Каждый год отряд скаутов отправляется на необитаемый остров Фальстаф у побережья Канады, где они проводят выходные в условиях дикой природы, учатся разводить костры, ловить рыбу и ориентироваться на местности. Это традиция, в ней нет неожиданностей, и каждое поколение вспоминает эти поездки с радостью и ностальгией. Только в этот раз все будет по-другому. К стоянке скаутов выходит странный незнакомец – невероятно тощий, жутко бледный и чудовищно голодный. Они столкнутся с чем-то куда страшнее любого привидения из байки у костра. Они столкнутся с носителем подлинного кошмара, созданного в биогенетических лабораториях. И теперь скаутмастеру Тиму Риггсу и его подопечным придется бороться со...

"The literary 'Oscars' features twenty outstanding examples of the best of the best in American short stories." - Shelf Awareness for Readers The Best American Short Stories 2014 will be selected by national best-selling author Jennifer Egan, who won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction for A Visit from the Goon Squad, heralded by Time magazine as "a new classic of American fiction." Egan "possesses a satirist's eye and a romance novelist's heart" (New York Times Book Review).

From the acclaimed author of The Troop—which Stephen King raved “scared the hell out of me and I couldn’t put it down… old-school horror at its best”—comes this utterly terrifying novel where The Abyss meets The Shining. A strange plague called the ’Gets is decimating humanity on a global scale. It causes people to forget—small things at first, like where they left their keys… then the not-so-small things like how to drive, or the letters of the alphabet. Then their bodies forget how to function involuntarily… and there is no cure. But now, far below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, deep in the Marianas Trench, an heretofore unknown substance hailed as “ambrosia” has been discovered—a...

BE PREPARED FOR THE MOST TERRIFYING THRILLER OF THE YEAR It begins like a campfire story: Five boys and a grownup went into the woods…. It ends in madness and murder. And worse. Once a year, scoutmaster Tim Riggs leads a troop of boys into the Canadian wilderness for a three-day camping trip—a tradition as comforting and reliable as a good ghost story and a roaring bonfire. But when an unexpected intruder stumbles upon their campsite—shockingly thin, disturbingly pale, and voraciously hungry—Tim and the boys are exposed to something far more frightening than any tale of terror. The human carrier of a bioengineered nightmare. An inexplicable horror that spreads faster than...

An all-new epic tale of terror and redemption set in the hinterlands of midcentury New Mexico from the acclaimed author of The Troop—which Stephen King raved “scared the hell out of me and I couldn’t put it down… old-school horror at its best.” From electrifying horror author Nick Cutter comes a haunting new novel, reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and Stephen King’s It, in which a trio of mismatched mercenaries is hired by a young woman for a deceptively simple task: check in on her nephew, who may have been taken against his will to a remote New Mexico backwoods settlement called Little Heaven. Shortly after they arrive, things begin to turn ominous. Stirrings in the...

Owen and Duncan are childhood friends who’ve grown up in picturesque Niagara Falls — known to them by the grittier name Cataract City. As the two know well, there’s more to the bordertown than meets the eye: behind the gaudy storefronts and sidewalk vendors, past the hawkers of tourist T-shirts and cheap souvenirs live the real people who scrape together a living by toiling at the Bisk, the local cookie factory. And then there are the truly desperate, those who find themselves drawn to the borderline and a world of dog-racing, bare-knuckle fighting, and night-time smuggling. Owen and Duncan think they are different: both dream of escape, a longing made more urgent by a near-death...

When a pair of fighters step into an illegal ring, sometimes only one walks out. This is the story of two men from radically different backgrounds, but with one thing in common. For Rob, it’s a question of talent and duty. For Paul, it’s one of fear. In the bloody world of bare-knuckle boxing the stakes are mercilessly high. Testing the difficult relationships between fathers and their sons, The Fighter explores the lengths to which these men are driven for self-knowledge, and the depths they will plumb in order to belong. ‘This gripping novel sees two men dive perilously into a violent underworld — a world that very quickly threatens to rip them both apart’ Maxim ...

In steel-tipped prose, Craig Davidson conjures a savage world populated by fighting dogs, prizefighters, sex addicts, gamblers, a repo man and a disappearing magician. The title of the lead story, “28 Bones”, refers to the number of bones in a boxer’s hands; once broken, they never heal properly, and the fighter’s career descends to bouts that have less to do with sport than with survival: no referee, no rules, not even gloves. In “A Mean Utility” we enter an even more desperate arena: dogfights where Rottweilers, pit bulls and Dobermans fight each other to the death. Davidson’s stories are small monuments to the telling detail. The hostility of his fictional universe is tempered by the...

Sarah Court. Meet the resident. The haunted father of a washed-up stuntman. A disgraced surgeon and his son, a broken-down boxer. A father set on permanent self-destruct, and his daughter, a reluctant powerlifter. A fireworks-maker and his daughter. A very peculiar boy and his equally peculiar adopted family. Five houses. Five families. One block. Ask yourself: How well do you know your neighbours? How well do you know your own family? Ultimately, how well do you know yourself? How deeply do the threads of your own life entwine with those around you? Do you ever really know how tightly those threads are knotted? Do you want to know? I know, and can show you. Please, let me...