54 results for "Science Fiction"

The Blade Between A Novel

Sam J. Miller
A Library Journal Horror Best Seller From Nebula Award winner Sam J. Miller comes a frightening and uncanny ghost story about a rapidly changing city in upstate New York and the mysterious forces that threaten it. Ronan Szepessy promised himself he'd never return to Hudson. The sleepy upstate town was no place for a restless gay photographer. But his father is ill and New York City's distractions have become too much for him. He hopes that a quick visit will help him recharge. Ronan reconnects with two friends from high school: Dom, his first love, and Dom's wife, Attalah. The three former misfits mourn what their town has become--overrun by gentrifiers and corporate interests. With friends and neighbors getting evicted en masse and a mayoral election coming up, Ronan and Attalah craft a plan to rattle the newcomers and expose their true motives. But in doing so, they unleash something far more mysterious and uncontainable. Hudson has a rich, proud history and, it turns out, the real-state developers aren't the only forces threatening its well-being: the spirits undergirding this once-thriving industrial town are enraged. Ronan's hijinks have overlapped with a bubbling up of hate and violence among friends and neighbors, and everything is spiraling out of control. Ronan must summon the very best of himself to shed his own demons and save the city he once loathed.
HarperCollins Publishers 2022-02 384 pages

The 13th Warning

R. L. Stine
Joseph has always had such good luck that his nickname is Lucky. Tomorrow, he is going to turn thirteen on the thirteenth of the month. He's the thirteenth child in a family with thirteen kids...and both of his parents are also thirteenth children. With so many thirteens, his luck is bound to run out! An old man and a woman with a black cat visit Lucky to warn him that he has too many thirteens in his life. And if he collects thirteen thirteens by midnight on his birthday, he'll unleash evil spirits. Almost as soon as the old man and the woman leave, the bad luck begins. And the thirteens just keep coming: the thirteen doughnuts his teacher gives him, the thirteen he scores on his pop math quiz, the thirteen barks from his normally quiet dog. Now Lucky is driving himself crazy adding up everything he comes across. Can he break the curse of thirteen in time? Clever and fun, The 13th Warning is certain to spook young readers.
Amazon Publishing 2012-04-13 76 pages

Zombie Town

R. L. Stine
This used to be such a nice, quiet town. But that was before all the zombies. When twelve-year-old Mike and his friend, Karen, go to see a horror movie called Zombie Town , the last thing they expect is for the title characters to come down off the screen and chase them through the theater. And it's not popcorn these hungry creatures want to chomp on--it's human brains! Now Mike and Karen frantically try to flee through the panicked streets of their hometown before shuffling bands of zombies turn every last citizen into a ravenous flesh-eater. But if Mike thinks he'll be safe once he reaches his house and warns Mom and Dad, he'd better think again. When the zombies say it's lunchtime, no home is safe! Zombie Town is R.L. Stine's delightfully spooky take on the horror genre that's infecting the world, bite by bite.
Amazon Publishing 2012-04-13 74 pages

The Adventures of Shrinkman

R. L. Stine
When Danny Marin isn't playing basketball, he spends hours drawing Shrinkman, his favorite comic-book superhero, or watching Shrinkman movies. His hero can shrink to the size of a bug. But, whoa--wait. Suddenly, Danny finds himself shrinking, too! His parents are horrified, his friend Megan thinks it's funny, and his doctor is baffled. With each passing hour, Danny gets smaller and smaller--until he's the size of a sparrow. Soon he's fighting for his life against a grasshopper, a colony of ants, and even his own dog. He isn't safe anywhere. He has to find a cure--before he shrinks away forever. Funny and terrifying and filled with BIG surprises The Adventures of Shrinkman proves that it takes more than size to overcome impossible hurdles.
Amazon Publishing 2012-04-13 140 pages

Isaac Asimov's Magical World of Fantasy Devils

Isaac Asimov,Martin H. Greenberg,Charles Gordon Waugh
From a man too simple for the devil to fool, to a college student taking an honors class in temptation, here are tales of black magic and demonic enchantment--stories of those who heed Satan's siren song and those ready to match wits with this most cunning of opponents. So get ready for some red-hot reading about the age-old battle between humans and their ever-present foe as you settle in for a devilish good time in Isaac Asimov's Devils. Arthur C. Clarke; Brian Cleeve; Ray Russell; Leo Tolstoy; Winston K. Marks; Cornell Woolrich; Frederic Brown; Robert Bloch; Robert F. Young; Stephen Vincent Benet; Rick Hautala; Philip Jose Farmer; Charles Beaumont; Jerome Bixby; Bruce Elliot; Theodore R. Cogswell; Theodore Sturgeon
Robinson Pub. 1989 351 pages

Tarot Tales

Rachel Pollack,Caitlin Mathews
In this extraordinary collection, outstanding writers share stories inspired by the symbols of the Tarot. From wandering women to howling wolves to rising dead, the images of the cards are mixed to create medieval parodies, fantasy adventures, New Age satires, comedies of manners, and even a fresh addition to Irish mythology. Features Michael Moorcock, Gwyneth Jones, Josephine Saxton and others.
Ace Books 1996 256 pages

Blood Thirst 100 Years of Vampire Fiction

Leonard Wolf
In the past hundred years, since the publication of Bram Stoker's infamous book, no literary figure has enjoyed a more horrific resiliency than Count Dracula. In film, television, novels, and short stories, he keeps coming back to life, fed by the vital imaginative energies of a world-wide audience that cannot seem to resist his abominable charms. Aristocratic and urbane, deeply erotic and profoundly evil, Dracula's bloodsucking savagery has cast a mesmerizing fascination not only over his victims but over his readers as well. And, as Leonard Wolf suggests, "Vampire fiction...exerts an amazing pull on readers for a reason that we may find disturbing. The blood exchange—the taking of blood by the vampire from his or her victim is, all by itself, felt to be a singularly symbolic event. Symbolic and attractive!" Now, in Blood Thirst: One Hundred Years of Vampire Fiction, Leonard Wolf brings together thirty tales in which vampires of all varieties make their ghastly presence felt—male and female, human and non-human, humorous and heroic—all of them kin to the dreadful bat. From Lafcadio Hearn, Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman, Edith Wharton, August Derleth, and Ray Bradbury to such contemporary masters as Anne Rice, Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, John Cheever, and Woody Allen, and in settings as diverse as rural New England and outer space, this collection offers readers a dazzling compendium of vampire stories. Wolf organizes the collection into six categories—The Classic Adventure Tale, The Psychic Vampire, The Science Fiction Vampire, The Non-Human Vampire, The Comic Vampire, and The Heroic Vampire—which allows readers to see the many guises Dracula's descendants have assumed and the many ways they can be interpreted. In his penetrating introduction, Wolf argues that such an arrangement enables us to see the evolution of the vampire from an unmitigated evil to a creature we are more likely to identify with. "In a century in which God and Satan have become increasingly irrelevant in the popular arts, there has been an accompanying secularization of the vampire idea. And, as the stories in Blood Thirst will show, sympathy for the vampire has grown as we have become increasingly interested in the workings of the mind." Indeed, the vampire's ability to change over time, to draw into itself such a richness of symbolic meanings, to conjure itself into so many diabolical shapes, may account for the enduring appeal of the literature written about it. Here, then, is a definitive collection for aficionados and novices alike, and whether readers find the vampires who inhabit these pages sympathetic or horrific, psychologically intriguing or spiritually repellent, morbidly seductive or comically absurd, Blood Thirst gives us all something to sink our teeth into.
OUP USA 1999-01-28 384 pages

The Selected Stories of Robert Bloch: Final reckonings

Robert Bloch
Best known as the author of "Psycho", Robert Bloch is world-renowned for his stories of horror, mystery, fantasy, and science fiction. Many of the 25 stories in this first volume of "The Complete Stories of Robert Bloch" have been unavailable for decades. The stories are in his classic style of gripping suspense, science fiction and fantasy. As Bloch writes, "These stories in this collection have a common theme; they deal with monsters. Some of the monsters are human, some are not-- but all of them embody, in one way or another, the fears common to us in our dreams. We call these monsters by many names-- ghosts, vampires, extraterrestrials, changelings. But we recognize them for what they are; manifestations of the secret dreads and desires which lurk beneath the surface of consciousness." "Bloch has become a virtual fixture on the popular culture landscape." --Publishers Weekly "If you're not familiar with Bloch's short fiction, find someone to borrow this from; if you already are familiar, you know that you want to own these volumes." --Locus
Carol Publishing Group 1990 384 pages

Wilde Stories 2018 The Year's Best Gay Speculative Fiction

Steve Berman
"The final volume in the series that offers readers the best gay-themed stories of the strange, uncanny, and fantastical is out! In these pages are work by such acclaimed spec fic authors as Richard Bowes, Sam J. Miller, Sean Eads, and John Chu. Turn a page and walk the halls of a library shelved with every book never completed by authors before they passed away, a fish grants a young man wishes without ever explaining their true cost, ghosts relive their erotic past, Captain Hook and the Greek god Pan finally meet, and even Oscar Wilde himself makes an appearance in this anthology by Lambda Literary Award-winning editor Steve Berman."--Page 4 of cover.
Lethe Press 2018 293 pages

Secret of Marracott Deep & Pawn of the Black Fleet

Henry Slesar,Mark Clifton
Armchair Fiction presents extra-large editions of classic science fiction double novels with original illustrations. The first novel, "Secret of Marracott Deep" is a tale of an undersea race rising from the depths to menace mankind. What was the secret of beautiful woman on the beach who found herself constantly threatened by monsters from below? Look out for giant lobsters! The second novel, "Pawn of the Black Fleet" is a tale of pending invasion. A massive alien fleet hovered in the skies above America. For days the grim, threatening spaceships of the invading armada were seen simultaneously over every major city, washing the earth below with a stinking miasma of evil dread. Then suddenly, the pattern stopped and the world waited silently and fearfully for the next move. Both novels are terrific thrillers penned by two well-known '60s sci-fi specialists, Henry Slesar and Mark Clifton
Armchair Fiction & Music 2011 218 pages

Vintage A Ghost Story

Steve Berman
Vintage is the engaging story of what it's like to be a teenager in today's world and the troubles that accompany that age as well as what it's like to be haunted by the troubles of the teens of yesterday's world and how similar both those worlds really are. More than a story about Goth fashion, teen angst or even restless ghosts, Vintage delivers pulse-quickening plot, unique and fully-developed characters.
Haworth Positronic Press, Harrington Park Press 2007 149 pages

Three Faces of Me

R. L. Stine
When Ira Fishman wins a prize in the machine outside a candy store, he's disappointed it's not the squirt gun he had his eye on. The little black plastic box looks like a camera, but when Ira presses the green button on top, nothing happens. After dinner that night, Ira can't believe what he sees in his room: a boy with the same clothes--and face--as Ira! He tries to get this second Ira to leave, but it's no use. Deciding to have a little fun, Ira makes the boy go to school in his place--but it's a disaster. The new Ira isn't good at math like the real Ira, and he's horrible at softball. Worst of all, he plays with the girls during recess! Ira's clone is ruining his rep--fast. And when a third Ira shows up, Ira number one has to find a way to make the others disappear for good before his whole world is turned upside down. But how do you get rid of yourself ?
Amazon Publishing 2012-04-13 86 pages

Stagestruck Vampires and Other Phantasms

Suzy McKee Charnas
Hugo, Nebula, and Tiptree award–winning author Suzy McKee Charnas offers up her lush stories in this compelling retrospective story collection. In Stagestruck Vampires , the supernatural and the real intertwine seamlessly. A villainous maestro is redeemed by his lovely, apt pupil in “Beauty and the Opera or The Phantom Beast.” Inside the “Unicorn Tapestry,” a psychotherapist stalks a vampire. A dazzling performance of Tosca is marred by a shocking murder during “A Musical Interlude.” This collection features original work by Charnas—the mystical novelette, “Peregrines,” and two original essays. Also included is a collaborative story on vampire themes, “Advocates,” written with Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, author of the Saint-Germain Chronicles.
Tachyon Publications 2004 328 pages