Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios" in Anthologies & Short Stories

A provocative collection of literary horror stories by one of America’s most acclaimed and inventive writers whose unique prose “can be soul-shaking” (New Yorker).

Years before, Wade Rycroft fell in love with Geneva Harris, the smartest girl in his class. The rodeo star and the shy academic made for an odd pair but their chemistry was undeniable. They made plans to get married after high school but when Genny left him standing in the rain, he joined the Army and vowed to leave that life behind. Genny married the town’s golden boy, and Wade knew that he couldn’t go home again. Fifteen years later, Wade returns to his Texas hometown for his brother’s wedding and walks into a storm of scandal.

A newborn’s absent face appears on the back of someone else’s head, a filmmaker goes to gruesome lengths to achieve the silence he’s after for his final scene, and a therapist begins, impossibly, to appear in a troubled patient's room late at night. In these stories of doubt, delusion, and paranoia, no belief, no claim to objectivity, is immune to the distortions of human perception. Here, self-deception is a means of justifying our most inhuman impulses—whether we know it or not.

An acutely observed moment in which we see the universe. Set in what was once a Canadian gold-rush town, it’s about lineage, sons and fathers and great uncles, and how we’re connected through time and across the planet.

Sex. That's all Noah Foster wants when Alexa Jackson shows up at his apartment. After returning from a semester in Paris, Alexa is back in her hometown of Boston and looking for anything but the drama that surrounds Noah. He's intense, gifted, famous, and a bastard through and through. Alexa doesn't take life too seriously. Noah doesn't do calm and easygoing. Their unexpected meeting sets them both on a course toward an unlikely connection.

Harvard student Sadie Lockwood was given a second chance, and she's determined to make it count. She planned her life out with precision, and she refuses to be deterred from her course. She knows what she wants, and that is to honor the person who lost their life to save hers. When Hunter Reynolds steps into Sadie's world, she is knocked off of her axis. He's bold, charismatic, and intense.

My favorite line in my favorite song about Dallas goes like this: Dallas is a rich man with a death wish in his eyes / A steel and concrete soul in a warm heart and love disguise... The narrator of Jimmie Dale Gilmore's perfect tune Dallas" is coming to town as a broke dreamer with the bright lights of the big city on his mind. He's just seen the Dallas cityscape through the window of his seat on a DC-9 at night. Is he just beginning his quest?

Buk's vignette, based on conversations between a drug dealer and his young daughter, follows unquestionable childhood logic about family, love, and making ends meet on the other side of the law.

"He'll Come Knocking at Your Door", a story by Robert McCammon, was originally published in 1985 in the anthology Halloween Horrors.

Nikki is a flirtatious six-time divorcee. Geraldine is her quirky grandmother. Together with their gang of retirement home grannies, they set out to solve the mysteries the police can’t. From holiday hijinx to midsummer murders, the Glock Grannies are ready for year-round, mystery-solving adventures. Are you?

Brian Evenson’s hallucinatory and darkly comic stories of paranoia, pursuit, sensory deprivation, amnesia, and retribution rattle the cages of the psyche and peer into the gaping moral chasm that opens when we become estranged from ourselves. From sadistic bosses with secret fears to a woman trapped in a mime’s imaginary box, and from a post-apocalyptic misidentified Messiah to unwitting portraitists of the dead, the mind-bending world of this modern-day Edgar Allan Poe exposes the horror contained within our daily lives.

Rachel Kramer Bussel ties her readers up in knots each year as they anticipate the very best BDSM stories of the year. And, she does not disappoint, defying the odds and occasionally gravity with tales of bondage at its best. These whip-smart tales of domination, submission, spanking, and other highly imaginative acts keep readers in a frenzy. Best Bondage Erotica 2014 features 21 hot bondage tales that titillate from the bedroom to the dungeon and beyond.

In this touching and moving pair of coming-of-age stories, best-selling author Jessica Anya Blau makes it clear that once you step over certain lines, there's no going back.

Four hundred years after mankind's arrival on Erna, the undead sorcerer Gerald Tarrant travels north in search of a legend. For it is rumored there is a forest where the fae has become so powerful that it devours all who enter it, and he means to test its power.

Takeo feels he must take on the Tribe and demonstrate the ruthlessness he will need to be a competent ruler. But the Tribe don't believe, firstly, that he knows where to find them and, secondly, that he will have the strength of will to deal with them. They are proven wrong.

Truckers have long been ingrained in the American popular imagination, celebrated in movies like Smokey and the Bandit and many a country-western ballad. They're also a favorite queer sexual icon, joining such types as sailors, cops, firemen, and other guys who "service society". For some gay men, life on the road conjures up images of hairy, sweaty, blue-collar joes traveling from town to town in their big 18-wheelers, pulling into all-night diners, gas stations, cheap motels, and highway rest stops for sex.

A stand-up with writer's block embarks upon his last gig as a Rodney Dangerfield impersonator. Reflecting on a childhood holiday, a father is faced with the limit to which he can keep his daughters safe. These characters search without knowing what they seek. At the heart of this work is Eva, whom we meet in childhood, locked in an enigmatic relationship with her mother; as a woman stumbling from youth into middle age; and in later life as the mother to a daughter of her own. Each story lays bare the emotional and psychic damage of life, love and abandonment.

In a landlocked galaxy that tunnels through our own, the Entire is a bizarre and seductive mix of long-lied quasi-human and alien beings gathered under a sky of fire, called the "bright". A land of wonders, the Entire is sustained by monumental storm walls and an exotic, never-ending river. Over all, the elegant and cruel Tarig rule supreme. Into this rich milieu is thrust Titus Quinn, former star pilot.

The undead are more alive today than ever. Immortal? Indeed! Nothing has sunk its teeth into 21st century popular culture as pervasively as the vampire. The fangsters have the freedom to fly across all genres and all mediums - there''s even apps for vamps. Whether roaming into romance, haunting horror, sneaking into science fiction, capering into humor, meandering through mystery - no icon is more versatile than the vampire.

After a difficult childhood and a turbulent stint in the military, Declan Burke finally got his act together. Now he’s a battle-hardened professional bodyguard who takes his job at McKay-Taggart seriously and his playtime - and his playmates - just as seriously. One thing he never does, however, is mix business with pleasure. But when the mysterious, gorgeous Suzanne D’Angelo needs his protection from a stalker, his desire for her burns out of control, tempting him to break all the rules…even as he’s drawn into a dark, dangerous world he didn’t know existed.