Disturbed and enraged by the bootleg recording the DJ plays for him, Ingram follows Hastur’s trail into the strange, uncivilized backwoods of Arkansas, where he hears rumors the musician has sold his soul to the Devil.
But as Ingram closes in on Hastur and those who have crossed his path, he’ll learn there are forces much more malevolent than the Devil and reckonings more painful than Hell. .
In a masterful debut of Lovecraftian horror and Southern gothic menace, John Hornor Jacobs reveals the fragility of free will, the dangerous power of sacrifice, and the insidious strength of blood.
Ex-mercenary, pirate, and gun-runner Dante Bogart knows he’s screwed the pooch after he hands one of his shady employers a biological weapon that made the dead rise from their graves, laugh like hyenas, and feast upon the living. Dante tried to blow the whistle via a tell-all video that went viral — but that was before the black ops boys deep-sixed him at a secret interrogation site on the Panama-Colombia border.
When Dante wakes up in the jungle with the five intervening years missing from his memory, he knows he’s got to do something about the laughing sickness that has caused a world-wide slaughter. The resulting journey leads him across the nightmare that was the Panama Canal, around Cape Horn in a hijacked nuclear warship, to San Francisco’s Mission District, where a crew of survivalist hackers have holed up in the pseudo-Moorish-castle turned porn-studio known as The Armory.
This mixed band of anti-social rejects has taken Dante’s whistle blowing video as an underground gospel, leading the fight against the laughing corpses and the corporate stooges who’ve tried to profit from the slaughter. Can Dante find redemption and save civilization?
In a future where death is a thing of the past…
…how far would you go to solve your own murder?
Paul Donner is a NYPD detective struggling with a drinking problem and a marriage on the rocks. Then he and his wife get dead — shot to death in a “random” crime. Fift y years later, Donner is back — revived courtesy of the Shift, a process whereby inanimate DNA is re-activated.
This new “reborn” underclass is not only alive again, they’re growing younger, destined for a second childhood. The freakish side-effect of a retroviral attack on New York, the Shift has turned the world upside down. Beneath the protective geodesic Blister, clocks run backwards, technology is hidden behind a noir facade, and you can see Bogart and DiCaprio in The Maltese Falcon III. In this unfamiliar retro-futurist world of flying Studebakers and plasma tommy guns, Donner must search for those responsible for the destruction of his life. His quest for retribution, aided by Maggie, his holographic Girl Friday, leads him to the heart of the mystery surrounding the Shift’s origin and up against those who would use it to control a terrified nation.
AN ANCIENT SOCIETY OF CARTOGRAPHER WASPS create delicately inscribed maps; a bodyjacking parasite is faced with imminent extinction; an AI makes a desperate gambit to protect its child from a ravenous dragon; a professor of music struggles with the knowledge that murder is not too high a price for fame; living origami carries a mother’s last words to her child; a steam girl conquers the realm of imagination; aliens attack Venus, ignoring an incredulous earth; a child is born on Mars…
The science fiction and fantasy fiction fields continue to evolve, setting new marks with each passing year. For the sixth year in a row, master anthologist Jonathan Strahan has collected stories that captivate, entertain, and showcase the very best the genre has to offer. Critically acclaimed, and with a reputation for including award-winning speculative fiction, The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year is the only major “best of” anthology to collect both fantasy and science fiction under one cover.
Jonathan Strahan has edited more than twenty anthologies and collections, including The Locus Awards (with Charles N. Brown), The New Space Opera (with Gardner Dozois), and The Starry Rift. He has won the Ditmar, William J. Atheling Jr., and Peter McNamara awards for his work as an anthologist and reviewer, and was nominated for a Hugo Award for his editorial work. Strahan is currently the reviews editor for Locus.
ABOUT THE EDITOR
Ellen Datlow has been editing science fiction, fantasy, and horror short fiction for over twenty-five years. She was fiction editor of OMNI Magazine and SCIFICTION and has edited more than fifty anthologies, including The Best Horror of the Year, Inferno, Poe: 19 New Tales Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror, Lovecraft Unbound, Supernatural Noir, Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy, Blood and Other Cravings, The Beastly Bride and Teeth: Vampire Tales (the latter two young adult anthologies with Terri Windling), and Haunted Legends (with Nick Mamatas).
Forthcoming is the young adult dystopian anthology After and the adult fantasy anthology Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells (both with Windling).
She’s has tied for the most World Fantasy Awards (nine), and has also won multiple Locus Awards, Hugo Awards, Stoker Awards, International Horror Guild Awards, and The Shirley Jackson Award for her editing. She was named recipient of the 2007 Karl Edward Wagner Award, given at the British Fantasy Convention for “outstanding contribution to the genre.” She has also been honored with the Life Achievement Award given by the Horror Writers Association, in acknowledgment of superior achievement over an entire career.
She co-curates the long-running Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series in New York City’s east village.
More information can be found at www.datlow.com or at her blog: http://ellen-datlow.livejournal.com/. She tweets as https://twitter.com/#!/ellendatlow