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

Declared missing-in-action while serving in Afghanistan, her eldest son's disappearance left a massive whole in this mother's life. Her misery cannot be assuaged by human sympathy or the keepsakes of memories. Although he is certainly dead, she refuses to speak of it and insists he is still alive somewhere out there in the world. On her deathbed, she reveals to her family that he has been calling her every Friday when it rains. A mother's love for her children may transcend time. When it does, who can determine where reality ends and desperate fantasy begins? Only she and her son know the ...

Black eyeliner. Black lashes. Black lips. Black hair. Through it all, peers the white cake face of Darling Girl Jones, orphan. From time to time, she awakens in her academy dorm room to find an ethereal spirit haunting her bed. Never disturbing, always intriguing, such an event is a certain promise of ghoulish adventure and mortal danger. Most girly-girls might scream. Not Darling Girl. Orphaned young and, so, relegated to the care of starchy Miss Jenkins, headmistress of her all-girls boarding school, Darling is no stranger to hardship and unquiet spirits. Today, in the company of a hippy ...

How long can one sensitive youth tolerate the incessant shelling, the nerve-wracking eruptions, the slumber-slaying shockwaves of bombardment? How much terror can a soldier endure before he takes that last short walk beyond the trenches and coiled barbed wire into no-man's land to meet his violent fate? The bloodiest war of the bloodiest century in human history. For some, it never ends.

If you listen long enough, you may be convinced of anything. Provided the voice you heed is sufficiently provocative... provided you are prepared to ponder its lies or truths... provided it gets to you early enough. What are the origins of human evil? Is it guaranteed from birth, or is it visited upon us via infantile nightmares?

Tarn is a water world, covered from pole to pole by an incredibly deep ocean. Humankind built only one city there. Situated directly on its equator, terraformers strategically emplaced this massive port to continuously exploit the planet's boundless fisheries. Because Tarn orbits its binary system on an extreme axial tilt, each day also measures a year, and because its suns are lethal, Tarn fish only rise to its surface in the darkness. Fishing there is a dangerous business, but the planet's entire economy subsists on the larva of a single enormous predator, which the galactic elite consume...

When we dream of falling, we inevitably awaken at the moment of impact. When we run for our lives from nightmare monsters, we invariably rouse before the bloodthirsty end. Myth and folklore imply we die in the waking world when we die in our dreams, and this is why living human beings never dream all the way through such slumberous events. This assertion begs a question. How many of the dead have suffered such fates? Countless anonymous people populate our night visions. Who are they? What becomes of them when we lay violent hands upon them in lividity of dreams?

Every ten years, a lottery draws them from all over the country. Every lottery is always the same: four boys and three girls, each with an exceptional mind and each mired in a neglectful or abusive life, which is sure to eventually destroy them. The spooky mansion at 472 Malign Terrace will become their home and their salvation, strange and mysterious though it may seem. Neglected by his addicted mother, a mysterious lottery is the one chance this boy has for a normal life. He reports to 472 Malign Terrace alone and trembling with a strange mixture of terror and excitement.

Black eyeliner. Black lashes. Black lips. Black hair. Through it all, peers the white cake face of Darling Girl Jones, orphan. From time to time, she awakens in her academy dorm room to find an ethereal spirit haunting her bed. Never disturbing, always intriguing, such an event is a certain promise of ghoulish adventure and mortal danger. Although today is a special day at her Academy because today is Christmas Eve - and that means all-you-can-eat pancakes with real maple syrup - Darling Girl's holidays are never so easy and a ghost with a serious problem is certain to spoil her fun!

They are five rough characters in service of the mysterious and powerful Heart Witch of the Gods. She has tasked them to enshrine the latest acolytes of her Sinister Profligate Palm, a jewel-encrusted platinum talisman of unknown power. Follow them through benighted crevasses of the nation on a quest to recruit their sinister counterparts from the ranks of underworld outcasts, vagabonds and felons. A career burglar, doomed prostitute, football player rapist, psychotic teen, and precognitive child form an unholy alliance. What comes next?

A young, newlywed couple. A new custom home. A good life. Yet nothing can ever be perfect. When the man of the house begins to experience bizarre nightmares involving a disturbing, pantomime face appearing in his wife's voluminous closet night after night, his sanity becomes an issue. Though their evenings at home are filled with playful lovemaking in the first months spent in their lavish new dwelling, a chill begins to settle over them with the passage of time. When disturbing images and inexplicable disappearances plague a young couple in their new home, they begin to question every ...

On a lonely plot of land in the middle of a desolate night, a forlorn man sits drinking and smoking on his porch as he watches a sinister shadow slowly, intrepidly crossing the abandoned rows of a forgotten farm. While a damaged siphon pump works rhythmically in the distance, he ponders the nature of destiny and fate. Will he survive the evening? Something black and terrifying crosses fallow rows, bound for your porch lamp in the darkness. Welcome or no, fate never knocks.

Take away all a man has. Burn away every sense but that of pain. Blow away the ashes of everything he once was and will no longer be. What remains? Something deadly. Make a man into such a thing, and you make him into something worse than an animal. Such a creature is capable of anything, since it is willing to do anything. Become anything. Anything it has to be to end its suffering and die properly. After a terrible crime, Maxwell Deem chooses the divergent pathway of revenge. With a laser-beam focus, he identifies his targets and then cuts straight to the kill. Sun hot. Blinding white. ...

It's a new approach to criminal rehabilitation. It's tough love at its toughest. There, complete isolation and unending hours of boredom act like an acid drip against the tough granite exterior of its recalcitrant inmates. Though it is a humane system, it offers no mercy to the incorrigible and it has no patience for those who refuse to learn. Only the strongest can long resist, but no human being can resist forever. Unreasonably hard and unforgiving, this prison receives only the worst of the worst, and it serves only one purpose. Despite his vows to break it before it breaks him, he will ...

He is Hate Equinox. She is Loathing Solstice. He is dark of eye and complexion, while she has ivory skin, white hair and a diamond blue gaze. Though they both come from the same community of pagans, they are polar opposites. Growing up together in public schools, each strives to outdo the other, but neither manages to successfully dominate. In time, they graduate high school and then attend different universities, enjoying a parting of ways. Many years later, their fates converge and the sparks fly. Given the conspiracy of proper circumstance and much time, mortal enemies may occasionally ...

The Korengal Valley of Afghanistan was one of the most dangerous places in the world during 2008. There on a daily basis, brave Americans confronted the grim realities of a determined guerilla resistance as they opposed an all but invisible enemy exercising a ruthless determination to achieve their objectives at all costs and without heed to civilized rules of war. Using improvised explosive devices and ambush tactics, stubborn jihadists of the region worked fanatically to sap American will to fight by bleeding its forward forces white via use of the most brutal weapons on hand. Deployment ...

This is the true-to-life horror story of a boy born without a name into a lifetime of loss, suffering and sorrow. Bestially abused throughout his formative years, the boy has the appearance of a patchwork monster by the time he arrives at a notorious desert orphanage in Pecan County, Texas. Ostensibly intended to alleviate and soothe the misery of such children, he quickly discovers that Parker House is instead a diabolical nightmare of neglect, exploitation and sadism. There, the boy will travel new realms of torment in the company of his sadistic keepers, Momma and Eugene Parker, who will...

Jo-Jo's father died young and his mother, while present, could not pick up the slack. It's not easy to raise an unguided young man of high school age, especially a young man as misunderstood as Jo-Jo. The last day of school will forever change everyone who experiences it. Life is too short to mourn the dead forever. In a smile, a frown. In laughter, sorrow. Today is Jo-Jo’s “Big Day”.

Civilization deconstructed itself like a riot in a madhouse. One minute it all functioned with a standard sort of craziness, and the next it devolved into ten billion psychotic inmates at each other’s throats like suddenly sprung animals. Survivors refer to civilization’s final irrational act as "Terminus", but this is an unofficial label. It simply gives them a handle with which to wield the concept of their end times. It bifurcates their memory. Before. After. In between, an unspeakable river of blood.

During his service as an intern at the SETI Project, Simian Wynwood fatefully records “first contact” with an alien intelligence. Captured in high-fidelity analog format, this broadcast message contains vast stores of advanced, world-changing technology. Within months, this so-called SETI-Tech becomes widely available to the general populous, and disturbing events rapidly begin to unfold around the planet as an apparently benevolent alien influence slowly embraces and then seizes control of nearly every aspect of human civilization.

After the apocalyptic Terminus Signal induces worldwide slaughter, a death-weary band of survivors has followed the exotically handsome Deacon into a desert wasteland equally plagued by semi-organized clans of Terminal-case burnouts and bizarre alien chimeras. From Badwater Basin, sunken into the lowest badlands of North America to the high, frozen icecaps of Antarctica, this hardy troupe of survivors has come to raise hell and kick alien ass.