Showing results by author "Stephen Donald Huff" in All Categories

Near the turn of the First Century, the Ninth Legion disappeared from frontier borderlands separating Romanized Britannia from the uncivilized lowlands of Caledonia. Between its first deployment there during Agricola’s invasion in 84AD and the return of Emperor Hadrian in 122AD, all mention of the Ninth fades from memory. No authenticated record confirms the legion’s military annihilation on a field of battle, and no evidence confirms its reassignment to any other region of the empire. Contemporary Rome, and all of history, seems to have simply forgotten the Ninth. Until now.

One of the most pivotal waterborne engagements in history would not be fought ship-to-ship in the traditional fashion of naval warfare, a brutal duel between massive battleships. Victory would ultimately be claimed in the skies, aircraft to aircraft. Will humankind ever fully benefit from the sacrifices made that fateful day in the skies surrounding a tiny Pacific Island?

Disinfectants, detergents, insecticides, fungicides, herbicides, and homicides – everything a human being needs to clear his or her lot and start fresh in life, clean and pure, and it all waits at the press of a finger. Some of us love a good disaster, but we watch from a safe distance and it always happens to someone else… somewhere else… never here. Never us. Scratch a moment, since you itch, and listen to the incessant rasp of a gathering legion. It twitters. Such twisted threads weave life’s strange tapestry. Of pests, here find a restive horde, and of plagues, ten.

He's the proverbial grumpy old man and he ruthlessly keeps his hit-lists. You had better hope he never jots your name down in his notebook, because he'll make you the object of his obsessive ire and his dissatisfaction is notoriously relentless. Unfortunately, today is his last day on Earth... and god just topped his list!

When their yacht sinks just east of New Zealand during a round-the-world sailing trip, three survivors somehow manage to pile themselves into a single tiny life raft. Adrift on one of the wildest seas in the world, their struggle to survive is a desperate one, and their hopes for rescue dwindle daily. Antarctica is one of the last wild places left on Earth, and it undoubtedly harbors exciting secrets waiting to be discovered. These hapless castaways will experience its darkest threats.

Tabloids invite us to gorge ourselves on tales of epic personal failures, and so many of us eagerly oblige. Guilty pleasures, we savor these stories most satisfactorily with a garnish of sex scandal, a dash of fiscal malfeasance, and a generous dollop of social corruption. Cup your ears and shade your eyes now. Peer into the gloom of your neighbor’s windows to eavesdrop. Such twisted threads weave life’s strange tapestries. Of tragically flawed characters, here find deplorable examples, and of losers, legions.

Upon opening a time capsule from 1968, the author finds a letter written by a condemned insurance agent from Texas only minutes before his arrest on capital murder charges. By the time you read his letter, fifty years will have passed, and nothing can be done to save its author. Beware of dames, dives, and death.

If the trials of childhood form the adult, then Stanley Newberry is growing into a grotesquely misshapen lump of a thing. All the popular people tell him so. Since he first met his classmates in grade school, Fat Stanley has singly borne the brunt of their endless insults, taunts, and abuses. This school year, his dedicated torturers have fabricated their most elaborate ruse to date. Fat Stanley will not survive it and in the aftermath a guilty few will envy the dead.

In a dystopian future, humankind has lost its love of violence. Peace has so long ruled the land that we have lost all means of confronting the resurgence of a genocidal revolution, which threatens to reduce human society to a state of chaos and anarchy. Only one defense stands between safety and oblivion. They are genetically modified warriors, bred and born to fight. They are Reapers.

Spoken aloud, poetry is the ultimate masochistic mouthwash. Used regularly, it will sponge your brain and fire your breath. So, crack these covers, sip, swish, and rinse. In time, your silly sense of well-being will slip away, and your brain germs will never feel the same way again.

Boogeymen, banshees, werewolves, and vampires; all figments of horror drawn upon parchments of fable, each the scrawl of individual phobias revisited by trembling quills dipped into inkwells of collective nightmare. Despite vaguely amusing caricatures, these monstrous legends probably developed from grisly human origins. Even now, your secret devil whispers into the blackout parts of your mind. Listen. Such twisted threads weave life’s strange tapestry. Of hidden dominions, here encounter endless landscapes, and of phantoms, flights.

Every day, we confront ourselves in mirrors of various shapes and sizes. We stare into them and our reflection stares back. Within these visions, everything about our reflection is backward, opposite, and reversed. Laws of physics prevent one side from emerging into the other, but we all occasionally wonder about life on the other side.

During the final years of the Soviet Union, its government started building an ultra-secret airbase in the center of a vast wilderness. Its secrecy outstripped its management such that construction continued despite its abandonment. At the end of a late night international flight from India to Russia, a weary traveler finds himself deposited in a lonely ramp of an empty terminal. As he navigates its endless gates and corridors, this hapless traveler begins to realize he has landed in no ordinary airport.

Deep within the guts of this world, men and women struggle daily to deliver fuel to feed ravenous industry. It is dangerous work. Indeed, this is a story about fire catching in a coal seam buried deep underground, where a dozen lives hang, choking, in the balance. Regardless of color, creed or religion, hard-rock miners work together as one to avoid perishing individually and alone down in the dark where the devil dwells.

Corporal Terrance “Tare” McGee, retired, was the prodigal princeling of his Texas trailer park until the United States Army decided to incarcerate his former partner, a military working dog named ‘Perquisite’. Collecting an endangered chimp named “Bobo” along the way, they flee into the vast, epic potential of an early Texas evening. This lyrical American fable will ultimately provide one startling insight into the nature of humankind… a primate with a machinegun is not always an entirely undesirable happenstance.

A compendium of three original novellas, this is the true-to-life horror story of a boy born without a name into a lifetime of loss, suffering, and sorrow. Bestially abused throughout his formative years, the boy has the appearance of a patchwork monster by the time he arrives at a notorious desert orphanage in Pecan County, Texas. There, the boy will travel new realms of torment in the company of his sadistic keepers, Momma and Eugene Parker, who will teach him every low art and mean skill with belt, strap, and whip. Stoic and untouched by the damage done to him, the boy named Manga will ...

On the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the eleventh year of the eleventh holy epoch, it happened. Some say God is sleeping. Some say God is dead.

Isolated by rumors of adultery and murder, ‘Cat Lady Cassie’ has long lived alone amid Florida’s sprawling Everglades. So, when several of her felines disappear one after another, Cass begins to worry. Lately, an eerie silence rules the hollows and basins that surround her porch. Even the largest alligators have gone missing. Clearly, a ravenous new invader has arrived to trouble paradise.

This is reality television run amok, daytime programming in the bloody Coliseum. Survival is the game and vast wealth the reward. As the number of players dwindle, the prize increases with the danger. Only one can win.

Klis would be their first failure and it would mark the end of their conquest. When the first Mongol envoy entered its city walls, he offered its citizens the same thing Mongols offered every conquest - tribute or extermination.