Showing results by narrator "Sarah Beth Pfeifer" in All Categories

Twin sisters Marisa and Clare Stockton were sixteen when Clare’s body was found in Virginia’s James River. No arrests were made. Fourteen years later, Marisa’s friends and dedicated career as a photographer help her to cope with the open wound of the past. But Marisa still feels the hurt—and the unsolved murder isn’t the only thing haunting her. A recent car crash has erased ten days of Marisa’s memories—a black hole leading up to the accident that’s left her disoriented.

At fourteen, Penny Winters fell out of the closet and in love with her best friend, Misa Ito. But before they truly understood their feelings, Misa and her family were gone. Over a decade later, when Penny secures a job at a New York advertising agency, she has a second chance at first love when she's introduced to the lead account executive, Misa. But the road to happiness is riddled with potholes. Misa is still impossibly beautiful, but super cold. And Misa shows no recollection of Penny—the girl who once showed her how to skateboard, make daisy chain crowns, and shared every secret with.

Hot on the heels of her 2018 This Is Horror Award–winning short story collection Spectral Evidence, critically horror author Gemma Files compiles fifteen more of her most startling recent nightmares—a creepily seductive downward spiral of dark poetry and existential dread, entirely suitable to the slow apocalypse going on all around us. So take your mind off your troubles and send it somewhere the rules still operate, if only to punish those who violate them.

Ruth is trapped. She’s stuck in her small, religious hometown of Kill Devil, Kentucky, stuck in the closet, and stuck living paycheck to paycheck. After her manager finds out that she lives with her girlfriend, Ruth is fired from her job at New Creations—a craft store owned by the church that dominates life in Kill Devil. In an act of revenge, Ruth attempts to shoplift some yarn but is caught red-handed. Instead of calling the police, the employees lock her in the store—and attack her.

Hannah has a routine. Wake up, take a shower, go to school, go to work, come home, and pass out. It's a perfectly normal routine for a perfectly normal girl who does not have to remember how her limbs work every morning because of haunting nightmares of being a very different creature in a very different world. That's all she thinks they are—nightmares—until one night, they're all too lucid, and her body on Earth starts to change. Slowly, Hannah's humanity starts to slip away... but surely she can continue just sticking to the routine, right? It'll be fine. It has to be.

In 2025, the moon hatched and its child died. Things have since gotten worse. Some people have superpowers now, but so do the extradimensional invaders slowly wiping humanity out. By Julietta's eighteenth birthday, the war has been loss after loss for far longer than she's been alive, so she can't bring herself to be terribly shocked when the sky splits in half and weeps death. Surviving is the real surprise.

Holly Ash is good actor. Just one downside: Most of the people she’s acting with have no idea they’re a part of her fiction. One that has been carefully constructed by the secretive company that Holly works for, known as D.O.P.L. Every assignment is a new role, a new name, a completely new self. Her newest role is “Margot” and her newest target: a boy her age named Will Aldrich.

A sweet sapphic romance takes a deadly dark turn in this sharp-as-a-knife novella with the slow build menace of Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber—from a New York Times-bestselling author hailed by Chuck Wendig as "a storyteller working at the top of her class."

Hannah is not human, and she's not sure what will happen when she stops pretending otherwise. Still stuck in a slowly mutating body on Earth and still waking up in a fantasy world whenever she sleeps, Hannah's stress continues to mount every single day. As magic continues to spread to her friends—whether they like it or not—Hannah is forced to confront what that magic means about her and what her terrifying Goddess wants her to do with it.

It is ever the nature of war to continue getting worse. The war Julietta remains stuck in is no exception. Though more and more threats start showing glimpses of themselves behind the scenes, Julietta can't deal with them while she's busy with boot camp. Even so-called superheroes need to learn how to shoot a rifle and work with a team, but the length and brutality of the war have not been kind to the training camps. Worse, after she graduates, Julietta will be thrust immediately into battle.

Euphoric from finally revealing her true self, Hannah finally starts to find things in her life going right as she teaches Earth about magic and has a pleasant vacation in Manumit, the city of the robotic Crafted. Of course, relaxation is always short-lived for her, and soon enough her life starts pulling her in all directions. Why did the Crafted originally go to war? Why did they so abruptly stop? How does she handle the government agents watching her house? And most importantly of all, how does she stop the impending apocalypse that the Disciples of Unification are so sure she'll cause?

In Feminist, Queer, Crip, Alison Kafer imagines a different future for disability and disabled bodies. Challenging the ways in which ideas about the future and time have been deployed in the service of compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, Kafer rejects the idea of disability as a predetermined limit. 

It's 2005, and Ali is a publicist for Hollywood's biggest stars. Part of her job entails keeping gay celebrities in the closet—which is pretty ironic, since she's a lesbian herself. When Ali is assigned a new client, Cara Bisset, upcoming star of a (hetero) romantic blockbuster, keeping Cara's sexuality under wraps becomes Ali's biggest challenge yet. Bold, unpredictable Cara hates that she has to hide such an integral aspect of her identity, and after a series of increasingly close calls, Ali is sent on her worldwide promotional tour to help with her image.

A year ago, everything was different. I had just left my home, joining the infamous Mountainside Pack. The daughter of an omega wolf, I've always been prized - but not as prized as I would be if my new packmates found out my secret. But when my fated mate - Mountainside's Alpha - rejected me in front of his whole pack council and my secret got out, I realized I had one choice. Going lone wolf was the only option I had, and I took it.

What happens when your gender doesn't fit neatly into the categories of male or female? Even mundane interactions like filling out a form or using a public bathroom can be a struggle when these designations prove inadequate. In this groundbreaking book, 30 authors highlight how our experiences are shaped by a deeply entrenched gender binary.

I’ve always known that Ryker is my fated mate. What I didn’t know? Was that he’s always known he’s mine...Ryker Wolfson. Strong. Sexy. Powerful. Irresistible. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been waiting for the Luna Ceremony that would make him my bonded mate. Though it’s not supposed to be possible, I’ve known since I was a kid that the future Alpha of the Mountainside Pack was fated to be mine. I figured my knowing had something to do with me being a rarity: A born female alpha.

In the title story, set five minutes in the future where you not only have a credit score but also a dating score, a woman who’s been banished from all dating apps attends a weekly help group with others who have been “banned for life,” and finds herself falling in love. In “Backwards,” a twist on Benjamin Button, a woman reconnects with her estranged father as he de-ages ten years each day they spend together. In “Welcome to Oxhead,” all the parents in a gated community “shut off” when the power goes out. 

Bond—James Bond. In the 80s and 90s, the debonair superspy's games failed to live up to the giddy thrills of his films. That all changed when British studio Rare unleashed GoldenEye 007 in 1997. In basements and college dorms across the world, friends bumped shoulders while shooting, knifing, exploding, and slapping each other's digital faces in the Nintendo 64 game that would redefine the modern first-person shooter genre and become the most badass party game of its generation.

Drawing on the author's experience as a mother walking with and learning from her own transgender child, as well as working with hundreds of families across the country doing the same, this book helps parents navigate the emotional, spiritual, and logistical landscape of raising a gender-diverse child.

An intimate and evocative celebration of the life and legacy of music and political icon Sinéad O’Connor, featuring writers including Neko Case, Sinéad Gleeson, Rayne Fisher-Quann, Porochista Khakpour, and more. More than thirty years ago, Sinéad O’Connor shocked the world by tearing up a...