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

A marauding legion of starving aliens arrive on Earth for a brief but terrifying raid on the planet. For a few unbelievably deadly days they will hunt humankind to fill their larder before they can continue on their indeterminate journey. Though the invaders are impervious to most human defenses, one man finds safety with a household pet! They are many and they are hungry. Human beings are defenseless. You never needed a cat so badly!

She has come to his office to give birth, but she is accursed and he knows it. Fortunately, she has chosen wisely and she can afford the best phy-magician in the country. He will safely deliver the demon inside her, and then he'll help her to determine who would cast such a spell on her in the first place. This is an age of science in magic. A phy-magician must master both trades with equal alacrity.

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. Recent ...

I heard the call, the tone of it teasing, a broadcast chorus of incessant singing amid devilish choirs of insidious patter, the dry rasping of scales and portentous matter to cast shadows of sounds among us that must listen, beyond maddened distraction, inaudible vision. For I heard the call, the lies of it pleasing, then I followed it blindly where it would lead me. Beyond death and disaster through ranges of never, I learned listening is ruin and blindness is error. I cursed blackness of bruises, I despised the tender of capital expenditures and I as the lender. I heard the call, and I ...

Jermy Borden's seven short years on Planet Earth had already been filled with hardship, deprivation and heartache when, on the way to school one morning, his drunken mother drove their car into a neighbor's home, killing herself and a hamster named "Ted". Jermy somehow managed to claw his way out of the shattered rear window, leaving his hands badly burned and his fate in the hands of his only living relative, Gandy Ross, a hard-living ex-Marine with no children of his own. This is either the worst thing to ever happen to him, or the best. Has fate left this young boy in the devil's hands?

As two adolescent boys struggle to survive the interior spaces of the American Midwest, they endure the inevitable rites of passage associated with the angst of puberty. Though their suburban surroundings present a façade of normalcy, the bullies who torment them are particularly craven and vicious. On the eve of profound personal discovery, they suffer a traumatizing assault that will irrevocably change their lives. Two awkward middle-school outcasts come together against their bullies when they author the “Modus Moronicon: A Functional Adolescent Guide for Surviving the Interior Spaces...

It's Halloween in Pecan Groves, Texas and much mischief is afoot. In the midst of the morbid celebration manifests an otherworldly invasion. How could the citizens of that sleepy bedroom community separate costumes from the genuine horror that has come among them? When the smoke clears, few will be able to explain resultant mass disappearances among the population. Fewer still will believe. Introducing Pecan Groves, Texas. Oh, the mischief that transpires in that sleepy little town!

When they come to cut her out of her third-floor apartment bedroom, a crowd gathers to point and laugh. A twelve-hundred-pound woman is not without recourse, however, and they underestimate her deranged temperament to their own detriment. Before they get her to the hospital, she will leave the entire town in ruins. She is a mighty big woman originally blessed with the patient, loving disposition of a child. Years of merciless, relentless torment have purged all semblance of compassion from her heart now, and she has grown weary of the laughter. Be warned. Beware!

Has Earth been visited by extraterrestrials? Yes. They live among us today. They watch us every moment of our lives with one intensely unwavering focus: to maintain the secrecy of their presence. Their surveillance technology is unimaginable. Their control is absolute. Yet, nothing is perfect. Through the years, a few clever people have learned the truth, but this knowledge invariably bears an extreme cost: keep the secret and survive or speak the truth and die. A handful of inquisitive men and women have discovered the extraterrestrial presence among us. Those smart enough to keep the ...

Corporate lobotomies. Psychotically amorous semi-sentient bots. Endless corridors. Countless unlabeled doors, all viciously locked. A lethally dysfunctional social infrastructure rife with corruption, inefficiency, and crime. Spiraling homicide rates… Welcome to your corpulent, overpopulated future! Here, everyone loves you, because everyone wants to screw you before they sell your living body to illegal pharmaceutical tumor-farms, which are also a popular method of suicide, because death-by-tumor is not as bad as many (though it is also worse than some). In this world, a much-hated ...

In the first days of the zombie apocalypse, a military physician and small team of survivors must gather their wits, their weapons and their available resources to make a last stand. When nowhere seems safe and no-one seems immune to the rapidly spreading disease, they must choose a destination that is both attainable and sufficiently remote to assure their long term safety. It's a sheer stone tower standing alone over a remote frontier, as iconic as it is forbidding. It is also the location of humanity's last stand. Do zombies climb?

Isolated by rumors of adultery and murder, ‘Cat Lady Cassie’ has long lived alone amid Florida’s sprawling Everglades. Although she is the reluctant caretaker of thirty-one felines, she loathes cats – especially the vermin-ridden feral strays that seek shelter around her island homestead. Like the climbing fern, hydrilla and nutria – and much like herself – the cats are an invasive species. They are all foreign intruders, lost yet thriving among formerly pristine swamplands. Lately, an eerie silence rules the hollows and basins that surround her porch. Even the largest ...

He hates clowns. His wife thinks they're cute. When they unexpectedly inherit an unimaginable fortune complete with fast cars, fine furnishings, and multiple large houses, they learn nothing comes free. The one catch to their apparent good fortune is a clockworks harlequin. Animated and entertaining, the life-size doll initially appears to be nothing more than yet another of his estranged uncle's bizarre idiosyncrasies. Nothing could be further from the truth. No need to wind it. It doesn't require batteries. This life-size clown runs on the power of black magic!

Awakening night upon night in a feverish chill, fresh from the throes of disturbing nightmares, one hapless human being ponders the separation of dream and reality. Within phantomic landscapes of half-slumber, he stalks nightfall with a violent, predatory intent, though he inevitably awakens uneventfully in his own home. Eventually, muddy feet betray the truth. Black River runs through the center of Pecan Groves, Texas. Lately, it floats.

Love is a powerful human emotion. The apex of its ideal uplifts the human condition and is called ‘inspiration’. Its nadir degrades the soul and is called ‘fanaticism’. When the devil walks the Earth in patent leather pumps, a short skirt and all the lacy things a simple man craves, countless lives go awry and evil prospers. One man will do anything for her. Ever for her. The devil is a femme fatale. What is the price of a soul? What is the currency of its purchase?

Corporal Terrance “Tare” McGee, retired, was the prodigal princeling of his Texas trailer park until the United States Army decided to euthanize his former partner, a military working dog, also retired, named ‘Perquisite’ or, most affectionately, ‘Perq’. Driven by un undeniable sense of honor, duty and loyalty, Tare successfully rescued Perq from certain doom amid the veterinary kennels of the local Army base, but reports of violent assault and stolen automobiles only end one way in Texas without regard to motive. Confronting their new status as fugitive outlaws, Tare and Perq ...

Somebody has to do it, and his mind is sufficiently perverse to qualify for the job. It's the age-old conundrum of time travel. It's the ultimate experiment. He packs a handgun before he steps into the time machine. What happens when a young man travels into the past to kill his own parents? Hello, father. Hello, mother. Good-bye, Thaddeus.

Human populations have ballooned to seventy billion. The world teems to capacity with complacent human beings, and only strict adherence to crushing routine maintains order. Despite harsh discipline, the planet's prisons swell with rebels and reprobates. To maintain peace and ease congestion, the International League of Diamond Ballers formed and then passed their game's Rule Number One - condemned criminals can earn their freedom by competing in the One True Game, a lethal five-day spectacle televised around the world to its teeming inhabitants. After his father's execution for rebellion ...

Raised in an automated environment maintained within a mysterious spacecraft, they know their unseen caretaker as Dangy, which manifests itself before them as an ethereal pair of hands. Can they survive a long and perilous journey across the cosmos to arrive at a paradise that they are engineered to re-populate? They are the last hope of a doomed world. Dangy's hands will keep them comfortable and safe during their long voyage to sanctuary.

At over one hundred years old, Grandma Moses is one of America's last true, living witches. Sold into apprenticeship as a young girl and extensively schooled in the black arts, she can solve most human problems with a potion and a spell. Though she never accepts money for her services, nothing is free, and the cost rises with the value of the result. Approach her with caution and be prepared to pay! Grandma Moses lives alone near the swamp, her only company all the slimy, crawling things that flop, splash and slither there. Her reputation is as black as her soul, and her powers are prodigious.