Showing results by publisher "Crossroad Press" in All Categories

Alexander the Great's soldier, Lydias of Miletus, has survived the final campaigns of the king's life. He now has to deal with the chaos surrounding his death. Lydias throws his lot in with Ptolemy, one of Alexander's generals who has grabbed Egypt as his personal territory.

The old wall is a border: England and Scotland, South and North, light and darkness. It is 1745, and the long-awaited night as come. The Bloodking calls his army to battle, and armed with the powers of the undead and the damned, he will bring them South to claim his birthright: The throne of Britain. Only the old Watchers on the wall stand in his way. They, their swords, and their faith. But too much time has passed and the Watch has grown slack and ill-prepared for the coming war.

AFRAID opens the collection with a new poem, "Afraid," which plays with the question, "Why do we read horror?" The 13 stories that follow include darkly light-hearted tales such as "Donald Meets Arnold," "Sweet Kitty," and "Sink or Swim," the graphically terrifying "Pit Boy" and "Los Penitentes," the darkly sinister "Brazen Bull," "Flip Flap," "Triptych of Terror," "Bargain Basement," "Now I'm With the Invalids," "Next Door Collector," and "Thundersylum," and the other-worldly and introspective "Beggars at Dawn."

When a chance encounter between a squad of Hitler's elite SS troops and a band of gypsies ends in slaughter, the Nazis take a man named Janos Kaldy into custody for the killings. When they find that Kaldy is a werewolf, the Nazis bring in a beautiful young chemist and an aging doctor turned minister to aid in a daring, crazy plan. As the Dr. attempts to regress Kaldy through hypnotism to the root of his curse, the Nazis strive to isolate the enzyme that can turn an army of their troops into an unstoppable killing machine.

What seem to be nightmares about her daughter, Heaven's, favorite cartoon characters soon lead Gabrielle to a stranger paranormal conspiracy focused on revenge. She's faced with a living nightmare in which friends die and dangerous sorcery is at work.

With only the help of a holy man named Danube, Gabrielle battles supernatural forces for her daughter's soul, and for her own sanity, especially when she learns she has to face demonic forces - and even hell itself.

This book comprises some of the author's earliest and most memorable stories. Often touted as a successor to Lovecraft, and compared to Thomas Ligotti, Osier's work is dark, surreal, and guaranteed to leave you with images that will haunt you long after you finish listening. From the streets of Chicago to the pages of a lost volume of boyhood reading matter, from the aquarium in the front room to the frigid, drifting snow, get ready for one of the darkest literary rides of your life.

The Wildlife Liberation Front, a bloodthirsty and radical animal rights group, has decided to turn the tables on hunters this year, with bullets, blades and bombs. And Ned Craig, a non-violent game warden, finds himself the target of not only the WLF, but another killer from his past with a more personal grudge.

Hartley Gorman College, in Pecan City, Texas, is hardly a bastion of serious scholarship. The little Baptist school is more interested in shielding its students from the evil influence of The World, The Flesh, and The Devil than in turning out future Nobelists. But its staff, by and large, is worthy of a more demanding institution; they are victims of a glutted market in Ph.D.s and they do the best they can.

In 1712, Johann Bessler unveiled the perpetuum mobile, a wheel that continually spun after being set into motion until it was stopped with no mechanical input. Bessler's secret died with him. Except that it didn’t. Elly Kassel is the granddaughter of Evelyn Kassel. Elly is called into the offices of eminent London solicitors where she discovers that her grandmother was a rich woman. She also receives a trunk and an envelope, which she is not to open until she reaches New York City. In New York, she is told, all her questions about her grandmother and her inheritance will be answered.

Someone in town has a macabre passion for beautiful young men. Healthy, gym-toned male bodies keep turning up, tortured, drained of blood, missing parts, and quite, quite dead. Someone is using the Creative City as a canvas of gruesome, sadistic creativity. Someone... or something. At the end of her investigative rope, WeHo city coroner Becky O’Brien calls upon the aid of an old college friend, Christopher Driscoll, who is an expert on serial killers.

Michael Carmichael was a normal man - until the careening downward plunge of his life culminated in a near-fatal skiing accident. He should have died in the icy waterfall where he crashed, but he became the exception to the rule no being was ever meant to break. Now Michael is not quite a man, nor is he alive or dead. His image in the mirror is inexplicably, but undeniably, different. The voices of others echo in his head. And as his inward metamorphosis brings the wrath of the natural world upon him, he must venture back to the waterfall to reclaim his soul from those who plan a crueler fate for him....

Summer has just begun, and fear is in season. School’s out, and the faculty at Fairington Elementary School are free for the summer. Emily Young can’t deny her attraction to Aaron Jackson, the ed tech from her classroom, but she’s afraid of being hurt again. Meanwhile, Aaron is determined not to let his phobia of drowning prevent him from enjoying the sun and the sand of Maine’s best beach town. But they’re about to learn real fear. Fairington is home to a monster.

It begins with a freak snowstorm in May. Hit hardest is the rural town of Colby, Connecticut. Schools and businesses are closed, powerlines are down, and police detective Jack Glazier has found a body in the snow. It appears to be the victim of a bizarre ritual murder. It won't be the last. As the snow piles up, so do the sacrifices. Cut off from the rest of the world, Glazier teams up with an occult crime specialist to uncover a secret society hiding in their midst. The gods they worship are unthinkable. The powers they summon are unstoppable.

Once you're on the synchronicity highway, you're traveling through a realm that often seems as magical and strange as Alice's Wonderland. You feel connected to something larger than yourself and your immediate world. Your perceptions change, you see and experience yourself and life differently. You become immersed in a mystery that often defies reason and logic. Your worldview can be turned inside out like a dirty sock. On the synchronicity highway, meaningful coincidence is your guidance system.

Foreman James has always walked the streets of Old Mill, North Carolina, standing tall on street corners and booming his "story" to the world. Not many know where he comes from, or where he goes - no one knows the whole story. When an old, hand-written journal Foreman has carried since childhood goes missing, his carefully preserved world begins to crumble, and Old Mill takes notice.

When a nameless man awakens to find his blood-spattered brother passed out in his trailer it sets off a chain of painful, hard-hitting events that tests family loyalty and shows the savage impact of a father's dark legacy.

Gina has seen strange visions since childhood. Her mother was considered insane for having the same affliction, and before her disappearance, Gina's sister Allie was obsessed with black magic and "saw" things too. It eventually led her to a depraved conjurer known as Mojo DeCanne, a man who possessed a book of demonic spells Allie stole and hid in Gina's apartment in the days before she vanished. Now, as Manhattan braces for the worst snowstorm in decades, and Gina's visions become worse, blurring the lines between nightmare and reality, Mojo DeCanne has come looking for what is his. In order to solve the mystery of her sister's disappearance and the meaning behind her own shattered life, Gina must first survive the night and somehow stop an unimaginable evil from fulfilling its horrific destiny. Darkness falls on Manhattan. The blizzard grows worse. And the lights go out.

Life has been good to Paul Tremblay. He has a decent job, a beautiful girlfriend, and a devoted pal. It's just another average day for this average joe. That is, until he wakes up on a table in the morgue. Now, his heart doesn't beat, he doesn't breathe, and he keeps forgetting things like his own name. Desperate to get to his girlfriend, Linda, before it's too late, Paul sets off on a cross-country journey to Los Angeles.

Dr. Hans Holzer is perhaps best known as the famed ghost hunter and paranormal investigator associated with the Amityville horror investigations, which later became the subject of several popular horror films. In January 1977, Holzer, working with the well-known trance medium Ethel Johnson-Meyers, entered 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York. In 1974 this had been the place of a horrific crime when the then-occupant Ronald DeFeo, Jr., murdered his own parents and four siblings.

When Euphrankes Holmynn, Captain of the Airship Vector, approaches the High Council with a plan for launching an airship through The Second Veil, an energy barrier that has protected their planet since the beginning of their collective memories, he is dismissed and banished from the city. The Second Veil, and the First, which is made up of the domed cities and shielded roads of their planet, are the only things protecting the shrinking resources that keep them all alive.