The Lazarus Condition Paul Kane   Matthew Daley is an enigma. He’s appeared after seven years – eager to pick up the threads of his life, make contact once more with his loved ones. Something that’s not so easy to do when your family’s last memory is of attending your funeral, and watching as your coffin is lowered into the ground… The Lazarus Condition is an emotional, moving tale of loss, grief, redemption, and why you should be careful what you wish for. It might not be what you expected. And you will get what’s coming to you. Bonus short story! Dead Time Helen Kirby is having one hell of a day. As she struggles, through the fog of a chronic hangover, to understand why the world around her seems to have gone to ruin between the time she passed out the night before and the time she woke up this morning, we find out why this New Year does indeed herald a New Dawn. Dead Time is a new take on the zombie tale – one that shows us without question that any differences between us and the undead are purely a matter of…taste.          In the Midnight Museum Gary A. Braunbeck Martin Tyler wants to end it all. Alone and in despair over the death of his parents as well as the death of his youthful dreams and ambitions, he makes the decision to overdose on prescription drugs. Not wanting to bow out in his dingy apartment, and with the first ingestion of drugs beginning to take effect, he drives to downtown Cedar Hill in the hopes of finding a hotel room. Along West Church Street there is a building he used to know as Devito’s Bookstore. Standing out front reminds him of times past; of the fond memories spent there and of a painting of that same building he still keeps bought from an old street artist. Striking up a conversation with his six-year old self and watching a strange creature pace along the building’s roof, Martin can feel the drugs taking the shine off reality – only now this IS his reality. From a room in the Psychiatric facility near Cedar Hill Memorial Hospital, Martin becomes aware of these creatures, of the limits of even the most unbound imagination, and of events that may lead to the extinction of the world. This is the land of Gash. Stone Cold Calling Simon Clark It beats but has no heart Calls without voice Desires yet is void of emotion And waits to destroy anyone unlucky enough to grant it freedom Stone Cold Calling It may well be the end of us all The Nobody Tom Piccirilli Cryer once had another name, but he can't remember it. The man he used to be was stabbed in the head by an assailant. After months of catatonia Cryer awakens in a mental facility to find that his former life is almost completely forgotten. He knows his wife and daughter have been murdered - he saw them die moments before his own assault - but his shattered mind is incapable of retaining their names. Or even his own. Now Cryer is free again and trying to track down an elusive killer through his own unknown past. But how do you investigate the murders of your loved ones when you can't remember them? When you have no idea who your friends or enemies were? Where you lived and worked? And what secrets you might have once had and failed to keep? And how is he supposed to deal with the little man who keeps crawling in and out of his skull? Cryer is a nobody now, but that won't stop him from finding a vicious murderer and making him pay. Clipper Girls Gary A. Braunbeck Evan Tanner, a single father, receives a call from the nursing home where his mother (who everyone assumes suffers from dementia) lives, informing him that his mother has become too distruptive in the past few weeks and they're kicking her out: she keeps screaming in the night about the smell of cigars and crates by the door and someone who 'warned' her not to go to work '...that day.' Evan takes his mother in, much to his daughter's dismay. As the days infold, both Evan and his daughter awake in the middle of the night to hear the voices of children coming from downstairs. When each investigates, they find the front room filled with the ghosts of dirty, undernourished children doing piecework sewing - buttons on coats, repairing socks, hemming dresses, etc. Evan and his daughter soon realize that Evan's mother only seems to sleep peacefully when these apparitions appear. Evan's mother was a child laborer back in the early 1900's, who was one of the few children to survive a massive fire at a Cedar Hill sweatshop mill where she was employed as a 'clipper girl' - the children whose job it was to snip the stray bits of thread from the dresses and blouses made in the sweatshops. Evan's mother isn't suffering from dementia but rather survivor's guilt, and that guilt has at last manifested itself in the apparitions of the ghosts of the poverty-striken children with whom she used to work - and who didn't make it out of the fire. The fire was deemed an accident, but Evan's mother and the 'Clipper Girls' know better, and the man responsible for the fire - who smoked cigars as he stomped up and down the sweatshop line - is not only alive and well, but flourishing in his successful family business. And Evan, his daughter, his mother, and the restless spirits of the girls killed in the factory fire, cannot rest until there's justice.     Stonecoldcalling.htm                    We accept reservations without prepayment for forthcoming books. Just drop us a quick line asking to reserve a title. We will reserve your copy now and contact you requesting payment immediately prior to shipping. Click here to email us to reserve a title