Here are the new releases from Crossroad Press for September and October 2023. Unless noted otherwise, you can purchase any of them at Amazon, B&N, Apple, Google Play, Smashwords, or Kobo.
(featuring the original cover art by Richard Newton)
Saturday Morning Fun
Heaven was only four and a half, but she knew everything about the Gnelfs. She watched the little green men on TV, “read” her Gnelf books, and watched the Gnelf movies her mommy rented for the VCR. Sometimes Heaven even dreamed about the adorable little creatures. She just loved the Gnelfs.
Saturday Night Terror
Then the Gnelfs changed. Instead of being cute and lovable, they were ugly and mean. They hurt Heaven and made her cry. Then they started hurting other people, too…her Mommy. And her best friend.
Only Heaven could stop the evil little monsters. If only she knew how…
(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
(Release date – 10/09/2023)
Irving Wallace’s novels have made him one of America’s best-known and best-selling storytellers. Now to the list of such best sellers as The Fan Club, The Word, The Seven Minutes, and The Plot he has added his most timely and compelling novel to date: The R Document—the story of a conspiracy to destroy the Bill of Rights, of an attempt by the FBI to take over the country.
Against a background of rising violence and crime, Wallace pits two opposing forces: those who are working to amend the Constitution so that the Government can impose a drastic rule of “law and order” and those who recognize that the proposed 35th Amendment may conceal a far more sinister and far-reaching plan, one that would subvert the entire process of Constitutional government and replace it with a police state. Opponents in this life-and-death conflict are the bull-like, powerful Director of the FBI, Vernon T. Tynan, and the new Attorney General, Christopher Collins, an ambitious, honest man who supports the controversial 35th Amendment despite his private misgivings, but who discovers that there is a secret plot of an evil and vicious nature behind it.
For Collins, the first doubt is stirred at the deathbed of his predecessor, whose last words are a warning of “The R Document”—the dangerous, mysterious, elusive key to the nation’s future. In search of this vital document, in a desperate fight against time, Collins stumbles upon the possibility that the FBI is terrorizing important leaders in California and that the Government may be secretly preparing a concentration camp in the desert against the day when the Amendment has been ratified. As his hunt for “The R Document” continues, Collins finds himself involved in a widening series of dirty tricks: an attempt at sexual blackmail against himself; the establishment of a zombie-like American town in which, as a “pilot program,” the citizens have been stripped of their Constitutional rights; a brutal double murder; a revelation of scandal in his wife’s past that causes her to vanish.
As the hours rush by to the moment when California will take the final, decisive vote on the ratification of the 35th Amendment, the fate of the country rests on Collins’ shoulders, on the outcome of his death struggle with Director Tynan and on the hunt for “The R Document.” Shocking, authentic, excitingly readable, blending inside fact with fiction as only Irving Wallace can, The R Document will be one of the most widely read and talked-about novels of the year.
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 P. D. Cacek
(Release date – 10/28/2023)
Poor Allison. One minute she’s crying into her tequila in a country-western bar, and the next she’s a vampire. She’d fallen for a lot of lines in her time, but she’s never had a morning after like this one, waking up alone in a seedy L.A. motel room, dumped again–and suddenly one of the undead.
Seth had promised her that things would be different. Then he sucked her dry and left her without so much as a training manual. Now it’s up to her to figure out how to survive without a clue in the seamy underbelly of the city at night. But survival is more of a long shot than ever once Allison gets on the bad side of a catty coven of exotic dancers…all of them vengeful vampires.
“Cacek brings impressive assets to the task of entertaining and frightening her readers.” – The Cemetery House
“Cacek doesn’t pull any punches.” – The Denver Post
(Release date – 10/31/2023)
At a multiple-vehicle accident in Memphis, EMT Rick Scott hears a dead man whisper, “It’s begun…the feeding.”
In Montreal, a demon attacks centuries-old horologist and priest of the Goddess, Reginaldo da Silva, damaging the mandala that binds the chains of the Pleiades.
In Arkansas, Talmaiel, a rogue Watcher who escaped the avenging angels in the days of Enoch, leads a biker army to free his brothers from the Abyss.
As the Hour of the Nephilim approaches, Rick must choose—side with humanity or become a prince among the Fallen.
The Cosmic Clock is ticking.
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“Boatman’s writing bruises with brutality and humanity. Gritty, breakneck, and terrifyingly dark.” —Lee Murray, four-time Bram Stoker Awards®-Winner and author of Grotesque: Monster Stories