Showing results for "blackstone" in Occult

Scott Crane abandoned his career as a professional poker player 20 years ago and hasn’t returned to Las Vegas, or held a hand of cards, in 10 years. But troubling nightmares about a strange poker game he once attended on a houseboat on Lake Mead are drawing him back to the magical city. For the mythic game he believed he won did not end that night in 1969—and the price of his winnings was his soul. Now, a pot far more strange and perilous than he ever could imagine depends on the turning of a card.

Struggling with the effects of early onset dementia, Dennie Keeling now leads a quiet life. Her husband is dead, her children are grown, and her best friend, Sarah, was convicted of murdering her abusive husband. After Sarah’s tragic death in prison, Dennie has found solace in her allotment, and all she wants is to be left to tend it in peace. Life remains quiet for 12 years, until three strangers take on a nearby plot and Dennie starts to notice unnatural things. Shadowy figures prowl at night; plants flower well before their time. And then Sarah appears, bringing dire warnings....

Sweeney Cassidy is the typical college freshman at the University of the Archangels and St. John the Divine in Washington, DC. She drinks. She parties. And she certainly doesn't suspect that underneath its picturesque Gothic facade, the university is a haven for the Benandanti, a cult devoted to suppressing the powerful and destructive Moon Goddess. But everything is about to change as Sweeney learns that her two new best friends are the goddess' Chosen Ones.

Deadwood, late 1876. A rowdy and reckless undertaker’s delight. What better place for a killer to blend in? Enter undertaker Clementine Johanssen, tall and deadly with a hot temper and short fuse, hired to clean up Deadwood’s dead...and the “other” problem. She’s hell-bent on poking, sticking, or stabbing anyone who steps out of line. But when a couple Santa Fe sidewinders ride into town searching for their missing uncle, they land neck deep in lethal gunplay, nasty cutthroats, and endless stinkin’ snow.

Anthropologist Calliope Santiago awakens to find herself in a strange and sinister wasteland, a shadow of the New Mexico she knew. Empty vehicles litter the road. Everyone has disappeared - or almost everyone. Calliope, heavy-bellied with the twins she carries inside her, must make her way across this dangerous landscape with a group of fellow survivors in search of answers. Long-dead volcanoes erupt, the ground rattles and splits, and monsters come to ominous life. Calliope will be forced to reconcile the geological record with the heritage she once denied.

After a tragedy too painful to bear, former novelist Lily Albrecht has resigned herself to a dull, sexless life as a rare-book dealer—until she gets a lead on a book that just might turn everything around. The Book of the Most Precious Substance is a 17th-century manual on sex magic, rumored to be the most powerful occult book ever written—if it really exists at all. And some of the wealthiest people in the world are willing to pay Lily a fortune to find it, if she can.

One October morning, Laina gets the news that her brother has been shot and killed by Boston cops. But what looks like a case of police brutality soon reveals something much stranger. Monsters are real. And they want everyone to know it. As creatures from myth and legend come out of the shadows, seeking safety through visibility, their emergence sets off a chain of seemingly unrelated events. Members of a local werewolf pack are threatened into silence.

Fleeing from a traumatic break-in, Londoners Paul and Tricia Feenan sell up to escape to the isolated Holiwell village where Tricia has inherited a property. Scattered throughout the settlement are centuries-old stones used during the Great Plague as boundary markers. No plague-sufferer was permitted to pass them and enter the village. The plague diminished, and the village survived unscathed, but since then each year the village trustees have insisted on an ancient ceremony to renew the village boundaries.

I've always had a weak spot for strange ladies. One very beautiful girl had even warned me that she was, get this, a vampire. But did I listen? No.

Unwitting time traveler Joseph Bridgeman is adjusting to life in the present and wondering if his traveling days are behind him. But when he’s contacted by the Continuum, an organized group of time travelers based in the future, he learns his career is just getting started. The Continuum needs Joe’s help. One of their operatives is missing, last seen in 19th-century Paris, and they believe Joe’s ability to see the past might be the only way to find him. Teamed up with Gabrielle Green, an acerbic, wisecracking traveler, Joe heads back to 1873 on his most dangerous mission yet.

It is the spring of 1895, and more than a decade of combating eldritch entities has cost Dr. John Watson his beloved wife Mary, and has nearly broken the health of Sherlock Holmes. Yet the companions do not hesitate when they are called to the infamous Bedlam lunatic asylum, where they find an inmate speaking in R’lyehian, the language of the Old Ones. Moreover, the man is horribly scarred and has no memory of who he is. The detectives discover that he was once a scientist, a student of Miskatonic University, and one of two survivors of a doomed voyage down the Miskatonic River.

This issue of Weird Tales presents a variety of stories, essays, and poems about cryptids and urban legends. Not to dispel, but to reveal.

Weird Tales magazine is known for launching a number of sub-genres of fiction—cosmic horror, swords & sorcery, dark fantasy, and others. It has also greatly added to existing genres like science fiction, horror, and—a personal favorite of editor Jonathan Maberry—weird mystery stories. Or, as they became known—occult detective tales.

In Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner tells of an aging spinster's struggle to break away from her controlling family - a classic story that she treats with cool feminist intelligence, while adding a dimension of the supernatural and strange. Warner is one of the outstanding and indispensable mavericks of 20th-century literature, a writer to set beside Djuna Barnes and Jane Bowles, with a subversive genius that anticipates the fantastic flights of such contemporaries as Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson.

Noah Fairchild has been losing his formerly polite Southern parents to far-right cable news for years, so when his mother leaves him a voicemail warning him that the “Great Reckoning” is here, he assumes it’s related to one of the many conspiracy theories she believes in. But when his own phone calls go unanswered, Noah makes the long drive from Brooklyn to Richmond, Virginia. There, he discovers his childhood home in shambles, a fridge full of spoiled food, and his parents locked in a terrifying trance-like state in front of the TV.

Peter Warlock is a magician with a dark secret. Every night, he amazes audiences at his private theater in New York, where he performs feats that boggle the imagination. But his day job is just a cover for his otherworldly pursuits: Peter is a member of an underground group of psychics who gaze into the future to help prevent crimes. No one, not even his live-in girlfriend, knows the truth about Peter - until the séance when he foresees an unspeakable act of violence that will devastate the city.

Single gay mom Brigid always thought that cutting ties with her extremist Catholic family was the best thing she could have done for her daughter, Dylan—and for herself. But when Dylan starts having terrifying fits of unnatural violence, Brigid can’t shake her memories of a girl from her childhood who behaved the same way … until Brigid’s uncle, Father Angus, performed an exorcism. Convinced that her daughter is suffering from demonic possession, Brigid does the thing she told herself she’d never do: she goes home.

Talented actress Diana and young bishop Alistair, her partner in crime-solving and supernatural sleuthing, face the terrifying curse of the Scottish Play in this witty, creeptastic paranormal mystery from New York Times bestselling British fantasy author Simon R. Green.

Nineteen-year-old Megan Howatt lives in a house on the edge of a crumbling sea cliff, waiting for her life to fall into the North Sea. Her mother is dead, and her father has lost his mind, obsessively hoarding the junk that he salvages from the shoreline. Her only friends are Lou, the eccentric owner of a beach-side cafe, and Kelpy, the large black dog that she rescued from the sea as a puppy. Desperate to escape, but unwilling to abandon her father, she scratches a living working at the Dry Dog Inn in the nearby village of Salwick.

In the titular Man, F--k This House, Sabrina Haskins and her family have just moved into their dream home. At first glance, the house is perfect. But things aren’t what they seem. Sabrina is hearing odd noises, seeing strange visions. Their neighbors are odd or absent. And Sabrina’s already-fraught relationship with her son is about to be tested in a way no parent could ever imagine. Because while the Haskins family might be the newest owners of this house, they’re far from its only residents …