A small town with dark secrets. A house hidden in the woods that holds horrors unimaginable. Four friends on summer break fighting off a group of bullies dead set on ruining their summer of fun. The little town of Winnsboro has buried its secrets beneath years of history and faded memories. But, it’s about to be unearthed releasing ancient creatures as a budding psychopath blooms. Will they survive what comes for them and possibly the world or will The Damned Place end it all?
Think adolescence is hell? You have no idea... Welcome to Dante's Inferno, by way of The Breakfast Club, from the mind of American fiction's most brilliant troublemaker. "Death, like life, is what you make out of it." So says Madison, the whip-tongued 11-year-old narrator of Damned, Chuck Palahniuk's subversive homage to the young adult genre. Madison is abandoned at her Swiss boarding school over Christmas while her parents are off touting their new film projects and adopting more orphans. Over the holidays she dies of a marijuana overdose--and the next thing she knows, she's in Hell. This is the afterlife as only Chuck Palahniuk could imagine it: a twisted inferno inspired by both the most extreme and mundane of human evils, where The English Patient plays on repeat and roaming demons devour sinners limb by limb. However, underneath Madison's sad teenager affect there is still a child struggling to accept not only the events of her dysfunctional life, but also the truth about her death. For Madison, though, a more immediate source of comfort lies in the motley crew of young sinners she meets during her first days in Hell. With the help of Archer, Babette, Leonard, and Patterson, she learns to navigate Hell--and discovers that she'd rather be mortal and deluded and stupid with those she loves than perfect and alone.
"Time travel, UFOs, mysterious planets, stigmata, rock-throwing poltergeists, huge footprints, bizarre rains of fish and frogs-nearly a century after Charles Fort's Book of the Damned was originally published, the strange phenomenon presented in this book remains largely unexplained by modern science. Through painstaking research and a witty, sarcastic style, Fort captures the imagination while exposing the flaws of popular scientific explanations. Virtually all of his material was compiled and documented from reports published in reputable journals, newspapers and periodicals because he was an avid collector. Charles Fort was somewhat of a recluse who spent most of his spare time researching these strange events and collected these reports from publications sent to him from around the globe. This was the first of a series of books he created on unusual and unexplained events and to this day it remains the most popular. If you agree that truth is often stranger than fiction, then this book is for you"--Taken from Good Reads website.
I have no interest in being a demon's plaything. I shouldn't even be in the Fallen City of Elisium, but all it took was one Nephilim jerk proclaiming me to be tainted and that's exactly where I wind up. The demons in this dark metropolis are vile, wicked beings, though none more so than Kincaid: the cruelest and most powerful of them all. To ensure my safe return home, I must strike a bargain with him. Forty days in exchange for my freedom. It's not like I have much choice, so I agree. If Kincaid's interest in me can help solve the riddle of my origin and aid in my escape from Elisium, I figure it'll all be worth it. Only, the more time I spend with Kincaid, the more the tenuous line between love and hate melts away. Soon, I'll be forced to confront something far more disquieting than the truth of my heritage: a confusing connection with a demon that I cannot deny...
The debut novel from Akashic’s new imprint, Punk Planet Books. Also check out the smash hits How the Hula Girl Sings, Tender as Hellfire, and The Boy Detective Fails. “A funny, hard-rocking first-person tale of teenage angst and discovery.” —Booklist “Captures the loose, fun, recklessness of midwestern punk.” —MTV.com Hairstyles of the Damned is an honest, true-life depiction of growing up punk on Chicago’s south side: a study in the demons of racial intolerance, Catholic school conformism, and class repression. It is the story of the riotous exploits of Brian, a high school burnout, and his best friend, Gretchen, a punk rock girl fond of brawling. Based on the actual events surrounding a Chicago high school’s segregated prom, this work of fiction unflinchingly pursues the truth in discovering what it means to be your own person.
The Thing No One Tells You About Dying Is Just How Much Fun It Can Be. Alive, ad exec Amanda Feral worked hard to wring enjoyment out of her days. Now that she's a zombie, it's a different story. Turns out, Seattle is home to glamorous undead of every description, and Amanda--stylish and impeccably groomed even in the afterlife--is swigging cocktails and living large (so to speak) among its elite. But there are downsides. Not being able to stomach anything except alcohol and human flesh, for instance. And the fact that someone is targeting Seattle's otherworldly inhabitants for their own sinister reasons. Preying on the undead is seriously uncool. The only option is for Amanda and her zombie BFF Wendy and gorgeous gay vampire pal Gil to unearth the culprit among the legions of Seattle's bloodsuckers, shapeshifters, reapers, succubi, and demons--before they all meet a fate a lot worse than death. . . "Worth a read;priceless, really. Road Trip of the Living Dead can't come soon enough." --Urban Fantasy Land
'One of my favourite books of all time' CHARLAINE HARRIS 'Jodi Taylor is quite simply the Queen of Time. Her books are a swashbuckling joyride through History' C. K. MCDONNELL 'A great mix of British properness and humour with a large dollop of historical fun' ⭐ ⭐⭐ ⭐⭐ Meet St Mary's - a group of tea-soaked disaster magnets who hurtle their way around History. - If the whole of History lay before you, where would you go? When Dr Madeleine Maxwell is recruited by the St Mary's Institute of Historical Research, she discovers the historians there don't just study the past - they revisit it. But one wrong move and History will fight back - to the death. And Max soon discovers it's not just History she's fighting... BOOK 1 IN THE INTERNATIONALLY BESTSELLING CHRONICLES OF ST MARY'S SERIES For fans of Jasper Fforde, Doctor Who, Genevieve Cogman and Richard Osman's Thursday Murder Club Readers love Jodi Taylor: 'Once in a while, I discover an author who changes everything... Jodi Taylor and her protagonista Madeleine "Max" Maxwell have seduced me' 'Addictive. I wish St Mary's was real and I was a part of it' 'Science fiction, historical fantasy, love story and more all wrapped up in a fast-paced comedy of errors. Please don't wait to read it, you don't know what you are missing' 'Jodi Taylor has an imagination that gets me completely hooked' 'A tour de force'
Ever since the publication of Ishmael in 1992, readers have yearned for a glimpse into a dimension of spiritual revelation the author only hinted at in that and later books. Now at long last they have it in seven profound but delightfully simple tales that illuminate the world in which humans became humans. This is a world seen through animist eyes: as friendly to human life as it was to the life of gazelles, lions, lizards, mosquitos, jellyfish, and seals — not a world in which humans lived like trespassers who must conquer and subdue an alien territory. It's a world in which humans have a place in the community of life — not as rulers but as equals — with the paths of all held together in the hand of god.This is not an ancient world or a lost world. It exists as surely today as it ever did — for those who have eyes to see it. Tales of Adam, delightfully illustrated by Michael McCurdy, is a book that will come to be shelved alongside The Prophet, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and The Alchemist.
They told me I was sick, that they were here to help. They told all of us that we needed their medicine. It doesn't help though, their medicine, it kills. It's a serum, a cuff, a life spent in poverty-infested valleys, it's poison. Most of us don't survive their medicine, their torture. We didn't choose to be like this, to be born different. We didn't choose to have unnatural abilities. We're not damned like they say we are, at least, I don't think we are.The elites control our world because my kind is evil, born of a different species. The trench is full of damned and normals living together, hiding from each other. Everyone here has a lineage that traces to some damned ancestor, thus why I'm here. I don't blame my ancestors; they didn't choose to be damned, just as how I didn't either.Not all damned are dangerous, so they tell us. The only damned to raise suspicion are the seekers and stats. The only ones that are killed onsite, just like my family. I'm a normal, I'm a damned, I'm a soul in a body that plays pretend. I can't escape my lethal destiny, that's what they tell me. Those foolish enough to leave are executed, put on trial for the rest of us to see. The only way to escape is through death, or so I thought.
The award-winning author of The Birthgrave invites you to Paradys, an alternate Paris, with three tales of dark magic, eroticism, and gothic fantasy. Three novellas from Tanith Lee—World Fantasy Award winner, Nebula finalist, and the first woman to win the British Fantasy Award for best novel—cast shadows on the history of the City of Light. Stained with Crimson: In the nineteenth century, poet Andre St Jean comes into possession of a ruby scarab ring, only to discover it belongs to the pale-skinned, ebony-eyed Antonina von Aaron, the most beautiful woman in Paradys. Preying upon Andre, she taps into his deepest, darkest desires, drawing him into her vampiric world of gender shapeshifting and bloody nightmares . . . Malice in Saffron: In the Middle Ages, young Jehanine has had her innocence torn from her by her brutal stepfather. Fleeing to Paradys, she seeks sympathy from her stepbrother, Pierre, who accuses her of lying and casts her out into the inhospitable streets. Finding refuge in a nunnery, Jehanine tries to live in God’s grace. But when dusk falls, she transforms into her male alter ego, Jehan. Prowling the alleyways with a gang of Devil-worshippers, he stalks the city’s denizens, unknowingly sowing the seeds for the fall of Paradys . . . Empire of Azure: In the early twentieth century, writer Anna Sanjeanne receives a cryptic note from a mysterious man: “In a week or less, I shall be dead.” On the predicted date, Anna follows the stranger’s trail. A chain of clues—a shattered window, a hanging corpse, a leather-bound diary, and a portrait of an unknown woman—soon lead the young journalist toward a sinister and ancient force . . . Told with lush fantastical prose and an acute aesthetic sense, The Book of the Damned ventures into a morbid and disquieting parallel world, exploring the recesses of identity, gender, and sexual transgression that lie within.
