Showing results by author "Stephen Huff" in All Categories

She's twelve years old and she's desperately in love with the fourteen-year-old boy who lives next door. He knows her as his best friend, but he's too preoccupied with his own travails to return her affection. Since his mother went missing three years previously, his father has become ever more violent and abusive. Now, each act of violence pulls him further and further from Dorry’s loving embrace, and she'll do anything to save him.

He is a secret agent assigned to fight a war of time. He serves an alien overlord, which has subjugated humankind through untold generations. They use him to execute subtle manipulations of time and space by sending him on mysterious errands to faraway places and distant times in the past or future. Each journey erodes a bit of his mind, his memory, his personality, and his psyche. As his personality corrodes, he encounters another alien race intent on aiding his struggle for rebellion. Waging a genocidal war through time and space, can he preserve his sanity long enough to free his people?

God's second son. Humankind's second sin. His crime, the first crime. Therefore, the greatest. After he murdered his brother, the bloody stone tumbled from his left hand, and he covered his youthful victim with earth. This, a tale told endlessly throughout eons of human existence. Yet history has always told it wrong, for his is a story without end. A fallen angel or a cursed man, one incarnate immortal soul walks among humankind through endless centuries of history. He is as irredeemable as he is unrepentant.

If the trials of childhood form the adult, then Stanley Newberry is growing into a grotesquely misshapen lump of a thing. All the popular people tell him so. Since he first met his classmates in grade school, Fat Stanley has singly borne the brunt of their endless insults, taunts and abuses. Passing from eighth grade to their first year in high school, purple-nurples and Indian-burns have long since given way to chocolate-swirlies and blackened eyes, but Fat Stanley has grown wiser and warier, too. Bastard twins born of terror and torment, fear and cynicism render him increasingly aware of ...

Mad pathos fetish broods while the black brow is creased to contemplate all manner of undoing, lays a thumb to the blade beneath a leering, sanguine eye and yearns unspeakably for a final message from God. Gross pathos fetish seethes to feed upon frustrations and terrors until the mind of a single lunatic is filled with dreams of dark endeavors that become a horror of blood, until pale the gaping face festooned in spider webs of splatters beholds a hand trembling at the wound, and moans out a final message to God. Drear pathos fetish blooms, that from an unwholesome vacuum, that from a fog ...

She’s a castaway fourteen-year-old orphan, all alone in the world, sigh! Nobody notices! Moan! Nobody cares! Groan! Heavy pout, mugging for pity! Hey! Step-off her uterus! She knows where she’s going, because she knows where she’s been! Nobody can tell her anything she hasn’t already heard! Except... this guy... this older guy... Sure, he wears cheap leisure suits and something resembling clown-shoes, but he makes such sweet promises! He tells her only what she wants to hear and nothing that bugs her... until one night... the night of Halloween and her fifteenth birthday.........

Denizens of Watami are more human than human. Though ‘normal’ citizens hysterically fear them as obscene chimeras, the pastoral Nascosi way of life embraces principles of passivity and altruism to selfless - some would say ‘suicidal’ - extremes. When a deviant dictator determines to exploit these deep-seated genocidal animosities for political gain, he finds the peace-loving Nascosi ‘morphs’ to be easy targets and convenient scapegoats in promotion of his sinister designs. Since Nascosi refuse to defend themselves, they will ultimately disappear into the vaporous anonymity of ...

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?

During the final years of the Soviet Union, its government started building an ultra-secret airbase in the center of a vast wilderness. Its secrecy outstripped its management such that construction continued despite its abandonment. Occasionally, an errant aircraft drops somebody on its tarmac, and they are never seen alive again. At the end of a late night international flight from India to Russia, a weary traveler finds himself deposited in a lonely ramp of an empty terminal. As he navigates its endless gates and corridors, this hapless traveler begins to realize he has landed in no ...

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!

During the summer of 1823, fortune called from the frontier of North America’s Great Plains. Alternately rowing or tromping along the Missouri River from Saint Louis through Fort Mandan and then beyond to Fort Henry and the Upper Missouri Breaks, countless traders gambled their lives to exploit the bounty of an untamed wilderness. All dreamed of easy profits. Through a hundred years, a plague of such interlopers had traveled there to procure beaver, mink and marten pelts via trap or trade. Herds of buffalo perished to feed them. Whole populations uprooted to serve them. Virulent diseases ...

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 ...

On Friday of Easter weekend in Juglan, Texas, many strange events distract from the festivities. Telephone service is sporadic and failing. Fires burn out of control. Police services are nonexistent. The dead and the dying accumulate on the streets. Before the village’s clocktower chimes midnight, many of its citizens will perish and the city itself will lie in flaming ruins. This is the terrible revenge of Nelson Sedgewick. For years preceding this heinous act he has brooded within the ramshackle ruins of his lifelong obsession, his self-styled “Animal Emporium and Family Fun Circus”...

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 ...