Showing results by narrator "Sophie Amoss" in All Categories

Centering us in Rome, but transporting us seamlessly into worlds as varied and exotic as they are emotionally real, these stories paint landscapes that are populated - vividly, hauntingly - by animals: from squawking, violent seagulls, to magical snakes, to a tiny dog on the side of a deserted road, to starlings circling the evening sky in exhilarating formation.

This collection of 22 short stories by the author of Daughter of Hounds and Alabaster firmly established Caitlín R. Kiernan as one of the preeminent voices in dark fantasy today. Through a cycle of interconnected narratives, Kiernan unflinchingly explores a surreal world where the fantastic and the mundane are never separated by more than the insubstantial thickness of a shadow.

It's hard to make Diane Harbaugh flinch. A former prosecutor notorious for her aggressive tactics, she's now a DEA agent who interrogates witnesses so effectively, she has them confessing in tears. But when she hears from Gustavo, a high-ranking cartel member with an invaluable secret about the international black market, she's thrown for a loop. She heads to Mexico to meet him, and her entire understanding of justice and duty is thrown into question.

Beatrice Fox deserves to go straight to hell. At least, that's what she believes. Her last day on Earth, she ruined the life of the person she loves most - her little sister, Emmy. So when Bea awakens from a fatal car accident to find herself on an airplane headed who knows where, she's confused, to say the least. Upon landing, Bea receives some truly harrowing news: She's in purgatory. If she ever wants to catch a flight to heaven, she'll have to help 5,000 souls figure out what's keeping them from moving on. But one of her first assignments is Caleb, the boy who caused her accident.

Nina is a struggling writer, a college dropout, a liar, and a cheater. More than anything she wants love. She deserves it. From the burned-out suburbs of Florida to the anonymous squalor of New York City, she eats through an incestuous cast of characters in search of it: her mother, a narcissistic lesbian living in a nudist polycule; Odessa, a single mom with even worse taste in men than Nina; Seth, an artist whose latest show is comprised of three Tupperware containers full of trash; Brian, whose roller-coaster affair with Nina is the most stable "relationship" in his life; and more.

Nina is a tough Queens detective with a series of cold-case homicides on her desk - men whose widows had the same alibi: They were living in Artemis, a battered women’s shelter, when their husbands were killed. Nina goes undercover into Artemis. Though she is playing the victim, she’s anything but. Nina knows about violence and the bullies who rely on it because she’s experienced it in her own life.

Cale Lambert, a bookish loner of mysterious parentage, lives in a dusty town near the California-Nevada border, a place where coyotes scavenge for backyard dogs and long-haul truckers scavenge for pills and girls. Cale was raised by her grandfather in a loving, if codependent, household, but as soon as she's left high school his health begins an agonizing decline. Set adrift for the first time, Cale starts waitressing at the local diner, where she reconnects with Penélope Reyes, a charismatic former classmate running mysterious side-hustles to fund her dreams.

Just when Malia, Dot, and Bree (aka the Best Babysitters Ever) corner the Playa Del Mar babysitting market, their lives get even busier. Malia's evil older sister ropes her into a thankless internship. Dot must win the science fair. And Bree's brand new cat turns out to be a holy terror. Meow! Malia is frustrated by the group's lack of commitment until she has an idea so great it rivals the creation of the club in the first place: They can hire new babysitters and take a cut of their wages! It's all of the money, and less of the babysitting. This plan is too perfect to fail.

Machine revolves around a group of teenagers - both locals and wealthy out-of-towners - during a single summer at the shore. Steinberg captures the pressures and demands of this world in a voice that effortlessly slides from collective to singular, as one girl recounts a night on which another girl drowned. Hoping to assuage her guilt and evade a similar fate, she pieces together the details of this tragedy, as well as the breakdown of her own family, and learns that no one, not even she, is blameless.

It begins with a drowning. One day Mr. Arcilla, the romance language teacher at Briarfield, an all-girls boarding school, is found dead at the bottom of Reed Pond. Young and handsome, the object of much fantasy and fascination, he was adored by his students. For Lilith and Romy, Evie and Claire, Nellie and Grace, he was their first love and their first true loss.

Mildred Groves, an unusual young woman gifted and cursed with the ability to see the future, goes to work in a top-secret research facility during WWII, only to be tormented by visions of what the mission will mean for humankind.

Everyone thinks fourteen-year-old Violet is a murderer. After a summer-night swim with her best friend, Ainsley, Violet is found confused, wandering in the forest - and Ainsley’s never seen again. But without a body, murder charges won’t stick, so Violet is sent away. After more than a decade in a psychiatric ward, Violet returns to her broken-down hometown of Normal, Alabama, to claim her dead mother’s inheritance and help her overworked sister care for their unstable, alcoholic father.

An epidemic of violence is sweeping the country: musicians are being murdered onstage in the middle of their sets by members of their audience. Are these random copycat killings, or is something more sinister at work? Has music itself become corrupted in a culture where everything is available, everybody is a "creative," and attention spans have dwindled to nothing? Destroy All Monsters tells a haunted and romantic story of overdue endings and unlikely beginnings that will resonate with anybody who’s ever loved rock and roll.

When Lane Fielding fled her isolated Florida hometown after high school for the anonymity of New York City, she swore she'd never return. But 20 years later, newly divorced and with two daughters in tow, she finds herself tending bar at the local dive and living with her parents on the historic Fielding Plantation. Here, the past haunts her and the sinister crimes of her father make her as unwelcome in town as she was the day she left. Ostracized by the people she was taught to trust, Lane's unsteady truce with the town is rattled when her older daughter suddenly vanishes.

Forced to flee the tyrannical state with her younger brother Simon in tow, Selena is now the last chance for peace in a continent on the verge of complete destruction. Between New Canaan and California stretch the Middle Wastes: thousands of desolate miles home to murderers, thieves, and a virulent strain of grass called yellow locust that has made growing food all but impossible. So when Selena and Simon stagger into Fallowfield, an oasis of prosperity amidst the poisoned plains, everything seems too good to be true.

Siblings Sam and Ilsa Kehlmann have spent most of their high school years throwing parties for their friends - and now they've prepared their final blowout, just before graduation. The rules are simple: each twin gets to invite three guests, and the other twin doesn't know who's coming until the partiers show up. With Sam and Ilsa, the sibling revelry is always tempered with a large dose of sibling rivalry. One night. One apartment. Eight people. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, we all know the answer is plenty. But plenty also goes right...in rather surprising ways.

Sixteen-year-old Jimi knows people change, but nothing could prepare her for what's about to happen to her best friend, Del. Del is obsessed with becoming a chimera: a person who pays back-alley geneticists, known as "genies", to illegally splice animal genes into their own. The resulting physical changes have scared lawmakers into drafting legislation declaring chimeras officially nonpersons, so when Del goes missing, Jimi is desperate to find him before he alters himself forever.

Beka and Charley were left alone by their parents more than a year ago. They are trapped in a city surrounded by a massive wall. Time is running out for the two of them to uncover the secrets behind their capture and to realize their best hope for survival could cost them everything.

Corey Bennett knows how to handle loss: she buries her grief, just as she buried her loved ones. After losing her parents to a tragic car accident and then her husband to cancer, Corey has focused all her attention on her career - first in law school and then on the partner track at a prestigious Atlanta law firm. When her boss insists she take a vacation, Corey balks. But two weeks on the Florida Gulf Coast, where she reconnects with Tripp, a childhood friend, prove to be profoundly rejuvenating.

What does it mean to be the executioner? Is it the struggle between good and evil and the fulfillment of a gypsy legend? For Robin, it's simply another day in the park in downtown L.A. It's killing the undead as she attempts to juggle life and love the same as any other ordinary woman would. That is until she meets Gordon, a crazed demon with a conscience. Now she must battle an ancient evil far more powerful then she's ever faced before or risk losing the world to Lilith, the mother of all vampires.