The Essential Sick Stuff

Winner of the 2021 Splatterpunk Award for Best Collection In the foul and fetid darkness, it awakens. Vile, unstable, brimming with ill intent, like pus on the verge of eruption. Repulsive to gaze upon and even more disturbing to comprehend. It reaches out and discovers that the others—its siblings—have abandoned this cancerous womb long ago. Angry and alone, it thrashes violently…tearing, clawing its way from dormancy into daylight…and onto the dark playground of your bookshelf. Amid these pages, Southern horror master Ronald Kelly has brought together a loathsome assemblage of stories that cut deeply and expose the raw nerves of fright and revulsion. Joining his extreme horror collections, The Sick Stuff and More Sick Stuff, is a third installment of yarns both new and old…Even Sicker Stuff. Combined, they meld and morph, forming The Essential Sick Stuff. Twenty-three abhorrent tales to tantalize and torture the fragile psyche; to cause the stomach to revolt and gooseflesh to crawl as though something, visceral and alive, lurks just beneath the surface...

Down below the Mason-Dixon Line, deep in the shadowy hills and hollows of Tennessee, lives a teller of terrifying tales and a spinner of dark yarns unlike any you have ever heard before. Stories to chill your bones and pepper your flesh with goose bumps. What his true name may be, no one knows for sure. But, if you listen closely, you can hear his voice ringing through the dead of night! Pull up a tombstone and join your host, The Old Storyteller, as he shares nine tales of ghostly horror that will run a shiver down your spine! Tour a backwoods graveyard, neglected and forgotten…a cemetery haunted by restless spirits and wayward souls. Some are earthbound by sorrow and remorse…others by an unearthly hunger for vengeance! Now enter…the Haunt of Southern-Fried Fear!

O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree... what lurks among thy branches... Christmas can be the most wonderful time of the year. Candy canes and hot cocoa. Snowmen and sleigh rides. The love and hope that the Nativity brings. Cold milk and warm cookies for Santa. Family, friends, and the cheerful laughter of children. But, beneath the festive wrapping paper and the gleam and glitter of the lights and tinsel, things less jubilant may lie in wait. The holiday season can bring love, peace, and benevolence... but it may also spawn a darkness lurking amid the shadowy boughs of the Christmas tree, ornaments that should have never seen the light of day, let along hung on festive branches, and bones that jingle and dance, in search of Santa's crimson suit... and the flesh that resides within. In this collection of harrowing holiday tales, Ronald Kelly leaves ten frightful and horrific gifts in the Christmas stockings that hang from the mantle of your cheerful fireplace. Ghastly and gruesome presents that slowly unwrap and burst into life while you are tucked, snug and warm, in your bed and take on nightmarish form in the icy winter hours of Christmas Eve, turning comfort and joy into terror and dread. Stories included in this collection: Jingle Bones The Skating Pond Depravity Road Heirlooms The Winds Within Then Came a Woodsman As for Me, My Little Brain Beneath the Branches Papa’s Exile The Peddler’s Journey

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A stunning “portrait of the enduring grace of friendship” (NPR) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century. NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara’s stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. Look for Hanya Yanagihara’s latest bestselling novel, To Paradise.

Includes the bonus short story "Last of the Chupacabra" BLOOD SPORT They were called diablos hoyos. Vicious black-furred beasts that fought in the pit with the raw fury and savage ferocity of Satan himself. For their owners, they were a lucrative investment. For the people of Sulphur Springs, Texas, they were the best entertainment they'd had in a long while. For Bowie Kane, they were his darkest nightmare come true. He alone recognized the dark and ravenous evil that his Apache ancestors had foretold. But Bowie Kane was an outsider in Sulphur Springs. No one would listen to his warnings. And now it was too late to avert the rampage of carnage and terror unleashed on an unsuspecting town.

Grill the perfect steak. Hit the perfect shot. BE THE PERFECT MAN.

Wouldn't you like: - Products that don't damage the environment? - A better way of life without agonising about your 'footprint'? - To really know your stuff? Climate change? Biofuels? Nuclear power? Landfills? Recycling? Renewable energy? Environmental issues can feel overwhelming. But, in fact, it is simple; it all comes down to one thing - stuff. Our use of the Earth's resources - whether a crisp packet or a cargo ship, a T-shirt or a wind turbine - has an inescapable impact on our future. In The Secret Life of Stuff, Julie Hill uncovers the origins and the true cost of what we use. Her inventory of over-consumption may shock but it is the first step towards overcoming waste. The misuse of stuff is not your fault, it's a product of history. But it is only by understanding what has gone wrong, that everyone - politicians, business people and us as consumers - can create a new and better material world.

The story of a recovery from a crippling disease and the physician patient partnership that beat the odds by using the patient's own capabilities.

Halloween is more than a holiday; more than a fun time of candy and costumes for the young. It is inoculated into our very being at an early age and there it remains. As we grow old, it grows dormant… but it is still there. For the lucky ones, such as us, it emerges every year, like a reanimated corpse digging its way out of graveyard earth to shamble across our souls. And we rejoice… oh, if we are the fortunate ones, we most certainly rejoice. So turn these pages and celebrate our heritage. Blow the dust off the rubber mask in the attic and hang the glow-in-the-dark skeleton upon the door. Light the hollowed head of the butchered pumpkin and string the faux cobweb from every corner and eave. It’s Halloween once again. Shed your adult skin with serpentine glee and walk the blustery, October streets of long years past. And, most of all, watch out for misplaced steps in the darkness and the things that lurk, unseen, in the shadows in-between. Stories included in this collection: Mister Glow-Bones The Outhouse Billy’s Mask Pins & Needles Black Harvest Pelingrad’s Pit Mister Mack & the Monster Mobile The Halloween Train The Candy in the Ditch Gang Halloweens: Past & Present Monsters in a Box

Includes the bonus novella "Potter's Field" SIGHT UNSEEN Little Cindy Ann knew things no one else knew; saw things no one else saw. Ever since she'd nearly died of fever, the gift of second sight had been hers. Only it didn't seem like such a gift when the other children called her a witch and wouldn't play with her. Or when her visions resembled nothing so much as her worst nightmares. DEATH UNDYING Then her older brother disappeared in the vicinity of the old tobacco barn. And Cindy's visions began to burn with a bloodthirsty relentless hatred. What horrors lay buried in the cold earth of the barn? And how could one innocent little girl hope to fight the terrifying evil - an evil that had taken her brother, and that would now turn on the only witness to its monstrous, merciless crimes...Cindy herself.