Showing results by author "Chet Williamson" in All Categories

Tired of the political machinations of his egotistical fellow wizards, Benelaius retires from the College of War Wizards to take up residency in Cormyr, where he lives peacefully until he and his legman, Jasper, are forced to investigate the murder of a messenger from King Azoun.

It's 1960. Norman Bates is in the State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, and it's up to Dr. Felix Reed to bring him out of his catatonic state. But Norman and Dr. Reed have obstacles in twisted fellow patients and staff members who think of the institution as a prison rather than a place of healing. And the greatest obstacle is the building itself, once a private sanitarium, rumored to be haunted. A wild card appears in the persona of Robert Newman, Norman's twin brother, taken away at birth after the attending doctor pronounced him brain damaged.

Night Visions: At The Crossroad presents eight tales of horror and dark fantasy by Richard Laymon, Chet Williamson, and Gary Brandner. Prepare to enter a world where your darkest nightmare can become a chilling reality...A world of Night Visions.

Three men are offered a million dollars each if they will spend a month in an isolated Pennsylvania mansion, The Pines. There, they will confront madness, murder, and the ultimate evil so that their billionaire host might find the key to life beyond the grave. But as they learn, dead souls dwell in The Pines. And death is just the beginning.

An aged photograph of a dead man hanging from a tree...Deaths in a nursing home that may not be as natural as they appear...Clues showing a 70-year-old suicide could be murder...Sinister small town secrets, decades old, finally revealed...Feisty Livy Crowe, single-and-loving-it owner of the nostalgia shop, Better Days, has to deal with all of these and more, including her mother's slow deterioration in a senior residence that might be a crime scene, a very awkward romantic triangle, and murders old and new that threaten even Livy herself...

Laika Harris, Tony Luciano, and Joseph Stein are the Searchers--deep cover government operatives directed by a man they dare not trust, exploring phenomena they cannot fathom. Now their hunt for the mysterious entity known as The Prisoner is leading them to a desiccated corpse in the Southwestern desert—and directly into the midst of violent fanatics who are determined to set the enigmatic captive free. But this merciless place of ancient cultures and strange, mystical canyons may be a death trap for the dedicated trio.

Ash Wednesday is a thoughtful horror story about what happens to people when they are forced to gaze into the face of death and, specifically, the face of their own personal dead: their friends and family, those they believed to be dead and gone. Murders are revealed, rapes, and other crimes. People despair, and try to create new lives out of the wreckage.

Welcome to Dreamthorp. A sleepy little Pennsylvania resort town where city folks can get away from it all...A town where a woman who saw her best friend mutilated by a crazed sex killer can hide - and forget...until haunted relics of another age awaken an ancient evil and unleash a human horror that has no place outside of Hell...

Jesse Gordon, driven to a shocking murder by the killing of his wife and infant daughter, condemns himself to life underground in the New York City subway system. Abandoning the light of day, he finds an evil as old as time, and a redemption which must be bought by a price far greater than death.

The Wildlife Liberation Front, a bloodthirsty and radical animal rights group, has decided to turn the tables on hunters this year, with bullets, blades and bombs. And Ned Craig, a non-violent game warden, finds himself the target of not only the WLF, but another killer from his past with a more personal grudge.

A Step Across the sea is what Susanna Cassidy takes when she travels from America to Ireland's County Galway to keep a date made 31 years before. Before she can find the love she seeks, Susanna must take even longer steps - across the chasms of class and religion, of 30-year-old jealousies and betrayals, and of peace and war in a still simmering, divided Ireland.

It all begins innocently enough. Woody Robinson, a successful musician, gathers his baby-boomer friends and recreates an evening in 1969 out of nostalgia for his long dead love, Tracy. The party quickly becomes a wake for lost ideals, and then something more, as time and fate play wonderful and terrible tricks on the celebrants. By the evening's end, Tracy is back in Woody's life as though she had never left. But there is another change as well, a shocking one.

A trio of uniquely talented CIA operatives, their mission is to explain the inexplicable: to debunk the work of psychic tricksters, magicians, and frauds whose calculated deceptions pose a serious threat to security and the national psyche. But the strange disappearance of an artist on New York, coupled with the discovery of 11 charred bodies in an Adirondack mountain lodge—corpses that forensic evidence indicates are centuries old—suggest to agents Laika Harris, Tony Luciano, and Joseph Stein that there is more to their assignment than they've been led to believe.

For covert CIA operatives Tony Luciano, Joseph Stein and Laika Harris, the search is nearing an end. Each passing moment brings them closer to answers to the mystery they have been entrusted to solve: what spawned this awesome being and released him into the world? And what is his horrifying purpose? But their hunt has left an FBI man dead, and now the Searchers are the hunted.