In Your Face = Trigger WarningsThis book contains twenty-two original and reprinted speculative fiction stories dealing with provocative themes. These stories are confronting, but with a firm purpose. They will make you uncomfortable, because they are a bit too hard-hitting or close to the bone. But they will also challenge you, by interrogating these themes and ideas to make a point about the world we live in.CONTENTSAlan Baxter / Bodies of EvidenceAngela Sla...

A lonely, overweight vampire tends a sleazy video store in inner-city Sydney...A multi-billionaire sacrifices everything to become Earth's first ambassador to the stars...A legendary time-travelling assassin finds himself pitted against the greatest detective that never was...A young father goes to extraordinary lengths to save his child after a car accident...A collection of works old and new from the pen of Tasmanian author Dirk Flinthart, these stories de...

Six hundred years ago, a group of pilgrims made their way to Canterbury, and Geoffrey Chaucer created one of the great works of English literature. A hundred years from now, a nuclear-powered steam train is stopped by a massive storm on its journey to Canterbury, the new capital of an England struggling to rise from the ashes of the twenty-first century. As the waters rise with the storm's fury, the weird and wonderful passengers tell the stories of a new age…18 original short stor...

Michael Devlin is the first of a new breed. The way things are going, he may also be the last.Being infected with an unknown disease is bad. Waking up on a slab in a morgue wearing nothing but a toe-tag is worse, even if it comes with a strange array of new abilities.Medical student Michael Devlin is in trouble. With his flatmates murdered and an international cabal of legendary man-monsters on his trail, Devlin's got nowhere to hide. His only allies are a hot-tempered Sydn...

A storm is coming...As a massive hurricane approaches the Eastern Seaboard, FBI consultant Jake Cole returns to Montauk to care for his father, a formerly brilliant painter deep in the grip of Alzheimer’s.But soon after his arrival, another malevolent force descends on the community—a monstrous serial killer—and a brutal double homicide teaches Jake that even though he has forgotten about the past, it has not yet forgotten about him.As the killer goes after everythi...

Hollis Henry never intended to work for global marketing magnate Hubertus Bigend again. But now she’s broke, and Bigend has just the thing to get her back in the game...Milgrim can disappear in almost any setting, and his Russian is perfectly idiomatic—so much so that he spoke it with his therapist in the secret Swiss clinic where Bigend paid for him to be cured of his addiction...Garreth doesn't owe Bigend a thing. But he does have friends from whom he can...

What Endures is a story of powerful love. It is a story that will break your heart. Inspired by true events, it tells of the incredible bond between a mother and daughter, and with gut-wrenching poignancy reminds us of the little things that make life worth living.“Holdstock’s writing manages to be both heartbreakingly poetic and densely detailed … sad passages, ghostlike recollections, written almost from the vantage point of the present, establish the book as a great wor...

“Silvey is a master of wit and words”—School Library JournalMeet twelve-year-old Liam McKenzie, who patrols his suburban neighborhood as the Masked Avenger—a superhero with powers so potent not even he can fully comprehend their extent.Along with his sidekick, Richie the Powerbeagle, he protects the people of Franklin Street from chaos, mayhem, evil, and low tire pressure on their cars.But when he attempts to rescue a damsel in distress from sadness...

A novel from one of the country’s most prolific and popular YA authors, this book, set in New York City on September 11th, shows us how the experiences of that day profoundly changed one teen’s life and relationships.Today is September 10, 2001, and Will, a grade nine student, is spending the day at his father’s workplace tomorrow. As part of a school assignment, all the students in his class will be going to their parents tomorrow, but Will isn’t excited about it–he’d rather sleep...

On the night that Carla Reid plans on celebrating her wedding anniversary with her husband Kevin and their grown son Jack, their New Zealand farmstead has never felt more like home. But when Ben Toroa and another aspiring gang member brutally force their way into the house with robbery and more on their minds the night and the rest of both their lives take a radically different direction. As Carla struggles to come to terms with the aftermath and bereavement of different kinds, and Ben fac...

Are we alone? From War of the Worlds to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, ET to Close Encounters, creators of science fiction have always eagerly speculated on just how the story of alien contact would play out. Editor Marty Halpern has gathered together some of the best stories of the last 30 years, by today's most exciting genre writers, weaving a tapestry that covers a broad range of scenarios: from the insidious, to the violent, to the transcendent.

Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters are addressed, with just two exceptions, to Sylvia Plath, the American poet to whom he was married. They were written over a period of more than twenty-five years, the first a few years after her suicide in 1963, and represent Ted Hughes's only account of his relationship with Plath and of the psychological drama that led both to the writing of her greatest poems and to her death. The book became an instant bestseller on its publication in 1998 and wo...