These are the books on pre-order that will be released within the next few months. Click the book title links to purchase your copy today.
(Release date – 9/12/2023)
TALES OF NYARLATHOTEP is the fourth book of the Books of Cthulhu series by Crossroad Press (Tales of the Al-Azif, Tales of Yog-Sothoth, The Book of Yig). It is an anthology featuring pulpy tales of horror starring Outer God and his myriad plots as well as games. Nyarlathotep is functionally omnipotent and treats humanity like ants underneath a magnifying glass. He is impossible to kill but perhaps capable of being thwarted. Or maybe that’s just what he wants you to think.
Experience such stories as a redneck family dealing with their insane body-snatching ancestor, a resurrected pharaoh trapped in a museum, a depraved family of British nobles out to harness ancient forces, and a post-apocalypse town under siege by a an immortal gun-slinging god’s avatar. Whether a hero or an ordinary human, none can triumph but maybe they can survive for another day.
This book contains thirteen chilling and adventure-filled tales by some of the best Cthulhu Mythos authors today, including Stoker Award-winning author David Niall Wilson (The Call of Distant Shores), as well as such fantastic authors as C.T. Phipps (Cthulhu Armageddon), David Hambling (the Harry Stubbs series), Matthew Davenport (the Andrew Doran series), Andrea Pearson (Mosaic), Eric Malikyte (Ego Trip), and David J. West (Let Sleeping Gods Lie).
Fans of Necroscope author Brian Lumley’s Titus Crow series will also see the authorized first appearance of the titular character since The Compleat Crow!
by Dave Jeffery
(Release date – 9/12/2023)
The coastal town of Dorsal Finn is no stranger to the fantastic and the bizarre. A dark heart beats beneath its cobblestone skin and the rhythm is a beacon for all things devious and evil. Only its reluctant sentinel, Beatrice Beecham, keeps the town free from the terrible entities that it attracts.
Now Dorsal Finn has four new visitors. They look like a regular gang of youths, yet they are anything but human. Masters of manipulation and skilled in deception, these beings have their own agenda. Their tools to move their plans forward include an esoteric device and a terrifying cosmic creature with deadly intent.
And, unless she can stop them, the ritual sacrifice of Beatrice’s best friends.
(Release date – 9/19/2023)
Double Dose picks up right where Double Threat leaves off – with a snarl of threads to tie up, a host of mysteries to explain, all complicated by some embarrassing intrusions from the past.
So many secrets in Nespodee Springs…the biggest is revealed when Rhys and Daley track down the second half of the Pendry film and learn the secrets of the clan’s Tesla tower and the catastrophic details of the plan to bring the Visitors back to Earth.
But the insidious malady known as “the horrors” remains a mystery, claiming more and more victims every day. Daley and Pard learn they can cure it – if only the powers that be will allow them.
Daley finds herself in an ironic situation: For the first time in her life she’s trying to play it straight – help people instead of scam them – and no one will let her. In the past, when she’s spun a web of lies, the marks lapped it up like honey. Now, when she’s telling the truth – a life-saving truth – no one believes her.
And meanwhile, over the Salton Sea, an ominous darkness is growing…
(Release date 9/26/2023)
The Canterbury Nightmares is a collection of stories from the edge of the abyss. Combining the essence of Chaucer’s pilgrims on their journey to a shrine, with what appeared to be the end of a global pandemic, these tales were born in a time when personal connections were few, breathing the air in a grocery store felt unsafe, and the country was dissolving into seemingly irreparable divisions.
Eleven travelers heading out to visit The Grand Canyon. All of them have their reasons. All of them have their losses, and their pain. All of them are dark. From an old man taking a promised journey with his wife, to a congregation that has lost its way, from different backgrounds and cultures, to different ways of dealing with grief, loss, and isolation, this book will take you places you do not expect.
Contents:
The Old Man’s Tale – Steve Rasnic Tem
The Liberation of Brother Buffalo – Michael Boatman
Think of the Family – Ai Jiang
To See Her in Sepia – Scott J. Moses
The Preditor’s Tale – Terence Taylor
The Wife of Wrath’s Tale – John B. Rosenman
The Secret Place: A Knight’s Tale – Stephen Mark Rainey
The Sacred Clarion – S. A. Cosby
The Tour Guide’s Tale – Anna Tambour
Every Form of Person – J. A. W. McCarthy
Vending Machine Girl – Eric LaRocca
Unfit to Print: A Modern Media Satire
(Release date – 10/10/2023)
What happens when SuperGoodMedia, a ridiculous out-of-town newspaper chain, buys the venerable Boston Daily Tribune, which has published every day since 1823? Heads roll and the few journalists left wonder when it will be their turn. That’s protagonist Nick Nolan’s worry, too – until he gets exclusive coverage of a single mother who claims that the Virgin Mary is speaking to the world through her young comatose daughter.
Nolan not only keeps his job but becomes an international celebrity as The Tribune’s circulation soars, advertisers bring record revenues, SuperGoodMedia negotiates lucrative movie and TV contracts, and circus-like crowds of thousands gather outside the single mother’s home, awaiting miracles as the pope plans to visit… and a secret disaster looms.
Enter Benjamin Franklin, Founding Father and early pillar of the American press. Appearing to Nolan in dreams, Franklin offers a brutal critique of much of today’s media, when real-life hedge funds and chains gut and close local newspapers, creating an unprecedented threat to American democracy. Franklin also prompts Nolan’s eventual crisis of conscience, which leads to his redemption and an initiative that might help save local journalism while furthering social-justice causes.
By turns dramatic, fantastical, and darkly comedic, Unfit to Print is a scathing indictment of today’s media by G. Wayne Miller, author and multiple award-winning journalist for four decades, most of them at the Pulitzer Prize-winning Providence Journal, oldest continuously published daily newspaper in the U.S. “Unfit to Print” is also a keen commentary on today’s politics and culture, when so many get their “news” from social media, misinformation from domestic and foreign sources distorts truth, and reporters are disparaged as enemies of the people.
But why a novel and not a memoir or exposé?
Because as Ralph Waldo Emerson is purported to have said, “fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.”
by Thom Carnell
(release date 11/7/2023)
In this, the tenth book by Fangoria/Dread Central contributor Thom Carnell, we present nineteen brand new tales, compiled in the order in which they were completed, all written during the first years of the Coronavirus Pandemic. These stories range from the poignant to the paranoid, from the heartbreaking to the heart-pounding, all designed to transport the reader away from our mundane world to the wild frontiers of the imagination. Stories that are meant to be read over and over again.
Stories included in this collection:
Advent
I Double-Dog Dare Ya
Lealtà
Hitting the Spot
Secuestrados
The Mumble
Real Estate
Paw-Fly
Burying the Bone
Ablution
Stuck
The Somnambulist
Carrion
Ijheyojin
The Atttestant
Alias: Smith and Jones
Kiru
Willow, Weep for Me
Man’s Best Friend
Salamat!
by Adam Stemple
(Release date – 11/7/2023)
Pallasoldi. The crossroad of kingdoms. Center of commerce, of trade. While empires rise and fall, the city remains. For trade is the lifeblood of all who would rule, and Pallasoldi is its beating heart.
Most nights in Pallasoldi were the same for Alda: dress in black, go to the nicer parts of town, and steal everything that’s not nailed down. It’s not the greatest life—she risks losing a hand to the law or her head to her murderous boss, Heron, if she screws up—but she’s good at her job, has her own place, and even has a little bit of silver stashed away.
But this night is different. Because whatever she stole has the whole city looking for her. They all want what she has and are willing to kill anybody and everybody to get it from her.
And Alda doesn’t even know what it is.
**************
“There is no one on earth who writes the kind of dirtbags, scoundrels, cutthroats and rotters quite like Adam Stemple, always with equal portions of compassion and exasperation, with the occasional well-deserved scorn. This book is a complex, knotty, and cliff-hanging yarn. I enjoyed it immensely.” — Kelly Barnhill, Newbery and World Fantasy award winner, and NYT best selling author
“Everything I’ve loved about Stemple’s work comes together in this. Three characters, each a delight to follow, spiral in to a meeting with all the fireworks you’d hoped for. I can’t wait for the next one.” — NYT best-selling author, Steven Brust
Billy the Kid and the Lazarus Stone
By Kevin Lucia
(Release date 11/14/2023)
The Lincoln County Wars are over. Billy Bonney—“The Scourge of the Midwest”—and his band of Regulators have lost, and are on the run. When a job offer to “hunt a big cat” menacing a mining operation in the small bordertown of Tascosa, Texas, comes their way, it seems like the perfect chance to flee the law and earn a big stake. Maybe a big enough stake for everyone to make a clean break and go straight for good.
It’s not a big cat killing the miners in Tascosa, however. It’s something ancient and evil, with an unquenchable thirst for human flesh. Even worse, Billy and his pals find themselves in the midst of one man’s obsessive search for the Lazarus Stone, a mythical gem purported to possess uncanny healing powers. According to legend, the last knight of the Templars hid the stone in Cottonwood Mountain, just outside Tascosa. The mining operation was nothing but a sham to find the stone; because Wagner Rutherford III—a wealthy plantation owner and amateur archeologist—believes the stone can resurrect his dead son. Even more—the monsters are drawn to the stone’s power like moths to a flame, and stand between them and the stone.
Since the end of the Lincoln County Wars, Billy the Kid has been without purpose. A gun pointed nowhere. Now, with the help of a former priest-turned occult scholar, a small town sheriff, and itinerant and adventuring frontier doctor, Billy the Kid will find his new purpose—and destiny—or he’ll finally feel the taste of death on his tongue.
(Release date – 11/14/2023)
“Welcome to the moon!”
Neal Gordon screwed up his assignment on Mars and they reassigned him to Antarctica. Now he’s being reassigned some place even worse: Luna City. A crime ridden hellhole with a super-rich ruling class, he almost immediately finds himself targeted by bounty hunters and cyborg terrorists. Thankfully, Neal has an unusual set of partners in robot dog, Barksley, and the snarky but badass Lucy Westenra. Yes, make all the vampire jokes you want.
It’s tough being a corporate cop on humanity’s foremost colony and before this adventure is over, he’s going to have to deal with deranged influencers, mysterious female secret agents, and a 1970s themed flying car called the Purple Rain. Can he survive to get reassigned? Who knows.
MOON COPS ON THE MOON is set in the Futurepunk setting of Agent G, the Cyber Dragons Trilogy, and Space Academy novels but functions as a standalone series. It is a humorous action-filled romp that fans of The Expanse, Robocop, Demolition Man, and Blade Runner will enjoy.
(Release date – 11/21/2023)
The oily and brackish waters of the Russian Northern Fleet submarine base part for the passage of the colossal special purpose Omega II-class submarine Belgorod, on a mission to hold the United States hostage. This gigantic submarine is armed with three Poseidon unmanned submersibles, each with a 10-megaton warhead. Her goal: placing them offshore in U.S. ports in a nuclear-blackmail chess move.
In response, the United States dispatches the newest special operations attack submarine, the Virginia-class USS New Jersey, which lies in wait to follow Belgorod under the polar icecap. Because every submariner knows that what happens under the ice…never happened.
Legendary former admiral and current National Security Advisor Michael Pacino and his son Anthony, a combat-decorated veteran of undersea warfare, return in this epic novel of submarine-versus-submarine warfare.
by Jason Ridler
The Great War, 1918. With no end in sight, dark forces have entered the horror of No Man’s Land to secure victory or Armageddon.
Swept into their currents are two figures who will shape the final blow. Warren Bishop, con man and coward, is killed by his own dead brother in the lunar hell of France and reborn to serve the Lost Battalion, the army of war dead serving a mad sorcerer. Meanwhile inventor Vasilya Savorov, illegitimate daughter and heir to the Fabergé family fortune, has been kidnapped by the Germans to make a mechanical nightmare to break the deadlock of war and secure victory for the Kaiser.
As fate draws them together the future of millions lies in the balance. Victory or defeat means a cataclysmic Harvest of Blood and Iron.