The Rot

The Rot

Kipp Poe Speicher

Horror / Short Stories

What starts as a normal morning turns into a complete nightmare, What would you do if you could not find a breath of fresh air, and all you could smell was The Rot.Review by: Chantale Reve on Mar. 21, 2011 : I have just read "The Rot" and am absolutely chilled to the bone. With an economy of words but an expanse of compassion, Speicher keeps the reader of this cryptic tale in suspense until the end. Palpable, odorous, stifling and frightening, Speich's masterful flash fiction left me wobbly in the shoes of his everyman protagonist. Also includes BONUS short stories "Closing My Eyes Helps Me To See Clearly, and a new edit of DIE ALREADY, and now my new short "i" and, "It Was The Dead Who Groaned Within" all five books in one collection.
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H. M. S. Ulysses

H. M. S. Ulysses

Alistair MacLean

Mystery & Thrillers / Biographies & Memoirs / Short Stories

The book that launched the career of one of the world's most popular thriller writers of all time, HMS Ulysses tells the story of enlisted men who rose to great heroism in savage conditions.Alongside The Caine Mutiny and The Cruel Sea, HMS Ulysses is one of the classic novels of the navy at war and a gripping survival tale. On a desperate voyage to Murmansk, the men of convoy FR77 are pushed to the limits of human endurance, crippled by relentless enemy attack and the bitter cold of the Arctic."A story of exceptional courage which grips the imagination." —Daily Telegraph"A brilliant, overwhelming piece of descriptive writing." —The Observer"It deserves an honorable place among twentieth-century war books." —Daily Mail
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Collected Poems

Collected Poems

Chinua Achebe

Fiction / History / Short Stories

A collection of poetry spanning the full range of the African-born author's acclaimed career has been updated to include seven never-before-published works, as well as much of his early poetry that explores such themes as the African consciousness, the tragedy of Biafra, and the mysteries of human relationships.
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The Amazing Web

The Amazing Web

Harry Stephen Keeler

Mystery & Thrillers / Science Fiction & Fantasy / Short Stories

How the Trigger-Finger of a Man Long Dead Sent Another Man To His DeathIn this gigantic mystery story, Mr. Keeler has employed atavism in his plot, a thing that has probably never before been attempted in mystery fiction. Starting in pirate days with the bitter enmity between Captain Kidd and Captain Quarlbush whom Kidd marooned on a desert island for mutiny and thus deprived of a share in the spoils, Mr. Keeler conjures up in modern times a descendant of each of them and shows how in a mysterious way Quarlbush was finally avenged.Standing one day before a strange beautiful Chinese cabinet, in which he was seeking some priceless papers, Kidd's descendant falls dead. With many dramatic suspenses, Mr. Keeler tells the story of how Captain Quarlbush, bent upon revenge, secretly built the beautiful Chinese cabinet, which he plotted to fall into Kidd's hands. This is the basis of the primary plot to which are interlaced many other plots in this incomparable book.
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Her Victory

Her Victory

Alan Sillitoe

Literature & Fiction / Short Stories

A story of love and romance between two lost people in 1950s Britain, from the author of The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner Every morning Pam decides to leave George. Somehow she never quite gets around to it. She's flirted with suicide too, but she doesn't see the point. A woman would have to be mad to kill herself for the sake of George. He's a brute, vain and selfish, with a cruel sense of humor and absolutely no regard for his wife. Someday she will leave him: Why not today? Pam flees to London, where she takes refuge in a lonely, sparsely furnished room. With a twist of her wrist, she turns on the gas and resigns herself to death, only to be rescued by a neighbor. Tom, a former sailor in the Merchant Navy who has just come into a surprise inheritance, is carrying scars of his own. Bound by despair, these two unlikely lovers begin a new life, and together they will find a reason to live This lonely middle-aged...
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Sexy Just Walked Into Town

Sexy Just Walked Into Town

Lucy Felthouse

Short Stories / Romance / Gay & Lesbian

Sexy Just Walked Into Town is a collection of delicious erotic and romantic stories from the Brit Babes. These eight British authors have put together a book of tales to tease and tantalise you, each one a sample of the individual Babes’ voices and styles. You’ll find contemporary, BDSM, same-sex loving, ménage a trois, paranormal, sporty, military, Rubenesque and more.
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[1935] The Shadow Out of Time

[1935] The Shadow Out of Time

H. P. Lovecraft

Horror / Weird Fiction / Short Stories

The Shadow Out of Time is a novella by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft. Written between November 1934 and February 1935, it was first published in the June 1936 issue of Astounding Stories.After twenty-two years of nightmare and terror, saved only by a desperate conviction of the mythical source of certain impressions, I am unwilling to vouch for the truth of that which I think I found in Western Australia on the night of July 17–18, 1935. There is reason to hope that my experience was wholly or partly an hallucination—for which, indeed, abundant causes existed. And yet, its realism was so hideous that I sometimes find hope impossible. If the thing did happen, then man must be prepared to accept notions of the cosmos, and of his own place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest mention is paralysing. He must, too, be placed on guard against a specific lurking peril which, though it will never engulf the whole race, may impose monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain venturesome members of it. It is for this latter reason that I urge, with all the force of my being, a final abandonment of all attempts at unearthing those fragments of unknown, primordial masonry which my expedition set out to investigate.
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The Thyme Fiend

The Thyme Fiend

Jeffrey Ford

Science Fiction & Fantasy / Short Stories

The Thyme Fiend by Jeffrey Ford is a dark fantasy novelette about a young man who can only prevent seeing visions by eating or smoking thyme. When he finds the skeleton of a missing man the skeleton begins to haunt him. What does it want? At the publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied.
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The Piazza Tales

The Piazza Tales

Herman Melville

Fiction / Poetry / Short Stories

First published in 1856, five years after the appearance of Moby Dick, The Piazza Tales comprises six of Herman Melville's finest short stories. Included are two sea tales that encompass the essence of Melville's art: 'Benito Cereno,' an exhilarating account of mutiny and rescue aboard a disabled slave ship, which is a parable of man's struggle against the forces of evil, and 'The Encantadas,' ten allegorical sketches of the Galapagos Islands, which reveal nature to be both enchanting and horrifying. Two pieces explore themes of isolation and defeat found in Melville's great novels: 'Bartleby, the Scrivener,' a prophetically modern story of alienation and loss on nineteenth-century Wall Street, and 'The Bell-Tower,' a Faustian tale about a Renaissance architect who brings about his own violent destruction. The other two works reveal Melville's mastery of very different writing styles: 'The Lightning-Rod Man,' a satire showcasing his talent for Dickensian comedy, and 'The Piazza,' the title story of the collection, which anticipates the author's later absorption with poetry.
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Golgotha Run

Golgotha Run

Dave Stone

Comics & Graphic Novels / Science Fiction & Fantasy / Short Stories

SUMMARY: My mom said, "Never, ever pick up hitch hikers..." America, tomorrow Multinational corporations control the media, the government and maybe even people's thoughts. Sinister religious cults are growing in power and influence day by day, and politicians are little more than media celebrities. In the polluted dustbowl of Middle America, Eddie Kalish makes a terrible mistake when he stops to help a pretty nurse stranded in the desert. Little does he realise that this simple act of kindness will catapult him into a vicious, all-out corporate war to gain possession of a mysterious artefact. Will country boy Eddie be able to get out alive? Too wild to be true – or too close for comfort? Welcome to the Dark Future.
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