Short Stories/Novellas
In the aftermath of a critical World War II battle, Father Gaetano is assigned as the sole priest at the Church of San Domenico in the small, seaside Sicilian village of Tringale. The previous pastor has died, and now the young priest must say all of the masses himself. In addition, he is tasked with shepherding the war's many orphans taken in by the San Domenico rectory. The children are a joy, but his attempts to teach them the catechism are in vain until he finds an ornate box of puppets in the basement. By day the puppets are teaching tools, but after dark… they emerge from their box, without their strings. And the children's lives will never be the same again.
Fear of the unknown--it is the essence of the best horror stories, theneed to know what monstrous vision you're beholding and the underlyingterror that you just might find out. Now, twenty authors have gatheredto ask--and maybe answer--a question worthy of almost any horror tale:"What the #@&% is that?" Join these masters of suspense as they take you to where the shadows grow long, and that which lurks at the cornerof your vision is all too real. Featuring stories by Laird Barron, Scott Sigler, Simon R. Green, Alan Dean Foster, Christopher Golden, Maria Dahvana Headley, John Langan, Seanan McGuire, Jonathan Maberry, Tim Pratt, An Owomoyela and Rachel Swirsky, and others!
It's October in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where Richie Feehan was born and raised and has lived his whole life. He's a part-time lobsterman and full-time painter who sells his art at galleries in Rockport and Newburyport. Between the two jobs he makes enough money to get by, living in an in-law apartment in the family home owned by his brother Jim. Jim runs Feehan & Sons Funeral Home, a business started by their grandfather in 1921. All in all, despite the tension with his brother, and despite the grumbling of his friends, whose business has suffered because of a lengthy red tide and a spectacularly bad overall fishing season, Richie enjoys his life very much. He's content, and believes that's pretty much all a man can ask from his life. That is, until a horrible mystery begins to unfold in Gloucester.Out lobstering, Richie sees something nightmarish in the surf one day, catches a bare glimpse of it beneath the surface. He doesn't dare speak of it for fear of what others might say-he doesn't want to become the town crazy. But he's having a hard time sleeping at night, and several days later, while out hauling in his traps for the winter, Richie finds one of them stuck on something. When he finally hauls it up, there's a corpse attached, a corpse that has been eaten at by sea creatures, including something large . . . the corpse of Greta Wagner, a woman who had been waked at Feehan & Sons two weeks earlier and buried a couple of days later.Someone stole her corpse from the ground.And her grave won't be the only one disturbed.