Bill Travis, an unmarried, unattached investment counselor rapidly approaching his fortieth birthday, conceives that he may not live the most exciting of lives, yet Julie Simmons, his first appointment that Monday, is deeply in trouble. She has taken a North Texas quarter horse racer and liquor baron named Archie Carpin - the last of a dynasty of criminals from the 1920's - for a ride and cleaned him out of a neat two million bucks. And thus begins the adventure of Bill's life.

This is the way the world ends: with a nanosecond of computer error in a Defense Department laboratory and a million casual contacts that form the links in a chain letter of death. And here is the bleak new world of the day after: a world stripped of its institutions and emptied of 99 percent of its people. A world in which a handful of panicky survivors choose sides - or are chosen.

On an entirely normal, beautiful fall day in Chester's Mill, Maine, the town is inexplicably and suddenly sealed off from the rest of the world by an invisible force field. Planes crash into it and fall from the sky in flaming wreckage, a gardener's hand is severed as "the dome" comes down on it, people running errands in the neighboring town are divided from their families, and cars explode on impact. No one can fathom what this barrier is, where it came from, and when - or if - it will go away.

Joe Pickett is the new game warden in Twelve Sleep, Wyoming, a town where nearly everyone hunts and the game warden—especially one like Joe who won't take bribes or look the other way—is far from popular. When he finds a local hunting outfitter dead, splayed out on the woodpile behind his state-owned home, he takes it personally. There had to be a reason that the outfitter, with whom he's had run-ins before, chose his backyard, his woodpile to die in.

The master at his scarifying best! From heart-pounding terror to the eeriest of whimsy - tales from the outer limits of one of the greatest imaginations of our time! Trucks that punish and beautiful teen demons who seduce a young man to massacre; curses whose malevolence grows through the years; obscene presences and angels of grace - here, indeed, is a night-blooming bouquet of chills and thrills.

Since his wife died, Ralph Roberts has been having trouble sleeping. Each night he wakes up a bit earlier until he's barely sleeping at all. During his late-night walks, he observes some strange things going on in Derry, Maine. He sees colored ribbons streaming from people's heads, two strange little men wandering around town after dark, and more. He begins to suspect that these visions are something more than hallucinations brought on by lack of sleep.

A dark and sweeping adventure, Dreamcatcher is set in the haunted city of Derry - the site of Stephen King's It and Insomnia. In it, four young boys stand together and do a brave, good thing, an act that changes them in ways that they hardly understand. A quarter-century later, as grown men who have gone their separate ways, these friends come together once a year to hunt in the woods of Maine.

Pulled off an undercover assignment, Widow returns home to a small town in Mississippi - a place he tried to forget. Taken to be a worthless drifter by the locals, Widow uses his skills to uncover the truth about his mother's last investigation. What was she looking for? What he discovers is an unsolved mystery of missing girls and townspeople harboring a deadly secret - a secret they'll die to protect.

In a future so real and near it might be now, something happens when women go to sleep: They become shrouded in a cocoon-like gauze. If they are awakened, if the gauze wrapping their bodies is disturbed or violated, the women become feral and spectacularly violent; and while they sleep they go to another place.... The men of our world are abandoned, left to their increasingly primal devices. One woman, however, the mysterious Evie, is immune to the blessing or curse of the sleeping disease.

When Micajah Fenton discovers a crater in his front yard with a broken time glider in the bottom and a naked, virtual woman on his lawn, he delays his plans to kill himself. While helping repair the marooned time traveler's glider, Cager realizes it can return him to his past to correct a mistake that had haunted him his entire life. As payment for his help, the virtual creature living in the circuitry of the marooned glider, sends Cager back in time as his 10-year-old self.

Just After Sunset - call it dusk, call it twilight, it's a time when human intercourse takes on an unnatural cast, when nothing is quite as it appears, when the imagination begins to reach for shadows as they dissipate to darkness and living daylight can be scared right out of you. It's the perfect time for Stephen King.

When confronted by raging fires or deadly accidents, volunteer fireman Taylor McAden feels compelled to take terrifying risks to save lives. But there is one leap of faith Taylor can't bring himself to make: He can't fall in love. For all his adult years, Taylor has sought out women who need to be rescued, women he leaves as soon as their crisis is over and the relationship starts to become truly intimate.

Writer Bobbi Anderson becomes obsessed with digging up something she's found buried in the woods near her home. With the help of her friend, Jim Gardener, she uncovers an alien spaceship. Though exposure to the Tommyknockers, who piloted the alien ship, has harmful effects on residents' health, the people of Haven develop a talent for creating innovative devices under their increasingly malignant influence.

Michelle Maxwell has just blown her future with the Secret Service. Against her instincts, she let a presidential candidate out of her sight to comfort a grieving widow. Then, behind closed doors, the politician whose safety was her responsibility vanished into thin air.

The cause of the devastation is a phenomenon that will come to be known as The Pulse, and the delivery method is a cell phone. Everyone's cell phone. Clay and the few desperate survivors who join him suddenly find themselves in the pitch-black night of civilization's darkest age, surrounded by chaos, carnage, and a human horde that has been reduced to its basest nature...and then begins to evolve.

Since she bought her rambling fixer-upper of a house, Jacobia Tiptree has gotten used to finding things broken. But her latest problem isn't so easily repaired. Along with the rotting floor joists and sagging support beams, there's the little matter of the dead man in Jake's storeroom, an ice pick planted firmly in his cranium. Jake's unknown guest turns out to be local boy turned billionaire Threnody McIlwaine.

Jenna Rosen returns to the place in Alaska where her young son, Bobby, disappeared without a trace two years before. Jenna is determined to lay to rest the aching mystery of his death. But ancient legends may have had a hand in Bobby’s fate, forcing Jenna to sift through her own Native American ancestry to uncover the truth.

He's a self-described beach bum who won his houseboat in a card game. He's also a knight errant who's wary of credit cards, retirement benefits, political parties, mortgages, and television. He only works when his cash runs out, and his rule is simple: he'll help you find whatever was taken from you, as long as he can keep half.

Anthony Award-winning author William Kent Krueger crafts this riveting tale about a small Minnesota town’s ex-sheriff who is having trouble retiring his badge. Cork O’Connor loses his job after being blamed for a tragedy on the local Anishinaabe Indian reservation. But he must set aside his personal demons when a young boy goes missing on the same day a judge commits suicide—and no one but O’Connor suspects foul play.

This is the way the world ends: with a nanosecond of computer error in a Defense Department laboratory and a million casual contacts that form the links in a chain letter of death. And here is the bleak new world of the day after: a world stripped of its institutions and emptied of 99 percent of its people. A world in which a handful of panicky survivors choose sides - or are chosen.

With tales from Laird Barron, Stephen King, John Langan, Peter Straub, and many others, and featuring Datlow’s comprehensive overview of the year in horror, now, more than ever, The Best Horror of the Year provides the petrifying horror fiction readers have come to expect - and enjoy.

Joe Pickett is the new game warden in Twelve Sleep, Wyoming, a town where nearly everyone hunts and the game warden—especially one like Joe who won't take bribes or look the other way—is far from popular. When he finds a local hunting outfitter dead, splayed out on the woodpile behind his state-owned home, he takes it personally. There had to be a reason that the outfitter, with whom he's had run-ins before, chose his backyard, his woodpile to die in.

It was one hell of an inheritance for former Chicago reporter Tom Coleman: a broken-down pickup truck, ramshackle campground, a canoe livery - and one pot-smoking, barely working employee he doesn’t need, doesn’t want, and can’t afford. But the truth is, after losing a child and a marriage, Tom doesn’t really care.

Zombie, Indiana explores the impact of an invading zombie horde on a trio of Hoosier protagonists…each of whom have some dark secrets to keep. When the governor’s daughter mysteriously disappears on a field trip, IMPD Special Sergeant James Nolan, scholarship student Kesha Washington, and Governor Hank Burleson must all come together not only to find the governor’s daughter, but also to undertake a quest to redeem the very soul of the state itself…all while under constant attack from the living dead.

When Micajah Fenton discovers a crater in his front yard with a broken time glider in the bottom and a naked, virtual woman on his lawn, he delays his plans to kill himself. While helping repair the marooned time traveler's glider, Cager realizes it can return him to his past to correct a mistake that had haunted him his entire life. As payment for his help, the virtual creature living in the circuitry of the marooned glider, sends Cager back in time as his 10-year-old self.

This set includes Crash Dive, What Comes Around, and White Death, three Alex Hawke novellas never available before on audio. In Crash Dive, Alex Hawke is on a highly covert mission to enter another nation’s airspace undetected and find a way to avert a global war. In What Comes Around, two CIA officers are found dead. Hawke discovers that the victims are connected through one man: Spider Payne, a rogue intelligence officer. In White Death, M16 suspects a bizarre conspiracy when two bankers are found dead, and vast sums are plundered from the Queen of England’s accounts.

Recently widowered and grieving, Gavin flees New York City for the quiet of the country. His new home on Lake Caldasac has surprisingly few visitors, and the author soon learns why: a suspiciously high number of people have gone missing in the small town. The deaths have all been ruled accidents, but Finn Horn, a handicapped boy obsessed with fishing, knows the truth. There’s a monster in the lake. And it wants to feed.

A boy literally disappears from Main Street. A security camera captures the moment of his instant, inexplicable vanishing. An audacious bank robbery goes seriously wrong: Four cops are gunned down; a TV news helicopter is shot and spins crazily out of the sky, triggering a disastrous cascade of events that ricochet across twenty different lives over the course of just 36 hours. Nick Kavanaugh, a cop with a dark side, investigates. Soon he and his wife, Kate, a distinguished lawyer from an old Niceville family, find themselves struggling to make sense of it all.

What’s happening in Acker’s Gap, West Virginia? Three elderly men are gunned down over their coffee at a local diner, and seemingly half the town is there to witness the act. Still, it happened so fast, and no one seems to have gotten a good look at the shooter. Was it random? Was it connected to the spate of drug violence plaguing poor areas of the country just like Acker’s Gap? Or were Dean Streeter, Shorty McClurg, and Lee Rader targeted somehow?

LeAnne Hogan went to Afghanistan as a rising star in the military and came back a much lesser person, mentally and physically. Now missing an eye and with half her face badly scarred, she can barely remember the disastrous desert operation that almost killed her. She is confused, angry, and suspects the fault is hers, even though nobody will come out and say it. Shattered by one last blow - the sudden death of her hospital roommate, Marci - LeAnne finds herself on a fateful drive across the country, reflecting on her past and seeing no future.