Pet Monsters gathers ten original stories about the strange, misunderstood creatures that crash into ordinary lives, and the children brave enough to love them back. They are funny, they are frightening, and underneath every one of them runs the same current: what it costs to be an outcast, what it means to finally be understood, and how much it hurts to let go.
Paintings that command armies. Songs that shatter crowds. Ancient poems that speak directly into an immortal ear. A revolver forged from the ruins of Earth, passed from hand to hand across generations, delivering justice with a chorus of the dead riding in its steel. What happens when inspiration stops feeling entirely human?
Small decisions. World-altering consequences. That’s the premise behind For Want of a Rivet, an anthology of eleven alternate history military stories that asks one deceptively simple question: what if a single invention, tactical choice, or quiet act of courage had gone differently?
In Crashed Landings, editor David Badurina has assembled ten all-new stories inspired by the group-adventure films of the 1980s and '90s —The Goonies, Explorers, Stand by Me, The Sandlot--where a strange event throws mismatched kids together and nothing is ever quite the same afterward.
Meet ten women of a certain vintage who possess particular sets of skills and absolutely zero patience for the alternative. A fire fairy stepmother navigating werewolves and blended family politics. A retired intelligence operative who knits Kevlar scarves and outsmarts Belarusian thieves. A grandmother handling the unfriendly aliens with a shotgun full of rock salt. A sharp-eyed matron in a Lovecraftian coastal town who faces off with an elder god.
In a world where genius teeters on the edge of catastrophe, mad scientists tinker with the impossible—and sometimes succeed. Welcome to the laboratory. Mind the sparks.
Most military fiction regales the reader with fast-paced tales of strong men with sexy weapons who close with, engage, and destroy the enemy with lethal precision. What it tends to ignore, though, is the supply clerk who issues him the body armor that protects him in the fight, the intelligence shop that arms him with information, or the maintenance troops who keep the vehicles running (ideally).
Step into ten stories of vibrant universes, where gleaming rays of energy shape the future and the past collides with the fantastic unknown. This collection of short stories invites you to explore a genre that is often called "Raypunk" or "Raygun Gothic," but we call "Plasma Pulp." Within these pages, you will encounter daring escapades and enigmatic characters who navigate a landscape defined by gleaming technology and surreal possibilities.
Insert Coin harkens back to retro arcades, digital adventures, and pockets full of quarters on a sweaty Saturday night with a group of friends. Looking for stories that have high adventure and real consequences? Friends surviving, very real injuries, clever moments where the big boss is conquered through wit and ingenuity. The games may be anything – space oriented, sword-and-sorcery, sports, spies, and the stakes are high.
The cumulative effect of these stories is a many-shaded collection of tales that explores the idea of how a more automated world would affect actual humans, as well as the automatons, themselves. On a deeper level, one might be inspired to consider the way humans treat one another, particularly when a helper is considered of a lower station. If one is predisposed to condescend to “lesser” folk, how, then, will that same person treat a non-person?
In the shadows between law and chaos, there are always men willing to get their hands dirty... but even the roughest men have lines they won't cross. From rain-soaked city streets to war-torn alien landscapes, from 1940s Arizona to cyberpunk futures, these stories follow enforcers, fixers, and hard cases who make their living in the gray areas of justice.
Eleven stories of mercenaries, spanning a broad range of genres and settings. A group of raiders sneaks into an enemy stronghold to open the way for their fellows, and find it to be very filthy work. An indentured drop trooper stumbles over a treasure of incalculable value, which might still be more trouble than it’s worth. Five soldiers of fortune wonder if what their client wants them to do is too much to risk the stain on their souls. A hyper-corporatized mercenary conglomerate hilariously, and brutally, reduces everything in battle, even blood and souls, into a dollar value.
Hopefully we’ve gathered a little something for every flavor of monster devotee in this anthology. A little nostalgia, a little time travel, a little horror, and a dump truck full of every type of monster from our youth. Some will make you laugh; some will make you change your shorts. However it turns out, we hope you have fun.
The idea of taking fairy tales back to their dark roots—to the horror and dread in them—was one of the premier goals of the stories presented here. Twisting them in dark and imaginative ways. Another goal was to have a few stories that would make the reader chuckle as things go horrifically bad for the characters. Horror and humor are often found skipping arm-in-arm over the river and through the woods together, after all.
These yarns o’ piracy take place in the near future, or the far past, in worlds almost too fantastical and mayhap too glacial, eerie, and everywhere in between. You'll come upon pirates ruthless, some with hearts of gold, some on a mission, and some learning a thing or two about themselves in the thick of things. We may be outlaws, but we still breathe the same life-giving mixture of oxygen and whatnot as the haughtiest king and humblest Calesian civilian. We're just more honest and forthright about our intentions. Savvy?
