High up on a treacherous canyon wall in a mysterious location, a man from the pueblo is stuck on a ledge. Furiously working to rescue him, Ranger Jack Chastain is nearly killed. Now he wants answers. Unfortunately, the man won't talk. While Jack learns that the secret revolves around a death sixteen years before, there is more. Looking for answers, he encounters ghosts from his own past in Montana. Secrets from that past, fights he lost, and people he hopes to avoid, threaten his new life...
It's Halloween night, 1963, in De Pere, Wisconsin. Local children dressed as ghosts, vampires, and hoboes chase one another on and off porches and through the streets, hunting for Dum Dums, Slo Pokes, and thrills. Meanwhile their parents fill the local bars, joking and fighting, bobbing for apples, and dancing to the jukebox. But all is not well. Evelyn Schmidt's life is almost at an end; she's been diagnosed with cancer and given only days to live. She'll be damned if...
After the fall of the Table Round, Launcelot DuLac fled England a broken man awaiting death. But death never came for him; instead, cursed, he has continued his search for the Holy Grail down through the ages, seeking a redemption that he fears he will never find. A chance meeting with Morgan LeFay makes him question his curse and his destiny, for Merlin is about to awake and Launcelot will be called on one last time to defend the ideals of King Arthur and the Table Round, because he is the last...
When Bill Wayne's friends began throwing bullets his way, he figured it was time to find out what they had against him! He took along a 45 in case the conversation should get rough -so it wasn't surprising that each old pal Bill visited suddenly turned up dead. But what burned Bill most was the way Carson Smith, the hick copper on his trail, insisted on playing intimate games with Holly Clark. The two seemed far more interested in each other's anatomy than in whether Bill was...
‘“Hundreds of famous brains,” beamed the newsgirl … “What. A. Mess.”’ Even Atom, a detective who harasses anyone who comes near him, wants to get to the bottom of what happened on the night the City Brain Facility blew up. Blince, Benny, mobster Eddie Thermidor and the other denizens of Beerlight wonder what the hell he’s doing. Bugs, brain-stealing and inevitable thermonuclear disaster are all given due consideration in this close-wired novel, where even the president’s penchant for bestiality...
‘Smithereens are hard to aggregate. Penguins can slide on their bellies but the humour is wasted on those stiff-billed bastards – yet put a paper hat on an owl and it’s you who feels like a fool.’Corpses rain down from the sky as punishment for the massacres of the last century. A teacher solves the behavioural problems of a young girl by installing a nest of black spiders in her brain cavity. A police chief and his trooper unravel the twisted suicide of an ex-mobster by rehydrating a raisin....
Smithereens gathers 19 stories of misfortune, madness and malady, including ‘The Man Whose Head Expanded’, set in a world where it is ‘undisputed’ that ‘if you tape the average man’s mouth shut he’ll lie through his nose’. Heads are no longer fashionable and are instead encased in ‘headgloves’, which turn out to have undesirable effects, as Brank realises when one day his head expands exponentially … that is, until a train shoots up his nose.Meet ‘Download Syndrome’: ‘Symptoms: 1. Constant...
'To those who know that the inhabitants of heaven and hell are political prisoners, that the law is as preventative as next year's weather, that the post-human's too predictable, South London has always been a playground.'<br> <br> What if god were found to exist? What if revenge were possible? Competing groups of assassins race to exterminate the creator, with young gun Alix the favourite.<br> <br> But conflict among the Edgemen sends...