Showing results by narrator "Neil Hellegers" in All Categories

Dorian Lake spent years cornering the Baltimore hex-crafting market, using his skills at the hermetic arts to exact karmic justice for those whom the system has failed. He keeps his magic clean and free of soul-corrupting Netherwork, thus avoiding both the karmic blow-back of his practice and the notice of the Presidium, a powerful cabal of practitioners that polices the esoteric arts in America.

The events of Jive take place in a not-too-distant future where things have gone from bad to worse. After the pandemics (and yes, there will be more) came the Bloom, an invasion that arrived in a way that no one could have predicted. It was a genetic invasion, the ancient alien hidden in our DNA “blooming”, an event that killed a third of the world population (that’s over one billion) and mutated a third into something slightly “more” than human. They were a daunting presence - and they were in charge.

I'm Cisco Suarez, and a week ago I was dead. Cursed into serving a clandestine shadow group, I have a lot of blood on my hands. Good thing I also have a juvenile problem with authority. I'm not taking orders anymore, and the first thing on my bucket list is bringing them down. If I'm good at anything, it's looking in dark places. But I've got shadows of my own. Horrific deeds coming back to haunt me, and not the metaphorical kind of haunting, either. I'm talking ghosts, mages, and that thing with the glowing red eyes.

Adam and Thomas is the story of two nine-year-old Jewish boys who survive World War II by banding together in the forest. They are alone, visited only furtively every few days by Mina, a mercurial girl who herself has found refuge from the war by living with a peasant family. She makes secret journeys and brings the boys parcels of food at her own risk.

What happens when a superhero becomes the world’s greatest villain? Ted Finley isn’t himself. Enslaved in his own mind, he’s forced to live the life of his deadliest enemy. Erica LaPlante has lost hope. The treaty that torched her purpose may destroy everything she loves as well. As Natalie fights her demons and Jennifer considers a new definition of family, Earth’s greatest threat looms large....

Isolated in the aftermath of tragedy, Erin Fullarton has felt barely alive since the loss of her young daughter, Korrie. Her estranged husband, Zac, a brilliant astrophysicist, seems to be coping better. Lost in his work, he's perfecting his model of a stunning cosmological phenomenon, one he predicts will occur today. But when Erin receives a phone call from her daughter's school, the same call she received 500 days earlier when Korrie was still alive, Erin realizes something is happening. Or happening again.

Bloodsport is the story of the creation of America's deal culture and the battle for control of America's corporations. Told through the fascinating, complex, and often flawed characters who created a new era, it begins as the '60s are ending, with the rise of the conglomerates, those vast assemblages of corporate assets. It rolls through the crisis-wracked '70s and the birth of the hostile deal then careens into the '80s, when the deal culture of mergers and acquisitions is truly unleashed.

Kyle and the crew have one chance to win the war on Tolsa. They are constantly moving between battlefields and helping the rebels in a desperate bid to find parts that they need, only ever staying a single step ahead of Motaki. One slip-up, and Kyle's team will be surrounded on all sides. With no respawn facilities - and trapped by bounty hunters - Kyle and his crew are torn between their own safety and doing the right thing. Cure a dying species, or snatch the finest mech they've ever seen.

The infamous 11th-century warrior Hexen Sabbath is plucked from death and certain damnation by a being claiming to be an angel of the Lord, and finds himself dropped into contemporary Manhattan with no clothes, no weapons, no resources, and one mission - to track down and kill the living personifications of the Seven Deadly Sins before they bring about Armageddon. With time running out and his only ally a destitute art gallery owner, Sabbath must fight his way through New York's elite and challenge the world's most powerful man.

In Caitlín R. Kiernan’s The Ammonite Violin & Others, one of contemporary dark fantasy’s most bewitching and distinctive voices is back with another banquet of the weird and unexpected. Within this book, you’ll discover a dazzling suite of stories situated on the borderlands between the unspeakable and the erotic, the grotesque and the sublime.

In search of Hugo and a reincarnated monk, Nick Barnette and company make their way to the Island Kingdom of Jonang. At least that’s the plan. Their ship is attacked, leading to an epic fight that separates Nick's party. Things only get more complicated once they arrive on the island and find that a newly crowned emperor has wreaked havoc on the natives, an emperor Nick is intimately familiar with.

The fantastic has always been at the edges of Heather O’Neill’s work.In Daydreams of Angels, O’Neill’s first collection of short stories, she gives free rein to her imaginative gifts. In “Swan Lake for Beginners”, generations of Nureyev clones live out their lives in a grand Soviet experiment. In “The Holy Dove Parade”, a teenage cult follower writes a letter to explain the motivation behind her crime. And in another tale, a grandmother reveals where babies come from: the beach, where young mothers-to-be hunt for infants in the surf.

Ted Finley is ready to fight, equipped with a weapon that could change everything. Erica LaPlante is ready to lead with an army prepared to make its final stand. Natalie Dorn is ready to die, though she wonders if there’s something worth living for. But The General is ready to end all of their lives with one fell swoop. Within 24 hours, a victor will be crowned. Can Ted and his friends survive long enough to take back their world?

Their work complete, Kyle and his guild leave Tolsa. The rebellion against Arndale is spreading, the economy is destroyed. They took everyone with them when they fled the doomed world, including their new allies the M-Wolves. Kyle wants to begin his final missions: rescue his familiar, meet Motaki’s mech challenge, and save the Denti homeworld. Yet, Kyle is nowhere near ready, and he knows it. They must upgrade and train every possible second, or everything will be lost. Arndale has other plans, and attacks the orphans on Cinna forcing Kyle to reverse course.

Over the past two years, a group of four players had given so much to their role-playing world that it had developed a magic of its own. The creatures, warriors, sorcerers, thieves—all came alive. Now, there is an odd connection between the gamers and their characters, splitting into factions to determine the fate of the Game itself, and both the inside and the outside worlds. One thing is for certain. Hexworld will never be the same.

Although news of Christians being killed overseas hits major media outlets from time to time, the news quickly fades away while our fellow believers continue to suffer. Johnnie Moore, as he has done before, wants to awaken the church and American politicians to the daily horrors happening to Christians, focusing this time on Africa. While the world has been fixated on jihadist threats in the Middle East, terrorists from Nigeria to Kenya have had free reign to massacre on a scale far beyond that of the terrorists in Iraq and Syria.

Jacobo's Rainbow is a historical literary novel set primarily in the 1960s during the convulsive period of the student protest movements and the Vietnam War. It focuses on the issue of being an outsider - the "other" - an altogether common circumstance that resonates with listeners in today's America. Written from a Jewish perspective, it speaks to universal truths that affect us all.

What happens when a bunch of 30-year-old degenerates survive an apocalyptic zombie outbreak? They get into even more trouble in the aftermath. Duh. That's right, Charlie Campbell and several of his loser friends have escaped a nightmare Chicago fraught with zombies and an occupying army, only to find the wild-lands beyond aren't any safer.

After passing through the portal to another realm, superhero Ted Finley must put his trust in unlikely allies to survive. The Realm of Souls is a war zone, and Ted and Natalie are behind enemy lines. Badly injured and powerless, a mysterious woman and her village may hold their only hope of making it home. Erica LaPlante is down to her second-to-last option. Only a coordinated effort from Jennifer, Dhiraj, and the rest of the gang will keep Erica from her last resort: death and regeneration. But fugitives at large can’t hide forever.

Years before his marriage to Olga Knipper and his self-imposed medical exile to Yalta, years before he even began writing the seminal works of dramatic literature for which he is renowned, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, to support his financially and physically struggling family, wrote stories...many, many stories. Starting in his early 20s, living in Moscow, he made a name for himself by capturing the peculiarities of Russian life through satire, humor, pathos, and passion. Myriad influences inspired his eventual words for the stage.