Horror Fiction Monsters

On a hot summer night in Montauk, the bodies of two local bar patrons are discovered in the dunes, torn to shreds, their identities unrecognizable.... In another part of town, a woman's backyard is invaded by four terrifying creatures that defy any kind of description. What's clear is that they're hostile - and they're ravenous....

Wounds is a confounding, strange, and utterly entrancing collection of six stories, including one new novella from Shirley Jackson Award-winning author Nathan Ballingrud. From the eerie dread descending upon a New Orleans dive bartender after a cell phone is left behind in a rollicking bar fight in The Visible Filth to the search for the map of hell in “The Butcher’s Table”, Ballingrud’s beautifully crafted stories are riveting in their quietly terrifying depictions of the murky line between the known and the unknown.

Detective Gabriella Versado has seen a lot of bodies. But this one is unique even by Detroit's standards: half boy, half deer, somehow fused together. As stranger and more disturbing bodies are discovered, how can the city hold on to a reality that is already tearing at its seams? If you're Detective Versado's geeky teenage daughter, Layla, you commence a dangerous flirtation with a potential predator online. If you're desperate freelance journalist Jonno, you do whatever it takes to get the exclusive on a horrific story.

A virus tears across the globe, transforming its victims in nightmarish ways. As the world collapses, dark forces pull a small group of women together. Erin, once quiet and closeted, acquires an appetite for a woman and her brain. Why does forbidden fruit taste so good? Savannah, a professional BDSM switch, discovers a new turn-on: committing brutal murders for her eldritch masters. Mareva, plagued with chronic tumors, is too horrified to acknowledge her divine role in the coming apocalypse, and as her growths multiply, so too does her desperation.

Nita doesn't murder supernatural beings and sell their body parts on the internet - her mother does that. Nita just dissects the bodies after they've been "acquired". Until her mom brings home a live specimen and Nita decides she wants out; dissecting a scared teenage boy is a step too far. But when she decides to save her mother's victim, she ends up sold in his place - because Nita herself isn't exactly "human". She has the ability to alter her biology, a talent that is priceless on the black market.

Mattie can't remember a time before she and William lived alone on a mountain together. She must never make him upset. But when Mattie discovers the mutilated body of a fox in the woods, she realizes that they’re not alone after all. There’s something in the woods that wasn’t there before, something that makes strange cries in the night, something with sharp teeth and claws. When three strangers appear on the mountaintop looking for the creature in the woods, Mattie knows their presence will anger William. Terrible things happen when William is angry.

Vera Martinez wants nothing more than to escape Roaring Creek and her parents' reputation as demonologists. Not to mention she's the family outcast, lacking her parents' innate abilities, and is terrified of the occult things lurking in their basement. Maxwell Oliver is supposed to be enjoying the summer before his senior year. Instead he's taking care of his little sister while his mom slowly becomes someone he doesn't recognize. Soon he suspects that what he thought was grief over his father's death might be something more sinister.

Beauty is...pain. But for Pamela Rose beauty is everything. She spends every day and almost every dollar fighting a losing battle against nature. When a young coworker comes to the office with a new set of breast implants, Pam's delicate psyche begins to crack. Doctor Joseph DiBiro used to make art from flesh and plastic, but after his release from prison the only thing he's handling is a broom. He knows he has more to give the world; he's not done creating beauty. He just needs the right patient.

The city of Elendhaven sulks on the edge of the ocean. Wracked by plague, abandoned by the South, stripped of industry and left to die. But not everything dies so easily. A thing without a name stalks the city, a thing shaped like a man, with a dark heart and long pale fingers yearning to wrap around throats. A monster who cannot die.

With an Introduction by Shirley Jackson Award-winner Gemma Files, this outstanding anthology of all things monstrous includes spine-chilling stories from Bentley Little, Simon Clark, Elizabeth Massie, Tim Waggoner, Sumiko Saulson, plus some of the best emerging horror writers working today.

Horror fans will get their thrills in this collection–from werewolves to vampires to zombies–all the time-worn horror baddies are there. But so are predators of a distinctly American variety–the horrors of empire, of intimate partner violence, of dispossession. And so too the monsters of Rogers’ imagination, that draw upon long-told Cherokee stories–of Deer Woman, fantastical sea creatures, and more.

Gabriel s'est perdu dans une pyramide. Sa cousine Sari, qui était dans la galerie devant lui, a mystérieusement disparu. Mais Gabriel a l'impression de ne pas être seul. Qui était là avec lui dans les ténèbres ? Peut-on troubler le repos millénaire de la prêtresse Khala sans courir de danger ?

Publié en langue française par Bayard Éditions.

Demeter just wants to do her job: shuttling humans between Earth and Alpha Centauri. Unfortunately, her passengers keep dying—and not from equipment failures, as her AI medical system, Steward, would have her believe. These are paranormal murders, and they began when one nasty, ancient vampire decided to board Demeter and kill all her humans. To keep from getting decommissioned, Demeter must join forces with her own team of monsters. Together, this motley crew will face down the ultimate evil—Dracula.

Satisfy your craving for extraordinary authors and exceptional fiction: Meet the women writers who defied convention to craft some of literature’s strangest tales, from Frankenstein to The Haunting of Hill House and beyond. Frankenstein was just the beginning: horror stories and other weird fiction wouldn’t exist without the women who created it. From Gothic ghost stories to psychological horror to science fiction, women have been primary architects of speculative literature of all sorts. And their own life stories are as intriguing as their fiction.

Courtney is a total show-off. She thinks she's so brave, and she's always making Eddie and his friends look like wimps. But now, Eddie's decided he's had enough. He's going to scare Courtney once and for all. And he's come up with the perfect plan to do it. Eddie's going to lure Courtney down to Muddy Creek. Because he knows that she actually believes those silly rumors about the monsters. That there are Mud Monsters living deep inside the creek. It's just too bad that Eddie doesn't believe the rumors, too. Because they just might be true.

After the devastating events on Prism Lake, Grady and the other survivors head south, hoping to find safety in one of the rumored "Cities of Light". But as they embark on their journey, they quickly discover the monsters aren't the only things out in the snow they must fear.

We make monsters in order to destroy them. For thousands of years, we’ve named witches and burned them, suspected demons and exorcised them. When crops die and children fall ill, who better to blame than a monster? In nineteenth-century Bulgaria, Yana rides from one desolate town to the next, staging grisly displays while the villagers sleep: animal corpses in the public square, eggs filled with blood in the chicken coop. She tells the stricken villagers stories of vampires that stalk the night. Then Yana eliminates the threat, and leaves seeds of hope in her wake.

In the wake of a disastrous affair with her married archeology professor, brilliant Wilhelmina Cooper arrives back at the doorstep of her hippie mother-turned-born-again-Christian's house in Templeton, New York - a storybook town her ancestors founded on the shores of Lake Glimmerglass. Upon her arrival, a prehistoric monster surfaces in the lake, bringing a feeding frenzy to the quiet town. And Willie learns she has a mystery father her mother has kept secret for Willie's entire life.

It’s the summer of 1969, and the shock of conflict reverberates through the youth of America, both at home and abroad. As a student at a quiet college campus in the heartland of Indiana, Terry Ives couldn’t be farther from the front lines of Vietnam or the incendiary protests in Washington. But the world is changing, and Terry isn’t content to watch from the sidelines. When word gets around about an important government experiment in the small town of Hawkins, she signs on as a test subject for the project, code named MKULTRA.

They call me mad, but I don’t see anything wrong with using science to create the perfect monster girl. They call me insane, but I just want to live my life with a harem of beautiful cat-girls, bear-girls, fox-girls, snake-girls, and...well, pretty much any type of monster girl. They call me a megalomaniac, but why wouldn’t any red blooded man want to make cute babies with all these beautiful monster girls? They call me evil, but they just don’t realize that I’d destroy anyone who tries to harm my monster girls.