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...

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...

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...

“Isn’t enough that I can’t stop thinking about you Sophie?” he says, his voice low and persuasive. “What else do you want from me?”Sophie chose to be alone rather than be with David Preston, the man who has her heart, and yet refuses to share his. Now she's trying to make a life for herself, a life that will not include him.But how can she get over a man who refuses to let her go, especially when he can still set fire to her blood with just one tou...

First in the WWI alternate reality trilogy. "Duncan has a wonderful knack of conjuring up wacky scenarios and making them believable and fascinating" ( Kirkus Reviews).The Great Game of Gods is afoot in a world on the brink of madness . . .In the summer of 1914, a young man of reputation beyond reproach awakens under police guard—grievously injured and accused of heinous, impossible murder. And in a strange, distant place, the youngest member of a p...

"Who are you?"After three months of travelling, all Connor Preston wants to do is sink into his own bed. The last thing he expects is to find a stark-naked woman already there….Josie Marchpane wasn't anticipating company either. Connor may be six feet four inches of pure muscle and boast a disturbingly sexy smile, but a fortnight in the South of France is the one thing standing between Josie and her sanity-and she's not about to give it up without ...

1588: Queen Elizabeth is felled by an assassin's bullet. Within the week, the Spanish Armada had set sail, and its victory changed the course of history.1968: England is still dominated by the Church of Rome. There are no telephones, no television, no nuclear power. As Catholicism and the Inquisition tighten their grip, rebellion is growing.

Skillfully combining complex science with finely executed prose, these edgy, award-winning tales explore the always-shifting border between the known and the alien.The beauty and peril of technology and the passion and penalties of conviction merge in stories that are by turns dark, satiric, bold, and introspective. A seemingly humanized monster from John Carpenter's The Thing reveals the true villains in an Antarctic showdown. An artificial intelligence shields a biologic...