Showing results by author "Brian Hodge" in All Categories

We each inhabit many worlds, often at the same time. From worlds on the inside to the world on a cosmic scale. Worlds imposed on us, and worlds of our own making. In time, though, all worlds will end. With Skidding Into Oblivion, his fifth collection, award-winning author Brian Hodge brings together his most concentrated assortment yet. It includes all of the best picks and awards finalists. All stories have one thing in common: It’s the end of the world as we know it, and we don’t feel fine at all.

Red Room Press is extremely proud to present its fourth annual anthology featuring this year's hardcore corps of authors with the best extreme horror fiction of 2018 that breaks boundaries and trashes taboos. Salud! Sleep well. If you can.

It was a killer year for horror fiction of the harder kind. Authors, editors, and publishers presented readers with some startling works of horrific imagination, stories graphic in the extreme yet with subtleties suggesting larger meanings, tales that explore humanity by plumbing depths of soulless inhumanity and, in some cases, outright depravity. The stories here represent the best of them, disturbing tales that dig deep and take you into the dark heart of horror itself, unrelenting and unapologetic.

You wouldn’t think events happening years apart, at points in the solar system hundreds of millions of miles distant, would have anything to do with each other. When she was six, Daphne was taken into a neighbor’s tool shed and came within seconds of never coming out alive. Most of the scars healed. Except for the one that went all the way through. You wouldn’t think that the serial murders of children and the one who got away would have any connection with the strange fate of one of Jupiter’s moons.

His touch can heal or harm. His fate is solitary. His agony belongs to us all…He was born on a day of pain: November 22, 1963. He came of age in agony: that moment of tragedy when fun-loving rock-and-roll deejay Paul Handler discovered the inexplicable power in his own hands. It is the power to make the wounded whole again. The power to make the lame walk and to heal the sick. It is a power that will sap his soul and plunge him into the world of a famous faith healer. It is a power that can turn to rage, even murder. It is a gift that makes Paul Handler a living, breathing human sacrifice. For thousands of years, a secret cabal has guarded the lineage to which Paul is heir — scapegoats who have been forced to bear humanity's anguish upon themselves. Now, while the cabal searches for him, and one man seeks to destroy him, Paul makes a lonely, frightening journey to the core of his identity and to his destiny … to all the pain his soul can bear, to all the redemption he can give, to the freedom that is death.

A mere child yet a precocious writer, young Freddie records a series of terrifying encounters with an inhuman being that haunts his life and seems to predict his death. When an award-winning horror writer on the downward slope of a long career receives an invitation to address the Essex County Science Fiction Group, he figures that he's got nothing to lose. Though she's adopted by the cool kids, the new girl at Renfield High School is most drawn to Nancy Wilhoit, who claims to be haunted.

To the warrior shamans of the Venezuelan forest people, the drug is a sacred substance: part pain, part pleasure, all power. Skullflush is pure psychic whiplash...an exhilarating gateway to an advanced consciousness beyond time and species. Deep in the Amazon, the primitive tribe has kept its secret safe from civilization - until a rising drug lord ends up with a stolen six-kilo stash and begins to peddle his prize in the nightclubs of Florida.

Behind the walls of respectability is a world exploding with crime, sin, and the darkest magic of all. The rain beats down on the hot New Orleans streets. A derelict staggers, no longer a man, but a zombie, a vessel emptied by voodoo sorcery and poured full of another's will. This is the land of lace curtains and Mardi Gras. This is the world of the bayou, and sizzling crawfish, and a man in white who can kill at any distance.

A golden time - that's what Chris Anderson, his brother Aaron, and their friends expected of that final summer. Freedom, and lazy, pleasure-filled days before the responsibilities of college and career. An idyll in their newfound private place on the shores of three small lakes. But Tri-Lakes is no oasis. A millennium ago it became the focal point of a powerfully malevolent force, and the remnants of an ancient Viking bloodfeud. Hatred is its source. Blood gives it power. And only sacrifice can banish it.

He's Code Blue when brought into the ER: a young drifter who wandered in from the desert, who was attacked for mundane reasons, and who broke his own hands on his attackers' faces and lacerated them with the jagged bones. His name is Clay Palmer, and he's one of the rarest people on earth... the carrier of a genetic mutation with frightening implications for humanity. With the time ticking on his self-control, Clay wages a desperate struggle to understand what has gone so wrong, with the help of psychologist Adrienne Rand and her anthropologist lover, Sarah.