Since 1889, mysterious lights have appeared outside Rostov, a remote Texas town. Ranchers believed them to be the campfires of rustlers, but campfires don’t rise and fall, merge, and change colors. In World War I, the locals believed that the lights came from German forces massing on the Mexican border. In the Second World War, the US military built an airfield there and used planes to try to discover the secret of the lights. In 1980, the entire town set out on a “Ghost Light Hunt.” For more than a century, each attempt to get close to the lights met with horrifying results. Now police officer Dan Page follows the trail of his missing wife from New Mexico to Texas and discovers that she and hundreds of spectators have become enraptured by the lights. After a crazed gunman fires obsessively into the crowd, the stage is set for more death. To save his wife, Page must confront the mystery of the lights. His desperate search reveals a government conspiracy that dates back to World War II. The abandoned airfield is more than what it seems. So is a nearby observatory, with a purpose even more mysterious and lethal than the lights themselves. Drawing his inspiration from the real-life Marfa lights, critically acclaimed Morrell packs The Shimmer with his trademark blend of action and terror.

How do you hunt a killer who can go back in time and make sure you’re never born? A police pursuit kicks Sergeant Jack Redding of the Florida Highway Patrol and his trainee, Julie Karras, into a shoot-out that ends with one girl dead and another in cuffs, and the driver of the SUV fleeing into the Intracoastal Waterway. Redding stays on the hunt, driven by the trace memory that he knows that running woman—and he does, because his grandfather, a cop in Jacksonville, was hunting the same woman in 1957. Redding and his partner, Pandora Jansson, chase a seductive serial killer who can ride The Shimmer across decades. The pursuit cuts from modern-day Jacksonville to Mafia-ruled St. Augustine in 1957, then to the French Quarter of New Orleans in 1914. The stakes turn brutal when Jack, whose wife and child died in a crash the previous Christmas Eve, faces a terrible choice: help his grandfather catch the killer, or change time itself and try to save his wife and child. The Shimmer is a unique time-shifting thriller that will stay with you long after its utterly unforeseen and yet perfectly diabolical ending.

How do you hunt a killer who can go back in time and make sure you're never born? A police pursuit kicks Sergeant Jack Redding of the Florida Highway Patrol and his trainee, Julie Karras, into a shoot–out that ends with one girl dead and another in cuffs, and the driver of the SUV fleeing into the Intracoastal Waterway. Redding stays on the hunt, driven by the trace memory that he knows that running woman – and he does, because his grandfather, a cop in Jacksonville, was hunting the same woman in 1957. Redding and his partner, Pandora Jansson, chase this seductive serial killer who can ride The Shimmer across decades. The pursuit cuts from modern–day Jacksonville to Mafia–ruled St. Augustine in 1957, then to the French Quarter of New Orleans in 1914. The stakes turn brutal when Jack, whose wife and child died in a crash the previous Christmas Eve, faces a terrible choice: help his grandfather catch the killer, or change time itself and try to save his wife and child. The Shimmer is a unique time–shifting thriller that will stay with you long after its utterly unforeseen and yet perfectly diabolical ending.

In the near future, in the Epcot of Walt Disney's imagination, sixty thousand people live in a CommuniTree surrounding the forward-looking Walt Disney World theme park. Five unique families are among the residents—and some of the parents were once known as the Kingdom Keepers. Their identities are carefully guarded in order to raise their children without special treatment, most of the Kingdom Keepers work for the Walt Disney Company, and have settled into "ordinary" and rewarding lives.When a messenger carrying a secret communication from Villains Park in Hong Kong coincides with both a solar eclipse and Eli Whitman's thirteenth birthday—a few "ordinary" kids are thrust into a battle to save Epcot and find their friend who has mysteriously disappeared.With their friend missing and their parents acting strangely, the Kingdom Kids discover they are in possession of unusual powers as they forge a bond to rescue their friend and uncover the truth about how real magic has entered their lives.

A shattered weapon. A job undone. A new danger. An ancient hero and an uprooted inventor reunite to deal with an old problem, all the while confronting changes, new fears, and a duty without end. “The Things She Made” is a short story set in Anthony St. Clair’s acclaimed Rucksack Universe. The Rucksack Universe series combines alternate history, speculative fiction, myth, adventure, globetrotting, and intrigue—all with well-poured pints of beer. Library Journal says Anthony St. Clair’s storytelling has “universe building reminiscent of Terry Pratchett,” and readers say they love the Rucksack Universe’s unique combination of “quirk, wit, travel, and magic.”

The weekend is fast approaching. The couple of days leading up to it are turning strange, with small occurrences that most people will shrug off as they go about their daily routines. That is, until they can no longer ignore them. Mike and his wife, Shelly, are dealing with their teenage children. One is planning to go out shopping and gallivant with her best friend, the other is content with hooking up with his best friend and getting lost all weekend in some otherworldly realm, gaming their life away. Mike and Shelly are trying to plan a quiet weekend around the house, sitting on the front porch, watching their little town come alive every morning, watching life ebb and flow. But the strange occurrences will become more intense with each passing day, until Mike and Shelly find themselves falling further into the very depths of hell. They both will bear witness to many horrific events that will shake them to their cores, leaving them to wonder about the fates of family, friends, and all of humanity.

Feminist Posthumanism in Contemporary Science Fiction Film and Media: From Annihilation to High Life and Beyond places posthumanism and feminist theory into dialogue with contemporary science fiction film and media. This essay collection is intimately invested in the debates around the posthuman and the critical posthumanities within a feminist critical-theoretical framework. In this posthumanist light, science fiction as a genre allows for new imaginings of human-technological relations, while it can also be the site of a critique of human exceptionalism and essentialism. In this way, science fiction affords unique opportunities for the scholarly investigation of the relevance and relative applicability of specific posthumanist themes and questions in a particularly rich and wide-ranging popular cultural field of production. One of the reasons for this suitability is the genre's historically longstanding relationship with the critical investigation of gender, specifically the position and relative empowerment of women. The original analyses presented here pay close attention to audiovisual style (including game mechanics), facilitating the critical interrogation of the issues and questions around posthumanism. Where typically the mention of SF in the posthumanist context calls to mind a whole set of (often clichéd) tropes-the cyborg, technologically augmented bodies, AI subjectivities, etc.-this volume's thirteen chapters analyze specific examples of contemporary SF cinema that engage in meaningful ways with the burgeoning field of critical posthumanism, and that utilize such films to interrogate posthumanist and feminist as well as humanistic ideas.