Showing results by author "Stephen Donald Huff" in All Categories

He is ruthlessly ambitious. He believes in selling people what they want to find a shortcut to the good life. He's not a thief, but he'll take anything he can get. He's not a killer, but he's responsible for countless deaths. The first day he shows up at your door, it's a party. The last day he shows up at your door, it's a funeral. A working man. Keeping the appointments of a lifetime. It's a living.

Hunted runaways fleeing bestial keepers across a desert wasteland. Bound for Sanctum. A boy named Manga. A girl named Heaven. Each a patchwork monster born of strap and stitch and scar, bestially abused but unbroken. Unbeaten. Not so badly undone that they have forsaken their sense of humanity. For they have yet to abandon all hope. This is their struggle. In love. For freedom.

The universe is a strange, all but impenetrable mystery. Every scientific advance sponsors countless new questions, and every new explanation spawns immeasurable unknowns. How can dinosaurs of all kinds and from all epochs of evolution suddenly and randomly appear all over the world? What would you do with a tyrannosaurus peering through your bedroom window? How would you deal with pterosaurs soaring above your roof? His is an unpredictable world surrounding an entirely too predictable suburban neighborhood. Then everything changes. One thing is certain, during a plague of prehistoric ...

To be certain, there are bad men in the world, but for every fistful of male villains there exists a shrewd woman to corrupt and torment them. She is the spider at the center of a web, and they have come to struggle violently in her traps. He's as loving and caring as a Gaboon viper. She’s as gracious and hospitable as a bristling spider. Choose your friends carefully.

An ordinary traveler. A typical business trip. Nothing unusual or out of place. If the inhabitants of Spittsville, Texas seem a bit odd, blame overbearing sunshine and endless horizons of arid wastes. Since a rational mind will neither conceive nor believe the startling truth. As gradual as the growth of a creeping vine, deep within the wilds of West Texas an unholy invasion begins. One changeling at a time.

Football is big business in the United States, but it plays largest in Texas. In Texas, football money is BIG money, and the best players start young. During high school, college scouts come calling, but they're only seeking winners. Nobody likes to lose. Least of all, the most promising sportsman ever to play for Pecan Groves High School. King Charlemagne Ebersol. The booster club and the team coach will stop at nothing to put him on the field. Due to past scandals, the local high school plays under court-ordered supervision. How far will they go to recruit the King of youth football?

On a sunny afternoon, he meets the love of his life and the bane of his existence in the same event. She is beautiful, wealthy and sweet. Unfortunately, she is also the mother of an extremely intelligence and overly protective five-year-old boy who takes enormous delight in tormenting her mother's suitors. "You look like you're made out of doo-doo." Is theirs a match made in heaven or hell? Can he survive her preschool son's animosity to prove his love for them both?

Pyatak, in Russian, means "slash five". It is the last stop for the most violent and incorrigible prisoners in the modern Russian penal system. Famously, it is said to have two ways in and only one way out. Inmates enter its cages via a dilapidated, one-hundred-year-old foot bridge or an aging boat. The only way they leave is via their grave. Lately, however, many of its worst have gone missing from their cells, although they never escaped its walls. Something ancient and evil has alighted in Pyatak. A mysterious entity, it is both vicious and insatiable. No one is safe.

In this vision of the future, the most prestigious vacation money can buy is a trip to a corporate planet overgrown with a jungle wilderness. There, wealthy tourists gird armor and fantastically powerful weapons to hunt strange chimeras through an endless forest. These beasts are all genetically engineered to be fierce, bloodthirsty, and difficult to kill. Despite the benefits of their high technology, only experienced guides can lead their pampered clients safely through to the end of the game. Every year, countless bored tourists pay exorbitant fees to hunt terrifying synthetic monsters ...

In a dystopian future, humankind has lost its love of violence. Peace has so long ruled the land that we have lost all means of confronting the resurgence of a genocidal revolution, which threatens to reduce human society to a state of chaos and anarchy. The most vulnerable citizens face annihilation as they confront the revolution's inevitable success. Only one defense stands between them and oblivion. They are genetically modified warriors, bred and born to fight. They are Reapers. He has been biologically engineered to do one thing: fight for the survival of his people. Can one Reaper ...

A thousand years ago, stoic Norsemen built resilient ocean-going longboats from wood and iron. Through four centuries of conquest, in these robust vessels countless Viking adventurers set forth from homelands of ice and snow to claim victory or Valhalla along far western horizons. Cast into a vast, hostile ocean aboard a small longboat, a handful of stoic Norse mercenaries gamble their lives in pursuit of freedom and fortune. All are bound for horizons of history, inevitably destined to find their eternal home among sagas of the never seen.

Incongruity, in all its fine, reeking regalia, found a place in my young, fertile heart, so all the while thereafter my struggle was one of difference, for the greater scheme of things is an endeavor to know that which is unknown. On having come to understand a thing previously incomprehensible, luster fades, its draw recedes, and that thing, like a coin in a collection, is put away, to be occasionally admired but mostly forgotten; so, it is named a possession, and is no longer counted among desires. Song is either the progenitor or most favored partner of poetry; either may be spoken or ...

He's the proverbial grumpy old man and he ruthlessly keeps his hit-lists. You had better hope he never jots your name down in his notebook, because he'll make you the object of his obsessive ire and his dissatisfaction is notoriously relentless. Unfortunately, today is his last day on Earth... and god just made the list!

When their yacht sinks just east of New Zealand during a round-the-world sailing trip, three survivors somehow manage to pile themselves into a single tiny life raft. Adrift on one of the wildest seas in the world, their struggle to survive is a desperate one, and their hopes for rescue dwindle daily. Many weeks later, a violent storm sweeps them into the frigid and dangerous Antarctic current, and they realize they will ultimately freeze if they are not rescued before winter comes. As their anger and frustrations grow, they know they must take matters into their own hands if they are to ...

He's a notorious corporate spy. His last job uncovered a disturbing truth long and deeply buried by the powers-that-be. Though his corporate enemies have kept him imprisoned by flying him endlessly around the world, he is neither forgotten nor alone. When a band of anonymous hackers finally locates him within his prison in the sky, they will stop at nothing to free him and expose his discovery. It's a hell of a way to travel!

While the vast majority perishes in quiet anonymity, a tour of any national monument quickly reveals countless names carved into stone. These names generally identify three classes of people; scribe, conquered and conqueror. Indeed, if anything, life is an endless series of contests, large and small, but these stone-graven records typically ignore the latter for the former. Too often, history overlooks the struggles of mundanity, which perhaps better define those who endure. Pause a reflective moment to ponder the future – anticipate all the boastful elite to be immortalized there. ...

Everyone loves a good joke, but nobody enjoys being subjected to the fun. Pranks are an especially childish form of delight, perhaps because they are the ultimate expression of prurient sadism, which we must disavow as civilized adults. We, the same civilized adults who teach our beloved youth the art of warfare while stockpiling an obscene surplus of thermonuclear weapons. Now that is funny! So, tease a guilty moment to titillate your secret sadist today. Giggling, it whispers. Of spoiled affluence and nothing better to do; of grotesque victimization that makes monsters from innocent ...

Bad things happen to the people that Pablo loves. Bad, bloody things. Indeed, his hapless path through life is littered with the human wreckage of lives badly wasted; of men, women and children inexplicably maimed and murdered. Though his presence is ever the common denominator among the many deaths that surround him, evidence never ties him physically to any of the crime scenes. One frustrated Texas detective believes Pablo is culpable after one fashion or another, but he can never prove his suspicions beyond reasonable doubt. When Pablo's threat becomes personal, however, he is hard ...

He is an escaped slave who traveled north to learn things men should not know. After accumulating a lifetime of esoteric knowledge and expertise in wicked magic, he has returned home to free his granddaughter from the exploitative grip of the south. There will be hell to pay, when paw-paw conjures! With the right words at the right time, magic is possible. Paw-paw knows.

Several of the best human hypocrisies are immortalized in catechisms. We say “violence never solved anything” when history repeatedly teaches us otherwise, and once we prematurely labeled an entire, global war as “The War to End All Wars” long before we recorded its half-formed outcome. Dynasties fall. Empires rise. In marble, granite and concrete, we immortalize these events, large and small, and we celebrate the human beings named heroes there. Rightly so. Pause a moment before The Wall – let your finger trace names in stone. From pits of despair and summits of glory, they ...