Monster Fiction

Over two decades ago, forty-eight young, gifted superheroes fell to Earth and were eventually marketed as opposing brands: heroes and villains. Now, one exceptionally gruff bad guy is looking to hop teams. Hello, PR director Vanessa Theriot. His real name is Roland Casteel a.k.a. the Pyro. First, swap that with the less incinerating the Wyvern. Next, put him in spandex to highlight that near-godlike body. Finally, give that hero in training a heroine—if Vanessa will play the part in a pretend romance guaranteed to make the city swoon. She’s game.

With Syl's checklist completed and Gold rank achieved in the Adventurer's Guild, the next thrilling adventure awaits in the Dwarven Empire!

Jed's not your typical middle school geek. He is, to use the politically correct term, cardiovascularly challenged. And while his parents have attempted to shield him from the implications of being different for as long as they could (Jed was eight and at a friend's sister's birthday party when he blew his lips off onto the cake in front of everyone, finally prompting the "big talk" from his parents and an emergency superglue repair by his dad), seventh grade at Pine Hollow Middle School as a target of Robbie the supreme school bully and his pack of moronic toadies is rapidly becoming unbearable.

I’m a monster DNA experiment and she’s everything my beasts want. I escape the hell that tortured me for months. I’m turned into something so dangerous and brutal; I don’t recognize myself. And when I feel a pull in my chest, I follow it not understanding why. I see her and possession takes over. Her beauty is addiction. And her smell? God…her scent….mmm… It drives me insane.

Jenna had promised her mother that if the worst happened during her dad's weekend, they would meet at Red Hill Ranch. When she finds seven words spray-painted on her dad's wall the morning after a deadly outbreak, she makes a promise to herself: to get to the ranch with her seven-year-old sister, Halle, and to get them both there alive.

Syl has conquered the forest, survived goblin treachery, and infiltrated a town, disguised as an elf. Now Syl has set their sights upon the next big goal—conquer a flying island! Pegasus, harpies, ghouls and tricky pixies abound, all as Syl hunts for the elusive yellow slime. The allure of Lightning is too great, and Syl will stop at nothing to add the yellow core to their ever growing collection. What other secrets lie in wait for the slimy hero on this unexplored land?

I ended my life to protect Lucian from his enemies. It should have been the hardest decision to make, but it wasn’t. Now I find that Lucian kept even more secrets, deadly ones that threaten to destroy me. I thought I won the game that he and Katarina played, but he’s never stopped shuffling the pieces on the board. Even so, I’ve found peace in his violence and learned to accept my fate within his embrace. As our enemies are revealed, and worlds crashed down into ours, everything is on the line again. Could we survive his latest betrayal, or would it destroy us all?

Do you know that the Olympians weren’t the original immortals? Or that the Goddess Hera restored her virginity each year? The ancient Greeks wove one of the richest and best-preserved collections of stories of all the early civilizations, from the dawn of creation to the bloody siege at Troy.

Those sentences might not seem like they fit together, but in my case, they do. Because six months ago, I was turned into a vampire by said ex. And a few days later, my potential mate—who's a demon—fed me his blood on the sly. Now, I'm literally addicted to him. My options are to drink from him for the rest of my life, or die. He's not keen on letting me die, so it's looking like a till-starvation-do-you-part situation.

Getting stuck in the hockey locker room was not how I envisioned catching my next story. After a fateful encounter with two of the hottest players in the NMHL, I'm swept into an unforgettable first date.

Drue Emmerson, noblewoman-turned-ranger, wants one thing: vengeance. With her family slain by the vicious shadow wraiths, she’s determined to defend her fallen kingdom. And that means carving out the hearts of every dark creature she can find. Talemir Starling, celebrated warrior of the realms, has a dangerous secret: he's a half-wraith, kin to the creatures wreaking devastation on the world. He’ll do anything to keep his true nature under control…especially around the woman who’s vowed to destroy him.

On a class trip to New Orleans, Catalina Cat Duran and her friends find themselves in the middle of a voodoo mystery.

An existence spent being forced to kill others to satiate a Monster. Where the only thing to look forward to was the blessed, if brief, period of time between paying that bribe. Except that very same Monster is and isn’t Rene. It just happened to live inside his own mind and force him to do what it wanted. Rather than being an actual Monster. That was Rene’s entire life until a fateful day changed that. A day that the career as a hitman for hire built on the Monster’s needs will end. Where Rene will be forced to atone for his actions. To be held accountable and judged.

Eric is a physicist, an angel vivisectionist, and an architect of the future. He's also an accidental time traveler, stuck in the past and trying to re-create his own future. Now he's got to save the world for a better tomorrow, but not like everyone does, in general, every day. Oh, no. He has to make a better tomorrow that looks exactly the way he remembers it, or there may be no yesterday, no today, and no Eric! There is a reason he hates time travel, and it has nothing to do with physics.

They didn’t care who got me pregnant… just that one of them did. The first time I saw the beasts, I’d wandered off and gotten lost. But I hadn't been alone. Not the entire time. I’d been found, just not by something that was human. Bear-beasts. They were myths whispered amongst the villagers and that parents told their children before bed to keep them inside, to make them fearful of what lurked in the dark. Seven-foot-tall creatures covered in fur, with sharp claws, fangs, and the strength of a hundred men. But the creature kept me safe and led me out of the woods.

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.

When my father died and I stepped into his shoes as leader of Enigma, I vowed to protect the gang he’d built. And I won’t break that promise—no matter what I have to do to keep it. So when a mysterious attacker targets our territory, I swallow my pride and propose an alliance between Enigma and the Princes of Carnage, a biker gang led by Nico Morelli. We’ve been rivals for years, but his territory is under attack too, and we’ll have a better chance of defending ourselves if we work together. Except Nico doesn’t just want an alliance.

Terrence Mack was born poor, grew up tough, and died hard. Waking up in a sea cave with nothing but the clothes on his back and a new bullet scar was enough to convince him that wherever his death had brought him, it wasn't paradise. His new world quickly proves to be a place of danger, magic, monsters, and - for Terry at least - women. Known on Celestine as a template, Terry's genes are key to the survival of the eldritch races. But the fiercely competitive eldritch don't typically leave their lovers alive long, and aren't accustomed to taking 'no' for an answer.

The battle of the dead was won, but at a great cost. Sion, leader of the Mist Village, was left with only pain and regret as Richter was claimed by the abyss. What no one but the abandoned chaos seed knows is that he narrowly avoided the curse of the lich Singh, a curse that still hangs above his head. Now, surrounded by miles of darkness and tons of crushing rock, Richter has to find his way back into the light.

They say greed lit the match, that gold was at the root of this evil. The miners up near Devils Desk, Alaska, dug too deep, blasted too hard, and they broke something that can never be repaired. Quakes shattered ancient barriers creating a rift between worlds that had been sealed by an ancient race, and the domino effect of those first tremors rocked both the earth’s foundation and humanity’s.