Showing results for "The End" in Short Stories

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.

When five college friends cross America in a minivan to find themselves, they chance upon a road that isn’t on any map. They can’t resist exploring it. The van breaks down. They find a town, a massive trailer park steeped in squalor. The town isn’t on any map either. They find people in town. They’ll wish they hadn’t. The only sanctuary is the Big House - a giant mansion at the center of town that appears to be abandoned, only all the lights come on at night. Inside the Big House is the secret of the town. Inside, they’ll finally find themselves. They won’t like what they find.

What is the real world? Does it exist, or is it merely a means of keeping another reality at bay? Not the End of the World is Kate Atkinson's first collection of short stories. Playful and profound, they explore the world we think we know whilst offering a vision of another world which lurks...

A murder at a crime writers' conference. The method is entirely literary, the motive seems obvious – but can the detective who was first on scene puzzle out what's between the lines? An intelligence analyst has the chance to get out from behind the desk and do some real spy work. But as he enters the field, he begins to realise just how out of his depth he is. A brilliant sleuth, obsessed with Sherlock Holmes’s mysteries, turns his attention to a serial killer targeting women in New York's Central Park.

In the Agatha Christie classic Peril at End House, a young woman who has recently survived a series of very close calls appears to be the target of a dedicated killer—and it’s up to Hercule Poirot to save her life. On holiday on the Cornish Riviera, Hercule Poirot is alarmed to hear pretty...

After years of playing the tormented actor Joe Laughlin on the hit television show Shadowland, Hollywood star Robin Chadwick Cassidy is ready for a change. Joe's character embodies the real demons of Robin's past - his struggle with his sexuality, his battle with alcoholism - and portraying the part has taken a heavy toll on his personal life. Robin's husband, FBI agent Jules Cassidy, has noticed the strain and will do whatever he can to make Robin happy.

In these visceral, stunningly crafted stories, people are effortlessly cruel to one another and the natural world is a primitive salve. Here, women are domestically trapped by predatorial men, Ireland’s folklore and politics loom large and poverty - material, emotional, sexual - seeps through every crack.

In his second collection of short stories, James Leo Herlihy explores a landscape of people living on the fringes of normal society as the pleasures of daily life fade. Men and women search for the missing fragment of meaning from their existence with Herlihy’s signature humor and deft dialogue. In the titular story, Mary Ellen McClure is trapped in a dull, unfulfilled life in a trailer park, suspecting her husband of having an affair. Together with her neighbor Ivy, she dabbles with a Ouija board which spells out the name Ezra and implies that Mary Ellen will have an affair.

In 1943, a young soldier named James Jones returned from the Pacific, lightly wounded and psychologically tormented by the horrors of Guadalcanal. When he was well enough to leave the hospital, he went AWOL rather than return to service, and began work on a novel of the World War II experience. Jones’s AWOL period was brief, but he returned to the novel at war’s end, bringing him to the attention of Maxwell Perkins, the legendary editor of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe.

Collins brings the Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie, to English language learners. Agatha Christie is the most widely published author of all time and in any language. Now Collins has adapted her famous detective novels for English language learners. These carefully abridged versions are shorter...

A beautiful girl of the street sits in jail awaiting her sentencing for the murder of an abusive boyfriend.

Collins brings the Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie, to English language learners. Agatha Christie is the most widely published author of all time and in any language. Now Collins has adapted her famous detective novels for English language learners. These carefully abridged versions are shorter...

For three strangers whose paths will cross, the storm hasn’t even reached its peak. Two of them are the kind of climate scientists no one ever listens to in disaster movies. The third, against even icier opposition, has just moved to the Magnolia State to come out. Soon they’ll all be pushed closer to the edge, where the bracing winds of cataclysmic change can be so wildly liberating.

Lucy Maud Montgomery (November 30, 1874 – April 24, 1942), published as L. M. Montgomery, was a Canadian author best known for a series of novels beginning in 1908 with Anne of Green Gables . The book was an immediate success. The title character, orphan Anne Shirley, made Montgomery famous in her lifetime and gave her an international following. The End of the Young Family Feud: A week before Christmas, Aunt Jean wrote to Elizabeth, inviting her and Alberta and me to eat our Christmas dinner at Monkshead. We accepted with delight.

"The noble father and simpleton Shchiptsov, a tall, stocky old man, famous not so much for his stage talents as for his extraordinary physical strength, had a huge fight with the manager during the performance and in the midst of the swearing suddenly felt that something had snapped in his chest..

Among US couples marrying today, roughly 40 percent will divorce. About half of those will have children at the time of the split. Ensuing ugliness will engulf the lives of both divorcees and offspring. Perhaps there is another way, a better way. Adam-Troy Castro brings you a brutally horrific tale of the ultimate settlement in the battle of broken-hearted wills. Petty power plays have been cast aside. The facade of decency is shelved. For one blistering week in an abandoned desert motel, there will be no excuses, pleading, or games. Only resolution, reason, respect. And blood.

Soon after two o'clock one night, long ago, the cook, pale and agitated, rushed unexpectedly into my study and informed me that Madame Mimotih, the old woman who owned the house next door, was sitting in her kitchen."She begs you to go in to her, sir..." said the cook, panting. "Something bad has happened about her lodger... He has shot himself or hanged himself...""What can I do?" said I. "Let her go for the doctor or for the police!""How is she to look for a doctor! She can hardly breathe, and she has huddled under the stove, she is so frightened... You had better go round, sir."

Are you ready for a wild ride through the absurdity of office life? Meet Sir Yetti The Scribe, the mastermind behind the gut-busting series "How to End up in HR." Brace yourself for a rollercoaster of dark humor and politically incorrect escapades set against the backdrop of the corporate jungle.

The apocalypse is coming. There's only one way off Earth. When a small-moon-sized asteroid is discovered hurtling toward Earth, billionaire scientist Darien Trass must deal with the hardships of finding the select few who will join him on his voyage to escape the apocalypse and rekindle civilization on another world.

A dismembered body in the park.... Grand Rapids Detective Bill DeYoung is an old-timer riding it out until retirement. A ravaged body in the park and a drunken witness are about to change his plans; so is the end of the world. The events happen concurrently with the first novel, End Time, but it can be heard at any point in the series to get exciting additional content on the origin of a main character.