For generations, the northern Minnesota mountain region has been a haven for peaceful hikes and breath-taking scenery. But when tourists suddenly turn up dead, FBI special agents Angela Wallace and Brian Shilling are called in to investigate, only to discover that the murders are part of a deadlier, supernatural mystery. In the series fiction debut, THE PACK: WINTER KILL, Bram Stoker Award winning author, Mike Oliveri gives us the first salvo in a crime, supernatural thriller that reimagines the werewolf mythos in a way you'll never see coming.

The Pack: Winter Kill

Mike Oliveri

Evileye Books

I AM A DARKWALKER By John Urbancik  I crept through the dark, pen in hand, notepad tucked under my arm, in search of a drink or a lonely corner or a girl. It’s hard to remember exactly. It was, after all, a long time ago. Smoke filled the air, music pulsed through my bones, strobes broke reality into an unsteady staccato simulacrum. I don’t remember the name of the bar or the name of the bartender, but I know it was long and narrow and old, as old as a thing can be in a city standing less than a century.  I’d caught an image. I’d captured an idea. This isn’t unusual, not in any real sense, but it was particularly vivid, a girl in gothic black with red lips, soul-trappingly powerful eyes, and a victim. There might have been some truth to the image. There may have been some vague whiff of reality about it. Gothic was the most common shade of black in a bar like this, and crimson the most common shade of red. The smoke, the darkness cutting the light, the phantom faces around me seeking their own drinks, corners, or lovers, intoxicated me and, more importantly, ignited my imagination.  A girl (a special girl, not just any random, freshly-met bar girl) asked me, “Have you ever seen the sun rise?” I told her I had, of course, been up that late. “And these things you see, or think you see,” she said. “You’re a night walker.”  It sounded wrong. It sounded wrong then, and it sounds wrong today. I’m not a night walker, I told her. “I’m a DarkWalker.”  The pieces came together rather swiftly after that. Untouched, invisible in the night, like a young poet without verse, not just ignored but protected—but where’s the story in that? Hunted. There, that’s a story. That’s got tension. Possibility. Opportunity.  Jack Harlow evolved in my head over a period of time. He didn’t arrive fully formed, appearing suddenly in the dark corner of a bar instead of that girl. He didn’t sit in the low, sagging sofa propped against the bar’s outer wall, soaked with sweat, beer, and whiskey, and say to me, “I’m your man.” He didn’t throw me a grin or a wink. No, he wasn’t that kind of man. He came gradually. He revealed himself slowly. He was a recluse, after all, unaccustomed to human contact, possibly skirting the edge of sanity. The things in the periphery of his perception, you must realize, include the darkest, most damnable things that have ever walked the earth. He, not I, had seen the girl in gothic black, and knew her for what she was.  But Jack’s got more to him than a mere ability to walk untouched through the dark. He’s got to grow. He’s got to learn. He’s got to love and lose and fight and struggle and win and die and discover undiscoverable things.  In “DarkWalker,” he begins that journey. In the first of a series, Jack Harlow learns what it truly means to be a DarkWalker—what it means when the things that bump the night can, quite suddenly, touch him, hurt him, and kill him. He trades his immunity for love. He begins to dream of normalcy even as the rhythms of his abnormal life are about to be ripped apart. He is targeted. He is hunted. But even in the dark, even in the night, he is not alone.  For the record, I did, that night, find the girl. That’s another story.  —JU

DarkWalker

Literature & Fiction

Urbancik, John

Genre Fiction

THE BURNING MAIDEN Where Literature and the Supernatural Meet Sixteen new short stories from bestselling authors... Joe R. Lansdale (Edge of Dark Water, Bullets and Fire) Matthew Pearl (The Dante Club, The Technologists) Louis Bayard (The School of Night, The Black Tower) Lyndsay Faye (The Gods of Gotham, Dust and Shadow) Charles Johnson (Middle Passage, Oxherding Tale) AND MORE! Sixteen stories and poems that redefine the boundary between horror and literature! FROM THE INTRODUCTION BY ANTHOLOGY EDITOR, GREG KISHBAUGH: THE BLURRED LINE Publishers love categories, as do bookstores. They want a writer’s work to fit neatly into a specific genre. The motivation for this, of course, lies in commerce, as well as questionable (and outdated) notions about the consumer mind. But this can be an unfair burden, as writers are far less compartmentalized in their thinking. They strive to tell a story. To enlighten. To entertain. The genre in which the story falls is not nearly as important as the story itself. After all, how would one categorize "A Clockwork Orange"? Is it horror? Yes. Science Fiction? Yes. Literature? Yes. And yet I’ve never heard Anthony Burgess referred to as a “horror” writer or a “science fiction” writer. How about Cormac McCarthy? No one would ever deem him a “horror” writer, but then how does one categorize "The Road"? Is Robert Louis Stevenson a “horror” writer because he wrote "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"? Is George Orwell either a “horror” or “science fiction” writer in light of his two most famous works, "1984" and "Animal Farm"? Let’s face it, many of the novels we consider classics today simply transcend genre, in no small part due to the fact that they manage to mash more than one together, producing works that resonate in our imaginations. "Slaughterhouse Five." "Lord of the Flies." "Fahrenheit 451." "Deliverance." These stories all contain skin-prickling elements of horror; yet none are categorized as “horror” novels. If such works can fit into the horror mold, then it begs the question: What is literature? And to analyze the other side of the coin, what do we make of works that are unquestionably horror but clearly transcend the boundaries of genre? Is "Something Wicked This Way Comes" any less a piece of fine literature because it also happens to be a work of dread-inducing horror? How about "The Haunting of Hill House," "I Am Legend" or "The Shining." What of some of the masterfully macabre short stories of Harlan Ellison? Or the works of Poe and Lovecraft? Certainly anyone would categorize them as glorious works of literature, all of which happen to squarely fall into the genre of horror. "The Burning Maiden" was born of this conundrum. When is horror simply “horror” and when does it cross over into “literature”? What happens when writers of unparalleled talents put their minds (and writing chops) to telling stories of the supernatural, of the darkness in the human soul, of the sadness and longing that sometimes supersedes the grave—all the while telling stories with the hearts and souls of poets? Contributors to this anthology have been nominated for or awarded (to name a few) with the American Mystery Award, the British Fantasy Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the Horror Critics Award, the Edgar Award, the Dagger Award, the Crime Writers’ Association Award, the British Fantasy Society Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Asimov’s Readers’ Award, the Rhysling Award, the International Horror Guild Award, the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. "The Burning Maiden" was created as a showcase for horror and suspense with a strong literary bent. Stories that focus on the glorious interplay of poetry and words set against the dark wonder that truly great speculative fiction can raise in us. Greg Kishbaugh Editor

The Burning Maiden

Kishbaugh, Greg

Short Stories & Anthologies

THE WHAT IF MOMENT A Note from the Author on the Rise of THE DEAD SHERIFF  It probably started with the Lone Ranger.  When I was a kid, westerns were everywhere, especially at our house. My dad was a nut for them. The table next to his chair always had a Louis L’Amour book on it. A John Wayne movie on a Saturday afternoon took precedence over everything else, even baseball games. Half the TV schedule was comprised of shoot-‘em-ups, including reruns of the Clayton Moore “Lone Ranger” series.  Believe me, I grew up well versed in “Giddyup” and “Whoa!” and “Reach fer the sky, mister!”  At some point, though, I’d had enough. I developed interests of my own, and the stuff my parents liked couldn’t be my favorites anymore. It just wasn’t cool.  Among my growing passions were “Chiller Theater,” “Famous Monsters of Filmland,” Marvel Comics and pulp magazine reprints of “Doc Savage” and “The Spider.”  Years later, I came across a DVD of “Lone Ranger” episodes. Giving in to a twinge of nostalgia, I bought it. It wasn’t great, but it was a classic part of my childhood. More importantly, it started the wheels rolling toward “What if?”  A lot of writers will tell you that almost everything springs from “What if?” My moment came right after the Lone Ranger and his stoic sidekick, Tonto, had stopped the bad guys, thus earning the undying gratitude of the whole town. As the crime-fighting duo saddled up and rode off toward their next adventure, I thought, “What if everybody thinks the Lone Ranger is in charge, but he’s really just some guy hired by Tonto to be the face of their crime-fighting operation and later, after the Ranger is snoring in his bedroll, Tonto creeps back to town to collect the reward money that the Ranger always turns down?” Hey, a guy has to plan for his future. Maybe Tonto needs a down payment on that retirement condo in Boca.  Something else writers will tell you is that the What If moment occurs maybe ten or twenty times a day. Out of those, maybe–maybe–one idea a week will become the germ for a story or novel or screenplay or poem.  The Tonto-as-boss notion was one of those that seemed to offer nothing more than a moment’s amusement. “Nothing to see here,” it seemed to say, “so move along.” I did.  But every now and then, the notion would resurface and I’d examine it and toss it back to wherever the lonely, unused concepts reside. It was incomplete—one half of an equation. One day, during a marathon of bad horror flicks, the other piece of the concept fell into place.  “The faithful Indian sidekick has a magic talisman that he stole. He only understands it enough to do one magical thing: to reanimate a corpse and control it like a puppet. While the rest of the west believes The Dead Sheriff is a murdered lawman that dug his way out of his grave to bring to justice the killers of his family, the truth is much different. The undead avenger is simply a means for a young man with a mystical totem to earn a little cash. Unfortunately, where magic and money are concerned, things inevitably go wrong.”  Despite a tendency for bits of himself to fall off along the dusty trail, I plan for The Dead Sheriff to be righting wrongs for many years to come, and encountering the oddest characters to ever saddle up, like the crazed cannibal brothers, a traveling vampire bordello and the posse made up of the West’s far less successful masked vigilantes. Did I mention the magic talisman’s original owner and his demonic sidekick? Or the time traveler?  I hope you’ll stroll into the saloon, belly up to the bar and order of a shot of pulpy fun. The Wild West is about to get very weird.  Mark Justice In the hills of Kentucky

The Dead Sheriff: Zombie Damnation

Justice, Mark

"The stories of Orrin Grey are fun, fast, and, surprising enough in a genre where doom, gloom, and ultra-gore are standard issue, rather good-natured. It's not often you come across 'pleasant horror,' but that's the best way to describe this collection—put a load of classic horror movies and comic books in a blender, liberally add some splashes of Mike Mignola-cool, and you've got yourself a monster mash to be reckoned with." - Jesse Bullington, author of Enterprise of Death and The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart A WORLD JUST BEYOND KNOWING By Orrin Grey As a reader and writer, I love the economy and freedom of the short story form. When it comes to matters of the supernatural, short stories are particularly well-suited to delivering the inexplicable, the indefinable, the numinous, something still left unexplored, an edge of the map marked “Here, there be monsters.” I seek out these stories in anthologies, in films, and in comics like the old Warren Creepy and Eerie magazines, but my favorite way to read them is in a collection written by the vision of a single author. Collections let you see the stories all stacked up next to each other, see how the author changes from one story to the next, and how they stay the same. Whether it's Clive Barker's The Books of Blood or the ghost stories of M.R. James and E.F. Benson, a collection by a contemporary master or one of the billion-or-so compilations of tales by Lovecraft, Bradbury or Poe, there's no other kind of book I'd rather curl up with. So when the opportunity presented itself for me to put together my first collection of stories, I jumped at the chance. I must have drafted the table of contents for the book that would become Never Bet the Devil &amp; Other Warnings at least a million times, trying to find just the right balance, the right combination. The title story is little more than a fragment, written for a contest that it didn't win, but I think it sets the right tone, invites you into the world that I'm building, one story at a time. A world made from old movies and horror comics and ghost stories, filled with golems and necromancers, cursed books and haunted houses, ghouls and jazz musicians and the skeleton of, well, something. That's the real beauty of a short story collection: it lets you build a world that somehow always remains just beyond the reach of knowing, a house that's always full of cobwebs and dark corners. A short story collection is never just one ride, it's an entire dark carnival, a cabinet of curiosities that gives you a glimpse into a place of infinite strangeness, but never quite lets you see the whole picture. — OG "Orrin Grey writes tales that are as eloquent as they are eerie. He deftly blends the high Gothic aesthetics of classical horror with a raconteur's innate knack for storytelling. Grey is a unique talent, and is destined to become a major name in weird fiction." - Richard Gavin, author of The Darkly Splendid Realm "Never Bet the Devil is a creepy foray into the realm of the weird and the sinister. An intriguing exploration of traditional and modern horror modes. Grey's debut shows a great deal of promise." Laird Barron, author of Occultation and The Croning

Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings

Grey, Orrin

Farro, Viktor

When tourists are murdered in a resort town in the northern mountain range of Minnesota, FBI Special Agent Angela Wallace is called in to investigate. But what she finds tests her training and sanity, for what she discovers should not exist. Winter Kill is the first book in the ongoing werewolf noir series, The Pack, by Bram Stoker Award winner Mike Oliveri. Book two, Lie with the Dead, is excerpted in this edition.

Winter Kill (The Pack)

Oliveri, Mike

At the end of book one of Mike Oliveri’s werewolf noir series, "Winter Kill," FBI special agent Angela Wallace lay in a hospital bed attempting to make sense of the bloody shootout with drug smugglers that nearly left her dead in the northern mountain range of Minnesota, and the mysterious, reclusive Tyler family that seems to be at the heart of all her questions. "Lie with the Dead" continues Agent Wallace’s search for answers, where the trail leads her to a deserted mining town in Nevada and, once again, finds herself fighting for her life against unseen enemies hell-bent on keeping dark secrets buried. But the truth she uncovers is deadlier than she ever imagined.

Lie with the Dead (The Pack)

Deep in the frozen heart of the arctic, the world’s most feared monster has hidden away for centuries from the prying eyes of mankind. But now a desperate stranger has ventured to this timeless wasteland in search of the monster. Not to hunt or kill him like all other men before him. No, this man has come seeking the monster’s help. In the darkened alleyways of Chicago, terrible experiments in bringing the dead back to life are again underway, filling the streets with soulless, undead wretches. And the only one who can stop the dark experiments is the creature who first crossed the threshold of death all those many years ago. A creature forged from the charnel house itself, brought to life through the burning pain of electricity. Stitched together from corpses coughed from their graves. With his new companion, the creature known as Frankenstein’s Monster returns to the world of man. A world that hates and reviles him. To battle the horrifying results of his own dark legacy.

Bone Welder

From New York Times bestselling author, Cullen Bunn, co-creator of The Sixth Gun and creator of the all-ages horror series, Crooked Hills, comes his first collection of acclaimed horror short stories.

Creeping Stones & Other Stories

Bunn, Cullen

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