“Even angels have to make a living these days.”With this dry observance Peter Darbyshire introduces us to Cross, a man who has lived thousands of years, though he’d prefer not to have, and who is now hunting angels in a Barcelona filled with tourists, phone cameras and deep mystery. The Mona Lisa Sacrifice is a layered supernatural thriller, filled with history, magic and beloved characters. When an angel promises to deliver Judas, a forgotten god of a forgotten people, to...

In these astonishing tales, Has the World Ended Yet? mashes up scheming ghosts, undead marketers, travelling deity salesmen, deadly supermodels, a troubled hit man and his sex doll partner, a truly Cold War, fallen heroes, old gods and avenging angels in a Twilight Zone–style collection that is as absurd as the real world yet profoundly human. We follow characters that are larger than life with tragic flaws that would put the Greek myths to shame, as they move thr...

The Witches never failed to extract a price somehow.When Cross stumbles drunkenly into a darkened Berlin theatre that is staging Hamlet, he does not expect to see Morgana le Fay on stage as Queen Gertrude or witness a real murder. But a deadly ghost is haunting the faerie queen’s plays and Morgana expects Cross to solve the mystery or risk his daughter, Amelia, becoming the next victim. With the fate of Amelia in the balance Cross tries to unravel a mystery that takes him ...

“You fool,” Sariel said. She gestured with a hand and the table between us slid to the side. “You ridiculous mortal fool. What did you do with the sphinx?” With these words Cross finds himself thrust into his most dangerous adventure yet, working with the double-crossing angel Sariel to stop Noah from ending his eternal suffering by ending the world. But this Noah has not saved any beings from the flood, he is God’s warden, and he is bound to hold all God’s mistakes captive on his ark for ...

I would take the whole world apart to find her.The immortal Cross is back in a wild new adventure – a desperate hunt to find the enigmatic Alice from the Wonderland tales. Alice has helped Cross save the world countless times over since she stepped out of the pages of her book, but now she is the one that needs rescue after vanishing during an apocalyptic battle. Aided by the faerie queen Morgana and her court, Cross journeys to mystical islands populated with murd...

**Long shortlisted for the 2018 ReLit Award for Short Fiction****Longlisted for the 2018 Sunburst Awards for the story "Casual Miracles"**In Has the World Ended Yet? we start with retired superheroes living in a soulless suburbia where everyone gets lost trying to get home. Then the angels start to fall from the sky. Is it Armageddon? And do we want the world to end or not?In a series of linked short stories Peter Darbyshire...

Eighteen Weird Western short stories from Beneath Ceaseless Skies, the three-time Hugo Award and four-time World Fantasy Award finalist online magazine that Locus online calls “a premiere venue for fantastic fiction, not just online but for all media.”Authors include Kenneth Mark Hoover, Peter Darbyshire, Mark Teppo, E. Catherine Tobler, Aurealis Award finalist and winner Ian McHugh, Shirley Jackson Award finalist Gemma Files (author of the Hexslinger novels), and Hugo Awa...

Issue #102 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies online magazine, featuring stories by Peter Darbyshire and Nathaniel Katz.

I'd Never Been Shot for Real Before takes readers through a post-9/11 world of sex clubs, bankruptcy cubicle farms and guns that definitely go off. This blackly comic short story will be a favourite for fans of Please, Peter Darbyshire's award-winning and critically acclaimed first book.

In short, sharp episodes, Please chronicles the life of a young man who drifts through a hallucinatory urban world filled with celebrity wannabes, addictive relationships and jobs that demand he become someone else. The only thing he cares about is finding his ex-wife, who seems to exist only in his memories now. This terse, savage debut fuses the quiet desperation of Raymond Carver with the absurdity and media-savvy irony of Quentin Tarantino. At the same time, Please has a compassionate ...

The legendary hero Allanon takes center stage in the first of three gripping new stand-alone eBook short stories set in the world of the fantasy-fiction phenomenon that is Shannara—by beloved New York Times bestselling author Terry Brooks.The history is thus: The once-Druid Brona, seduced by his pursuit of dark magic, was forever transformed into the Warlock Lord—whose evil would be the downfall of the Four Lands and the death of the Races. Against him, th...

THIS TIME IT'S PERSONAL.Ed Rogan, tough as nails and twice as sharp, is a private investigator of malfeasance in the corporate world. The enigmatic case he's working on in A MURDER TOO PERSONAL takes on a very personal aspect when he searches for the murderer of his ex-wife. Someone has put a bullet in the back of her head and Rogan is driven by the twin demons of guilt and revenge to find her killer. His quest leads him through the netherworld of Wall Street and corporate board roo...