Search Results for: night-life

In this chronicle of a long-ago land on civilization’s brink, Gorgik the Liberator’s campaign to end slavery has been successful. But in the novel and two novellas comprising this fourth, final, and eponymous volume in Delany’s series, slavery is both a political memory and a sado-masochistic sexual fantasy…


The Game of Time and Pain: In this novel, stopping in a deserted castle for the night, Gorgik reflected on his campaign to a barbarian boy.


The Tale of Rumor and Desire: From the gutters of port Kohari to the mountain gorge of Neveryon, the novella gives a moving account of the life of a Neveryon bandit and outlaw in the time of Gorgik the Liberator.


The Tale of Gorgik: With this story of Gorgik’s youth, we begin our real return to Neveryon…

This collection by Lucius Shepard, one of the most exciting new writers to emerge in the 1980s, includes the eponymous story ¿Barnacle Bill the Spacer¿, about an attempted mutiny on a space station, which won the Hugo Award, as well as ¿Sports in America¿, about a man who finds out just how far he is willing to go when he is hired by a local crime boss to kill a man. In ¿All the Perfumes of Araby¿ a small-time smuggler is granted a vision of the future that compels him to change his life, while ¿Human History¿ is a post-apocalyptic adventure story with a hint of decadence. ¿The Sun Spider¿ is a romance of sorts, with a decidedly gothic twist, while in ¿Beast of the Heartland¿, a boxer at the end of his career is lured back into the ring with the promise of one last big payoff. And anyone who has ever completely lost themselves in a piece of music will recognise the inspiration for ¿A Little Night Music¿. Shepard’s stories are not just wonderfully three-dimensional characters dealing with life-changing events; they are filled with colours, textures, sounds and smells, as he describes his backgrounds with as much care as a master painter.

A blackmailer – murdered. And the suspect in fear for her life…
Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club

Margaret Ross knew she had to pay off the blackmailer, Samson, or else her beloved son would go to jail for forgery.

The next night she rang the bell at Samson’s sinister house on Margate Street. There was no answer. Slowly she entered the house and went up the stairs. Samson was waiting at his desk – murdered. She found the incriminating letters and the cheque and escaped with them. But she had been seen.

The dangers gather like wasps around Margaret and it takes all of Detective Arthur Crook’s genius to get to her in time.

‘Amusing and zestful, with an unexpected and exciting climax’ Daily Telegraph

‘No one writes a better crime novel than Charles Willeford’ Elmore Leonard

By day, Richard Hudson, woman-chaser and used-car salesman, works his crooked car lot with much success. By night, he returns home to a family of misfits. One day, seized by a feeling of terror and revulsion, he realises he’s wasting his life in the meaningless pursuit of money. His only hope, he decides, is to pursue his dream of making a movie.

Richard completes his cherished project, but forces beyond his control swiftly reject and destroy it. As a result, enraged and humiliated, he goes on a bender of epic proportions, drinking his way through the underbelly of Los Angeles and exacting a monstrous revenge on all who have crossed him.

Twelve-year-old Koot Hoomie Parganas’s parents prepared him for a career as a metaphysical holy man – but after they’re brutally murdered one night he finds himself a fugitive in the darkest corners of Los Angeles, pursued by denizens of a dark underworld who want what Kootie’s parents have been hiding for forty years – the ghost of Thomas Edison contained in a bust of Dante.

But Kootie has broken the bust and inhaled the ghost, and now has in his head the lively personality of Edison himself – and together Kootie and Edison must learn the harsh rules of the occult world existing behind the glitter of modern Los Angeles, and find a way to save Kootie’s life and free Edison’s ghost from its earthly Purgatory.

Josetta is a princess of one of the Five Families. But she is far from the throne, so she is free to spend her days working in the poorest sections of the city.

Rafe Adova lives the life of a career gambler in those slums. He has no real ambition – until the night he helps a girl names Corene, who looks like she’s stumbled into the wrong bar.

Josetta is fascinated by the man who has helped her sister. Rafe is unlike anyone she’s ever encountered – someone seemingly devoid of elemental blessings.

Rafe is also drawn to Josetta, but when he is assaulted by foreign mercenaries and the reason behind the attack is discovered, Rafe and Josetta realise that the truth could endanger not only their newfound love but also their very lives . . .

After his father’s interference in Irish politics ends with a band of killers arriving on Christmas night to assassinate him, young Charles Peridore finds himself master of the estate. During idyllic school holidays, Charles enjoys riding to hounds and hunting geese and snipe while his friend Tommy Marlin tells stories of Tir-nan-Og, the land of eternal youth that lies just beyond the bog. But when Progress arrives in the form of an English corporation determined to convert the landscape into factories and housing, it appears that an entire way of life is destined to vanish. Only one thing stands in the way: the sorcery of an old witch, whose curses the English workers do not even believe in. In the novel’s unforgettable conclusion, the ancient powers of the wise woman will be pitted against the machinery of modern corporate greed, with surprising and thrilling results.

When 14 year old Matt lands a job with his hero – world-famous monster maker, Chancey Balogh – he can’t believe his luck! Chancey has made lifesize mechanical monsters for Hollywood blockbusters and his reputation for scaring the living daylights out of audiences is legendary. But as soon as he starts work, Matt is plagued by bad luck. First some local boys get wind of his new job and his new money and decide to launch a full-on bullying campaign and then one night they break into the studios, determined to sabotage years of skilled craftsmanship. In a terrifying ordeal, where Matt suffers severe hallucinations, he sees the monsters come to life. But when he recovers from his concussion he cannot tell whether this actually happened or not. And neither can we . . .

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?

‘Suddenly out of the darkness, out of the night, there swooped something with a swish like an aeroplane. The whole group of us were covered for an instant by a canopy of leathery wings, and I had a momentary vision of a long, snake-like neck, a fierce, red, greedy eye, and a great snapping beak, filled, to my amazement, with little, gleaming teeth.’

Desperate for adventure, journalist Ed Malone joins a scientific expedition to the South American jungle led by the larger than life figure of Professor Challenger. But you should be careful what you wish for. After climbing to the summit of a mysterious plateau in the Amazon rainforest the explorers find themselves trapped in a world lost in time, inhabited by carnivorous dinosaurs, giant fish-lizards and murderous ape-men.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s thrilling tale of adventure and crypto-zoology became a template for an industry of creature features that came in its wake.

She lost her memory – will she lose her life?

Superb crime fiction from ‘A star in our galaxy of crime writers’ FINANCIAL TIMES

‘The mistress of unease’ DAILY TELEGRAPH

Mrs Anderson is starting to forget where she has put things, what she has bought, or even eaten. Living alone in a rambling mansion, she is isolated from the town.

But Mrs Anderson has a visitor. A young man comes every night, through the dining room window. He helps himself to food and money, and has even made himself comfortable in the attic. A young man who enjoys power, he might take over the whole house and make it his. It’s a place where no one will think to look for him, where no one will find him – no matter what he’s done.

Between the frozen wastes of the night side and the searing inferno of the dayside, the Twilight Belt held all that was Human on the tiny world of Mercury, Hell Planet of the Solar System. A strange world, airless, subject to the alien distortions of Einsteinian mathematics, Mercury was both a promise and a challenge, for here could be found torrents of cheap power essential to the ships and men in space. Lee Correy, Commander of the Station, plunges into the frigid wastes in a desperate race against time to find and rescue both his brother and the essential component of the beam control. Fighting impossible conditions and incredible alien life he is up against the enigmatic mystery of the sand devils; a dead man who walked, and a machine that could not fail-but did.

Here is a story of the future, of the planets and the men who will colonise them, of the way they will live and the problems they will face. With mystery, adventure, exciting action and scientifically correct detail. A story of what might well be in the days to come . . .

In a distant future, on an Earth populated by a scant few hundred thousand humans, the Atkins’s Thomas performs without question the duties for which he was genetically bred. Called “Soldier” by one and all, he is a man of honor and ability, responsible for keeping the peace, for maintaining the status quo . . . and, most important, for guarding the great Book House on the hill – a vast repository of Last Culture knowledge presided over by Libary, Soldier’s mentor, the most senior of the mystic Celibate scholars.

Such is Thomas’s life in the serene, semi-primitive world without nations and cities and governments – until the night the starship comes home. Having fled a dangerously overcrowded Earth years before the Collapse and the Twilight that followed, for seven centuries the men and women of the space-going vessel Search have been combing the galaxy for inhabitable planets – their aging processes dramatically slowed by the relative magic of light speed travel and cryogenic sleep. And now, lonely and frustrated, the weary voyagers have returned to a homeworld unrecognizably altered by the relentless tides of time – a world that does not want them back.

A bitter welcome awaits the Searchers, as old Libary gathers Earth’s Ordinands and Elders together to tap the terrifying power of the collective unconscious – in preparation of the Carnival night when they will sweep the helpless intruders back to their lonely sky in the name of Holy Science. And it is Soldier who stands in the middle, silent and alone – bound by duty to evict the homesick star-travelers . . . yet cursed by a preordained genetic destiny that has decreed their eviction will mean Soldier’s death.

DOMINIC FLANDRY HAS FOUGHT THE GOOD FIGHT.

But fight, scheme and betray he might to stave it off, with the inevitability of physical law the Long Night of interstellar barbarism approaches. He has known that for 50 years – just as he has known that a lost cause may be the only one worth fighting for. That is why he has devoted his life (that part of it not devoted to the decadent pleasures of a decadent civilisation) to providing a few more years of peace and plenty for uncounted billions of sentient beings.

But now Dominic is of an age more suited to deciding the fate of empires from behind the throne; others must take up the challenge of courting danger on strange planets filled with creatures stranger still. Such a one, with her faithful Tigery companion, now enters the galactic stage. Her name is Diana.

Though her career is just beginning, two things are certain: illegitimate or not, she’s the true daughter of Dominic and…

SHE’LL DO HER OLD MAN PROUD!

Humpty Dumpty is a breakthrough work for this acknowledged master of the fantastic, an intriguing, entertaining, and immensely appealing novel of a man trying to make sense of a world gone mad. The tale begins when Wellington Stout wakes in an Italian hospital, uncertain how or why he came to be there. Gradually he learns that he was shot in the head in a Milan restaurant the night before his stepdaughter’s wedding, perhaps because of a mysterious packet his brother asked him to deliver. The doctors tell him he is fortunate to be alive, but Stout has his doubts. For the bullet that has entered his skull has also opened cracks in the fabric of reality, and, as in the old nursery rhyme, no force on Earth or in Heaven can put it back together again. Soon Stout is hearing voices foretelling his doom, encountering antediluvian cabals of dentists, extraterrestrial shoe salesmen, gargantuan rodents, seductive adolescent sibyls, and giant craters opening across the face of North America, and traveling on an uncertain odyssey through a distorted landscape made of the fragments of his own life and memory.

The daughter of rich but neglectful parents, Terisa Morgan lives alone in a New York City apartment, a young woman who has grown to doubt her own existence. Surrounded by the flat reassurance of mirrors, she leads an unfulfilled life-until the night a strange man named Geraden comes crashing through one of her mirrors, on a quest to find a champion to save his kingdom of Mordant from a pervasive evil that threatens the land. Terisa is no champion. She wields neither magic nor power. And yet, much to her own surprise, when Geraden begs her to come back with him, she agrees.Now, in a culture where women are little more than the playthings of powerful men, in a castle honeycombed with secret passages and clever traps, in a kingdom threatened from without and within by enemies able to appear and vanish out of thin air, Terisa must become more than the pale reflection of a person. For the way back to Earth is closed to her. And the enemies of Mordant will stop at nothing to see her dead.

One night in October when he was ten years old, Tyler Dupree stood in his back yard and watched the stars go out. They all flared into brilliance at once, then disappeared, replaced by a flat, empty black barrier. He and his best friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, had seen what became known as the Big Blackout. It would shape their lives.

The effect is worldwide. The sun is now a featureless disk – a heat source, rather than an astronomical object. The moon is gone, but tides remain. Not only have the world’s artificial satellites fallen out of orbit, their recovered remains are pitted and aged, as though they’d been in space far longer than their known lifespans. As Tyler, Jason, and Diane grow up, space probe reveals a bizarre truth: The barrier is artificial, generated by huge alien artifacts. Time is passing faster outside the barrier than inside – more than a hundred million years per day on Earth. At this rate, the death throes of the sun are only about forty years in our future.

Jason, now a promising young scientist, devotes his life to working against this slow-moving apocalypse. Diane throws herself into hedonism, marrying a sinister cult leader who’s forged a new religion out of the fears of the masses.

Earth sends terraforming machines to Mars to let the onrush of time do its work, turning the planet green. Next they send humans…and immediately get back an emissary with thousands of years of stories to tell about the settling of Mars. Then Earth’s probes reveal that an identical barrier has appeared around Mars. Jason, desperate, seeds near space with self-replicating machines that will scatter copies of themselves outward from the sun – and report back on what they find.

Life on Earth is about to get much, much stranger.

Gifted novelist Fowler (Sarah Canary and The Sweetheart Season) delights in the arcane, and, as a result, these 15 clever tales are occasionally puzzling but never dull.

In the long title story, temperance activist Carry Nation is resurrected in the 1990s (“We’re talking about a very troubled, very big woman,” says one shaken barman to reporters) and becomes such a nuisance that the DEA is forced to dispatch her with voodoo. Other plots are only slightly less outrageous in conceit. In “Lieserl,” a lovesick madwoman dupes Albert Einstein into believing he has a daughter; in “The Faithful Companion at Forty,” Tonto admits to second thoughts about his biggest life choice (“But for every day, for your ordinary life, a mask is only going to make you more obvious. There’s an element of exhibitionism in it”). “The Travails” offers a peek at the one-sided correspondence of Mary Gulliver, who wants Lemuel to come home already and help out around the house. The homage to Swift makes sense, for, when Fowler doesn’t settle for amusing her readers, she makes a lively satirist. The extraterrestrials who appear in her stories (whether the inscrutably sadistic monsters in “Duplicity” or the members of a seminar studying late-1960s college behavior in “The View from Venus: A Case Study”) seem stand-ins for the author herself, who, in elegant and witty prose, cultivates the eye of a curious alien and, along the way, unfolds eccentric plots that keep the pages turning.

Contents:
Black Glass (1991), Contention (1986), Shimabara (1995), The Elizabeth Complex (1996), Go Back (1998), The Travails (1998), Lieserl (1990), Letters from Home (1987), Duplicity (1989), The Faithful Companion at Forty (1987), The Brew (1995), Lily Red (1988), The Black Fairy’s Curse (1997), The View from Venus (1986), Game Night at the Fox and Goose (1989)

Hesta Web, with her hot red hair and her tough, guarded coldness, is trapped with a mother who hates her and a father who is mostly away earning money on an oil rig. When Hesta discovers that her mother and her mother’s lover have had rampant sex in Hesta’s bed, she absconds with her friend Janey to the seaside.

It is the last day of the season, sun bright and sea sparkling. The bars and shops are open, the funfair spins round with shrieks and shouts. As night falls, the illuminations go on. But when Janey catches the last train to London, Hesta stays behind. She falls in with the gothic-looking, unpleasantly attractive Skilt and his subject colony of junkies and beggars. In a rotting hotel on the front, among the broken marble balustrades, the mouse-eaten rooms and the bonfire in the ballroom, Hesta takes up her new life. She hears drugged legends told beside the fire, the rumours of ghosts and the strangeness of the sea.

For now the season has ended, the seaside is deserted, the illuminations are switched off, this place is very strange. Does Skilt know its secret? Should Hesta be wary of the blond man who watches her from the pier? And what happens when the lights go out?

It’s dark.

Where the moon washed the deck, something sat, its huge head raised, more like the visage of a bear than a wolf, yet long-snouted, the jaws open. Cold eyes that had no soul in them mirrored the moon…
After the killing of his brutal father, golden and handsome Daniel Vehmund has sought refuge in an exotic faraway land. But his contentment is shattered when a fabulous diamond is pressed on him by a sinister graverobber. From that first fatal contact, Daniel is doomed each night of the fill moon to become something else…something dark and powerful and savage. And nothing that originates on this earth can destroy him.
Laura, a beautiful redhaired farm-girl, lives with her two awful sisters and her selfish grasping parents in the remote English countryside. Apparently condemned to a life of drudgery, all is transformed when she is wooed and wed by a wealthy local squire. But this gilded existence is threatened when a travelling magician persuades her besotted husband to buy from her a very unusual diamond. For this gem is “The Wolf”, the diamond that had transformed Daniel Vehmund’s destiny. And when he himself returns at last to England, his fate and Laura’s are devastatingly intertwined…
Meanwhile some dark, malignant presence continues to prowl the woodlands and hedgerows…and seemingly nothing can curb its unquenchable bloodlust.

During the day a blazing and merciless sun beat down on “the boy” and at night a friendless and cold darkness enveloped him. It was a bleak and lonely countryside over which he had been wandering for ten years. A rare tree, bird or wild animal was the only life he encountered during his desolate trek through his young years of roaming. Infrequently, he was fortunate enough to find shelter and food in the shops of deserted villages; otherwise he foraged what he could from the nearly barren land. Contact with other humans was his innermost and greatest fear.

But the day came when his curiosity overcame his sensibilities of self-preservation and he was drawn to the sound of a great wailing not far from a place where he had come to rest.

Form that moment on his whole existence took on a radical change. His wanderings became a kaleidoscope of adventures, emotions, and responsibilities – never static, forever mobile, and potentially dangerous. There were moments when it would have been easier to turn his back, return to old ways, but somehow he knew this was an impossibility. He accepted his new fate, but still feared the greatest of all commitments until it was too late for him.

This fantasy adventure will not fail to excite and stir in every reader memories and emotions of seemingly forgotten times and moments.

Susan Galina and her friend Pat have escaped their normal lives into the elegant, isolated world of the Odyssey, a luxury cruise ship heading from New York to Europe via Bermuda. Pat is working on her doctoral thesis in quantum physics, and Susan is recovering from a recent and unhappy divorce.

To Susan’s delight, she discovers that her favourite author, Max Merriwell, is also aboard ship, teaching a writers’ workshop. Susan’s life becomes even more interesting when she meets Tom Clayton, the handsome chief of security. This cruise looks very promising indeed.

But the pleasant shipboard vacation turns dark as the Odyssey passes into the Bermuda Triangle. Each year, Max Merriwell writes three novels: a science fiction novel under his own name, a fantasy novel under the pseudonym Mary Maxwell, and a mystery novel under the pseudonym Weldon Merrimax. The trouble begins when Max receives a threatening note that appears to come from Weldon Merrimax, Max’s own pseudonym. Susan hears wolves howling in the night, the ship’s passengers are seized with a dancing mania, and monsters lurk in the ship’s corridors. An eyewitness reports a murder – but the victim of the crime is not on the passenger list and the body is nowhere to be found. While others struggle to understand these strange events, Pat seeks the explanation in quantum theory.

Billy Byrne was a product of the streets and alleys of Chicago’s great West Side. From Halsted to Robey, and from Grand Avenue to Lake Street there was scarce a bartender whom Billy knew not by his first name. And, in proportion to their number which was considerably less, he knew the patrolmen and plain clothes men equally as well, but not so pleasantly. His kindergarten education had commenced in an alley back of a feed-store. Here a gang of older boys and men were wont to congregate at such times as they had naught else to occupy their time, and as the bridewell was the only place in which they ever held a job for more than a day or two, they had considerable time to devote to congregating. They were pickpockets and second-story men, made and in the making, and all were muckers, ready to insult the first woman who passed, or pick a quarrel with any stranger who did not appear too burly. By night they plied their real vocations. By day they sat in the alley behind the feedstore and drank beer from a battered tin pail. The question of labor involved in transporting the pail, empty, to the saloon across the street, and returning it, full, to the alley back of the feed-store was solved by the presence of admiring and envious little boys of the neighborhood who hung, wide-eyed and thrilled, about these heroes of their childish lives. Billy Byrne, at six, was rushing the can for this noble band, and incidentally picking up his knowledge of life and the rudiments of his education. By the time he became an adult, he was another thing entirely. . . .