Showing results by author "Kevin Candela" in All Categories

Dracula, Wolfman, The Mummy, Frankenstein. You've lived with the stories your whole life. You've read the tales. You've watched the films. But what if the stories were different? What if the things you read about these monsters were warped and twisted? Here lie stories you may not have heard. Stories both weird and shocking. Bizarre and grotesque. Alternate versions of your favorite classic monsters you've never read and never will again. Featuring 13 stories by Jonathan Moon, The Sisters of Slaughter, Tom Lucas and more!

Something ancient has awakened in the depths. So terrifying is this newly freed entity that sea slugs are driven onto resort beaches to climb hotel walls...and die. Yet the threat posed by the primal sentience is far less obvious to the world's dominant species, seemingly manifesting in the trance states of a couple rescued by Ben Miles and his celeb wife, Morna Belchek...and subsequently communicated to Morna as well.

Gigantic centipedes born of genetic engineering and experimental pesticides and fertilizers storm a small farming community, running down and devouring everything on two legs, in this exciting new tale of suburban terror and mayhem.

The saga of Krakenstein concludes in cataclysmic, mind-blowing action in the Next Regeneration trilogy. The former Dr. Max Shepperton, who long ago became a superhero daikaiju by default when he merged with an ancient marine creature and the mutated result grew to immense size, is still at it 20 years after the original trilogy. This time around, he takes on a shape-shifting titan made of nanobots and controlled by his vengeful brother, and battles a life-draining giant horror from the depths of outer space.

Working on the High-Altitude Atmospheric and Light Observatory research platform 16 miles above Earth's surface , Crystal Calhoun is used to an alien form of existence. But when she dreams through the waking eyes of a shipboard peer, the game changes, and when she learns that the same thing is happening to others, her paranoia kicks in and she seeks to understand what's happening. The problem is that even the people running the entire operation don't have a clue, and what's worse is that they're more confused and worried than she is. Crystal becomes determined to get to the truth.

The sixth "drive-in double feature" in the Super SF Double Feature series spotlights alien invasion in both directions - coming and going - with two thrilling tales of science-fiction culture shock.

A Year in the Borderlands writer Kevin Candela's wild second excursion into alternate realities includes 17 tales, twelve of which have appeared in previously released anthologies and are collected here for the first time. These short stories combine with five never before released works, including the novella It's Only Funny if You Laugh, to produce a wide-ranging panoramic view of the worlds and realities that exist beyond our own. Playing With Reality is another vividly detailed page in the Atlas of the Unknown.

In Ghost in the Sky, the first installment in the Bob the Interdimensional Trucker series, Sam Gage has picked up an enigmatic motorist whose mere presence, it seems, is making Gage hear the sound of a small propeller-driven passenger airplane...or maybe even a crop duster. But whatever is really making the sound, which his rider can't hear, is not only keeping pace with Gage's truck at an impossibly slow speed for airplane flight - it's also invisible.

Horrifying creatures have been loosed from a secret lab, leaving the handful of survivors of the storm under siege by nightmarish beasts with raking talons and fiendish cleverness. Though small, the monsters are utterly ruthless, and though at first they carefully seek out only one person at a time their resolve and boldness continues to increase such that they are soon hunting down the last of the human prey...an army of vicious predators determined to exterminate the species that created them.

When monsters rule the earth...Herein you’ll find a series of sojourns to places where humans are often quite literally overshadowed by the action at hand. This collection of exciting tales from writers who love the giant monster genre runs the gamut from mutation to invasion - from insurrection to vengeance - from the distant past to a far-off future, all with a single common factor: Great big game-changing things.

Mars One by Kevin Candela: What do you do when cabin fever of the outer space variety drives one of your four-person crew to prank your commander…to death…leaving you and said pranker to “work things out” on the last half of your eight-month pioneering mission to colonize Mars? Homecoming by Roma Gray: An alien race decides to “punish” humanity by sending all their ships and military home unharmed. Are they being nice, or have they figured something out?

In the year 1284, the legendary Pied Piper punished the villagers of Hamelin, Germany, by leading their children off into a hole that opened in a mountainside. The parents never saw their offspring again. This much is common knowledge thanks to the tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, which came to be in the year 1482.

The Red Bozos were the friendliest faces in frenetic Midlands Amusement Park. Security personnel, yes, but they were more than that, for lost children seeing one of those garish outfits and the sympathetic smile on the painted face atop it knew they would soon be reunited with their parents.

The ghosts were there the day it opened for business. The Leeward Hotel is a mirror. From the moment its first stone was laid, it has reflected the mysteries of the restless and the restless Atlantic Ocean over which it looms atop a stark cliff in Cornwall, with guests frequently seeing the highly eccentric owners walking around the halls while they were supposedly locked in their private haven upstairs.

Aurora Hayes is probably the most agreeable and least judgmental of the Roads Unlimited driving team, but even she has her limits. When something that sure looks like the scary bipedal "myth" called the chupacabra races in out of the darkness in North Texas and jumps aboard her rig, Aurora finds herself stuck with the edgy, bug-eyed little monster on a long haul across the South to Florida. But dealing with the freakish creature, which appears to have no language and seems determined to stay with the truck, is just the warm-up: The thing's master arrives.

Race Harleson is up against it big time: The world is stripping naked, and it seems to be some form of viral madness. He ends up shot into space with a couple of sharp veteran astronauts...and a new sidekick, Dark Matter. Physics super-prodigy Crayten "Cray-Cray" Hobbs has juiced himself up so much that he can alter the essence of matter to his rather freewheeling will, so Race is understandably both awed and annoyed by the hyper young man, and he's stuck keeping his fingers crossed that the people who sent them up there knew what they're doing.

In a quartet of tribute tales from theses authors that both idolize and have recently encountered Hank's works, the voice of the poet laureate of the gutter is restored, so that once more the good duker can take a swing.

You won’t find the place on any map. It’s somewhere else, hidden away in a wondrous parallel reality of mystery, awe, and terror. This both is and isn’t the “Old West”. They share the same stark and unforgiving terrain and exist in the same timeframe, primarily the 1800s. But there the similarities cease. In Spirit County, for example, death is often not the end, but the beginning. Sometimes even the middle. Mythological creatures prove real...and deadly. Towns can disappear by daylight and return with the setting sun.

With great power comes great responsibility. And on modern day Earth, if great power doesn’t play nice with greater powers it gets something else too: Deadly persecution. After all, the stakes are no less than absolute control of every living being on the planet. Roman Novato and Chalice Rayne can communicate telepathically, sense imminent danger, and more now, but when those accidentally inherited talents are set against shape-shifting alien assassins, invisible drones, devastating particle beam satellites, and the world’s hidden ruling elite the game isn’t exactly fair.

Just like their new home of Sunder Creek, set in the shadow of Blood Ridge, young Ronnie Carpenter and her shy ward Essa Hale harbor strange secrets. In fact, their arrival seems to bring the town’s dark and unspoken terror to light, as it affects Essa in mysterious ways. Soon, inexplicable events all point to an ancient legend being all too real. What does the dreaded ilé nagí, the fiery spirit of the woods, want with the girl? Ronnie must find out before it’s too late.