Plant Fiction

The moon hung like a crimson eye in the velvet sky, casting long, skeletal shadows over the dilapidated church that stood sentinel in the ancient graveyard. Within its crumbling walls, a figure stirred, her raven hair cascading down her back like a silken shroud, her dark eyes glittering with a seductive fire. She was a creature of the night, born of darkness, consumed by a thirst that no mortal could ever quench.

H Is for Hell is the eighth book in an epic series of 26 horror anthologies. In this book, you will find a collection of 13 horrific tales from some of the most talented independent horror writers on the scene today. Each tale brings to life a different vision of Hell, each unlike anything you have heard before. H Is for Hell will take you to the depths of the Underworld, and you may not return unscathed.

The girl he’d planned to marry shattered his heart into a thousand pieces. His best friend stabbed him in the back. He was heartbroken, angry, and ashamed. Then he met Fiona. Could she help put his life back together, or would her witchy ways lead him further down a dark and wrathful path? And what of the plant? It had grown from a cursed seed that he’d nurtured with his own blood. Vengeance has teeth, and sometimes it comes in the form of a flesh-eating ecological horror.

Chris Astor is a man in his early forties who is going through the toughest stretch of his life. Becky is Chris's fourteen-year-old daughter, a girl who overcame enormous challenges to become a vibrant, vital young woman - and now faces her greatest obstacle yet. Miea is the young queen of a fantasy land that Becky and Chris created when Becky was little, a fantasy land that has developed a life of its own and now finds itself in terrible, maybe fatal trouble.

What may we become? How will we endure? The future is a daunting realm, filled with real and imagined perils. So enter it prepared! Here are vivid tales about possible tomorrows, from the keen eye and colorful pen of David Brin, a modern master of speculative fiction.

In the 1990s American workplace, survival of the fittest is sometimes less about clawing your way to the top than developing good camouflage. And Audrey Rohmer is doing her very best to blend in as an undistinguished middle manager. Uninspired by her job and uneasy about her father's new marriage, Audrey coasts through the work week leaning on her “partner in apathy”–an admin assistant named Pooter–to keep her relationship with the married head of her department from becoming water cooler gossip.

Ben Seidel wasn't sure how serious they were when he and his wife, Shira, discussed having an open marriage. But when Shira announces that she is going on a date with Liz, any ambiguity evaporates. Suddenly, every day is new terrain for Ben, navigating between keeping things together with Shira and exploring new partners. And when one of those new partners begins to matter to him more than he ever anticipated, he discovers that the complexities of this new life are only just beginning.

Throughout their married lives, baseball star Gaspar Bethlen's wife gave him a lovingly crafted mystery every year for Christmas. Solving the clues led him to his present, but the mysteries themselves were the true gift. Now, Beth has died, leaving Gasper a wreck of a man. But Beth left behind a clue, the beginning of one final Christmas mystery, and it's much more than either of them expected.

As a child, Annie Baskin envied her older sister. Sarah was beautiful, smart, popular, and contemptuous of her messy, graceless kid sister. Annie grew up in Sarah’s shadow, knowing she was second-tier, second-rate, an also-ran. The other Baskin girl.

Recent retiree Ruth Singer is reflecting on her life and wondering what direction it might have taken if she'd made different choices. What if she'd had her tubes tied before her difficult youngest child was born? What if she'd run off with Danny Fortuna when she'd had the chance? Not only does Ruth ponder these questions, she lives those what-if lives in her imagination. As the chaos of her real life swirls around her, she contemplates the roads she never took, the choices she never made, and comes to understand how she became the woman she is - and why.

Jesse Sienna doesn't believe that love can last. His parents' marriage was caring but passionless, and his own romantic history tells him that love can burn bright, but that it cannot burn for long. So when his elderly father, Mickey, moves in with him and seems unable to understand Jesse's no-strings-attached relationship with Marina, his current girlfriend, Jesse barely pays attention. It's just another example of how different they are - and more evidence that he and his father will never connect on any meaningful level.

Imagine the mid-1980s, last day of school, summer break. A teen rushes to meet his mother, who is being released from the hospital after cancer surgery. When the teen arrives, he finds out his mother is dead, but his ex-gangbanging dad, who's been in jail the last eight years, is at the hospital, ready to take the teen home. Mendel is a coming-of-age story about a high school senior who must learn how to forgive as he navigates life without his mother. To honor his mother, he joins Mendel's track team, but his father's thuggish past catches up with them.

Jimmy Kozlowski has a regular gig playing Paul McCartney in the Beatles tribute band Help!. The band is part of a cottage industry built around mimicry, where each group strives to be the ultimate Fake Fab Four. And none strives harder than Help!, thanks to Gene Klein, its John Lennon and leader. Gene's just gotten his Medicare card and spends much of his time caring for his ailing mother. But he hasn't lost a step on guitar or vocals and is determined to take Help! to the top, his goal being to perform in Liverpool one day.

The arrival of Julian Mack, an openly gay new student quickly gaining the attention of bullies, draws Nate into a friendship that tests the limits of what he can endure. Absorbed by the need to please Julian, Nate is quickly at odds with his best friend Michelle and her efforts to protect him. As Nate struggles to find what meaning music has in his life, rumors about him swirl around school, leaving him to decide between defending Julian and his reputation or the safety and comfort of his haven of music and color.

Nature is beautiful...until it tries to eat you. Jaxon is just your average janitor, but when he's caught in the crossfire between advanced science and terrorism, he ends up running for his life and watching the world around him get swallowed whole. Mother Nature takes revenge, and Jaxon has nowhere to go!

According to a 2021 study from the IPCC, conditions of extreme drought are 1.7x more likely than they were 100 years ago. That is, at any given time we are nearly twice as likely to be experiencing an extreme drought than our desert-dwelling ancestors had a century ago. And this problem is not trending in the right direction. Though drought conditions can impact so many areas of our lives, the beauty and diversity of our lawns does not have to be one of them.

Rick and Abby grew up together, became best friends, and ultimately fell in love. Circumstance tore them apart in their early teens, though, and they went on to lives less idyllic than they dreamed about in those early days. Rick has had a very successful career, but his marriage flat-lined. Abby has a magical daughter, Paige, but Paige's father nearly destroyed Abby's spirit.

Holding onto tin helmets, obscured vision through suffocating gas masks, tumultuous clouds of debris tumbling through a convoluted, mid-night sky from above, the girls scampered from installation to installation, from shelter to shelter in an attempt to, time the speed and distance of descending shells with a futile delusion of child like imagination.

Deirdre and Sam, mother and daughter, have been stuck in individual grief cycles since husband and father Niall died less than a year earlier. Now it is time for a change. For Deirdre, this means hiring a life coach, rediscovering long-dormant parts of herself, and putting the family home on the market. For Sam, it's jettisoning an abusive employer, re-evaluating her strengths, allowing for the possibility of love, and maybe even moving home for a while.

Wangari lives in a magical place in rural Kenya where the soil is rich for planting, the trees abundant, and the nearby pond full of mysterious creatures. She drinks from cool, clean streams and plays beneath her favorite fig tree under her mother's watchful gaze. Then Wangari grows up and goes away to school, and things start changing at home. Farmers chop down the trees.