Search Worlds Without End

Bill Easter is a petty criminal with a little problem of a £2000 overdraft that he has no means of covering. Fortunately, the bank manager has a problem of his own and needs Bill's help: the corpse of Henry Oliver, a very hairy 350 lb. mass murderer known as the "Mad Vicar," is decomposing in his basement and he wants it removed. Among Oliver's papers, Bill finds a tantalizing reference to treasure that leads him to the Scottish isle of Rhona, where he meets the intrepid General Charles Kirk of British Foreign Intelligence and the arrogant adventurer J. Moldon Mott. Kirk has uncovered a bizarre plot involving the KGB, ex-Nazi mad scientists, and the "mad monk" Rasputin, while Mott is hot on the trail of a stolen gold treasure. And when they discover the island is being overrun by werewolves, their trip to the remote island will become a very beastly business indeed!

More than forty-five years after his first collection was published, here is an original volume of David Case's transformative tales that showcases the author's remarkable psycho-sexual fiction combined with the tropes of the classic werewolf story.

Beginning with the powerful novella that gave its title to that inaugural collection, The Cell & Other Transmorphic Tales also includes such memorable stories as 'Strange Roots', 'Among the Wolves', 'A Cross to Bear' and 'The Hunter'.

With a personal Introduction from award-winning editor Stephen Jones and an exclusive Afterword by acclaimed film writer Kim Newman, in which he discusses how 'The Hunter' was adapted into the 1970s TV movie Scream of the Wolf, this volume celebrates the work of one of the genre's finest exponents of the macabre.

A killer stalks the city's streets...

Only a crazed beast could have committed the grisly murders that are terrorizing the city of Toronto. The victims are usually young women, their bodies found mangled as though torn apart by the fangs of a rabid animal. Yet witnesses swear they have seen the hulking figure of a man nearby.

But everyone knows there's no such thing as a werewolf...

One of the first werewolf novels ever written!

A lost classic from the author of The Three Musketeers and The Man in the Iron Mask.

What's the next best thing to having a walking wolf grant your wishes? Would it be enough to take revenge on those who oppose you?

To Thibault the shoemaker, that pact is worth more than gold. Or at least more than the single, dark hairs on his handsome, youthful head. What could go wrong when one can simply wish their enemies out of the way? Alexandre Dumas brings us a story of envy so ravenous, it eats its own heart.

A mysterious young man has come to a small Highland town. His talent for wood carving soon wins the admiration of the weaver's daughter, Maddie. Fascinated by the silent carver, she sets out to gain his trust, only to find herself drawn into a terrifying secret that threatens everything she loves.

There is an evil presence in the carver's life that cannot be controlled, and Maddie watches her town fall under a shadow. One by one, people begin to die. Caught in the middle, Maddie must decide what matters most to her-and what price she is willing to pay to keep it.

"From the summit of the ivy-grown tower, the very rooks, in the midst of their cawing, are scared away by the furious rush and the wild howl with which the Wehr-Wolf thunders over the hallowed ground." - G. W. M. Reynolds, Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf

This collection brings together fifteen chilling stories of lycanthropy and murder written from 1838 to 1896, all taken from their original appearances in Victorian periodicals and story collections, many of them reprinted here for the first time. This edition includes a new introduction by Alexis Easley and Shannon Scott, explanatory notes, and numerous rare Victorian werewolf illustrations.

This collection contains:

• "Hugues, the Wer-Wolf" (1838) by Sutherland Menzies
• "The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains" (1839) by Frederick Marryat
• "A Story of a Weir-Wolf" (1846) by Catherine Crowe
• excerpts from Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf (1846-47) by George W. M. Reynolds
• "Lycanthropy in London; or, The Wehr-Wolf of Wilton-Crescent" (1855) by Dudley Costello
• "The Gray-Wolf" (1871) by George MacDonald
• "The Were-wolf of the Grendelwold" (1882) by F. Scarlett Potter
• "The White Wolf of Kostopchin" (1889) by Gilbert Campbell
• "A Pastoral Horror" (1890) by Arthur Conan Doyle
• "The Mark of the Beast" (1890) by Rudyard Kipling
• "The Were-Wolf" (1890) by Clemence Housman
• "Dracula's Guest" (ca. 1892) by Bram Stoker
• "The Other Side: A Breton Legend" (1893) by Eric Stenbock
• "Morraha" (1894) by Joseph Jacobs
• "Where There is Nothing, There is God" (1896) by William Butler Yeats

An appendix of contextual materials is also included, featuring nonfiction articles from Victorian periodicals dealing with lycanthropy, Rosamund Marriott Watson's poem "A Ballad of the Were-wolf" (1891), excerpts from Sabine Baring-Gould's The Book of Were-Wolves (1865) and Laurence Housman's illustrations for Clemence Housman's The Were-wolf (1896).

The werewolf is one of the great iconic figures of horror in folklore, legend, film, and literature. And connoisseurs of horror fiction know that The Werewolf of Paris is a cornerstone work, a masterpiece of the genre that deservedly ranks with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Endore's classic novel has not only withstood the test of time since it was first published in 1933, but it boldly used and portrayed elements of sexual compulsion in ways that had never been seen before, at least not in horror literature.

In this gripping work of historical fiction, Endore's werewolf, an outcast named Bertrand Caillet, travels across pre-Revolutionary France seeking to calm the beast within. Stunning in its sexual frankness and eerie, fog-enshrouded visions, this novel was decidedly influential for the generations of horror and science fiction authors who came afterward.

Table of Contents:

• ix - Introduction (Werewolves) - essay by Ed Gorman
• 11 - Extinctions in Paradise - short story by Brian Hodge
• 29 - Bindlestiff - short story by Peter Crowther
• 46 - Never Moon a Werewolf - short story by Barbara Paul
• 62 - Dumpster Diving - short story by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
• 71 - Woofman - short story by Brenda Crank and Scott Nickel
• 86 - Nick of Time - short story by Matthew J. Costello
• 93 - The Nighttime Is the Right Time - short story by Bill Crider
• 111 - Double Identity - short story by Terry Beatty and Wendi Lee
• 118 - Little Boy Riding Hood - short story by Lawrence Schimel
• 127 - Wolf - short story by Max Allan Collins
• 136 - Children of the Night - short story by Cheri Scotch
• 149 - Bark at the Moon - short story by Mike Baker
• 155 - Nights in the Mountains of Haiti - short story by Hugh B. Cave
• 172 - The Last Link Between Life and Death - novelette by J. N. Williamson
• 193 - Asleep in the Mist - short story by Billie Sue Mosiman
• 202 - The Pack - short story by Norman Partridge
• 218 - Waiting for Moonlight - short story by Roman A. Ranieri
• 226 - A Taste of Blood and Roses - short story by David Niall Wilson
• 238 - Sand Boils - short story by Tracy Knight
• 255 - Only the Strong Survive - short story by Richard Chizmar and Barry Hoffman
• 272 - The Night of Howling - short story by Mickey Zucker Reichert
• 281 - Some Touch of Pity - novelette by Gary A. Braunbeck

In the heart of the superstitious Pennsylvania Dutch country stands the mansion of Pierre de Camp-d'Avesnes, whose family history dates to the 12th century, when, according to family lore, an ancestor made a deal with the devil. As part of the bargain, the legend says, every seventh generation a terrible curse is visited upon the eldest child of the family.

Recently strange things have begun to happen: children are being savagely murdered, a mysterious white wolf has been sighted, and Pierre's daughter Sara has been behaving oddly. Is the curse to blame, or is there a rational explanation? Desperate to uncover the truth, Pierre enlists the aid of cynical journalist Manning Trent and psychiatrist and occult expert Dr. Justin Hardt. It's a race against time to save Sara and stop the killings as modern-day science and skepticism are pitted against medieval magic and superstition in this suspenseful thriller.

Jimmy Finn is having a real bad day. He woke up drunk and on the wrong end of a nightstick. He lost his job, and had to see his shrink. Now the cops are after him, he's falling apart, and his only friend is a volatile drug lord. How could it get any worse?

As smoke envelopes the city, he finds himself on the run, and out of time. He's either losing his mind, or becoming a monster. Or maybe it's both. Jimmy Finn has one last hope. A long-buried family secret, lost above a mysterious town in the mountains, full of bizarre shadows and a strange girl that haunts his memories.

A spellbinding and darkly humorous coming-of-age story about an unusual boy, whose family lives on the fringe of society and struggles to survive in a hostile world that shuns and fears them.

He was born an outsider, like the rest of his family. Poor yet resilient, he lives in the shadows with his aunt Libby and uncle Darren, folk who stubbornly make their way in a society that does not understand or want them. They are mongrels, mixed blood, neither this nor that. The boy at the center of Mongrels must decide if he belongs on the road with his aunt and uncle, or if he fits with the people on the other side of the tracks.

For ten years, he and his family have lived a life of late-night exits and narrow escapes--always on the move across the South to stay one step ahead of the law. But the time is drawing near when Darren and Libby will finally know if their nephew is like them or not. And the close calls they've been running from for so long are catching up fast now. Everything is about to change.

A compelling and fascinating journey, Mongrels alternates between past and present to create an unforgettable portrait of a boy trying to understand his family and his place in a complex and unforgiving world. A smart and innovative story--funny, bloody, raw, and real--told in a rhythmic voice full of heart, Mongrels is a deeply moving, sometimes grisly, novel that illuminates the challenges and tender joys of a life beyond the ordinary in a bold and imaginative new way.

Virtual reality. Murder. Werewolves. And teen girls! In a future where nothing is as it seems, can old legends come true? In the near future, humans will communicate almost exclusively through monitors, making real interaction a rarified and weak occurance for those living in a near totalitarian society. In this new world of communication, children are only allowed to interact personally on school grounds. So when a serial killer starts slaughtering junior high children the communication routes go under futher surveillance. And despite all the safeguards put in place to avoid physical interaction, the killer's latest victim turns out to have been in contact with three young girls: Mio Tsuzki, a certified prodigy; Hatsuki Matsuno, a quiet but opinionated classmate; and Ayumi Kono, her best friend. And as the girls get caught up in trying to quell curiosity under such terrorist scrutiny, Hatsuki learns that there is much more than meets the eye of their monitored communications.

"I want to be like John Langan when I grow up, okay? He blends meticulously crafted traditional narratives with joyous genre-bending and narrative rule-breaking. His stories are fiercely smart, timely, timeless, heartbreaking, and of course, flat-out scary. Langan fearlessly commits to his monsters, his characters, his readers, to his vision of the horror story and the messed-up, broken, frightening world we inhabit. Wide, Carnivorous Sky, indeed."-Paul Tremblay, author of The Little Sleep and Swallowing a Donkey's Eye.

John Langan has, in the last few years, established himself as one of the leading voices in contemporary horror literature. Gifted with a supple and mellifluous prose style, an imagination that can conjure up clutching terrors with seeming effortlessness, and a thorough knowledge of the rich heritage of weird fiction, Langan has already garnered his share of accolades. This new collection of nine substantial stories includes such masterworks as "Technicolor," an ingenious riff on Poe's "Masque of the Red Death"; "How the Day Runs Down," a gripping tale of the undead; and "The Shallows," a powerful tale of the Cthulhu Mythos. The capstone to the collection is a previously unpublished novella of supernatural terror, "Mother of Stone." With an introduction by Jeffrey Ford and an afterword by Laird Barron.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Reading Langan, by Jeffrey Ford
• Kids
• How the Day Runs Down
• Technicolor
• The Wide, Carnivorous Sky
• City of the Dog
• The Shallows
• The Revel
• June, 1987. Hitchhiking. Mr. Norris.
• Mother of Stone
• Story Notes
• Afterword: Note Found in a Glenfiddich Bottle, by Laird Barron
• Acknowledgments

They did not know what they were, really; they only knew they were something more than human. They could Change Over, take on the form of wolves; they did not age, and could be killed only by a bullet or thrust through the heart. Other humans feared and hated them, and called them supernatural creatures of evil.

George Adrian had been born a man in the Thirteenth Century. He entered into the strange symbiosis and became what they all called a werewolf when he was thirty-six years old. He met that strange one of Them-strange even to his companions-called The Woman, who appeared to the Outer Others, as they called ordinary human beings, as an old woman, quite harmless.

Then came the call from Mariana and others in the pack-that mental...

The body of a young girl is found mangled and murdered in the woods of Hemlock Grove, Pennsylvania, in the shadow of the abandoned Godfrey Steel mill. A manhunt ensues--though the authorities aren't sure if it's a man they should be looking for.

Some suspect an escapee from the White Tower, a foreboding biotech facility owned by the Godfrey family--their personal fortune and the local economy having moved on from Pittsburgh steel--where, if rumors are true, biological experiments of the most unethical kind take place. Others turn to Peter Rumancek, a Gypsy trailer-trash kid who has told impressionable high school classmates that he's a werewolf. Or perhaps it's Roman, the son of the late JR Godfrey, who rules the adolescent social scene with the casual arrogance of a cold-blooded aristocrat, his superior status unquestioned despite his decidedly freakish sister, Shelley, whose monstrous medical conditions belie a sweet intelligence, and his otherworldly control freak of a mother, Olivia.

Contents:

• 11 - Introduction (The Werewolf of Ponkert) - essay by Donald M. Grant
• 13 - Prologue (The Werewolf of Ponkert) - short fiction by H. Warner Munn
• 15 - The Werewolf of Ponkert - [Tales of the Werewolf Clan] - (1925) - novelette by H. Warner Munn
• 53 - The Werewolf's Daughter - [Tales of the Werewolf Clan] - (1928) - novella by H. Warner Munn

Growing up on the edge of the Missouri wilderness in the 1830s, Nadya knew she was not like other girls. But when she became a woman and the Change came, she discovered just how different she was. For Nadya was a shapechanger, a werewolf like her mother and father before her.

Every teenage girl thinks she's different. When government agents kick down Claire Forrester's front door and murder her parents, Claire realises just how different she is.

Patrick Gamble was nothing special until the day he got on a plane and, hours later, stepped off it, the only passenger left alive. A hero.

President Chase Williams has vowed to eradicate the menace. Unknown to the electorate, however, he is becoming the very thing he has sworn to destroy.

Each of them is caught up in a war that so far has been controlled with laws and violence and drugs. But an uprising is about to leave them damaged, lost, and tied to one another for ever.

The night of the red moon is coming, when an unrecognizable world will emerge, and the battle for humanity will begin.

Aged and deserted, Fernand Wagner agrees to serve John Faust for the last year of his life. In return he is given youth, wealth and beauty--but at the terrible price of becoming a werewolf. He loves the glacial, beautiful, sensual Nisida, whose family history conceals a dreadful secret. Together they flee from Florence to a desert island: but dogged by the Inquisition, and by the might of the Ottoman Empire, they are finally forced to face the horror that lurks in the closet...

First published in 1847, Wagner the Werewolf is one of the very earliest treatments of the werewolf theme in English literature, and has lost none of its power to shock, it is one of the greatest works of George W.M. Reynolds, once the most popular author in England, and the Master of the Penny Dreadful.

Deep in the mountains of nineteenth-century Carpathia lies the mysterious and mythic land of Transylvania, a world where evil is ever-present, where danger rises as the sun sets, and where monsters such as Count Dracula, the Wolf Man, and Frankenstein's Monster take form and inhabit man's deepest nightmares -- terrifying legends who outlive generations, defying repeated attacks from the doomed brave souls that challenge them in their never-ending war upon the human race.

On order of a secret society, only a lone force of good stands against them -- the legendary monster hunter Van Helsing, a man revered by some and feared by many. In his ongoing battle to rid the earth of these fiendish beings, Van Helsing must now travel to Transylvania to bring down the lethally seductive, enigmatically powerful Count Dracula, and joins forces with the fearless Anna Valerious, a woman out to rid her family of a generations-old curse by defeating the vampire. But unknown to all, the immortal Dracula will stop at nothing to unleash his master plan of subverting human civilization and ruling over a world of havoc, fear, and darkness...

In the dark, they are watching...

They are waiting for you.

No one has ever lived to tell the horrifying truth about them. Yet even now the Wolfen are gathered in the night-dark alleys... unseen, poised... ready to destroy their helpless human prey. Only one man and one woman, trained cops, willing to risk their lives, stand in the way.

The unsettling dreams begin for small-town reporter Will Barbee not long after he first meets the mysterious and beautiful April Bell. They are vivid, powerful and deeply disturbing nightmares in which he commits atrocious acts. And, one by one, his friends are meeting violent deaths.

It is clear to Barbee that he is embroiled in something far beyond human understanding, something unspeakably evil. And it intimately involves the seductive, dangerously intoxicating April, and the question, 'Who is the Child of the Night?' When he discovers the answer to that, his world will change utterly.

An ancient race of lycanthropes has survived to the present day, and its numbers are growing. Bent on dominance, rival factions are initiating the down-and-out of L.A. into their ranks. Caught in the middle are Anthony, a kindhearted, lovesick dogcatcher, and the object of his affection: a female werewolf who has abandoned her pack.

Then she opened her mouth to scream-and recognised me. It was what I'd been waiting for. She froze. She looked into my eyes. She said, "It's you."

Meet Jake. A bit on the elderly side (he turns 201 in March), but you'd never suspect it. Nonstop sex and exercise will do that for you-and a diet with lots of animal protein. Jake is a werewolf, and after the unfortunate and violent death of his one contemporary, he is now the last of his species. Although he is physically healthy, Jake is deeply distraught and lonely.

Jake's depression has carried him to the point where he is actually contemplating suicide-even if it means terminating a legend thousands of years old. It would seem to be easy enough for him to end everything. But for very different reasons there are two dangerous groups pursuing him who will stop at nothing to keep him alive.

Here is a powerful, definitive new version of the werewolf legend-mesmerising and incredibly sexy. In Jake, Glen Duncan has given us a werewolf for the twenty-first century-a man whose deeds can only be described as monstrous but who is in some magical way deeply human.

One of the most original, audacious, and terrifying novels in years.

For Cheyenne Clark, there's a bad moon on the rise...

There's one sound a woman doesn't want to hear when she's lost and alone in the Arctic wilderness: a howl.

When a strange wolf's teeth slash Cheyenne's ankle to the bone, her old life ends, and she becomes the very monster that has haunted her nightmares for years. Worse, the only one who can understand what Chey has become is the man-or wolf-who's doomed her to this fate. He also wants to chop her head off with an axe.

Yet as the line between human and beast blurs, so too does the distinction between hunter and hunted... for Chey is more than just the victim she appears to be. But once she's within killing range, she may find that-even for a werewolf-it's not always easy to go for the jugular.

The days grow colder. The nights grow longer. And every time the moon rises, the wolf inside her grows a little stronger.

Cheyenne Clark--a woman whose hatred for werewolves has turned her into the very beast she most despises--prowls the Arctic Circle on the trail of an ancient secret, hunting for the one thing that could remove the lycanthropic curse and make her human again.

Yet standing between Chey and her goal are a werewolf hunter armed with a diabolically brilliant weapon, a centuries-old werewolf with her own mysterious agenda... and Chey's own complicated feelings for the man who doomed her to this existence but on whom her life now depends.

Worse, with every hour that passes, the wolf inside Chey becomes more powerful. It won't be long before the woman disappears completely, and only the beast is left.

In Cancun, Mexico, police investigate a slaughter at a wedding ceremony. In Dublin, Ireland, the clientele of a backstreet pub are found dead. In Kyoto, Japan, the bullet train pulls into the station with blood-spattered windows.

It is the time of the Black Sun. Across the world, the wolves are calling to each other. Locked in bodies that had no idea they were there, they rise from the depths of the unconscious and turn towards America!

For Hellboy, it's a race against time to prevent a devastating wave of primal savagery washing across the land. And so he is drawn to Boston's Beacon Hill and the Grant Mansion, believed to be the most haunted house in New England, where the truth may lie buried.

The Wolf's Hour is a 1989 World War II adventure novel with a twist by Robert R. McCammon. A British secret agent goes behind German lines to stop a secret weapon from being launched against the Allies. The twist is that this agent is a werewolf. The book also includes some of the agent's history, namely how he became a werewolf.

Harry Keogh is moving on. Though the search for his missing wife and child continues, his heart now lies in Edinburgh with Bonnie Jean--a beautiful Scottish werewolf whose friendly pack and flourishing pub have given him a place he can almost call home.

But from the rocky heights of Sicily, the diabolical Francezci brothers plot the wolf-pack's destruction; and down in the terrible Pit beneath Le Manse Madonie, an ancient evil schemes.

The vampires conspire. They reach a decision. They choose a vector. Mafia thug Mike Milazzo is no good to anyone, anytime, anywhere... which makes him perfect. Disposable.

The brothers infect him with a deadly poison--an engineered plague that even a werewolf could never survive--and they offer him a terrible bargain: successfully contaminate the wolf-pack, and receive the antidote. Fail, and die!

Mike has everything to lose. So does Harry Keogh. But the Necroscope lost everything once before, and he isn't about to do it again...

MATT RICHTER MAY BE DEAD, BUT HE'LL STILL CRACK THIS CASE

Meet Matt Richter. Private Eye. Zombie. His mean streets are the city of the dead, the shadowy realm known as Nekropolis.

This place has always been ruled by the vampire overlords. Now they're plotting to destroy the city.

... over his dead body.

The return of Matt Richter. Private Eye. Zombie.

MATT RICHTER'S GOING TO PIECES - LITERALLY.

You've got to keep your head to survive in the teeming undead city known as Nekropolis. It's a pity crazed genius Victor Baron couldn't manage that. Now everyone wants a piece of him.

Zombie detective Matt Richter and his glamorous she-vampire companion Devona are back on the case, with another wild and wonderful investigation.

Meet Matt Richter. Zombie. PI.

From his arrival at Nekropolis, Matt has found himself embroiled in disputes with the city's vampire lords, shapeshifters, golems and other monstrosities.

Nothing has prepared him for the Dark War.

Sam and Dean travel to Indiana, to investigate a murder that could be the work of a werewolf. But they soon discover that werewolves aren't the only things going bump in the night. The town is also home to a pack of jakkals who worship the god Anubis: carrion-eating scavengers who hate werewolves. With the help of Garth, the Winchester brothers must stop the werewolf-jakkal turf war before it engulfs the town - and before the god Anubis is awakened...

On a brisk autumn day, a thirteen-year-old boy stands on the shores of the gray Atlantic, near a silent amusement park and a fading ocean resort called the Alhambra. The past has driven Jack Sawyer here: his father is gone, his mother is dying, and the world no longer makes sense. But for Jack everything is about to change. For he has been chosen to make a journey back across America - and into another realm.

One of the most influential and heralded works of fantasy ever written, The Talisman is an extraordinary novel of loyalty, awakening, terror, and mystery. Jack Sawyer, on a desperate quest to save his mother's life, must search for a prize across an epic landscape of innocents and monsters, of incredible dangers and even more incredible truths. The prize is essential, but the journey means even more. Let the quest begin...