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It is hard to say how it started – all the unexplained little signs of a new baby about the house in ‘The Silent Cradle’ – but soon none of the O’Bannons could deny that there had been a highly irregular addition to the family. In ‘Max Haunting’ a middle-aged hippie, preserved almost intact from the Sixties, starts showing up on the doorsteps of his old friends and loves who, in acquiring jobs and furniture, have ‘sold out’ rather less than he thought. Hauntings of curious varieties continue in other stories: the sort manufactured out of glass by a man who thinks his godly wife deserves a miracle; the visitation of a mother’s cruelty into the mind of her daughter as she confronts the frustrations of coping with her own child; the specters of opportunities lost or spurned which nag to be laid, like ghosts.



Elsewhere Leigh Kennedy considers the impulse of cannibalism in a future world whose greed has induced ecological upheaval, and the phenomenon of speaking in tongues as investigated by a sociology professor. She views the world through the eyes of a victim of seizures and of a primatologist whose devotion to apes has gone a bit too far.

Book four in the series which relate the story of Kirth Gersen as he exacts his revenge on five notorious criminals, collectively known as the Demon Princes, who carried his village off into slavery during his childhood.

It was the party of a lifetime – but she never arrived…

‘Vera Caspary is an expert at suspense and suspicion’ New York Times

When popular young schoolteacher Nina Redfield reports to police the whereabouts of Bushie Neal, a criminal on the run, she sets off a chain of events over which she has no control.

Nina is about to leave for a Hallowe’en party at a friend’s house. An escort is sent to collect her, so it’s no surprise to Nina when a masked man in a Harlequin costume calls for her. But Nina and her escort never reach the party . . .

Could her past association with Bushie’s sworn enemy Nick Brazza have any connection to her disappearance? And has she been spirited to safety – or further into danger?

By the author of Rogue Male, one of the classic thrillers of the twentieth century.
A superb thriller from a 20th century master of the genre.

Edmund Hawkins is down on his luck in London, after a brief sojourn in an African dictatorship. In desperation for cash he steals a woman’s bag in which, in addition to money, he finds a mysterious gold pendant, which, it transpires, is the national icon of Malpelo, a small Central American country.

Intrigued by the pendant, and flush with money from the theft, Hawkins decides to travel to revolution-riven Malpelo, setting in motion a train of dramatic and far-reaching events from which he will be lucky to escape.

After laboring for thousands of years, the people of Earth, fleeing ecological disaster, have built a new, clean, stable world on a worldwide platform erected over the entire land surface of the Earth. Everything is going well–except for Carl Magner, the man who’s been having bad dreams. He shouldn’t be having dreams at all, because dreams have been banished from the society of the Euchronian Millennium, but somehow he is, and his dreams are showing him the “Underworld.” The real surface of the Earth, the Underworld that the Euchronian Millennium has left behind, still maintains life, human and otherwise, life that’s adapted to a world without sky or sun, still evolving in response to extreme environmental challenges. Dreams are only dreams, but they’re a provocation nevertheless, not merely for Carl Magner, but for the whole of Euchronian society. Can Heaven be truly Heaven, if Hell still festers in its entrails?

The adventures of Li-lin, a Daoist priestess with the unique ability to see the spirit world, continue in the thrilling follow-up to the critically-acclaimed historical urban fantasy The Girl with Ghost Eyes.

It’s the end of the Nineteenth Century. San Francisco’s cobblestone streets are haunted, but Chinatown has an unlikely protector in a young Daoist priestess named Li-lin. Using only her martial arts training, spiritual magic, a sword made from peachwood, and the walking, talking spirit of a human eye, Li-lin stands alone to defend her immigrant community from supernatural threats.

But when the body of a young girl is brought to the deadhouse Li-lin oversees for a local group of gangsters, she faces her most bewildering-and potentially dangerous-assignment yet. The nine-year-old has died from suffocation . . . specifically by flowers growing out of her nose and mouth. Li-lin suspects Gong Tau, a dirty and primitive form of dark magic. But who is behind the spell, and why, will take her on a perilous journey deep into a dangerous world of ghosts and spirits.

Muphormosy, a disease not unlike leprosy, has ravaged the first settlers on the planet Tezcatl. Generations later, their similarly emaciated descendants live in a compound where they are isolated from the planet’s normal inhabitants. The new kommissar of the compound, Lucian Yeardance, cares for his charges and alleviates their suffering with the narcotic heartsease. despite the open revulsion the normal inhabitants show for the maimed men and women, Luican determines to find out what the dread disease really is. Still, he is unprepared for the appalling discovery he makes: except for the open lesions and missing limbs and digits, not one of the muphormers shows a sign of any disease.

It is the year 2450. Humanity is scattered among the stars, which teem with intelligent life, while the home world has been destroyed by an inadvertent catastrophe two hundred years before. Thus all Earthmen are exiles, and Earth itself is only a memory.

Hydros is a world of great complexity. It has almost no landmass, only a great globe-encompassing ocean with occasional tiny islands. Its seas swarm with apparently intelligent life-forms of a hundred kinds, and one – a bipedal humanoid form – has created a kind of land for itself: floating islands, woven from sea-borne materials, buffered by elaborate barricades against the ceaseless tidal surges that circle the planet.

To Hydros have come an assortment of Earthmen. For them it’s a world of no return: having no form of outbound space transportation. This brilliantly inventive novel tells their story, as they travel across the planet’s endless ocean in search of the mysterious area from which no human has ever returned – the Face of the Waters.




(First published 1991)

In the year 2794, the greatest civilisation in Earth’s history, ravaged by over-population and lack of food, faces almost certain destruction. A handful of men and women struggle desperately to avert the coming holocaust, but they seem doomed to failure. And even if they succeed, Earth will never be the same again . . .

They woke up to the smell of danger. No one could see it. None of them could hear it. But it was there. Lurking… intangible… inaudible… invisible. The space around them was alive with it. They breathed it into their lungs. It crept through the pores of their skins. It was the dreaded presence of X the Unknown.

Riverworld was a planet of Eden whose people possessed the power of dreaming the future. Kyreol, daughter of a Healer, pierced the vision veil to discover the ultimate truth – that her home world unknowingly hosted the way station of a vast interstellar civilisation.

An evil star shone on Kyreol’s first mission as an interplanetary agent. Her ship fell out of space, cracking on a lonely, mysterious moon. Rising from its endless plains was the white city – awesome, abandoned, eons-dead – a silent world of secret wonders.

Only her prophetic dreams linked Kyroel to Riverworld, but she was hopelessly marooned light-years away. And she was not alone…

It started as a harmless practical joke. But then the real nightmare begins…John Straker is the neighbourhood bogeyman. Hideously disfigured, he hides himself away from the rest of the world – until the night when a group of children set fire to his house and reduce it – and its owner – to ashes.

Mr Bad Face has been well and truly laid to rest. Or so the children think…

They’re grown up now and they’ve struggled hard to leave the bad dreams behind. Then, without warning, a figure from the past casts his shadow across the present. Mr Bad Face is back – and he wants revenge.

Pout, the chimera, half-man, half-ape, was incorporated into one of the plants or vice versa. He was jammed into a squatting position, while the stems, entering at his buttocks, merged with his legs, his arms and his torso, emerging at knees, elbows, and through his abdomen and thorax. A large, yellow-petalled flower seemed to frame his face.

It was his face that rivetted Ikematsu’s attention, while the chimera squirmed in dumb distress, glaring with huge piteous eyes. For in that face, set into it as if set in pudding, was the zen gun. The gun was his face, or a part of it. The barrel pointed straight out in place of a nose… the stock merged with and disappeared into Pout’s pendulous mouth.

Ikematsu leaned toward the chimera. “How you loved your toy! Now it is truly yours!”

Alone in New York City, Lizanne Steffasson comes face to face with reality when her dream of acting on Broadway collapses.

Now she just needs to pay her rent. So she answers an unusual ad in the paper, for ‘a beautiful girl. One not afraid to look on danger’s bright face’.

Lizanne is neither beautiful nor fearless, yet she is certainly about to look danger in the face. A New York estate lawyer wants her help to track down a young man who has vanished into the wilds of the city on the eve of inheriting a vast sum of money from his billionaire late father, a Swedish man known as the Cross-Eyed Bear.

It turns out that Lizanne is the perfect person for the job, as she knows more about the story than her employer has bargained for . . .

Tanaquil, a young mender, and her familiar come face to face with her half-sister, Lizra, who forces Tanaquil to make a perilous choice between siding with Lizra in her quest for conquest or risking her terrible anger.

Helen Powell was a punch card operator in the test office of Elcomp, the largest and most dynamically progressive computer manufacturing company in the West. A saboteur, acting for a totalitarian regime, eluded the security network and attempted to destroy the new top secret Mark IX, the greatest computer Elcomp had ever constructed. Unfortunately for the saboteur, the Mark IX had inbuilt defence mechanisms and the secret agent died in a holocaust of high voltage sparks.

From that time onwards Helen began to notice strange changes in the great electronic thinking machine. It seemed to her that the Mark IX was developing something which might almost have been described as a personality. She tried to dismiss the thoughts as imagination . . . then the face appeared . . . if it was a face!

Helen saw an image on the computer’s main screen. It was a face, yet not a human face in the accepted sense. The most horrible thing about it was the resemblance it bore to the dead agent.

Keill Randor, the Last Legionary of the planet Moros, and his alien companion, Glr, finally end their search for the evil that threatens the galaxy when they come face to face with the true horror of the Galactic Warlord. But even their combined power may not be enough to smash the Deathwing army and save the galaxy from destruction.

Set a thousand years before the reign of Lord Valentine, in a time of ancient mysteries, new wonders and new horrors, this is the fifth book in the Majipoor Cycle, one of the jewels of modern fantasy.

When a plague of madness sweeps over Majipoor, Coronal Lord Prestimion’s quest for a cure brings him face to face with enemies, delusions and forgotten powers.

Mark Girland, good-for-nothing secret agent with a distinct weakness for money and women, finds himself in Prague for his latest adventure. But events in the Communist country prove all too much for Girland as he comes face-to-face with a sinister world of deception, fraud and corruption.

‘The same compulsive readability and sheer hard story-telling as in every other’ Sheffield Telegraph

Called to the end of time by a being they knew only as The Face of Ea, four adventurers from the twentieth century faced a power that not even the super-science of that era could meet – the nekron, negative matter, negative force, ultimate destruction for everything it touched. It seemed hopeless to expect them to win this battle for the fate of the universe – but between them they had a power they themselves could not suspect.

Ten tantalizing tales of man, woman and child – and their cosmic connections…

Contents:
Angel Fix (1974)
Beaver Tears (1976)
Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light! (1976)
The Screwfly Solution (1977)
Time-Sharing Angel (1977)
We Who Stole the Dream (1978)
Slow Music (1980)
A Source of Innocent Merriment (1980)
Out of the Everywhere (1981)
With Delicate Mad Hands (1981)

A Wall Street trader leaves the bulls and bears – and comes face-to-face with hungrier dinosaurs. A Roaring ’20s gangster gets roughed up – by real cavemen. A pioneer hitches up his covered wagon on the Oregon Trail – and winds up in a modern shopping mall. And Roger Tyson, who thought the space-time continuum had finally settled down to normal, is flung helplessly from the distant past to the far future, and back again.

Superbeings from the end of time are struggling for control of the universe with aliens from another galaxy. And if a few random humans get caught in one of their time gates, they don’t much care. So Roger and his friends find themselves facing everyone from the cast of the original Mutiny on the Bounty to real pirates of the Spanish Main in a wild quest to their own time and bring everything back to insanity as usual…

It should have been routine. Nothing could go wrong. The anode and the cathode were behaving perfectly. The meters and dials were recording accurately. A faint effervescence stirred in the chemical solution.

There was a subtle change in the speed – the experiment seemed to freeze in its tracks – the stream of gentle bubbles hovered motionless. Something inexplicable was appearing in the solution. The scientist peered harder at the vessel…It couldn’t be…It was impossible…It was incredible…but it had happened!

A woman’s face smiled at him from the depths of the glass tank! But the face was translucent, he could see tank and solution despite its contours.

“Hello, Earthman,” said the face from Nowhere.

He clapped a hand to his forehead and collapsed insensible. When he came to, the experiment was back to normal. What had happened? Was it all in his mind? Or had he really made contact with an alien?

Parallel Worlds! Earth, cerated out of universal chaos, and the Dreamlands, spawned of the dreams of men. But where dreams turn to nightmares, Death is the only crossing-point…
Ex-waking worlders David Hero and Eldin the Wanderer are now sellswords in that ephemeral dimension called Deramland. Once a talented artist of the fantastic, now Hero’s art is the wizardry of his swordplay. Once a lecturing professor, now Eldin professes a knowledge of the dark, mysterious Dream Realms second to none. A formidable pair! But face to face with Yibb-Tstll and the Gaunts of Night, the Eidolon Lathi and her brood, and the mad, alien First One who plots to set free dreaming Cthulu from eon-old imprisonment…what can mere men do?
Take up arms with the Heroes of Dreams and laugh in the face of the world’s worst nightmare!