The world’s food supply grows aggressively, occupying every inch of earth, no matter how inhospitable. World hunger is averted. Humanity flourishes. RC-714 is digested, absorbed…and passed on. The Change affects small fast-breeding mammals first. They multiply with the same aggressive speed as the ExoGen plants, but an insatiable hunger drives them to violence. A war between species breaks out. When RC-714 reaches humanity, along with every other large creature on the planet, civilization implodes.

Jack Kernigan is having a bad day...a bad year...a bad life. After being booted out of MIT, he’s back in his Ohio hometown, working for the family business, facing a life of mediocrity. Then one day, out on a delivery, his truck hits...something. Something big...something furry...something invisible. And, it turns out, something not of this Earth. Fate can play funny tricks. Which is why Jack suddenly finds himself the planet’s best hope to unravel a conspiracy of galactic proportions that could spell the end of the human race.

Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant, living a quiet life among books and history. Now, the commanding general—also known as her tough-as-talons mother—has ordered Violet to join the hundreds of candidates striving to become the elite of Navarre: dragon riders. But when you’re smaller than everyone else and your body is brittle, death is only a heartbeat away...because dragons don’t bond to “fragile” humans. They incinerate them. With fewer dragons willing to bond than cadets, most would kill Violet to better their own chances of success.

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal—an experience that shocks him to his core.

Twelve-year-old human Sophie Dawes lives a good life in Hopetown. There, vampires and humans live in harmony, and Sophie and her adoptive vampire moms are living (or unliving) proof. There are a lot of rules that vampires must follow to keep the humans they live around feeling safe, but if regular visits from child protective services and abiding by a nightly curfew keeps their family together, Sophie will do anything to stay with her loving vampire parents. But then, normal law-abiding vampires begin to go rogue.

When Louise finds out her parents have died, she dreads going home. She doesn’t want to leave her daughter with her ex and fly to Charleston. She doesn’t want to deal with her family home, stuffed to the rafters with the remnants of her father’s academic career and her mother’s lifelong obsession with puppets and dolls. She doesn’t want to learn how to live without the two people who knew and loved her best in the world. Most of all, she doesn’t want to deal with her brother, Mark, who never left their hometown, gets fired from one job after another, and resents her success.

Rose Winter has enough problems. With a marriage going down the tubes and a dreaded anniversary party on the horizon, the last thing she needs is the zombie apocalypse. She wanted to get drunk and sing karaoke, not murder her undead neighbors. It’s clear the party’s over, however, now Rose has more problems - a missing husband, an overbearing houseguest, and keeping her family alive.

After years of bickering, Penny and Tate have called a truce: they’ll play nice. They have to. Their mothers (life-long best friends) need them to be perfect, drama-free daughters when Penny’s mother becomes a living liver donor to Tate’s mom. Forced to live together as the Moms recover, the girls’ truce is essential in keeping everything—their jobs, the house, the finances, the Moms’ healing—running smoothly. They’ve got to let this thing between them go. There’s one little hitch: Penny and Tate keep almost kissing.

As the ash and chaos from Mount Rainier’s eruption swirled and finally settled, the story of the Greenloop massacre has passed unnoticed, unexamined...until now. The journals of resident Kate Holland, recovered from the town’s bloody wreckage, capture a tale too harrowing - and too earth-shattering in its implications - to be forgotten. In this audiobook, Max Brooks brings Kate’s extraordinary account to light for the first time, faithfully reproducing her words alongside his own extensive investigations into the massacre and the legendary beasts behind it.

Sixteen-year-old Jack Moreno is managing to hold his life together. Barely. After a terrible car accident leaves his father unable to work, Jack makes ends meet by dropping out of school and covering his dad’s custodial shifts at a school for troubled teens, high in the Wasatch Mountains. Everything is going all right until the night Jack finds Sarah Watson—yes, descendant of that Watson—dead.

Underprivileged and keenly self-aware, SoCal fourteen-year-old Layla Bailey isn't used to being noticed. Except by mean girls who tweet about her ragged appearance. All she wants to do is indulge in her love of science, protect her vulnerable younger brother, and steer clear of her unstable mother. Then a school competition calls for a biome. Layla chooses her own home, a hostile ecosystem of indoor fungi and secret shame.

For the lucky among us, life is what you make of it, but for Dixie Wheeler, the theme music for her story was chosen by another long ago, on the day her father butchered her mother and brothers and then slashed a knife across his own throat. Only one-year-old Dixie was left alive, infamously known as Baby Blue for the song left playing in the aftermath of the slaughter. Twenty-five years later, Dixie is still desperate for a connection to the family she can’t remember, so when her childhood home goes up for sale, Dixie sets aside all reason and moves in.

These 31 stories are fiction. Short and scary. Delivered to you in small, terrifying bursts, much the way you’d experience each individual room in a haunted-house attraction. They were specifically written to be enjoyed by both the not-too-young and old alike. Inside, you’ll find horror, drama, even a few laughs - and zombies. Zombies by the ton. Gnawing, gnashing, stumbling, and staring... Right. At. You. Waiting…for a bite-sized offering.

Sylvie Rossi has the loner thing down pat, with the exception of her best friend, Grace. But when the two are trapped in a hospital during the last gasp of a dying city, alone time is no longer an option. A nurse's offer of sanctuary promises Sylvie the supplies she needs to survive the zombies - it's the coexisting with people that might do her in. Eric Forrest will do whatever it takes to get into the dead city for his sister, including ending up dead himself. He's used to taking risks, but with every mile he travels death looks likelier.

Marigold is running from ghosts. The phantoms of her old life keep haunting her, but a move with her newly blended family from their small California beach town to the embattled Midwestern city of Cedarville might be the fresh start she needs. Her mom has accepted a new job with the Sterling Foundation that comes with a free house, one that Mari now has to share with her bratty 10-year-old stepsister, Piper.

Margaret Murphy is a weaver of fantastic tales, growing up in a world where the truth is too much for one little girl to endure. Her first memory is of the day her friend Agnes died. No one blames Margaret. Not in so many words. Her mother insists to everyone who will listen that her daughter never even left the house that day. Left alone to make sense of tragedy, Margaret wills herself to forget these unbearable memories, replacing them with imagined stories full of faith and magic—that always end happily.

Joyce Carol Oates assembles an outstanding cast of authors—including Margaret Atwood, Tananarive Due, and Megan Abbott—to explore, subvert, and reinvent one of the most vital subgenres of horror.

Alma Katsu calls My Heart Is a Chainsaw “a homage to slasher films that also manages to defy and transcend genre.” On the surface is a story of murder in small-town America. But beneath is its beating heart: a biting critique of American colonialism, Indigenous displacement, and gentrification, and a heartbreaking portrait of a broken young girl who uses horror movies to cope with the horror of her own life.

Meet Preach, Digit, and Maria, three lost and damaged souls trying to make it on the streets of New York City, running petty scams to stay alive. A twist of events changes their lives forever when they accidently kill a man connected to the mob and find a small fortune. Now on the run, the trio tries to escape a notorious hit man called B-Boy. Along the way, they run into more shady characters and more trouble. Seduced by the siren call of the money and struggling with their own demons, Preach, Digit, and Maria will soon discover even the closest bonds can't overcome their past traumas.

Reeling from the sudden death of his teenage son, our narrator receives a letter from an attorney: he has just inherited a plot of land from his estranged grandfather. He travels to a beach town several hours south of his home with the intention of immediately selling the land. But upon inspection, what lies beneath the dirt is much more than he can process in the throes of grief. As a biracial Black man struggling with the many facets of his identity, he’s now the owner of a former plantation passed down by the men on his white mother’s side of the family.

Annabel Hayes—born, baptized, and orphaned in the sleepy conservative town of Dayton, Tennessee—is thrilled to find herself falling quickly and deeply in love with George Craig, a sophisticated attorney newly arrived from Knoxville. But before the end of their first year of marriage, their lives are beset by losses. The strain on their relationship is only intensified when John T. Scopes is arrested for teaching Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution at the local high school.

In the distant future most of the human race has fled a ravaged Earth to find new life on other planets. For those who stayed a lawless society remains. Technology has been renounced, and saints and sinners, lawmakers and sheriffs, travelers and gunslingers, abound. What passes for justice is presided over by the High Sheriff, and carried out by his cruel and ruthless Deputy.

It’s March 1918, and World War I is raging in Europe. In the trenches in northern France, a group of British officers, led by the war-weary Captain Stanhope, ready themselves for a major German attack while facing their worst fears. R.C. Sherriff drew on his own experiences in World War One to create the play, which premiered in 1928 and is now considered one of the preeminent works about the horrors of war.

This Is Not a Game is the extraordinary untold story of the internet’s first conspiracy theory, the legend of Ong’s Hat. Marc Fennell will dive deep into a previously unexplored world of tech hippies, eccentric web subcultures and simmering paranoia, uncovering how this tongue-in-cheek artistic experiment backfired on its creator and went on to influence much of what’s wrong with the internet today.

In 2002, Dan Slepian, a veteran producer for NBC’s Dateline, received a tip from a Bronx homicide detective that two men were serving twenty-five years to life in prison for a 1990 murder they did not commit. Haunted by what the detective had told him, Slepian began an investigation of the case that eventually resulted in freedom for the two men and launched Slepian on a two-decade personal and professional journey into a deeply flawed justice system fiercely resistant to rectifying—or even acknowledging—its mistakes and their consequences.

Rhoda West is Silicon Valley’s favorite female CEO: the luminously charismatic founder of the fast-growing startup Radical, a wellness company whose core mission is the betterment of women’s lives. Rhoda’s Instagram page offers intimate glimpses of her personal life alongside promotions for the cult-status products developed in the Well, Radical’s secretive lab.

In a world ravaged by climate change, a mysterious time travel agency known as the Program sends carefully selected Heroes back in time on missions to prevent environmental damage before it happens. Sloane Burrows secretly longs to be a Hero and restore the natural world of her childhood—a world she can envision with absolute clarity because of her superpower memory. But her father raised Sloane to believe her “freak memory” is a shameful flaw that should be hidden from the world. Sloane stuffs her dream of being a Hero and conceals her memory to the point of making herself sick.

Ganga, joyful goddess of the river, serves as caretaker to the mischievous godlings who roam her banks. But when their antics incur the wrath of a powerful sage, Ganga is cursed to become mortal, bound to her human form until she fulfills the obligations of the curse. Though she knows nothing of mortal life, Ganga weds King Shantanu and becomes a queen, determined to regain her freedom no matter the cost. But in a cruel turn of fate, just as she is freed of her binding, she is forced to leave her infant son behind. Her son, prince Devavrata, unwittingly carries the legacy of Ganga’s curse.

Lavender House, 1952: the family seat of recently deceased matriarch Irene Lamontaine, head of the famous Lamontaine soap empire. Irene’s recipes for her signature scents are a well guarded secret—but it's not the only one behind these gates. This estate offers a unique freedom, where none of the residents or staff hide who they are. But to keep their secret, they've needed to keep others out. And now they're worried they're keeping a murderer in. When your existence is a crime, everything you do is criminal, and the gates of Lavender House can’t lock out the real world forever.

When grave misfortune leaves thirteen-year-old Terry Sayre without relatives to care for him in the summer of 1939, his only option to elude foster care is to accept asylum abroad with his mother's Danish kin, people he met only briefly as a child. Terry begins life anew in his grandparents' home, but within months of his arrival, the Second World War breaks out.