What if Trayvon Martin survived and George Zimmerman died in his place? What if President Barack Obama accidentally transformed African Americans into horrific, Lovecraftian abominations while trying to make them all light skinned? Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, President Barack Obama, Bill Cosby and dozens of other real life pillars of black community meet and clash in this satirical epic by the author of Yurope!: Hillary's Invasion.

The year is 2061. The Red Dragon Crime Syndicate is king, and for all those lucky enough to be members of this crime family, life is damn good. Well, not for everyone.... For two entry-level gangsters in Tharsis City, Mars, life in the Syndicate isn’t quite all guns and glamour. That’s right. Long before they were mortal enemies, Spike Spiegel and Vicious were just two friends clawing their way up the crime ladder and trying to have a little fun while doing it. But when an opportunity to pull a job for their boss arises, it’s make-or-break time.

The Nameless Dark debuts a major new voice in contemporary weird fiction. Within these minutes, you'll find whispers of the familiar ghosts of the classic pulps - Lovecraft, Bradbury, Smith - blended with Grau's uniquely macabre, witty storytelling, securing his place at the table amid this current Renaissance of literary horror.

Eddie is a grizzled war veteran who feels trapped in a meaningless life of fixing rides at a seaside amusement park. His days are a dull routine of work, loneliness, and regret.

The Shape of Water is set in Cold War-era Baltimore at the Occam Aerospace Research Center, which has recently received its most sensitive asset ever: an amphibious man captured in the Amazon. What unfolds is a stirring romance between the asset and one of the janitors on staff, a mute woman who uses sign language to communicate with the creature.

Allander Atlasia is an infamous psychopath whose heinous crimes have earned him a lifetime stay at the Tower, the world's most extreme maximum-security prison. But after a brilliant and brutal escape, the criminal mastermind begins a killing spree that is intensely personal. Jade Marlow is an ex-FBI profiler and tracker whose fearlessness is only surpassed by the severity of his own inner demons. With a record of irrational behavior and a genius for putting himself into the mind of a criminal predator, he may be the one man diabolical enough to catch Atlasia.

Entrusted with the lives of Jesus Christ's top servicemen, YouTube superstars Matt Watson and Ryan Magee must travel to the farthest reaches of the earth and terminate public enemy number one: Osama bin Laden. Discovering along their journey that things aren't always so easy for two incredibly rich and handsome celebrities, the dynamic duo is put through the ultimate trial of courage, patriotism, and friendship.

Firstborns rule society. Secondborns are the property of the government. Thirdborns are not tolerated. Long live the Fates Republic. On Transition Day, the second child in every family is taken by the government and forced into servitude. Roselle St. Sismode's eighteenth birthday arrives with harsh realizations: she's to become a soldier for the Fate of Swords military arm of the Republic during the bloodiest rebellion in history, and her elite firstborn mother is happy to see her go.

A boy and his father walk on the shore of an ocean filled with bloody spears cast off from a war between gods. A father travels back in time over and over, unable to rescue the mother of his child. A mischievous satyr lurking in a dungeon has a field day with trespassing adventurers. These tales and more are in Resurrections, a compilation of short stories written by Chris Philbrook.

Some call it purgatory, others know it as the in-between, but for those poor souls who are trapped there eternally it is simply: The Carnival - macabre mockery where night is never-ending, and a sadistic creature known as the Fool rules with an iron fist. And the Fool has one rule: No one leaves the Carnival. Ever. Christopher, the latest arrival thrust reluctantly through the gates, is certain that he doesn't belong there, and he's damn sure he's not going to be staying. To have any chance of escaping, he must confront not only the Fool, but his own dark past.

Italian director Nicolo Funelli's lost film comes alive when the maven of the macabre is released after 20 years of VHS imprisonment. New hire Annie Watkins' pre-emptive obituaries at Live @ Five New Orleans News seem to be killing off famous people. A used delivery van causes Katie and Gavin's life to take an unimaginable wrong turn into very dark territory. A teen orphan with a unique ability is held captive in a secret government lab, forced to submit to their whims. Vacationers become a grotesque part of the Easter festivities in a small English town.

She's a prisoner with a secret gift. He's a soldier with a monster locked inside. Now they will decide if humanity is worth the fight.

For two years, Cyrus and Antigone Smith have run a sagging roadside motel with their older brother, Daniel. Nothing ever seems to happen. Then a strange old man with bone tattoos arrives, demanding a specific room. Less than 24 hours later, the old man is dead. The motel has burned, and Daniel is missing. And Cyrus and Antigone are kneeling in a crowded hall, swearing an oath to an order of explorers who have long served as caretakers of the world's secrets, keepers of powerful relics from lost civilizations, and jailers to unkillable criminals.

Warning: The next terrorist attack on American soil is coming...sooner than you think. They can strike anytime, anywhere. A public landmark. A suburban shopping mall. And now, the human body itself. Three Middle Eastern terrorists have been injected with a biological weapon, human time bombs unleashed on American soil. They are prepared to die. To spread their disease. To annihilate millions. If America hopes to fight this enemy from within, we need a new kind of weapon. Meet Special Agent Jericho Quinn. Air Force veteran. Champion boxer. Trained assassin.

Where is the real Leeds? How does one get there? Is it floating on the air—words and music you can almost reach out and grab like wriggling worms of sound and ether? Is it in the carnival that seethes under the corrupted church, drawing the lost along shadowy corridors and through the strangely angled funhouse doors to the place where the city fathers perform secret rites with the goat-headed masters of the dark?

Described as American Gods meets The Avengers, Paternus combines myths from around the world in a modern story of action and intrigue that is “urban fantasy on the surface, but so much more at its core!”

Time is running out for the two nations that once made up the former USA. Weakened by their division, both the Islamic republic and the Bible Belt are threatened by the expansionist dreams of the Atzlan Empire to the south, and their own intellectual decay engendered by their fundamentalist beliefs. The only solution is to reunite the two nations and regain its former glory, and there's only one way to do it, and only one man, Rakkim Epps, who can.

It's 1948, and World War II has just ended. Berlin is in pieces, torn apart by bullets, bombs, and bloodshed. But a particular scientist has survived - one with vital knowledge of an ancient weapon. When Endgame spies learn of the news, Boone, a Cahokian, and Ariadne, a Minoan, are each sent undercover to find the scientist amid the snowy rubble. But when their paths intertwine, the last thing they expect is to let their guards down and work together.

Matt Hollis is the current wielder of the holy weapon, DÄMOREN. With it, he stalks and destroys demons. A secret society called the VALDUCANS has taken an interest in Matt's activities. They see him as a reckless rogue - little more than a "cowboy" corrupted by a monster - and a potential threat to their ancient order. As knights and their sentient weapons begin dying, Matt teams up with other hunters of his kind such as LUIZA, a woman with a conquistador blade; ALLAN, an Englishman with an Egyptian khopesh; MALCOLM, a voodoo priest with a sanctified machete; and TAKAIRA, a naginata-swinging Samurai.

Edgar Award nominee Victor Gischler “specializes in morbid humor, dark sarcasm, and comic noir, complete with violence and mayhem” ( Library Journal). Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse picks up 10 years after the end of the world. Former insurance salesman Mortimer Tate leaves his secluded cabin and discovers a desolate landscape complete with cowboys, bandits, and cannibals, where the only traces of civilization are found at Joey Armageddon’s Sassy-a-Go-Go club.

Everyone loves a well-catered event, and the supernatural community is no exception. Enter Sin du Jour, the expert caterers to demons, goblins, faeries, and everything in between. In their first month on the job, Lena Tarr and Darren Vargas, the newest line chefs at the supernatural catering agency, have had to approximate angel meat, evade amorous lizards, and provide craft sacrifices for a Hollywood debut. Their coworkers have contended with zombified clowns, fought off the Easter Bunny's hit squad, and captured a golden fish for a goblin royal wedding.

For 10 years Kal Hakala has been the Bureau of Supernatural Investigation's top man, the longest surviving agent in its blood-soaked history. The World At Large has no idea that The World Under exists. And its vampires, demons, zombies, and mythic monsters are growing increasingly restless. In all Kal's time with the Bureau, there has been no case he couldn't crack, no monster he couldn't kill. Then a plague of zombies comes to Denver, along with a vicious serial killer dubbed The Organ Donor.

Glorious is set against the backdrops of the Jim Crow South, the Harlem Renaissance, and the civil rights era. Blending the truth of American history with the fruits of Bernice L. McFadden's rich imagination, this is the story of Easter Venetta Bartlett, a fictional Harlem Renaissance writer whose tumultuous path to success, ruin, and revival offers a candid portrait of the American experience in all its beauty and cruelty.

Ben McKelvie believes he's moving up in the world when he and his fiancée buy a house in the cushy Washington, DC, suburb of Barcroft. Instead he's moving down - way down - thanks to Madeleine Roux, the crazy neighbor whose vermin-infested property is a permanent eyesore and looming hazard to public health. First Ben's fiancée leaves him; then his dog dies, apparently killed by a predator drawn into Barcroft by Madeleine's noxious menagerie. But the worst is yet to come for Ben.

Named a New York Times notable book of 1994, The Iron Dragon's Daughter tells the heartrending story of a changeling child who is kidnapped to a realm of malls and machines and enslaved in a vast, infernal factory. Ultimately, she escapes and attempts to educate herself about this alien world, while being tormented by visions of the life she was denied.

Among the Northern Cheyenne of the Great Plains lives a boy named Winterfox, whose family has fought monsters since the days of the Spanish conquistadors. In the aftermath of Westward Expansion, he has become the sole heir to their blood feud against the Beast. Winterfox comes of age in the long shadows of the American frontier, a time when magic has not yet passed into myth. It is a place where the mundane and fantastic still walk side by side, and the warrior society of the Rédo’osnin Dog Men will be remembered a little while longer.

The Seven Wonders adventures continue in this bind-up of The Select and The Orphan. The Select tells the story of thirteen-year-old Burt Wenders, the first documented carrier of the G7W gene, and his fated voyage to the island that would eventually come to house the Karai Institute. In The Orphan, learn the story of Daria, orphaned at a young age and enslaved by the Babylonians, and her valiant battle to escape the only city she's ever called home. These titles are together for the first time ever.

Warning: The next terrorist attack on American soil is coming...sooner than you think. They can strike anytime, anywhere. A public landmark. A suburban shopping mall. And now, the human body itself. Three Middle Eastern terrorists have been injected with a biological weapon, human time bombs unleashed on American soil. They are prepared to die. To spread their disease. To annihilate millions. If America hopes to fight this enemy from within, we need a new kind of weapon. Meet Special Agent Jericho Quinn. Air Force veteran. Champion boxer. Trained assassin.

NYPD detective Paul Donner and his wife Elise were killed in a hold-up gone wrong. Fifty years later, Donner is back: revived courtesy of the Shift. Supposedly the unintended side-effect of a botched biological terrorist attack and carried by a ubiquitous retrovirus, the Shift jump-starts dead DNA and throws the life cycle into reverse, so reborns like Donner must cope with the fact that they are not only slowly youthing toward a new childhood, but have become New York's most hated minority.

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.