Amanda M. Lyons

Step right up, ladies and gentlemen. Don't be shy. Inside these pages are the most bizarre. The most unusual stories you won't see anywhere else. For those with weak hearts, or weak stomachs, you may want to turn away because once you see what's inside these pages you won't ever forget the curiosities that await you. I bid you welcome, come inside and see our Freaks.

In a post-apocalyptic world where new dangers appear at every moment, Henry is still learning how to survive, and things only grow more complex as the path to his escape grows ever-winding. Abby has become less of a stranger but no less strange and she holds the book with all the answers shut tight in her pack. Henry is still trapped in her nightmarish world, it only makes sense for him to seek it out no matter how much she swears that it would be his undoing. What will he find inside and what will be the cost for his transgressions? It appears he is about to find out.

These three stories come with a breath of cold and a sort of longing, the sort of thing that consumes someone if they let it. Wendy Won't Go is the story of a family whose loss threatens to consume them all, Love like Blood is a story about the limits one will reach before love is gone, and Cold Comfort is about the bitterness that devours us within before it goes on to consume everything around us.

While Sacrum Umbra showed us the darkness of our own shadow, and In Ventre Tuo the guts of our inner monster, The Lesser Apocrypha is still another beast altogether. Meant to gather together the stranger stories, it contains some of the more surreal and ephemeral stories, the ones that just are without much rhyme or reason. Stories like an odd moment in the park, the strange child who won't stop haunting you, an alien invasion that gets very personal, an AI born of a lolcat, monsters in the woods, and a spell gone terribly wrong.

In Sacrum Umbra you were treated to tales from the shadows, the literary darkness that lives within all of us. Here you will find tales of another sort, the type you might find in the less wholesome end of the collective unconscious and the very depths of the gut. From stories of childhood gone horribly wrong to sex and madness with an impossible cost, this is where you'll find the more gruesome end of the spectrum.

In the dark heart of our imagination, and the haunted corners our past there are places we fear to tread. As much as we might try to outrun them, as much as we might try to deny their truths, we are owned by their shape, molded by their claws. The story of our being, they form a Sacrum Umbra, a sacred shadow of improbable origin- our own dark heart.

In Doorway to Death, you met death head on, traveling the varied path by which man may meet his end. In Doorway to Death: Afterlife you'll be asked to go further, from the moment of death on, into the strange planes that lie beyond all we know. Are you ready to meet your end? Is it all that you expected?

A thicket. What could be more normal and harmless than that? As you're about to find out, it isn't the outer appearance that decides your fortune. No. It's the darkness and secrets hidden among the trees and bushes, dark nightmares contained within their leafy branches, that are coming for you. All you have to do is be brave enough. Daring enough. To slip inside.

You came for the Splat and satisfaction brought you back Here you'll find yet more tales of the grotesque and sickening to tickle your gorge from authors Essel Pratt, Tristann Jones, John Ledger, Richard D Ramsey, Amanda M Lyons, Zolt n Komor, Donald Armfield, Michael Noe, William Bradley, Dani Brown, Justin Hunter, Lisa Dabrowski, Jonathan Moon, Brian Barr, Brian Glossup, Toneye Eyenot, Charie D. La Marr, Michelle Garza and Melissa Lason. Be careful what you wish for

Tales of sword and sorcery come to us across the ages, across worlds, and across time. Legends about the warriors and priests, the lost gods and forgotten cities of old, and the things that were done in their time, live within the fires of man. The words of the storyteller who sits there by the flames to speak of it all with great reverence and his own special magic take us to other realms as we seek to understand and to build our own kingdoms of might and magic. The storyteller is the soul of man, the flame and the wick by which he thrives. Here then you will find such storytellers and the worlds they weave with their tales dark and light, humorous and stark, uplifting and bleak. Heroes and monsters so bold they could only be forged in the fire of the spirit, the imagination of man. Kristen Kitchell, Toneye Eyenot, Dona Fox, Roy C. Booth, Brian Woods, Kat Doughty, Edward P. Cardillo, Essel Pratt, Richard D. Ramsey, Charie D. LaMarr, Brian Barr, William Bove, Amanda M. Lyons, Chad Michaels, Justin Hunter, Sam Reese, and Melissa McDannell