Monster Fiction

It takes a survivor to know a madman. When the police need to crawl inside the mind of a monster, they call Caroline. As a child, Caroline was abducted along with her twin sister. Caroline escaped. Her sister didn’t...But there’s something different about her latest case. Something familiar. Teenage girls are being murdered, their organs removed. As the scope of horror widens, Caroline begins to experience blackouts of lost time and disturbing hallucinations that are leading her to one terrible, impossible conclusion.

Veteran horror screenwriter and novelist Jamie Nash leads us into the shadows of Blake Snyder’s legendary Monster in the House genre—and sheds light over the secrets to crafting truly terrifying tales.

Dollitrice Grandmeir never thought her village would turn into a dungeon or that she’d battle a Kaiju overlord with the help of her giant tortoise. Now she’s got an all-new weirdness on her radar. The Twelve Days of Crisismas are coming, and without a special brew of eggnog, Taffy and the Ex-Mas Posse will transform into horrific Grumpus monsters, annihilating Dolli’s dungeon from the inside out.

Dolli was just getting to like the idea of being the overlord of Monster Haven when a roaming Warmonger set his eyes on her dungeon core. Some of her citizens have defected to the enemy horde for the promise of safety, and now Dolli has a choice to make. Does she wipe them out to save those who remain, or does she sacrifice herself to save them all? But the defectors don’t know that the Warmonger has an even more sinister plot than just consuming Dolli’s core—and when they finally see his true monstrous nature, will it be too late?

A towering genius who'd already solved the problem of death by making memory recording possible, Cassia leads a team of scientists and problem solvers to a station floating in the harsh winds of Saturn. Their mission: to grow interstellar ships using nanobots in the planet's material-rich environment. She called them "monsters" to help sell the project to a skeptical public. Little did she know how prophetic that name would become.

When Tom's big brother decides to become an Evil Scientist, his first experiment involves dunking Frankie the goldfish into toxic green gunk. Tom knows that there is only one thing to do: Zap the fish with a battery and bring him back to life! But there's something weird about the new Frankie. He's now a Big Fat Zombie Goldfish with hypnotic powers... and he's out for revenge!

On the brink of losing her position as a maid and with no prospects to go on, the offer of a place at Rooksgrave Manor - a house of ill and unusual repute - sounds like a perfect fit for a young woman with Esther’s inclinations. Even better, the invitation comes by the hand of the handsome Dr. Underwood, a delicate gentleman with a ferocious alter ego who knows exactly what he wants from Esther. Upon arrival, the men and the daily decadence of the manor feel too good to be true for a girl of Esther’s station.

When my beer kegs turn up missing days before a big event, I hire Monsters, PI to track down my beer. Who's assigned to my case? Tuvid, the gargoyle who wrongfully accused me of gnome-theft. Tuvid's seven feet of gargoyle muscles with a killer smile. So, when our not-one-night-stand results in a marriage proposal—solely to save his gargoyle rep—I know I'm in trouble. My business plans don't include marrying a gargoyle, but Tuvid's impossible to resist.

I thought I was done with romance, until a certain pompous elf reappeared in my life at the illustrious Monster Ball. A little teasing led to bruised lips and captured hearts. No one wants Jhaeros and me to be together, not even my favorite sister, Melarue. But she's a teenager just coming into her elemental powers and discovering boys - the wrong kind - the type I want to shoot arrows through.

Follow John Smoke—a cunning ex-con turned supernatural bounty hunter—and his partner, Sidney Shaw, a fearless former FBI sharpshooter—as they battle shapeshifters, werewolves, shadowy conspiracies, and inter-dimensional dragons. From secret D.C. wars to world-bending portal invasions, the stakes climb fast and never let up.

The Full Moon Resort in western Canada looks all but abandoned when Hunter, his twin sister, Maeve, and their parents arrive. The outdoor pool is in disrepair, and the cabins are overgrown with strange plants. What a dump! And to make matters worse, Hunter and Maeve’s aunt and uncle, as well as their two kids, fail to show up for the family vacation.

War has erupted in the Banished Lands as the race for power intensifies. Corban flees his homeland searching for peace, but he soon discovers that there is no haven in the west as the agents of Rhin and roaming bands of giants hound his every step. Veradis leaves the battleground and rushes to...

After slaying a leviathan of the deep, and gaining a magic he barely understands, an ordinary fisherman finds himself entangled in a magical game of the gods with the fate of his planet as the prize. Dean becomes Oakley's champion, competing in the Minotaur's Maze. He travels through a portal to Mixonia, a city of wonders, filled with magic and monster girls of all sorts. As he levels up in his noble quest to save his home world, he will earn and lose fortunes, rescue a bevy of beautiful babes, and protect the innocents of planet Oakley.

Send living shadows to drag me to another world? They better be ready for a fight! I’ve always been a scrapper, so when I was snatched from my world by shadow creatures and hauled to another one, I did as I’d always done. I fought. But I still didn’t know anything about where I was. My luck was in, because I quickly had the good fortune of meeting a sexy prophetess and a gorgeous, blue-skinned, redheaded mage who said she was something called a moonwisp. Yeah, magic was a thing.

In the second book of this series, a forest monster shows up looking for help with an embarrassing problem, and Zoey is sure it will be a simple fix. But her first two tries at helping him fail, and she has a sobbing monster on her hands! Will Zoey and Sassafras solve the problem in time for Gorp to go to the annual Monster Ball?

I was thrown out of the fae world, but I’m back now. Three brooding demons and a sinful incubus returned me to my sweet little homeland. And I’ll finish what I started all those years ago. Sure, maybe my delicate fae features are twisting into spiraling horns and demonic eyes, but that won’t stop me from righting my wrongs. The Queen of Hell might possess my body, but the deadly vengeance in my blood is my own. The Prince will die by my hand for what he's done.

When Josh Underwood is thrown through a wormhole and lands on an unfamiliar world, he is immediately attacked by flesh-eating worms and snarling wolves. He has one huge advantage. A ring sits on his finger, but it's no ordinary ring. It's alien tech designed to improve its host’s strength, speed, agility, durability and combat instinct. Not all boons are infinitely wondrous. This tech has to understand what Josh needs for it to evolve, and time is of the essence.

Sacrifice your soul? Check. Die to protect those you love? Check. Come back as something the world hasn't seen since the dawn of mankind? Check. Make those who hurt me wish the Gods had never created them? I'm still working on this one.... Are you ready to play? I'm coming back. I'm more, darker, deadlier, and I'm pissed.

Sorcha has spent her life helping raise her many siblings but now finally has the chance to seek her own adventures. At least, she did, before she was snatched from her horse and peddled by slavers. Taken far from home, she's brought to the worst place imaginable—the craggy western mountains infested with brutal, brutish orcs. All humans know to fear them and stay away, and now she's been sold to the cruelest clan chief of them all. But the first orc she meets is nothing like the stories. He's gentle. He frees her.

In this striking and bleak, yet luminous debut collection, Nathan Ballingrud, winner of the inaugural Shirley Jackson Award, uses the trappings of the Gothic and the uncanny to investigate a distinctly American landscape: The loneliest and darkest corners of contemporary life. Ballingrud’s stories are love stories. They’re also monster stories. Sometimes the monsters collected here are vampires or werewolves.