James Brogden

From the critically acclaimed author of Hekla's Children comes a dark and haunting tale of an ancient cult wreaking bloody havoc on the modern world. YOU SHALL REAP WHAT YOU SOW Struggling with the effects of early-onset Alzheimer's, Dennie Keeling leads a quiet life. Her husband is dead, her children are grown, and her best friend, Sarah, was convicted of murdering her abusive husband. All Dennie wants now is to be left to work her allotment in peace. But when three strangers take the allotment next to hers, Dennie starts to notice strange things. Plants are flowering well before their time, shadowy figures prowl at night, and she hears strange noises coming from the newcomers' shed. Dennie soon realises that she is face to face with an ancient evil - but with her Alzheimer's steadily getting worse, who is going to believe her?

Twenty curses, old and new, from bestselling fantasy authors such as Neil Gaiman, Christina Henry, M. R. Carey and Charlie Jane Anders. ALL THE BETTER TO READ YOU WITH It's a prick of blood, the bite of an apple, the evil eye, a wedding ring or a pair of red shoes. Curses come in all shapes and sizes, and they can happen to anyone, not just those of us with unpopular stepparents... Here you'll find unique twists on curses, from fairy tale classics to brand-new hexes of the modern world - expect new monsters and mythologies as well as twists on well-loved fables. Stories to shock and stories of warning, stories of monsters and stories of magic. TWENTY TIMELESS FOLKTALES, NEW AND OLD NEIL GAIMAN JANE YOLEN KAREN JOY FOWLER M. R. CAREY CHRISTINA HENRY CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN TIM LEBBON MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH CHARLIE JANE ANDERS JEN WILLIAMS CATRIONA WARD JAMES BROGDEN MAURA McHUGH ANGELA SLATTER LILLITH SAINTCROW CHRISTOPHER FOWLER ALISON LITTLEWOOD MARGO LANAGAN

From the critically acclaimed author of Hekla's Children comes a dark and haunting tale of our world and the next. After a brutal break-in leaves her family traumatised, Trish Feenan jumps at the chance of a fresh start in a charming historic community. But in the back garden of her new cottage sits an unsettling reminder of past wrongs: a standing stone, once one of the markers that kept plague sufferers outside the village bounds, its `powers’ renewed every year in a ritual that seems to be more than just local oddity. As the Feenans settle in, they experience unexplained accidents, accompanied by sightings of a girl who vanishes into thin air. Soon, it becomes obvious that there is a reason traditions must not slip, and that all acts of betrayal, even those committed centuries ago, have consequences…

After her hand is amputated following a tragic accident, Rachel Cooper suffers vivid nightmares of a woman imprisoned in the trunk of a hollow tree, screaming for help. When she begins to experience phantom sensations of leaves and earth with her missing limb, Rachel is terrified she is going mad... but then another hand takes hers, and the trapped woman is pulled into our world. This woman has no idea who she is, but Rachel can't help but think of the mystery of Oak Mary, a female corpse found in a hollow tree, and who was never identified. Three urban legends have grown up around the case; was Mary a Nazi spy, a prostitute or a gypsy witch? Rachel is desperate to learn the truth, but darker forces are at work. For a rule has been broken, and Mary is in a world where she doesn't belong...

A decade ago, teacher Nathan Brookes saw four of his students walk up a hill and vanish. Only one returned - Olivia - starved, terrified, and with no memory of where she'd been. After a body is found in the same woodland where they disappeared, it is first believed to be one of the missing children, but is soon identified as a Bronze Age warrior, nothing more than an archaeological curiosity. Yet Nathan starts to have terrifying visions of the students. Then Olivia reappears, half-mad and willing to go to any lengths to return the corpse to the earth. For he is the only thing keeping a terrible evil at bay...

War has come to the Tourmaline Archipelago. The Amity finds itself threatened by an Elbaite fleet armed with weapons of unparalleled destructive power supplied from our world - the Realt - by the shadowy forces of the Hegemony. Fleeing from this devastation, Alison Owens - the last survivor of the raft-island Stray - takes refuge in the city of Carden, where she begins to discover the scope of her abilities as a lucid dreamer in this world on the other side of sleep. Meanwhile, Bobby Jenkins must inflitrate the Hegemony itself to find the secret of how to return to Tourmaline and the woman he loves. But there are darker forces than the Hegemony in play. The Brood of Lilivet have taken hosts, and they seek to awaken an unspeakable evil which lies neither in Tourmaline, nor the Realt, but the dreaming space between.

The Tourmaline Archipelago is a place of wonder and grotesquerie which exists on the other side of our dreams. In our sleep we sail its seas and walk the streets of its cities like phantoms. Sometimes we bring back souls from the other side when we wake. Lost, confused, and possessed of powers which leak through from their home, these exiles are pursued by the mysterious Hegemony, which seeks to enslave them. When a woman appears who exists in both worlds simultaneously, she must run for her life from enemies who will tear apart the boundaries of existence and plunge each into chaos in order to possess her abilities.

There are places where the skin of the world is thin. Here, miracles walk the streets, and nightmares haunt the alleyways. Welcome to the Narrows. Bex belongs to a hidden society of misfits, homeless, and runaways who live in the Narrows - the hidden paths that lie behind even the darkest of alleyways. For years they have lived invisibly alongside ordinary city-dwellers, with their own allegiances, their own dreams and deaths, loves and wars. Except that the Narrows are closing, and nobody knows why, and the things that hunt them have begun to chase them onto the daylight streets. Andy Sumner lives a perfectly conventional life, but a chance encounter with a wounded and pursued Bex leads him into a world where the very laws of space and time are malleable. But how much of his life is truly governed by chance? Why does he seem to be able to control the Narrows? And what secrets were inscribed in the energy meridians of his own flesh by the dark figure that now hunts them both? The search for answers will take Andy and Bex far beyond the spheres of reality that either of them have known, and to a confrontation with evil upon which hangs the fate of an infinity of possible worlds.