Logan Talbot is no stranger to war. Retired from the Marine Corps, he watches as his best friend now fights a different kind of battle against a deadly illness. A fight that requires more money that either of them have. So when Logan is approached by a stranger with an offer that seems too good to be true—a chance to win millions of dollars in cash on Black Friday—he knows it’s his only chance to help his friend. What he doesn’t know is that he will find himself locked in a shopping mall with dozens of other desperate contestants.

Fourteen stories, all in classic style, introduce Holmes to new clients with strange and quirky problems. Clues to a fortune are hidden in a ludicrous painting, a modern mummy walks, and a novel tourist attraction holds the key to why an unattractive lady is suddenly pursued by an amorous admirer.

Samantha's entire life plan crashes in a single moment. Now she's drunk in a hotel, her left hand a whole lot lighter, her heart a whole lot heavier. All she wants is to feel nothing--and what better way to numb the pain than a drink? Kolt's career has been skyrocketing on stage and his life has been spiraling in memories. Everyone is trying to keep him moving forward, moving on, but nothing chases away the memories of broken love.

Life is extraordinarily dull for Wilhelmina Fairweather. With her days spent reading in the conservatory, she secretly longs for an adventure. Unfortunately, adventures do not come easily for someone like Willa. Afflicted with bouts of asthma since childhood, an exciting life far from home is a hope she dares not entertain. For as every Fairweather knows, hope has no place at Haven House. That is until the holiday season heralds the arrival of a new doctor to the area.

I can spin gold, I lie. With my life at stake, I have no other choice. I get one chance to turn my lie into truth, and I'm shocked when I succeed. But now the cruel human king demands I become his wifepassing between his bed and being locked away in a tower, spinning gold until my last breath. My only way out is to summon him. A brutal Fae prince. The deal we strike is sickening, but it's the only way I'll live after I'm caught escaping. My new captor drags me back to his realm.

“Before there was light, there was a vast emptiness. That is Mother Cold, and we will all return to her." "As Confederate soldier Martin Tomball faces death, freezing overnight on a battlefield, Mother Cold comes to make a deal—a deal that will curse his family for generations to come. Now, in the winter of 2021, Texas is hit with a state-wide ice storm, leaving millions of households without power. Siblings Jasper and Autumn Tomball are going to have to find a plan to stay warm until the ice thaws—or until Mother Cold comes to collect her bargain.”

Amber and her four best friends are about to reach their teenage years when the unthinkable happens; one of her friends, Kieran, is killed in a freak accident. Twenty years later, Amber no longer speaks to her friends and is still haunted by that day in the form of severe psychological issues, including sleep paralysis, insomnia and hallucinations of a terrifying entity she calls The Creature. But it isn’t just in her head; it is real.

Charlie Haynes is an aging ex-detective, working unsolved cases. Obsessed with cleanliness and order, Charlie is a loner who trades on his experience of grisly crimes, and struggles to maintain a relationship with his adult daughter. When three teenagers are murdered in a public cemetery, the ritualistic killings show similarities to one of Charlie’s old investigations: a savage serial killer who targeted the members of a notorious Traveller family, the Boswells.

Winnie is the daughter of the mayor of the cursed Mirror Village, Cranwick. She has always felt trapped, since her city is controlled by the brutal Roth witches, and the only way out of the city is through their mirror portals. Princess Frost is the lonely princess of Icefall, the Winter kingdom. She has felt abandoned since her mother's death five years ago, especially since, for the last three years, he has been courting a princess that she knows nothing about.

High up on the windswept cliffs of Pale Peak, Faye and Felix celebrate their new engagement. But soon, a chorus of ghastly noises erupts from the nearby woods: the screams of animals, the cries of children, and the mad babble of a hundred mournful voices. A dark figure looms near the windows in the dead of night, whispering to Faye. As the weather turns deadly, Felix discovers that his terrified fiancée isn't just mumbling in her sleep—she's whispering back.

Muriel McAuley has lived in the Scottish fishing village of Witchaven all her life. She was born there, and she intends to die there. But when an overseas property developer threatens to evict the residents from their homes and raze Witchaven to the ground in the name of progress, all seems lost . . . until the day a mysterious fog bank creeps inland.

If it wasn’t bad enough that an anti-Christmas Grinch was playing cruel pranks, now DS Ellen Fine was right in the middle of a murder investigation. With no leads and the countdown to Christmas in full swing the pressure is on to find out who’s responsible.

Fueled by online trends, a shift in the American zeitgeist has led to the instatement of the Lazarus Act, legalizing the 'recreational use' of human corpses. Ellis Mercer, recently bereaved, embarks on a secret mission to America's first 'necrotel' to recover his wife's remains, before her corpse and his memory of her are desecrated by the motel’s twisted membership.

When Andrew Ingram walks his longtime friend and confidant Jeanie home after a celebratory dinner, he has no idea that his life is about to change in unimaginable ways. After having created an innovative new automotive gaming platform, he was riding high on the wings of success when a deadly explosion ripped not only his best friend but also his eyesight away from him.

This collection contains all-new stories of coulrophobia (fear of clowns) from some of the most talented horror writers alive!

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.

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.

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.

Jazz Bashara is a criminal. Well, sort of. Life on Artemis, the first and only city on the moon, is tough if you're not a rich tourist or an eccentric billionaire. So smuggling in the occasional harmless bit of contraband barely counts, right? Not when you've got debts to pay and your job as a porter barely covers the rent. Everything changes when Jazz sees the chance to commit the perfect crime, with a reward too lucrative to turn down.

Charlie Haynes is an aging ex-detective, working unsolved cases. Obsessed with cleanliness and order, Charlie is a loner who trades on his experience of grisly crimes, and struggles to maintain a relationship with his adult daughter. When three teenagers are murdered in a public cemetery, the ritualistic killings show similarities to one of Charlie’s old investigations: a savage serial killer who targeted the members of a notorious Traveller family, the Boswells.

On the winter solstice Bren gets pulled into the Celtic Otherworld, where he uncovers a grave threat looming over the world. Armed with ancient magic and guided by legendary figures from Celtic mythology, Bren embarks on a perilous quest to retrieve relics said to hold the key to restoring balance. But as he delves deeper into the mysteries of his own identity and confronts the shadows of his past, Bren realizes that his journey is not just about saving the Otherworld— it's about discovering the hero within himself.

Every living creature wants to survive. For young Mason, his experiences of being beaten, bullied, and abandoned by his own family encouraged him to do just that. But after being caught up in a terrorist attack during a college tour, he finds himself in an unfamiliar place, surrounded by a new foe—the supernatural—and not even death can stop his primal instinct to live.

Meet Reinhardt Blazkowicz. Orphan. Hero. Warrior. And now, the unlikely heir to the legendary Blue Star Duchy. Found by the Duke himself on a battlefield, surrounded by enemies, Reinhardt's life is about to change forever. Plucked from the ashes of war and thrust into a world of unimaginable wealth and privilege, he must now trade his battle-worn armor for the hallowed uniform of Aegis Crown Academy. There, in a world of magic, combat, and courtly intrigue, he'll need more than just his battle-honed instincts to survive.

Lucas Sinclair, a washed-up hacker, finds an encrypted channel, buried in routine network traffic, that is transferring enormous volumes of data to seemingly random locations. In his enclave, surrounded by aging clusters of tech, Lucas uses a suite of bespoke tools to trace down the origin.

In the Gallagher Hotel, every room holds a nightmare, and every guest becomes prey. When Riley accepts a serving position at an exclusive party in the infamous Gallagher Hotel, she sees it as a chance to move past her son's tragic death. Instead, she steps into a supernatural nightmare. Together with Chris, a mysterious thief haunted by his own tortured history, she discovers the hotel's current owner isn't who she claims to be - but rather the vengeful spirit of an executed criminal.

When the System came to Earth, technology failed, monsters appeared, and billions died as humans were inducted into the game-like physics the System enforced.

Milo lives in a steel cave within a man-made mountain of steel and concrete. He spends his days repairing the machinery that keeps the habitat livable and tinkering with the prosthetics that help his twisted body move about through the small tunnels and air shafts that are his world. He's as much a piece of discarded machinery as the equipment he keeps running. An escaped lab experiment living in a hole. Given a chance at being someone different, will he become a hero and live in the sunlight?

When the apocalypse comes, a mysterious entity grants Theo Spencer the gift of reincarnation. The gift of a quiet life as an alchemist. He awakens in a small town in the southern reaches of a small kingdom in a non-human body. Broken Tusk doesn't seem like much, but his legendary alchemy skills will soon turn their fortune.

Amber is a young videographer who has landed her dream job. She is to produce a web series based on a late-night talk radio show dealing with the unexplained. She is a huge fan of the show, and its host, Jack Owens, who she hopes to help reveal the world’s most cryptic secrets. The first secret she reveals is Jack’s. He doesn’t believe any of this crap. To him, the show is just a cushy job that allows him to support himself and his wife without having to try very hard.