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The late Lin Carter was a prolific writer and anthologist of horror and fantasy with over eighty titles to his credit. His tales of Mythos horror are loving tributes to H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘revision’ tales and to August Derleth’s stories of Hastur and the R’lyeh Text. This collection of Carter’s Mythos tales includes all five Xothic Legend Cycle stories:

– The Dweller in the Tomb
– Out of the Ages
– The Horror in the Gallery
– The Thing in the Pit
– The Winfield Heritance

Filled with mind-bending, soul-warping terror, Carter taps into the eldritch horrors that Lovecraft brought into the world…

Thumb Rivera is in a bind. A college dropout, aspiring writer, smalltime marijuana grower, and biker club hang-around, Thumb finds himself confined to his rural ranch house in the desolate Maine countryside, helpless to do anything but watch as his former friends and housemates scheme behind his back, conspire to steal his girlfriend, and make inroads with the Blood Eagles, a dangerous biker gang.

Thumb is also dead.

A ghost forced to haunt his survivors and reflect back on the circumstances that led to his unsolved murder, Thumb discovers he has one channel through which he can communicate with the living world: Ben, an unemployed ghost hunter. Ben soon convinces local curmudgeon Fred Muttkowski, failed novelist turned pig farmer, to turn Ben’s Ouija-board conversations with Thumb into an actual book.

Thumb has two things on his mind: To solve, and then avenge, the mystery of his own violent death, and also to tell his story. That story is American Ghost-as told to Ben, then fictionalized by Fred. It’s at once a clever tale of the afterlife, a poignant examination of the ephemeral nature of life, and a celebration of writing and the written word.

Top Gun heads to outer space in this throwback to the classic science fiction of Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein.

Strapped in to artificial wings spanning twenty-five feet across, your arms push a tenth of your body weight with each pump as you propel yourself at frightening speeds through the air. Inside a pressurized dome on the Moon, subject to one-sixth Earth’s gravity, there are swarms of chiseled, fearless, superbly trained flyers all around you, jostling for air space like peregrine falcons racing for the prize. This was the sport of piloting, and after Helium-3, piloting was one of the first things that entered anyone’s mind when Borealis was mentioned.

It was Helium-3 that powered humanity’s far-flung civilization expansion, feeding fusion reactors from the Alliances on Earth to the Terran Ring, Mars, the Jovian colonies, and all the way out to distant Titan. The supply, taken from the surface of the Moon, had once seemed endless. But that was long ago. Borealis, the glittering, fabulously rich city stretched out across the lunar North Pole, had amassed centuries of unimaginable wealth harvesting it, and as such was the first to realize that its supplies were running out.

The distant memories of the horrific planetwide devastation spawned by the petroleum wars were not enough to quell the rising energy and political crises. A new war to rival no other appeared imminent, but the solar system’s competing powers would discover something more powerful than Helium-3: the indomitable spirit of an Earth-born, war-weary mercenary and pilot extraordinaire.

Vinny and Toby can make things happen just by using their minds. As Vinny stares at a box of ants, she feels as though she is plugging into a giant power socket. It is then that she hears a voice, letting her know that the ants plan to take over the Earth. Can Vinny stop it before it’s too late?

Welcome to Argylle, where the ruling family – a brilliant, flighty, civilized and occasionally dangerous clan of nearly-immortal warriors and magicians – are hoping for a few years of relative peace.

True, their Father Gaston has vanished, leaving both throne and family while he pursues some unexplained errand. His absence has stretched into years. True as well that their powerful Uncle Dewar has also wandered off without leaving a forwarding address, and hasn’t been heard from for a worrisome length of time. It’s a bad habit of running off that this family’s elders have.

But now young Prince Gwydion’s been stuck with ruling the Dominion of Argylle, and with any luck, life can go back to being a satisfactory mixture of intrigue, gossip and viniculture, periodically enlivened by amateur theatricals and the odd quest or two.

Yet Gwydion is finding this arrangement uncomfortable. Strange things keep turning up. A plague of monsters appears out of nowhere, attempting to take up residence in the local barns and forests. These are trumped by the arrival of a ravenous Great Dragon – ancient, sorcerous, profoundly cunning – so big you can see it thirty miles away. Meanwhile, a mysterious young woman has shown up, claiming to be Gwydion’s long-lost – indeed, quite unexpected – sister. And then there are the high-tech aliens, who say they just want to conduct a legal investigation. It’s enough, Gwydion thinks, to make a ruler want to find some nice long errand that’ll take him away from his homeland for a spell…

The Well-Favored Man is a courtly, complex, bloody-minded fantasy for those who love Roger Zelazny’s Amber, Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint and the fantasy adventures of Steven Brust.

THE DEMONS HAD TO STOP JOHN BRAVAIS

His secret assignment was simply – to save mankind from the savage dog-like ‘things’ that used their hands like men. Yet an unknown number of apparently ‘human’ beings were against him too.

First transformed by surgery into a superman, John Bravais probes ever more deeply into the secret nightmare world of the ‘things’. At last, when only his mind remains – trapped in a vast robot war machine on the moon – only by an immense act of will-power can he give humanity a future.

A marvelous medley of Tiptree’s best, including:

“YOUR HAPLOID HEART” – When Ian Suitlov and Pax Patton landed on Esthaa to check for humans, the job wasn’t as easy as it appeared. Though the natives seemed human enough, only cross breeding would be conclusive proof. But how were they to prove anything, when sex was punishable by death?

“THE PSYCHOLOGIST WHO WOULDN’T DO AWFUL THINGS TO RATS” – Dr Tilly Lipsitz hated his name, loved his rats… and would be out of a job if he didn’t come up with a real zinger of an experiment soon. He didn’t have much in mind until he took a midnight trip to his lab and learned more than he would have thought possible.

“SHE WAITS FOR ALL MEN BORN” – She had eyes that could not see, but without sight she had powers that went far beyond those of all who came upon her.

Contents:
Your Haploid Heart (1969)
And So On, and So On (1971)
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (1974)
A Momentary Taste of Being (1975)
Houston, Houston, Do You Read? (1976)
The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Awful Things to Rats (1976)
She Waits for All Men Born (1976)

Cameron, a tall, testy, whisky-drinking, nationalist-minded, Scottish physicist, may not have been an astronomer, but he knew the off things in the sky when he saw them. From an Australian mountaintop where he was advising on the location of a radiotelescope he saw what looked like Mars, in the wrong spot in the sky. But it wasn’t Mars at all, it was a supernova … no, not a supernova but a quasar.

Knowing what would happen, Cameron dashed home to Scotland and found himself at a crossroads of his life. In the face of total catastrophe, and of intense heat, darkness and rain, he took over as natural leader with both the north and south of the United Kingdom turning to him for help.

Sir Fred Hoyle, world-renowned astrophysicist, and his son, Geoffrey Hoyle, have set their newest science fiction thriller not only in London and Scotland, but also at the University of Charlottesville, and in Australia as well.

The result is an intriguing, fast-paced novel written with a wry humour and offering some fascinating glimpses of and gibes at astronomy.

This is some household. The kid is a genius, the father a scientist of international repute. Money is a problem. Not a shortage of money, but the opposite: too much. The sort of money that brings the envious and the scheming clustering like flies around offal: nieces, nephews, cousins … a family of mean minds and gross appetites.

The staff has its peculiarities, too: the chauffeur is an ex-con; the governess formerly a featured act in strip clubs from New York to Miami; and the secretary has a well-developed taste in other women.

Yes, it’s some household – and not all that welcoming of PI Mike Hammer, not when the kid has been kidnapped and everyone’s a suspect.

They came out of the great abyss which lay around the Earth, from the planet of a star so distant that it could not be seen with the naked eye. Their purpose was survival and the conquest of Earth. They were alien and possessed a mysterious force which lay at the very origin of human comprehension; the ability to enter into a man’s mind, to make him think the thoughts they chose, to make him hear and see and feel the things they wanted.

Against such a force there seemed no defence; for who could say that the man or woman by his side was not motivated by one of these creatures? Who could say that his own thoughts and senses belonged to him and not to some ‘thing’ seated in some alien way inside his brain?

Alex was a pioneer. Like all pioneers he had problems. He had more problems than most; when things start to go wrong in space they go wrong in a big way. One by one the perils of the void took their toll of his companions. Alex was alone, alone with a vision, the vision of a town, home.

Only thoughts of home kept him alive. He remembered trees, houses, shops, churches, peoples…above all people. At last he reached earth…or perhaps it wasn’t earth? Things had changed unbelievably. Perhaps he had changed. How long had he been away? How far had he drifted? There was a sinister possibility that this wasn’t home at all. If the things that looked like people weren’t people but aliens, what was he to do?

Alex was a realist. He knew what space could do to a man’s mind. He was disinclined to trust the evidence of his own senses. A mine that has had far more than it can take can produce from very peculiar perceptions…

Sally McQuire worked for an unusual organisation. She was an undercover agent for the I.P.F., but her friends knew her only as a scatter-brained night club dancer. Then came the Thing. At first there were just off paragraphs in provincial papers. A cow disappeared. Fish stopped biting. Finally Jon Vardo, a shepherd, vanished without a trace. The I.P.F. put Sally on the track. She discovered a strange common denominator linking the events. There was a mathematical and geographical sequence. Sally arranged to be at the next danger zone, and then she too vanished. This is a story of humanity at its best, locked in a life and death struggle with a cruel, cold culture of Beings from the Beyond. This is a story of humanity fighting against incredible odds and fantastic weapons. Can the mind of man hold its own against deadly, sinister Intelligence from beyond the stars?

In the realm of science things are often far from what they seem. In the science of sociology this is truest of all. Those who seem to control human affairs may only be figure-heads. The real power lies in unsuspected places…sinister…alien…

Mervyn Wayne called at the offices of an apparently normal, respectable, old-established city firm and overheard intrigue of nightmare quality. He found himself a fugitive from an organisation whose ramifications extended everywhere.

Society was being master-minded by someone, or something, so irresistibly powerful that Mervyn’s first reaction was hopeless fear. Gradually, however, he learnt how to distinguish allies from organisation men and began building a counter-group of his own.

When Cassidy Walker stumbles into the middle of the highway, bloodied and bruised, Bard college in flames behind her, and manages to flag down a ride, she thinks the worst is over. Arriving in the nearby town of Red Hook, Cassidy tries to call her parents but the phone lines are down – no radio or television signals are being received either. The town, it seems, is cut off from the rest of the world. But that’s not the strangest thing. Not by a long shot. Nobody in Red Hook has even heard of Bard College. Furthermore, they claim that Cassidy is not a music student, but a hand at the local stable. And she has lived in a house she can’t remember, with people she barely knows, for over a year.


The world is fracturing. Cassidy just knows it – just as she knows that she is responsible. As Cassidy undertakes the ultimate road trip, through bubbles of reality, she will find that everything she thinks she knows about herself is wrong. Is she losing her mind or is the world a far more complex place than she thought?

A native woman working in the little cultivated patch just outside the palisade which surrounded the mission was the first to see them. Her scream penetrated to the living room of the little thatched bungalow where the Rev. Sangamon Morton sat before a table. He had heard such screams before. The one thing always uppermost in his mind and the one, great, abiding terror of their lives there in the midst of the savage African jungle was the Wakandas.

From the vaults of the SF Gateway, the most comprehensive digital library of classic SFF titles ever assembled, comes an ideal introduction to the varied work of author, editor and critic, L. Sprague de Camp.

Although arguably best known for his continuation of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories, de Camp was an important figure in the formative period of modern SF, alongside the likes of Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein. In a career spanning seven decades, he won the HUGO, WORLD FANTASY LIFE ACHIEVEMENT and SFWA GRAND MASTER AWARDs. This omnibus collects three previously out-of-print classics: LEST DARKNESS FALL, ROGUE QUEEN and THE TRITONIAN RING.

Lest Darkness Fall:
The Roman Empire had spread order, knowledge and civilisation throughout the ancient world. When Rome fell, the light of reason flickered out across the Empire. The Dark Ages had begun; they would last a thousand years. Could a man from the 20th century prevent the fall of Rome?

Rogue Queen:
Decades before a certain five-year voyage, L. Sprague de Camp sent a spirited crew to a strange and distant world, where their meeting with its inhabitants created chaos in local politics, upset the balance of power and generally created the most entertaining havoc.

The Tritonian Ring:
The gods of Poseidonis – or Atlantis – were powerful and real. Now they were determined to destroy the kingdom ruled by the father of Prince Vakar, the one man whose mind they could not read. The only way to save the kingdom was to discover that thing which the gods feared most.

He knows their darkest secrets – but they are even more ruthless than him, with murder in mind…
Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club

Teddy Lane has sunk into the sordid depths of blackmail and thinks he is on to a good thing. He knows the dark secrets of four people who have everything to lose if they are exposed – a young actress, a criminal lawyer, a scientist, and an elderly woman with a doctor son.

What he hasn’t bargained for is that two people are more ruthless than him. And they will not let him get away with it, even if it means murder – his murder.

Dakos was an alien humanoid who hated earth; he detested the planet; its people were anathema to him. He loathed its cities; its countryside was an abomination to him. He lived for one thing only… the destruction of the world which had rejected him.
Dakos was no mean enemy. His hatred was allied to a brilliant mind and a very superior technology. He was a man of action… highly destructive action!
Security agents Blanthus and Croberg were after him, but Dakos covered his tracks with all the cunning of a diabolically clever homicidal maniac.
He could so easily pass as a terrestrial humanoid.
…Are you sure that man sitting beside you in the bus isn’t the alien? What’s in that case?
His clothes? His lunch? His business documents? Or an alien bomb?
This is the story of a world reeling from a war of nerves with a sinister secret enemy.

Jake Cutter is reluctantly learning how to be a Necroscope – how to use the Möbius continuum to travel instantaneously from place to place, how to talk to the dead – but the dead don’t like him much. It seems Jake’s got a hitchhiker in his mind, a dead vampire named Korath. But since Korath holds the key to the Möbius equations, Jake can’t just kick him out…

In Australia, Jake helped E-Branch destroy the aerie of the mind-master, Nephran Malinari, one of the trio of Great Vampires who came to Earth from the vampire world. Malinari escaped and went to ground with the hideously beautiful Lady Vavara. Vavara has taken over a holy monastery on a beautiful Greek island and turned the nuns into most unholy creatures of fearsome appetites for all things carnal.

But Jake wants revenge against the Italian mobsters who killed the woman he loved. As far as he’s concerned, E-Branch can search for Malinari, Vavara, and the metamorphic Lord Szwart without him until he’s satisfied his own bloodlust. But it seems vampire-hunting is truly Jake’s job now – the men he’s trying to kill aren’t men at all but vampires hidden for two generations in human guise!

To defeat them, Jake will need every weapon in Necroscope’s arsenal, including the power to call the unsleeping dead out of their mouldering graves…

It’s breaking through…

In a nightclub rest room a man mumbles these words and then puts a shotgun in his mouth and pulls the trigger. The only witness, music journalist Nick Finch, watches in horror as he crumples to the ground beside the similarly slain bodies of a woman and a little girl. Nick exits the room fast, but when someone goes in to check out his story the bodies are no longer there.

Then things get really strange.

Unspeakable nightmares. Hallucinations. Mysterious figures shadowing him. Is Nick losing his mind? Or is someone – or something – planting ideas in his head? And why does that word – GENESIS – keep cropping up?

Nick battles to keep a grip on his sanity. But Nick’s wildest nightmares, his deepest fears, couldn’t begin to prepare him for the horror from the past which is about to engulf him…

They’re on the run! Now that their monstrous vampire ‘gardens’ under London, in Australia, and on the Greek island of Krassos have been razed, two ‘Lords’ and a ‘Lady’ of the Wamphyri Malinari the Mind, Lord Szwart, and the hag Vavara have joined forces, leaving a trail of undead destruction as they flee headlong from Ben Trask’s E-Branch and the dead-waking Necroscope, Jake Cutter.

But headstrong Jake has problems of his own. In the metaphysical Mobius Continuum, it appears that his blue life-thread – the emblem of his humanity – is gradually fading, changing to red. And not only red but blood red, dreaded insignia of the Great Vampire!

Could this be the downside of Harry Keogh’s legacy? And if so, are Necroscope and Trask’s ESP-talented Avengers – his team of precogs, telepaths, and locators – hastening in pursuit of their own hideous doom? Earth’s fate is undecided, mankind’s destiny on hold, the future a page as yet unwritten.

And the future was ever a devious thing…

The Real Story was just a preview to this action-packed tome… The Gap series steps on the accelerator with Forbidden Knowledge. Beautiful cop Morn Hyland, desperate and in pain aboard Captain’s Fancy, controls her body and mind with her illegal zone implant, recreating herself as a superbeing worthy of holding Captain Nick Succorso’s affections. Jealousy among the crew, threats of rape and ship self-destruction, prisoner torture, and government cyborg programs keep things moving along. Alien Amnioni seeking genetic domination over humankind enter the scene with new technologies such as mutagens and force-growing fetuses. Bite your fingernails while you live it all (vicariously!) through brilliant survivor Morn and villain-turned-conspirator Angus Thermopyle.

‘The entire head had been stripped of skin, creating a nightmarish sculpture in gelled blood…’
The hideous apparition that confronted John Redpath almost defied description. It was the beginning of a horrific ordeal that would cause him to question his own sanity…
A member of a telepathic research project, Redpath believes the cause to be side-effects from the experimental drugs he is taking – but then stranger things begin to happen. He wakes up to find himself in America…he is drawn to a local house occupied by a bizarre group of people leading an artificial and peculiar life…which events are really happening?
Slowly an explanation emerges, more terrifying than anything he could have imagined…

It was a world of tiers and layers – the Amerind level, the Garden of Eden level, the Talanac, the Atlantean – a universe of green skies and fabled beasts. It was the playground-cosmos of the Lord Jadawin, with trans-gravitational gates to the other levels and other worlds.

But now those gates were being sabotaged to permit the entry of an invading force of ‘Bellers’ – human bodies housing the transferred minds of rebel Lords – and their minions, who were seeking two things: total domination of every lord’s private cosmos, now that they had achieved immortality, and the life of Kickaha the Trickster, who knew too much…