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A decade dead, Jacob Campbell is a preservationist, providing a kind of taxidermy to keep his clients looking lifelike for as long as the forces of entropy will allow. But in the Land of the Dead, where the currency is time itself and there is little for corpses to do but drink, thieve, and gamble eternity away, Jacob abandons his home and his fortune for an opportunity to meet the man who cheated the rules of life and death entirely.

According to legend, the Living Man is the only adventurer to ever cross into the underworld without dying first. It’s rumored he met his end somewhere in the labyrinth of pubs beneath Dead City’s streets, disappearing without a trace. Now Jacob’s vow to find the Living Man and follow him back to the land of the living sends him on a perilous journey through an underworld where the only certainty is decay.

Accompanying him are the boy Remington, an innocent with mysterious powers over the bones of the dead, and the hanged man Leopold l’Eclair, a flamboyant rogue whose criminal ambitions spark the undesired attention of the shadowy ruler known as the Magnate.

An ambitious debut that mingles the fantastic with the philosophical, Dead Boys twists the well-worn epic quest into a compelling, one-of-a-kind work of weird fiction that transcends genre, recalling the novels of China Miéville and Neil Gaiman.

Drawn from together from publication in such outlets as Weird Tales, Night Visions and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Plots and Misadventures is the second collection of short stories from the award-winning author of Valley of Lights, Chimera, and The Kingdom of Bones. Includes Doctor Hood, the novella that inspired the TV series Eleventh Hour, and World Fantasy Award nominee Little Dead Girl Singing. Contents: Little Dead Girl Singing The Back of his Hand Restraint The Plot Doctor Hood Jailbird for Jesus Hunter, Killer My Repeater The Wishing Ball Like Clockwork The Blackwood Oak Endpiece: Nine Horrors and a Dream

The golden planet of Astrobe, made in the image of Utopia, now faced a crisis which could destroy it forever; and yet, no one could understand it: In a world where wealth & comfort were free to everyone, why did so many desert the golden cities for the slums of Cathead and the Barrio? Why did they turn away from the Astrobe dream and seek lives of bone-crushing work, squalor and disease?

The rulers of Astrobe didn’t know, so they sought in humankind’s past for a leader who could give them the answers. They brought to life the one man out of history who would most want to destroy Astrobe!

She distrusted him at first, not least because she knew his words were lies. “Call me Grey,” he said, but that was not his name. Fear gripped her like a hand.

No one but the priestess could look upon the relics: the Ring, the Jewel and the Bone. It was for the bone that this grey stranger had come. He was like a thief, but she realized with a sinking heart that he was armed with as much magic as herself, and maybe more.

Eager to graduate from the school on the hill, Phelan Cle chose Bone Plain, oft immortalised by poets and debated by scholars, for his final paper because he thought it would be an easy topic. It was commonly accepted – even at a school steeped in bardic tradition – that Bone Plain, with its three trials, three terrors and three treasures, was nothing more than a legend, a metaphor. But as his research leads him to the life of Nairn, the Wandering Bard, the Unforgiven, Phelan starts to wonder if there are any easy answers…

Patricia A. McKillip is the author of a number of hugely acclaimed fantasies, including The Riddle-Master of Hed and its sequels, which have been compared to Gene Wolfe’s epic Book of the New Sun, and The Forgotten Beasts of Eld and Ombria in Shadow, both of which won the World Fantasy Award for best novel. She has won the Mythopoeic Award three times and in 2008 was given the World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement. This omnibus collects three of her later works: In the Forests of Serre, Alphabet of Thorn and The Bell at Sealey Head.

IN THE FORESTS OF SERRE: In the tales of World Fantasy Award-winning author Patricia McKillip, nothing is ever as it seems. A mirror is never just a mirror; a forest is never just a forest. Here, it is a place where a witch can hide in her house of bones and a prince can bargain with his heart…where good and evil entwine and wear each others’ faces…and where a bird with feathers of fire can quench the fiercest longing…

ALPHABET OF THORN: One of the most spectacular fantasists of our time, Patricia A. McKillip creates fairy tale worlds of wonder and magic. Now, she opens the page on a time and place where an orphan girl is haunted by thorns…a reluctant queen rules between sea and sky… and epics never end…

THE BELL AT SEALEY HEAD: Sealey Head is a small town on the edge of the ocean, a sleepy place where everyone hears the ringing of a bell no one can see. On the outskirts of town is an impressive estate, Aislinn House, where the aged Lady Eglantyne lies dying, and where the doors sometimes open not to its own dusty rooms, but to the wild majesty of a castle full of knights and princesses.

Nick Walker can pass for eighteen, which comes in useful while living on the streets. But Nick isn’t eighteen. He’s fourteen. He’s been fourteen for years . . .

A chance encounter with Manta, an exceedingly powerful witch, sees Nick cursed with changelessness. Not only will he never age, but, more usefully to Manta, broken bones and sliced flesh, while excruciatingly painful, will mend themselves in a short space of time – making Nick the perfect weapon against the demonic assassins sent by the evil Cartel. Constantly hunted, Nick is forced to run – evading his enemy when he can and facing gruesome and bloody battles when he can’t.

But, help comes from a surprising source – April, a young girl Nick rescues from some occult enthusiasts intent on sacrificing her, has powers beyond her control or understanding. Together, might they be a match for the sinister forces that stalk them?

Admiral Slovo was a man of his time, but of more than one dimension..In his sixteenth century, a pirate might be followed by the corpse of his victim, walking across the ocean, until putrescence claimed it. Or an interview with the Pope might be mirrored, exactly, by one with the Devil. Reality shifts could cause a King to see his capital city shimmer into another Realm entirely.

Through such scenes of macabre hallucination, mayhem and murder, Slovo is a man alone, set apart by his stoic beliefs from the rigours of human fears and passions. As such, he was a valuable find for the Vehme, a clandestine, subversive society that ensnared its members from an early age, securing loyalties by the expedient methods of blackmail, bribery and barbarism.

But Slovo is more than a Vehmist puppet, and whether as a brigand on the high seas, or emissary to the Borgias, or as the Pope’s Machiavellian Mr Fix-it, he plots a course that suits his own ends as much as those of his paymasters. He knows that, in the words of his mentor Marcus Aurelius, “in a brief while you will be ashes of bare bones; a name, or perhaps not even a name”. And there are few things that cannot be solved by a stiletto in the eye.

The eleventh novel in Craig Johnson’s bestselling Longmire series – now a hit TV drama.

Sheriff Walt Longmire has handled some cold cases in his time, but none as cold as the sixty-five million-year-old death of a Tyrannosaurus rex. The discovery of the most complete T rex skeleton ever found appears to be a windfall for the local High Plains Dinosaur Museum, until the body of Danny Lone Elk, the Cheyenne rancher on whose land the remains were discovered, is found floating face down in a turtle pond.

Walt is on a mission to determine who would benefit from Danny’s death, but first he must disentangle the interests of numerous factions including the palaeontologists, Danny’s family, Wyoming’s Acting Deputy Attorney – and the FBI.

And then, in the thick of the investigation, Walt’s daughter, Cady, arrives with her baby, bringing tragedy in their wake . . .

Nadia has been here before, at this seeping-away of hope. The other times curl behind her like the petals of a rose, all the memories, all her babies – false alarms, real pregnancies lasting only until her body rejected them.

Meanwhile her boyfriend Simon is underground caving. Nadia knows he risks his life, a decadent death among the limestone, his bones withering in the rock. Her work is to create, to mould leather-hard clay into something beautiful. But she has not the heart for it today.

‘Limestone and Clay shows a maturation and deepening of her considerable talents … Lesley Glaister has produced a portrait of human relationships both disconcerting and haunting in its unflinching clarity’ Sunday Telegraph

At the end of the 22nd century, following a nuclear accident, the birth rate is falling.

Faced with a rapidly shrinking human race, governments come up with a solution: new people from old. Cloning.

But these Reborn people are kept closely monitored, in controlled scenarios. Will they really fit into futuristic society? What other secrets are being hidden outside of the worlds in which they are contained?

“LAMB HOUSE is in Rye, an ancient town of East Sussex, England. It is very much a real place, even a famous one, yet The Haunting of Lamb House is as elusive to review as it must have been to write. It is safe to say that no one but Joan Aiken could have written it, not only because she was born in Rye and has the town in her bones as it were, but also because she has the power — shown in her other books — of evoking strange, often eerie events of the past and making other times, places and people vividly alive. This book goes further: She has taken the real history of Lamb House and interwoven happenings that are purely imaginary, working so skillfully that even those who have lived there can hardly tell which is which!”

So wrote novelist Rumer Godden, who also lived in Lamb House. She went on:

“For those who do not sense such things, The Haunting of Lamb House is a most skillful and intriguing interweaving of fact and fiction; to those who do, it is a memorable evocation. In either case it is a little masterpiece.”

Lamb House in Joan Aiken’s birth town of Rye in Sussex is said to be haunted. This is her story of what might have happened to cause the haunting: using the imagined diary of an earlier Mayor of Rye, Toby Lamb, whose father built the handsome Georgian house, and later episodes that might have occurred during the occupancy of two of its famous literary tenants – Henry James and E.F. Benson.

Joan Aiken was born in another haunted house owned by her father Conrad Aiken: Jeake’s House, just around the corner in Mermaid Street, Rye, which she also wrote about in Return to Harken House.

“Joan Aiken has written a clever book, kindling a whole world of feeling out of small macabre details, presenting to the senses a series of apprehensions of reality which seem to touch a completeness beyond themselves. An impressive achievement; I shivered as I admired” Robert Nye, The Guardian

“Joan Aiken’s artful web of truth and fancy is divided into three histories of haunting – the first employs Aiken’s considerable skill in a vivid evocative rendering of the old town of Rye when the house was built…followed by the twenty years of Henry James’ residence. The end is worth waiting for…where E.F.Benson encounters hideous apparitions and even an exorcism in the last enthralling twenty pages” Miranda Seymour, T.L.S.

“Aiken has conjured up a deliciously scary ghost story…her mastery of style serves her well in the creation of three separate voices. Those familiar with Henry James’s writing especially The Turn of The Screwwill derive special enjoyment from this novel, but there are shivers enough for any reader willing to acknowledge the possibility of ghosts and the reality of evil” U.S. Library Journal

“In three interlocking ghost stories this veteran British novelist places a fictional haunting within the history of a real house, and displays a masterly way with several contrasting narrative styles, sympathetically evoking some ghostly presences…the wayward spirit of the house and the growing number of literary presences which gradually take possession” Publisher’s Weekly

It was no place for man to be. Men were tissue, blood, bone, nerve. This place was not made for them. It was made for force and radiation. Go home, men.

But I can’t, thought Jay Birrel. Not yet…I have to go on into this place where a human being looks as pathetic as an insect in a furnace.

The transformation of a highly civilized, blue-blooded young Bostonian into the savage bone-and-muscle chief of a band of shaggy cavemen is a challenge worthy of the talents of the man who created Tarzan of the Apes.



In THE CAVE GIRL, Edgar Rice Burroughs tells, in a thrill-after-thrill novel, the story of Waldo Smith-Jones and how his desperate effort to survive on a lost island of primitive men and primitive beasts. How Waldo was given the name of Thandar, how he had won the hand of the cave princess Nadara, and how he overcame the most desperate of odds make this a real Tarzan-type epic.

Asa Steele was unprepared for the incredible events that began to unfold when Rila Eliot – a long-lost love – stepped out of the past and his faithful dog Bowser started loping into it through time trails he’d discovered in his own backyard.

Rila’s appearance was mere coincidence, but Bowser’s retrieval of fresh dinosaur bones was as inexplicable as was the curious crater in Asa’s backyard that seemed to have been made by a spaceship from the stars. Soon Asa himself tripped in time, led into prehistoric eras by an enigmatic cat-faced alien. In short order, the time trails in the quiet town of Willow Bend became the focus of global attention and government scrutiny.

Then time-travelling turned into big business and led to big trouble, when Asa and Rila uncovered an interstellar mystery from before recorded time!

I saw her, hanging in the sky like a flake of the moon. A woman, her face masked by a black shireen, her body by a black shift, but her white arms spread, and her white, white, bone-white hair blowing all around her like a flame composed of smoke. Recognition was immediate. It was my mother. I shouted at her. It was crystal clear to me, what he had meant for me, my father, Vazkor, what she had robbed me of. And I drew from my belt my hunting knife and threw it at her heart.

Mahali’s rulers for generations were the water witches, who could feel the ebb and flow of precious water in their very bones. Then there was a coup, and control of Mahali’s water passed to an impersonal computer network.

It was Deza’s father who hit upon the scheme. Dressing his daughter in ceremonial garb, he passed her off as the last surviving member of the royal house. With tricks and illusions she and her father moved toward the centres of power.

But it’s the nature of a con artist to go too far . . .

Merlin is almost young, and immortal, one of those born to walk the paths of the world, a man with charm carved into his bones, and enchantment running through his body thicker than blood . . .

And this is a time of heroes, centuries before King Arthur is born, men and women who, though not gods themselves, are something more than mere mortals. For decades, Jason has been immured in his ship Argo in a lake in the far north, alive, but not, still traumatised by the murder of his sons by his enchantress wife Medea . . . until Merlin sees through the veil of enchantment and realises the boys were never killed; it was all a trick.

Through the mists-shrouded isle of Alba to Greek Land, Merlin leads Jason and his Argonauts, some old, some new, on a quest to find the boys, journey filled with heroism and heartbreak, truth and treachery.

Wondrous beings inhabit these woods – creatures born of mythic fable and the mortal subconscious: a snow woman beckons; a scientist succumbs to an age-old madness, tale-tellers weave extraordinary yarns of terrifying primal power. Explore a dark and secret place where daemons roam, where conjurers work their awesome pagan magic in eight stunning short stories of exhilarating imagination by the acclaimed author of Lavondyss and the World Fantasy Award-winning classic Mythago Wood.

Mahlia Ettison thought she had left terror behind. But the quiet community she thinks of as sanctuary hides an ancient evil – voodoo magic that steals lives and souls from the most innocent: children.

The bones rise from their mud-clogged grave, bringing visions of horror and death: Mahlia’s children are to be the next sacrifice.

And all her witchcraft may not be enough to save them.

“I’ll need your help. Come night and the Oracle again, I’m going to try the final couplet.”
“Jinian,” Murzy breathed while Dodie looked white-eyed at me. “Dangerous.”
“And fatal not to,” I said, still smiling at them all…

I wove by forest and meadow, branch and leaf. I wove by stream and pool, by river and fall. I wove by cloud and air, by thunder and sunset glow. I wove by depths of the earth, rock and gem, glittering ores and crystals blooming in the dark, old bone and new. Beside me the others wove as well…

“And all within sound of my voice or reach of the wind,” I cried, thrusting my voice like a Sending, like a magic spear, driving it upward. “And all within sound of my voice or lick of the wave, or all within sound of my voice or stretch of the soil, or all within sound of my voice where green grows and leaf springs up. Named or unnamed, silent or speaking. Let this message be brought,

By the Eye of the Star,
Where Old Gods Are!”

For Mavin, coming of age as a shape-shifter is both exhilarating and terrifying. Recklessly headstrong, she is to become notorious in the lands of the True Game. With her brother, she leaves their home – a place of slavery and fear – only to have the boy’s powers of beguilement lead them into danger. Rescued by the Wizard Himaggery, the shape-shift and man of magic make a vow. When twenty years have come and gone, they will meet again.

But Himmagery has vanished, leaving only a letter of love behind for Mavin to find. If he were dead, she would know it: sorcerers could trace the scent of his trail, necromancers raise his bones from the dust. But he has disappeared – beyond the power of wizardy.
And so the search of Mavin Manyshaped begins.

This is the final volume of Sheri S. Tepper’s acclaimed The Chronicles of Mavin Manyshaped

For Mavin, coming of age as a shape-shifter is both exhilarating and terrifying. Recklessly headstrong, she is to become notorious in the lands of the True Game. With her brother, she leaves their home – a place of slavery and fear – only to have the boy’s powers of beguilement lead them into danger. Rescued by the Wizard Himaggery, the shape-shift and man of magic make a vow. When twenty years have come and gone, they will meet again.

But Himmagery has vanished, leaving only a letter of love behind for Mavin to find. If he were dead, she would know it: sorcerers could trace the scent of his trail, necromancers raise his bones from the dust. But he has disappeared – beyond the power of wizardy.

And so the search of Mavin Manyshaped begins.

This is the second volume of Sheri S. Tepper’s acclaimed The Chronicles of Mavin Manyshaped.

For Mavin, coming of age as a shape-shifter is both exhilarating and terrifying. Recklessly headstrong, she is to become notorious in the lands of the True Game. With her brother, she leaves their home – a place of slavery and fear – only to have the boy’s powers of beguilement lead them into danger. Rescued by the Wizard Himaggery, the shape-shift and man of magic make a vow. When twenty years have come and gone, they will meet again.

But Himmagery has vanished, leaving only a letter of love behind for Mavin to find. If he were dead, she would know it: sorcerers could trace the scent of his trail, necromancers raise his bones from the dust. But he has disappeared – beyond the power of wizardy.
And so the search of Mavin Manyshaped begins.

This is the first volume of Sheri S. Tepper’s acclaimed The Chronicles of Mavin Manyshaped