Dramatized Fantasy

Fear and human depravity permeate the frigid air in a once-dynamic Alaskan city. Ryan Cawdor and his group of survivalists go on red alert the moment they set foot on the forbidding tundra, but regardless, they find themselves rounded up by cannibal coldhearts. The companions quickly discover there's a fate much worse than becoming food. Dangerous new experiments are taking place in a long-abandoned military base and, in the bitter heart of the frozen North, new horrors reach out to poison their hope for a better tomorrow.

L. E. Modesitt, Jr. moves deep into Recluce's past to chronicle the founding of the Empire of the Legend, the almost mythological domain ruled by women warriors on the highland plateau of the continent of Candar. He tells the story from the point of view of Nylan, the engineer and builder whose job it is to raise a great tower on the plateau known as the Roof of the World. Here the exiled women warriors will live and survive to fulfill their destiny.

An ancient evil looms over Santa Luz. Prostitutes are showing up dead and eviscerated. And Jill Kismet just might be able to get her revenge against an old enemy. There's just one problem. Someone wants Jill dead - again. And if they have to open up Hell itself to kill her, they will. Sometimes, even when you're Jill Kismet, you don't have a prayer....

An insular group of fanatics calling itself the Children of the Rock is leaving a trail of barbarism and a growing tide of hate in its wake. The leader of the cult is connected to Ryan's past — to Trader and the war wagon days. Littered with victors and losers, it's a past some can't walk away from.... In this haven in a ravaged country, Ryan and his warrior wayfarers find that new laws of survival have emerged.

Following up rumors of trouble on his old home ground, Ryan Cawdor and his band seek shelter inside the walls of what was once the largest shopping mall in the Carolinas. The baron of the concrete fortress gives them no choice but to join his sec teams. As outside invaders step up their raids on the mall, Ryan has to battle both sides for a chance to save their lives.

In 2001, the face of the Earth changed forever in a nuclear firestorm. Generations after the apocalypse, Ryan Cawdor leads a courageous struggle for survival in a brutal world, striving to make a difference in the battle raging between good and evil. On sacred aboriginal land, Ryan Cawdor and his band of warrior survivalists discover Mount Rushmore still standing, a symbol of a long-gone power. Here, a charismatic baron and his followers force Ryan to breach the icy fastness of the mountain stronghold, which harbors a cache of 20th-century technology.

Post-nuclear America has changed little since the primal leveling of the 21st century. Warrior survivalists Ryan Cawdor and his band live by a code that honors the kind of absolute freedom only a raw frontier can provide. Until rumors of a wider, more prosperous world than the Deathlands thriving deep in Mexico, untouched by the nukecaust, lure them into uncharted waters....

World War III was only the beginning. Inevitable death now awaits every soul who lived through the holocaust as the earth's atmosphere is about the explode into a searching blaze of fire. But one man refuses to die, refuses to accept the horror: John Thomas Rourke, the ex-CIA Covert Operations Officer, weapons expert and survival authority.

Dante Valentine has been through Hell. Literally. Her body shattered and her mind not far behind, she's dumped back into her own world to survive - or not - as a pawn in one of Lucifer's endless games. Unfortunately, he's just messed with the wrong Necromance. And this time she's mad enough to do something about it. This time, the Devil will pay.

Emerging from a gateway into a redoubt filled with pre-Dark technology, Ryan and his band hope to unlock some of the secrets of post nuclear America. But the fortified redoubt is under the control of a half-mad former sec man hell-bent on vengeance, who orders Ryan and the others to jump-start his private war against two local barons. Under the harsh and pitiless glare of the rad-blasted desert sun, the companions fight to see another day, whatever it brings....

A virulent strain of a predark biowep has been unleashed upon the denizens of northern Kansas, turning them into rotting, flesh-eating monsters. Running from the mindless, soulless rottie hordes, Ryan and his companions arrive in the civil-war-torn ville of Sweetwater Junction. They've got one shot at beating the hungry rotties: Turn the bloodlust of the ville's warring factions away from each other and toward a common enemy.

Using a rigid code of honor learned from pre-nukecaust fantasies and westerns, Thunder Rider is a self-styled superhero, serving up mass murder in a haze of napalm and nerve gas. Seeing his trail of destruction firsthand, Ryan Cawdor accepts a bounty from a ravaged ville to find and eliminate this vigilante. But Thunder Rider is determined to have Krysty Wroth, Ryan's lover, as his new sidekick and her abduction makes Ryan's quest deeply personal, and unleashes the vengeful fury of Cawdor and his warrior companions.

The thief Widdershins and her own "personal god," Olgun, return to their home city of Davillon after almost a year away. While Shins expects only to face the difficulty of making up with her friends, what she actually finds is far, far worse. Her nemesis, Lisette, has returned, and she is not alone. Lisette has made a dark pact with supernatural powers that have granted her abilities far greater than anything Widdershins and Olgun can match.

If any kind of utopia exists in postapocalyptic America, Ryan and his companions have yet to find it. But high in the Virginian mountains, their quest may find its reward. Heaven Falls is an agrarian idyll, its thriving inhabitants harnessing powerful feminine energy and the medicinal qualities of honey. Bountiful and serene, this community is the closest thing to sanctuary the companions have ever encountered. But as they are seduced by a life they have only envisioned, they discover Heaven has a trapdoor that opens straight to hell....

Having narrowly escaped with their lives from the redoubt near Cornerstone, the Deathlands survivors known as the Companions arrive via mat-trans at a destination they presume to be North Dakota, if the mysterious codes given them while in Cornerstone are accurate. That assumption is soon put in doubt as they discover a devastated city covered in continual ashfall, a sky perpetually obscured by black clouds illuminated only by sporadic lightning. The former metropolis is not deserted, however, but densely populated with ravening hordes of barely human creatures.

A civil war raging in the Des Moines River valley forces Ryan and his companions to take sides, or die. Because somewhere in the middle of the generations-old conflict is a lost redoubt. But Snake Eye, the deadliest gunslinger in Deathlands, stands between them and the way out. And the mutie contract chiller won't step aside until he has Ryan's head.

Looking for respite after a bitter struggle in Kentucky's Hazard ville, the wayfarers must make do with Arctic tundra and earthquakes. Trapped in the hostile landscape by a mattrans jump, Ryan and companions find the ultimate challenge to their will to survive. The odds dwindle when they become the new bounty in a struggle for dominance between a group of Neanderthals and descendants of a military garrison stranded generations ago.

The nuclear exchange that ripped apart the world destroyed a way of life thousands of years in the making. Now, generations after the nuclear blight, Ryan Cawdor and his band of warrior survivalists try to reclaim the hostile land, led by an undimmed vision of a better future. Hard on the heels of their escape from a powerful baroness, the wayfarers arrive at the shore of the might Mississippi. As if whisked back in time, they find themselves passengers on a riverboat plying the waters and offering every gambling pleasure.

The dark frontier of the 22nd century is lawless and oppressive, but humanity is slowly beginning to carve out new beginnings in the midst of this brutal, nuke-altered world. In pockets of civilization called villes, peace and hope start to flourish. But law and order invite what's evil and corrupt.... Ryan Cawdor and his band of warrior survivalists are guests of a powerful Tennessee baroness and her mysterious adviser at her ville on what was once the mighty Mississippi. Beautiful and alluring, the venomous baroness will do anything to secure her future line.

The world's last freelance detective, Zach Johnson, must find the assassin who murdered Sexy Sprocket and two other members of the World Council. His investigation leads him to the moon - and to a tall, sensuous, blue-haired beauty named Lea who possesses psychic powers and powerful ambitions....