Nipping Them in the Bud is a gripping tale of extreme horror, showcasing Edward Lee’s mastery in blending visceral terror with thought-provoking themes. Prepare yourself for a journey into darkness, where every decision carries the weight of eternity, and every action challenges the soul’s very essence.

Detectives investigate a series of disappearances linked to a mysterious prop door marked with cryptic blood-drawn symbols. A vampire adapting to the Covid pandemic is forced to order delivery, but his meal arrives with a sinister surprise that he’d rather forget. A woman on the run discovers her tiny mountain town has secrets of its own, and not all cults are created equal.

When a mysterious truck crashes through the gates of the AccuTech factory, the final shift descends into a nightmare of inhuman proportions. An extraterrestrial parasite capable of absorbing and perfectly mimicking any life form has arrived, leaving a trail of blood and chaos in its wake. Desperate to contain the outbreak at any cost, a shadowy military faction places the factory under quarantine, sealing the doors and condemning everyone inside to a grisly fate.

A die-hard paranormal skeptics beliefs are turned upside down after a night of unimaginable terror trapped inside a notoriously haunted house. Pages torn from a lost journal recount a camping trip gone terribly wrong. A teenager investigates a knock at the basement door of an abandoned church in the woods. A late-night gas station clerk encounters disturbing pale figures in top hats. Airline passengers glimpse tentacled monsters outside the plane windows.

The unsettling stories in this collection will wrap themselves around the lobes of your brain and refuse to let go. Thomas O.’s twisted tales run the course from outright horror all the way to dark humor.

A rookie postal inspector hunts a postal bomber as police search for the wrong man! Set in Tucson and Phoenix, where I worked for 20 years as a postal clerk, retiring early in 2009 to do more writing. See memoir Post Office Confidential. The story needs no update as it fits today's headlines about shootings and bombings, and border tensions with targeted immigrants and social services costs.

Drunk customers. Shoplifting raccoons. Otherworldly visitors. As night-shift clerk at the 24-hour gas station at the edge of town, Jack has pretty much seen it all. That is, until his best friend reveals the body of a local politician hidden in the trunk of a car, setting off a chain of events with apocalyptic potential. Soon, Jack finds himself entangled in a supernatural conspiracy involving monster hunters, sociopaths, doomsday cultists, and...garden gnomes?

Welcome to the world of cursed objects and demented morticians, a spectral realm where living shadows traverse the darkness of your bedroom at three in the morning—the Witching Hour. This terrifying collection of horror shorts will torture your fearful mind with the sound of claws scratching the floor beneath your bed and the nightmarish figure of a milky-eyed corpse reaching for you with ghoulish intent.

Magic is often seen as wondrous and benevolent. But T.W. Grim, a celebrated author of eerie NoSleep tales, offers a different kind of sorcery: one that pulls at the very threads of reality, weaving tales of terror and wonder.

When 12-year-old Brandon Walker’s family is brutally murdered and the ruthless perpetrators escape prosecution, Brandon turns to the local gravedigger for justice. Shadowed by a cloud of mystery and local folklore, the gravedigger unleashes the most violent and horrific acts of retribution upon the guilty. Unbeknownst to Brandon, a naïve adolescent, his quest for justice opens a gateway to Hell for the condemned.

Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission - and if he fails, humanity and the Earth itself will perish. Except that right now, he doesn't know that. He can't even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it. All he knows is that he's been asleep for a very, very long time. And he's just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.

Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first people to walk on Mars. Now, he's sure he'll be the first person to die there. After a dust storm nearly kills him and forces his crew to evacuate while thinking him dead, Mark finds himself stranded and completely alone with no way to even signal Earth that he’s alive - and even if he could get word out, his supplies would be gone long before a rescue could arrive. But Mark isn't ready to give up yet.

Inheriting your uncle's supervillain business is more complicated than you might think. Particularly when you discover who's running the place. Charlie's life is going nowhere fast. A divorced substitute teacher living with his cat in a house his siblings want to sell, all he wants is to open a pub downtown, if only the bank will approve his loan. Then his long-lost uncle Jake dies and leaves his supervillain business (complete with island volcano lair) to Charlie. But becoming a supervillain isn't all giant laser death rays and lava pits.

It’s 1984, and life has changed beyond recognition. Airstrip One, formerly known as Great Britain, is a place where Big Brother is always watching, and nobody can hide. Except, perhaps, for Winston Smith. Whilst working at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting history, he secretly dreams of freedom. And in a world where love and sex are forbidden, where it’s hard to distinguish between friend and foe, he meets Julia and O’Brien and vows to rebel.

Two astronomers have detected a strange, pulsing signal from deep space. Within hours, the US government goes into lockdown, restricting airspace and scrubbing scientific data. Was the signal an intercepted communication revealing alarming plans for an enemy’s military strike? Or has humanity at long last found proof of extraterrestrial life?

YOU ARE IN DANGER. You are afflicted with a mind parasite that feeds on your suffering and destroys your families so it can have something to drink from your ruined energetic body. To burn it out is the only way and it is the fire of your personal apocalypse, or revealing, that will perform this cleansing action. Contact me in any way you can should you require further help in this matter. I am here for you as a fellow human being, with a nervous system and feelings like yours, and as a practicing sorcerer, beyond feeling anything...

Moving from Reykjavík to the rural village of Búdardalur in Iceland, a successful yet overworked and divorced master chef, Bragi, hopes to start a new life with his two teenagers. He buys an old house by the sea and takes over management of a local motel and restaurant. Soon, a mysterious woman walks in: Karitas. Bragi feels strangely attracted to her. Thinking he's in love, he convinces himself Karitas will be part of his new life.

Christmas Eve, 1971... Five-year-old Billy Chapman witnessed his parents brutally murdered by a man disguised as Santa Claus, leaving him and his little brother to be raised in a strict Catholic orphanage ruled by the sadistic Mother Superior.

Long ago, an otherworldly creature made the Earth almost uninhabitable and nearly consumed all of mankind. Now angels protect, and rule over, New Eden—Earth’s last remaining city. By angelic decree, and scripture akin to propaganda, all redheads are enslaved. Alizard is the stubborn daughter of the two most powerful families in the city. She expects to inherit a position of great leadership until the day her hair turns red.

Jake, once a rising star in the literary world, is now a man on the edge of madness. Now, the characters he created—once confined to the pages of his stories—are haunting his every waking moment. Victor Black, the cold-blooded villain. The Butcher, pure evil incarnate. Eliza Nightshade, deadly and seductive. The eerie Twins, laughing in the shadows. And Mr. Snuggles, the sarcastic talking cat, now a chilling figure of Jake's spiraling mind, stalking him with yellow eyes and a grin that promises terror.

Having just graduated from college, Parker is excited to get a career started in the United States Forest Service and serve the community in his home state of California. Unfortunately for Parker though, there currently are no forestry job opportunities in Northern California. Except for one volunteer summer job that no one has applied for in the area. However, deep in these woods exists a creature of folklore that hunts humans for prey with a ravenous and insatiable hunger as told by generation after generation of loggers and outdoorsmen in the area.

A collection of three dark novellas that delve into the nature of memory, madness and the afterlife.

It is a favorite pastime in Southern Louisiana taverns to speak of the Dread Pirate LaBelle and his cursed treasure. In hushed tones and careful whispers, drunken storytellers regale the interested with descriptions of a sinking ship and LaBelle’s cursed treasures lost among the marshes. For Trevor, these stories are more than just rumors. Trevor thinks that he’s tracked down the map to LaBelle’s final resting place, and a guide who is brazen enough to take them there.

Cole Danner survived. His wife and daughter didn’t. The authorities assured him. Alone, severely injured and suicidal, he has no memory of how he escaped the crash into a mountain lake that claimed his girls. Until a series of otherworldly and brutal flashbacks brings him back from the brink, convinces him the crash was no accident, and leads him on a bewildering journey in search of his presumed-dead daughter. Sophie Danner survived. Her father and mother didn’t. Her new family assured her.

It's 1974, and four students—Tom, Danny, JoJo, and Lara—move into a grand but decaying country residence near their university, attracted by its low rent. Whilst none of them love the place, Tom is the most unsettled. From the moment he enters the property, called Beulah, he imagines being alone there, engulfed by its shadows. On the run up to their first Christmas, JoJo finds a Ouija board, and they decide to use it—encouraged by Danny's drugs. In the midst of the game, Tom makes contact with something, possibly the spirit for which the house is named.

When an unspeakable ancient evil returns, an orphan girl’s secret may be the world’s only hope. After witnessing the murder of her mother and enduring captivity by outlaws, a young girl finds herself the slave of a brutal mountain man. Trapped by magical wards carved into the trees surrounding a trapper’s shack, the girl almost gives up hope. The arrival of a ghostly gunfighter, as pale as the moon, changes her fate.

After a painful battle with cancer, Ember is ready to call it quits. The problem is, Death didn’t get her memo. Now only mostly dead, Ember must come up with her own exit strategy.

Cheating death, cheating time, looking for the easy way out. These things have consequences. Consequences that can be violent and painful.

It’s 1984, and the invisible mists are falling, mists that cause people to slip into dreamless slumber—sleeps from which most, but not all, awaken. Those who do wake live in fear of the next mist, and the next, each a little longer and more dangerous than the last. Alternating between the perspectives of a kleptomaniac waitress named Cora and her twelve-year-old friend Glass, Sleepaway depicts a small-town America turned alarming. This is a place where loved ones are lost to a state between life and death; where denial, delusion, and desperation take hold of those remaining.

Jacob Miller, a teenager who has lived in the isolated and deeply religious community of New Hope all his life, never believed the old stories about how the devil and his demons would invade their town and carry away souls. Only a few surviving elders could claim to have witnessed these horrors first-hand two generations ago, yet nobody knows for sure what lies beyond the boundaries of New Hope.