems, yet the challenges encountered in these pages mirror those we face in our modern age.

Machine revolves around a group of teenagers - both locals and wealthy out-of-towners - during a single summer at the shore. Steinberg captures the pressures and demands of this world in a voice that effortlessly slides from collective to singular, as one girl recounts a night on which another girl drowned. Hoping to assuage her guilt and evade a similar fate, she pieces together the details of this tragedy, as well as the breakdown of her own family, and learns that no one, not even she, is blameless.

After Lisa-Marie and her big brother, Vernon, visit a Create-A-Ted store, the unexpected happens. Their teddy bears come to life! But it turns out they aren't the only ones. All kinds of teddy bears - zombies, ghosts, aliens, and more - are suddenly alive and creating mayhem...and soon there is an army of evil teddy bears on the loose!

Committed to both peace and human rights for chimeras—people who alter themselves with animal DNA—seventeen-year-old Jimi Corcoran is torn when she’s invited to a gathering of moderate pro- and anti-chimera rights activists seeking to find common ground. But when a militant chimera rights group prevents her from attending—and saves her from being killed by the bomb they’ve planted—Jimi herself falls under suspicion for the blast.

Morgan Mallory is a typical college girl, immersing herself in her studies and her various hobbies—and overcoming her deep psychological traumas by indulging in careful manipulations and socially acceptable cruelties. So when she wakes up to discover she’s been transported to a new world that’s oddly reminiscent of a certain childhood fantasy story, she does what any completely sane and totally altruistic heroine would do: set out to kill the queen who brought her there.

Sherry Robicheaux loves men. She loves love. And she loves an adventure. So when she meets a mysterious man while working backstage at a country music concert in Vegas, she's all about what's happened in Vegas staying there. Country music superstar Tyler Blue just wants a weekend of anonymity...though there's something about the spunky waitress with the streaks of purple hair that tempts him like no other. Until the next morning, when they both wake up with fuzzy memories...and rings on their fingers.

London, 1881. There's something eerie about Manon—she's not like the other girls at the orphanage. Maybe it's her red eyes. Maybe it's her silence. Maybe it's the series of violent deaths that seem to follow her. What we do know: someone is hot on her tail. And there's a lot of money at stake in finding out where exactly she comes from—and what exactly she is. Concurrent to Manon's story are letters to Charles Darwin from Professor Humphrey, a scientist who has recently died under mysterious circumstances. Is it true that natural selection left humans at the top of the pyramid?

Edie and Violet Bond know the truth about death. The seventeen-year-old twins are powerful mediums, just like their mother—Violet can open the veil between life and death, and Edie can cross into the spirit world. But their abilities couldn’t save them when their mother died and their father threatened to commit them to a notorious asylum.

For the past two years, Lee has been laser-focused on two things: her job as a sound tech at a local coffee shop and her podcast Artists in Love, which she cohosts with her boyfriend, Vincent. Until he breaks up with her on the air right after graduation. When their unexpected split, the loss of her job, and her parent’s announcement that they’re separating coincide, Lee’s plans, her art, and her life are thrown into turmoil.

This collection of 22 short stories by the author of Daughter of Hounds and Alabaster firmly established Caitlín R. Kiernan as one of the preeminent voices in dark fantasy today. Through a cycle of interconnected narratives, Kiernan unflinchingly explores a surreal world where the fantastic and the mundane are never separated by more than the insubstantial thickness of a shadow.

Centering us in Rome, but transporting us seamlessly into worlds as varied and exotic as they are emotionally real, these stories paint landscapes that are populated - vividly, hauntingly - by animals: from squawking, violent seagulls, to magical snakes, to a tiny dog on the side of a deserted road, to starlings circling the evening sky in exhilarating formation.

Working at a bookstore in Berkeley in the years after college, Gabriele becomes intrigued by the orders of signor Vietri, a customer from Rome whose numerous purchases grow increasingly mystical and esoteric. Restless and uncertain of her future, Gabriele quits her job and, landing in Rome, decides to look up Vietri. Unable to locate him, she begins a quest to unearth the well-concealed facts of his life.

The number-one paid escort in Las Vegas calls herself Nine. She's become very wealthy with 300 very loyal VIP clients. Trig is also the best at what he does. He works for the biggest drug dealer in Vegas, as his personal executioner. One night with the wrong client and everything spirals out of control when Nine and Trig collide. Watch what happens when two of the best in underworld trades go against the grain, against the rules, and against all odds of making it out alive.

A young girl named Ginny and her family are dealing with the hardships of the Great Depression, and in order to survive, her dad decides they must sell their horse, and Ginny's best friend, Thimble. But Ginny will do anything in order to find a way for them to stay together and chooses to leave her family in Oklahoma and travel west to California.

On the heels of a devastating plague, Torvi’s sister, Morgunn is stolen from the family farm by Uther, a flame-loving Fremish wolf-priest who leads a pack of ragged, starving girls. Torvi leaves the only home she’s ever known, and joins a shaven-skulled druid and a band of roaming Elsh artists known as the Butcher Bards. They set out on a quest to rescue Torvi’s sister, and find a mythical sword.