A SAMPLER OF ALAN BAXTER'S DARK FICTION Horror, crime, and dark fantasy. Four complete stories and the opening chapters of six longer books from Alan Baxter's extensive back catalogue. Featuring one full novella ("Out On A Rim" from The Gulp), three entire short stories ("Crow Shine" from Crow Shine, "Simulacrum of Hope" from Served Cold, and "The Normandy Curse"), plus the opening chapters of six longer books: Devouring Dark, Hidden City, Bound, Manifest Recall, Primordial, and Blood Codex. "Alan Baxter is Australia's master of literary darkness." – This Is Horror "Alan Baxter can take horror from gonzo to heartbreaking in an instant. Good stuff… Alan Baxter can write like a m***********." – Gail Simone, best-selling author of DC's Birds of Prey, Wonder Woman, and more "Alan Baxter is an accomplished storyteller who ably evokes magic and menace." – Laird Barron, author of Swift to Chase "Baxter delivers the horror goods." – Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Cabin at the End of the World "Alan Baxter is one of the best horror writers in the business." – Kealan Patrick Burke, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Turtle Boy, Kin, and Sour Candy "Step into the ring with Alan Baxter, I dare you. He writes with the grace, precision, and swift brutality of a prizefighter." – Christopher Golden, New York Times bestselling author of Ararat and The Pandora Room "Alan Baxter's thrillers have complete anatomy—muscles, brains, guts, and heart." – World Fantasy Award-nominated author, Anna Tambour "Alan Baxter delivers a heady mix of magic, monsters and bloody fights to the death. Nobody does kick-ass brutality like Baxter." – Greig Beck, Internationally bestselling author "Alan Baxter's fiction is dark, disturbing, hard-hitting and heart-breakingly honest. He reflects on worlds known and unknown with compassion, and demonstrates an almost second-sight into human behaviour." — Kaaron Warren, Shirley Jackson Award-winner and author of The Grief Hole "…fantastic storytelling in the vein of Neil Gaiman or Alan Moore, but with a merciless black streak…" – Spooktapes "…if Stephen King and Jim Butcher ever had a love child then it would be Alan Baxter." – Smash Dragons "Alan's work is reminiscent of that of Clive Barker and Jim C. Hines, but with a unique flavour all of its own.” – Angela Slatter, World Fantasy, British Fantasy and Aurealis Award winner “Baxter draws you along a knife’s edge of tension from the first page to the last, leaving your heart thumping and sweat on your brow.” – Midwest Book Review

If you visit Sam Shepard country, expect to find bayous, deserts, and junkyards where dreams rust alongside abandoned '51 Chevys. Prepare to meet broken gunmen and refugees from distant galaxies, slavering swamp things and California Highway Patrolmen gone high-tech and blood simple. It is a country whose creator does nothing less than renew America's myths. And sometimes he invents them from scratch. In these fourteen darkly funny, furiously energetic early works for the theater, our most audacious living playwright sets genres and archetypes spinning, with results that are utterly mesmerizing.

A wonderful variety of compellingly original vampire stories, many of them wholly unexpected, from award-winning, New York Times bestselling authors. There are typical vampires who would be right at home in a horror story or a gothic romance; historical vampires; contemporary, gritty, urban vampires; fang-in-cheek comedy; boy-meets-girl sweetheart stories (if a little bloodier!); and erotic tales of inhuman passions and midnight pleasures. Look out, too, for stand-alone stories relating to existing series and characters of contributing authors, or stories which develop more fully characters who have only walk-on parts in those authors' longer fiction. Includes writing by big-name authors such as Jennifer Ashley, Kim Harrison writing as Dawn Cook, Caitlin Kittredge, Diane Whiteside and Eileen Wilks.

In Temporary, a young woman’s workplace is the size of the world. She fills increasingly bizarre placements in search of steadiness, connection, and something, at last, to call her own. Whether it’s shining an endless closet of shoes, swabbing the deck of a pirate ship, assisting an assassin, or filling in for the Chairman of the Board, for the mythical Temporary, “there is nothing more personal than doing your job.” This riveting quest, at once hilarious and profound, will resonate with anyone who has ever done their best at work, even when the work is only temporary.

Since taking power in 2010, the Coalition Government in the United Kingdom has pushed through a drastic program of cuts to public spending, all in the name of austerity. The effects on large segments of the population, dependent on programs whose funding was slashed, have been devastating and will continue to be felt for generations. This timely book by journalist Mary O'Hara chronicles the real-world effects of austerity, removing it from the bland, technocratic language of politics and showing just what austerity means to ordinary lives. Drawing on hundreds of hours of first-person interviews with a wide range of people and, in the paperback edition, featuring an updated afterword by the author, the book explores the grim reality of living amid the biggest reduction of the welfare state in the postwar era and offers a compelling corrective to narratives of shared sacrifice.

" ... selected not only African oral and written stories but also tales from around the world ..."--Pref., p. 11.