Every stellar rise deserves a cosmic fall. Inhumanly callous and ruthlessly selfish, he made a fortune in predatory mortgage loans prior to the economic collapse of 2008. In its calamitous aftermath, executive handlers staged him for a corporate patsy and left him to answer alone for their collective crimes. Facing financial ruin and certain incarceration, his reduced prospects force him to move his family into a rat-infested bungalow. One family confronts an epic plague of vermin when they move into a modest country home. They have all the benefits of human civilization in such a contest,...

Insomnia is a special kind of torture. Its short-term effects are something everyone experiences from time to time, but its long-term effects are known only to an unfortunate few. These effects include panic attacks, paranoia, and phobias. Eventually, hallucinations and convulsions become noticeable, followed by symptoms of dementia, coma and then death. Inevitably, the difference between waking and sleeping dissolves and the two become inseparable. After months of restlessness, a chronically sleepless man loses the ability to differentiate between nightmares, daydreams and reality. While...

In the limitless expanse of the cosmos, intelligence need not be confined to water-filled flesh. For every form of imagination, there is an embodiment of it out there in the void. On this world in this system, everything may be uniquely alive, from the rocks to the sandstorms. How does one conquer the wind? It is an alien intellect in the shifting sands of a waterless planet. Journey here to die. Or be reborn.

Upon hearing of a lost fortune in pure, refined opium, western adventurers stationed in Afghanistan decide to retrieve it, despite repeated warnings about the dangers that confront them. When a local guide leads them through the desert into the mountains to a dark and foreboding crack in a towering precipice, they again shrug off the man's dire insistence that they return home. Their decision to enter into the defile is one they will soon regret. Greed can drive a man to dare a deadly waste. Pride can push him to the world's most desolate peaks. In the barren, combat-wracked heart of...

In the first days of the zombie apocalypse, an army physician and small team of survivors must gather their wits, their weapons and their available resources to make a last stand. When nowhere seems safe and no-one seems immune to the rapidly spreading disease, they must choose a destination that is both attainable and sufficiently remote to serve their long terms safety. It's a sheer stone tower standing alone over a remote frontier, as iconic as it is forbidding. It is also the location of humanity's last stand. Can zombies climb?

In this vision of the future, the most prestigious vacation money can buy is a trip to a corporate planet overgrown with a jungle wilderness. There, wealthy tourists gird armor and fantastically powerful weapons to hunt strange chimeras through an endless forest. These beasts are all genetically engineered to be fierce, bloodthirsty, and difficult to kill. Despite the benefits of their high technology, only experienced guides can see their pampered clients safely through to the end of the game. Every year, countless bored tourists pay exorbitant fees to hunt terrifying synthetic monsters...

Tarn is a water world, covered from pole to pole by an incredibly deep ocean. Humankind built only one city there. Situated directly on its equator, terraformers strategically emplaced this massive port to continuously exploit the planet's boundless fisheries. Because Tarn orbits its binary system on an extreme axial tilt, each day also measures a year, and because its suns are lethal, Tarn fish only rise to its surface in the darkness. Fishing there is a dangerous business, but the planet's entire economy subsists on the larva of a single enormous predator, which the galactic elite consume...

A marauding legion of starving aliens arrive on Earth for a brief but terrifying raid on the planet. For a few unbelievably deadly days they will raid humankind to fill their larder before they can continue on their indeterminate journey. Though the invaders are impervious to most human defenses, one man finds safety with a household pet They are many and they are hungry. Human beings are defenseless. You never needed a cat so badly