Mostrando resultados por autor "Stephen Donald Huff" en Todas las categorías

Insomnia is a special kind of torture. Its short-term effects are something everyone experiences from time to time, but its long-term effects are known only to an unfortunate few. These effects include panic attacks, paranoia, and phobias. Eventually, hallucinations and convulsions become noticeable, followed by symptoms of dementia, coma and then death. Inevitably, the difference between waking and sleeping dissolves and the two become inseparable. After months of restlessness, a chronically sleepless man loses the ability to differentiate between nightmares, daydreams and reality. While ...

He has perfected the necessary skills, collected the requisite equipment, and buried the resultant bodies. Like a grotesque human hermit crab, he periodically sheds one shell for another, gutting the original to make it his own, and no regard whatever for previous ownership. Fluid and untouchable, he stalks the nation, forever in pursuit of his next lifetime, and nobody knows his name. A ruthless master of disguises, he lives many lives. Maybe one of them will be yours.

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. The letter relates this agent's downfall at the hands of a crooked police detective and a twisted woman. Though he was undoubtedly innocent of the crime, history long ago recorded his apprehension, trial and execution. By the time you read his letter, fifty years will have passed, and nothing can be done to save its author. His tale is a cautionary one, however, and so well worth reading. Beware of dames, dives, and death.

Every man who murders his wife and every wife who murders her husband does so with the firm belief that they will never be caught, although this belief belies the inevitably obvious suspect. From time to time, however, chance mates with fortune to present the perfect crime. She's worth a life and the price of a bullet. He will risk all for one selfish act of violence.

Facing the hangman's noose, why not confess everything? If you've lived a notoriously colorful life, most of your stories cannot be believed! Read this confession, and make your own decisions about the veracity and implications of it all. You'll get your chance to make a final statement. Make it count.

Jo-Jo's father died young and his mother, while present, could not pick up the slack. It's not easy to raise an unguided young man of high school age, especially a young man as misunderstood as Jo-Jo. The last day of school will forever change everyone who experiences it. Life is too short to mourn the dead forever. In a smile, a frown. In laughter, sorrow. Today is Jo-Jo’s “Big Day”.

Matriculating across that stage, nothing betrayed the Texas sand behind his ears, though his stiff, high collar hid a neck roasted red by long hours spent laboring beneath August sunshine. Indeed, years of careful study and patient attention had polished away the roughest facets of his country-born demeanor with a doctoral degree, but he would always be Charles Ray McCormick, white trash. Learning from the invariably negative example set forth by his errant, wayward siblings, Ray avoided the pitfalls of youth via intervention of a well-meaning mentor and pursuit of an academic career. ...

Simian Wynwood opened Simian’s Gate by recording first contact with alien intelligence. Within weeks, civilization rapidly changed. Renewable energy, resolved. Global pollution, remediated. Cancer, cured. Eighteen months later, six-and-a-half billion people lay withered in death, victims of a technological Trojan horse. In the aftermath, survivors divide, hunter and hunted. Extinction looms. No one will survive Simian’s Way unscathed.

1943. World War II. The U.S. government drafted him out of his life of normalcy and complacency into the life of a United States Marine Corps officer. After intensive training, he would serve during some of the bloodiest assaults of the war. The violent rigors of combat would teach him the rules of long-term survival amid the most lethal fighting in human history. Those who failed to learn these lessons would not return home to their families. During the bloody throes of combat, all is fair and the only rules that apply are those that promote survival. When confronting evil, what is the ...

Not everyone in war-torn Europe believed in bigotry and hatred. A few human beings remained, hidden and camouflaged within the guise of Nazism and fanaticism. This is the story of one such old man, a railyard, and tiny scraps of paper drifting on the wind, each bearing a desperate last message from the dead. This really happened. It didn't have to happen, but it really, really did.

He was a child prodigy born with an irrepressible genius. He grew into a clever sociopath. When he graduated at the top of his class at a remarkably young age, the U.S. government recruited him directly out of the university and assigned him to a top-secret project entitled "Ogre", the man-eating giant of mythology and folklore. As he rose through the ranks of government service, he learned to adapt the incredible power of Ogre to his personal benefit. Caught, he must pay a terrible price for his crimes. "Project Ogre" is the most powerful information-gathering computer system ever ...

Mothers no longer name their sons ‘Adolph’. Almost everyone knows why. Though all innocent babes do not develop into monsters, all monsters develop from innocent babes. We prefer fiction to reality, because thoughts of the former easily yield to denials of reason, while the latter only reminds us of our common origins in the primitive. Steal a private moment now and listen to your inner voice. It whispers. Of rising mutant domination amid apocalyptic wastes; of grotesque human chimeras practicing ancient arts; of despicable capital criminals kept in unbreakable cages and of the flawed ...

Every stellar rise deserves a cosmic fall. Inhumanly callous and ruthlessly selfish, he made a fortune in predatory mortgage loans prior to the economic collapse of 2008. In its calamitous aftermath, executive handlers staged him for a corporate patsy and left him to answer alone for their collective crimes. Facing financial ruin and certain incarceration, his reduced prospects force him to move his family into a rat-infested bungalow. In the aftermath of his ruin, one man’s family confronts an epic plague of vermin when they move into a modest country home. They have all the benefits of ...

The plight of the village is desperate and dire. Once protected by a powerful shaman, their savior has grown old and decrepit, perhaps too weak to save them from a violent storm brewing on the horizon. To save them, he must perform the ritual, but will he beat the clock and conjure before she comes, the devil? Ethereal and sublime, theirs is a lust to outlast the ages. No matter what else happens, their final tempestuous passion will make for one hell of a ride!

In this vision of the future, the most prestigious vacation money can buy is a trip to a corporate planet overgrown with a jungle wilderness. There, wealthy tourists gird armor and fantastically powerful weapons to hunt strange chimeras through an endless forest. These beasts are all genetically engineered to be fierce, bloodthirsty, and difficult to kill. Despite the benefits of their high technology, only experienced guides can lead their pampered clients safely through to the end of the game. Every year, countless bored tourists pay exorbitant fees to hunt terrifying synthetic monsters ...

A thousand years ago, stoic Norsemen built resilient ocean-going longboats from wood and iron. Through four centuries of conquest, in these robust vessels countless Viking adventurers set forth from homelands of ice and snow to claim victory or Valhalla along far western horizons. Cast into a vast, hostile ocean aboard a small longboat, a handful of stoic Norse mercenaries gamble their lives in pursuit of freedom and fortune. All are bound for horizons of history, inevitably destined to find their eternal home among sagas of the never seen.

Incongruity, in all its fine, reeking regalia, found a place in my young, fertile heart, so all the while thereafter my struggle was one of difference, for the greater scheme of things is an endeavor to know that which is unknown. On having come to understand a thing previously incomprehensible, luster fades, its draw recedes, and that thing, like a coin in a collection, is put away, to be occasionally admired but mostly forgotten; so, it is named a possession, and is no longer counted among desires. Song is either the progenitor or most favored partner of poetry; either may be spoken or ...

His pranks are sinister and macabre, but each one offers a critical life lesson to his hapless victims. His neighbors, coworkers, and acquaintances rarely associate their strange misfortunes with the odd young man in their midst. Yet he is always watching, always aware, and his cunning mind is inevitably filled with delightfully perverse plans for their future. Any outcome is possible given proper context, impeccable timing, and the right props.

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. Many weeks later, a violent storm sweeps them into the frigid and dangerous Antarctic current, and they realize they will ultimately freeze if they are not rescued before winter comes. As their anger and frustrations grow, they know they must take matters into their own hands if they are to ...

Pyatak, in Russian, means "slash five". It is the last stop for the most violent and incorrigible prisoners in the modern Russian penal system. Famously, it is said to have two ways in and only one way out. Inmates enter its cages via a dilapidated, one-hundred-year-old foot bridge or an aging boat. The only way they leave is via their grave. Lately, however, many of its worst have gone missing from their cells, although they never escaped its walls. Something ancient and evil has alighted in Pyatak. A mysterious entity, it is both vicious and insatiable. No one is safe.