As the war in Europe winds down, a unit of battle-fatigued GIs are tasked in liberating the survivors of the infamous Verurteilt concentration camp, in theory a relatively simple rescue mission. Upon arrival, Sergeant Rance Hawkins and his four young charges are ordered to search an unmapped area beyond the main camp for evidence of a separate, clandestine compound, reportedly created for high-ranking SS officers to further torment and torture. Their quest will eventually lead them into a nearby coal mine, where a young camp survivor claims that her mother and other refugees are being held. Inside the murky caverns, the motley crew of dogfaces discover revelations so terrifying and vile as to make even the inhuman atrocities of Verurteilt seem tame by comparison.
When Niles and Justine Burton go camping to get a break from their stressful lives, they expect to find peace . . . not an abandoned village hiding an ancient evil. After accidentally stealing the cursed mask of the murderous Plague Doctor, they’ll have to keep their family from falling apart as they solve an ancient mystery and struggle to survive. Collects the six-issue series. “A solid horror comic, that definitely deserves a big screen adaptation.”—Graphic Policy
A novel of the improbable friendship that arises between a Nazi officer and a Jewish chessplayer in Auschwitz SS Obersturmfuhrer Paul Meissner arrives in Auschwitz from the Russian front wounded and fit only for administrative duty. His most pressing task is to improve camp morale and he establishes a chess club, and allows officers and enlisted men to gamble on the games. Soon Meissner learns that chess is also played among the prisoners, and there are rumors of an unbeatable Jew known as "the Watchmaker." Meissner's superiors begin to demand that he demonstrate German superiority by pitting this undefeated Jew against the best Nazi players. Meissner finds Emil Clément, the Watchmaker, and a curious relationship arises between them. As more and more games are played, the stakes rise, and the two men find their fates deeply entwined. Twenty years later, the two meet again in Amsterdam—Meissner has become a bishop, and Emil is playing in an international chess tournament. Having lost his family in the horrors of the death camps, Emil wants nothing to do with the ex-Nazi officer despite their history, but Meissner is persistent. "What I hope," he tells Emil, "is that I can help you to understand that the power of forgiveness will bring healing." As both men search for a modicum of peace, they recall a gripping tale of survival and trust. A suspenseful meditation on understanding and guilt, John Donoghue's The Death's Head Chess Club is a bold debut and a rich portrait of a surprising friendship.
It's one hundred years in the future and an organisation known as AIM is fighting a non-violent conflict with the fascist government it wishes to change. But there's a splinter group that's ready to return to its violent roots. Problem is the killer robot. It isn't sure what side it wants to be on.
Death's Head illuminates a little-known but significant moment in history, one whose outcome resonates through the years to the present day. It is a story of war and love and the faith that enables ordinary men to perform extraordinary deeds. 1190 - Saladin's armies have overrun most of the Holy Land, prompting a great crusade from the West, led by Richard the Lionheart, King Philip of France, and the German emperor, Frederick Barbarossa. Unjustly accused of murder, an idealistic young monk named Roger flees his abbey and joins the vast tide of men headed for the East. In the Holy Land, Roger finds not glory, but death and misery as he takes part in the greatest military debacle of the Middle Ages - the siege of Acre. Roger makes a name for himself in the company known as the Death's Heads, and he falls in love under the most improbable circumstances. But as the months pass, and he watches the mightiest fighting force in the history of Christendom being destroyed by battle and disease and starvation, he suffers a soul-shattering crisis of faith, wondering how God could permit His children to indulge in such madness.
For most of the previous century forces loyal to the death-gods of Lathakra, King Cold and his triplet sister, the Scarlet Empress, have sought to replace the Head's reigning sense of hopelessness with another Golden Age, that of their own. Equally godlike devils such as the Unity of Chaos support them.
With Death’s Head, David Gunn rocketed onto the scene in the most explosive and entertaining science fiction debut since Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon. Now Gunn is back–and so is Sven Tveskoeg: antisocial, antihero, anti-you-name-it, a one-man killing spree whose best friend is an intelligent handgun with a bad attitude and whose worst enemy is, well, just about everybody else. And if Sven weren’t dangerous enough already, add in the lethal alien parasite that resides in his throat . . . and is capable of bending space and time. Then there’s the fact that Sven’s genetic makeup is only 98.2 percent human, the rest being undetermined but possibly contributing to his enhanced healing abilities, superior strength, unusual agility, and notable sociopathic tendencies. The result is one seriously badass soldier with a hair-trigger temper and a chip on his shoulder the size of a small moon. These are qualities that would doom a man to prison or worse in any decent society. Luckily, Sven doesn’t live in a decent society. He lives in the empire of OctoV, a tyrant who is part machine, part boy, part god, and all evil. Sven’s qualities have brought him to OctoV’s personal attention and earned him a lieutenant’s commission in the Death’s Head, the elite corps of assassins and enforcers whose purpose in life is to kill and die for the greater glory of OctoV. Sven’s new assignment? Lead his ragtag band of Death’s Head rejects–the Aux, short for auxiliaries–to the artificial world of Hekati. It seems that a citizen of the United Free, an empire not only vaster than OctoV’s but far more technologically advanced, has gone missing there. Now it’s up to Sven to rescue the poor soul. But Hekati turns out to be a vicious den of backstabbing and betrayal, where nothing and no one can be trusted, least of all the greenhorn colonel put in charge of the mission at the last moment. It looks like somebody wants Sven Tveskoeg dead. So what else is new?
Wessex, Mercia, Danelaw: what will one day become England. Celts, Danes, Saxons, Norse: all are forging their own paths, each paved with blood and faith, both Pagan and Christian. Black Erlik, the Kinslayer, ventures below Hadrian's Wall with Byzantine nobleman Palladius Mauricius Veratius, his blood brother from his distant past. The warriors confront a horrific winged evil from Palladius's own eastern lands. Together, the men must face the terror that plagues the small village of Edenston, as well as the long-ago events which brought them together in a haze of blood and battle. As boys, they had paid a heavy price in blood. As men, they exact their own blood price.