Dan Simmons has produced science fiction, horror, fantasy, and mainstream fiction and won awards in just about all of them. His first novel, Song of Kali, won the World Fantasy Award; his first science fiction novel, Hyperion, won the Hugo Award. His other novels and short fiction have been honored with numerous awards, including nine Locus Awards, four Bram Stoker Awards, the French Prix Cosmos 2000, the British SF Association Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Award.

E-Reads has hundreds of titles on Kindle we’re happy to tell you that Song of Kali is nnow one of them. Look for news of its release on the Apple iPad soon.

In Calcutta, one of the world’s most crime-ridden cities,  nightmares become real and evil is defined by frightening occurrences. An American family finds itself immersed in lurid events as a death cult tempts it to doom.

Originally published in 1988, Horror Grand Master Ray Garton’s Crucifax (along with his stunning debut novel Live Girls) is regarded as a classic of the “splatterpunk” movement in horror fiction. Garton depicts teenage boredom, small-town isolation, incest, drug abuse and over-the-top violence. In Crucifax he has created a modern remake of the Pied Piper story with the sinister Mace seducing mixed-up kids with his siren song of pleasure, power and indulgence, all leading to a horrifically unsettling climax of death and destruction. And let’s not forget the rat-like things that do the piper’s bidding…

E-Reads is in the process of rereleasing the complete works of this master of the horror genre, plus some other works that take his readers far, far away from genre fiction. Visit his author page for a complete list.

RC

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro is the first woman to be named a Living Legend by the International Horror Guild and is one of only two women ever to be named as Grand Master of the World Horror Convention (2003). In 1995, Yarbro was the only novelist guest of the Romanian government for the First World Dracula Congress, sponsored by the Transylvanian Society of Dracula, the Romanian Bureau of Tourism and the Romanian Ministry of Culture.

Yarbro is best known as the creator of the heroic vampire, the Count Saint-Germain. With her creation of Saint-Germain, she delved into history and vampiric literature and subverted the standard myth to invent the first vampire who was more honorable, humane, and heroic than most of the humans around him. She fully meshed the vampire with romance and accurately detailed historical fiction and filtered it through a feminist perspective that both the giving of sustenance and its taking were of equal erotic potency. E-Reads is happy to begin bringing many of Yarbro’s St. Germain novels back into print.

In the first published volume, Hotel Transylvania (forthcoming soon), we meet Saint-Germain in Paris during the reign of Louis XV when he is, apparently, a wealthy, worldly, charismatic aristocrat, envied and desired by many but fully known to none. In fact, he is a vampire, born in the Carpathian Mountains in 2119 BC, turned in his late-thirties in 2080 BC and destined to roam the world forever, watching and participating in history and, through the author, giving us an amazing perspective on the time-tapestry of human civilization.

In The Palace, Renaissance Florence provides the background for this story of the collapse of the artistic and literary life of the city after the death of Saint-Germain’s friend Lorenzo the Magnificent, followed by the rise of the fanatical Savonarola.

What if half the world’s population – the female half -  practiced witchcraft and kept it a secret from men?

In Science Fiction Grand Master Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife Norman Saylor, a professor of ethnology, discovers his wife Tansy has put his research into practice for the sake of protecting him from other spell-casting faculty wives who wish to further their own husbands’ careers. A man of science, Norman has only an academic interest in the subject of magic and superstition and forces Tansy to cease all her workings and to burn all her charms. As soon as Norman burns the last charm, things start to fall apart. He has a run-in with a former student, his student-secretary accuses him of having seduced her, and he is passed over for a promotion that had seemed certain.

Norman begins to have more than his fair share of small accidents: cutting himself while shaving, stepping on carpet tacks, cutting his hand with a letter opener, and more. He begins to imagine that there is a dark presence exploiting his fear of trucks. Tansy takes his curse upon herself forcing him to overcome his disbelief and use witchcraft to save his wife’s body—and her soul.

Originally published in 1953, Conjure Wife is considered a modern classic of horror-fantasy and has been adapted for film three times: “Burn, Witch Burn” (1962); “Weird Woman” (1944); and “Witch’s Brew” (1980). Yet another film remake is in the works.

E-Reads carries many great Fritz Leiber novels including the classic Lankhmar series. Click here for a complete list.

While studying his beloved San Francisco through binoculars from his apartment window, horror writer Franz Westen is astonished to see a mysterious figure waving at him from a hilltop two miles away. He walks to Corona Heights and looks back at his building – and discovers the same figure waving at him from his apartment window! He soon finds himself caught in a century-spanning curse that may have destroyed Clark Ashton Smith and Jack London.

The book is Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber, and it was 1978 winner of the World Fantasy Award. E-Reads is happy to offer it as an e-book. The print version, paired with another Leiber horror classic, Conjure Wife, is available from Tor.

“In today’s terms this is horror in the style of The Blair Witch Project. A story permeated by a sense of menacing creepiness” says one Amazon.com reviewer.

Fritz Leiber is considered one of science fiction’s legends. Author of a prodigious number of stories and novels, many of which were made into films, he is best known as creator of the classic Lankhmar fantasy series. Leiber has won awards too numerous to count including the coveted Hugo and Nebula, and was honored as a lifetime Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America. He died in 1992.

Publication of Our Lady of Darkness brings to 13 the number of works by Leiber published by E-Reads. Visit our Leiber page to see them all and order any that may be missing from your collection.

With publication of The Loveliest Dead E-Reads continues its program of reissues of horror novels by Grand Master Ray Garton.

In this novel Garton is at the top of his macabre form. The “loveliest dead” are far from lovely but they are definitely dead and making life hell for the living. Following a sequence of increasingly dire personal tragedies, culminating in the unexplained death of their four-year-old son, Josh, Jenna and David Kella plan to make a new start of their lives on the old family homestead they’ve inherited just outside Eureka, California with their surviving son Miles. What they discover, though, is a nightmare. Ghostly children play on the backyard swings and vanish abruptly. In a cruel and maddening irony, one of the child ghosts resembles their dead son Josh. The horrors pile up as psychics, Ouija boards and poltergeists drive the couple to the borders of madness and terror.

Ray Garton is the author of close to sixty books of which perhaps the best known is Bram Stoker nominee Live Girls. E-Reads has recently released his widely-praised novel Sex and Violence in Hollywood, bringing to 5 the Garton books in our program. We have no intention of stopping there.
RC

Don’t know what a lot lizard is? You obviously haven’t been hanging around truck stops. And you may never want to go near one after you read Ray Garton’s Lot Lizards

A “lot lizard” is a female hooker who works highway truck stops as her territory. When trucker Bill Ketter looks for a little relaxation and release, he discovers, too late, that he has bitten off more than he can chew. In fact, his lot lizard is the one that does the biting–she is a vampire, one of number who move from one truck stop to the next under the watchful and vicious eyes of the repulsive Carsey Brothers. Against his will, Bill becomes one of the undead. He follows the brothers and their cargo to another stop where he meets his ex-wife and children and Bill finds himself battling the vampires and their age-old leader for the life of his teenaged son.

Horror Grand Master Ray Garton has created another small masterpiece, contemporary adult horror at its most gruesome and loaded with extras doses of sex and gore. The confined setting creates a perfect claustrophobic stage for the story and the hellaciously quick pace never lets the action slow down.

The cruelest punishment that can be inflicted on any book is neglect. And to neglect a great book is tantamount to a crime. With publication of Ray Garton’s masterpiece Sex and Violence in Hollywood we have the opportunity to reverse a terrible wrong.

“Great” is a common hyperbole used by publishing people to pitch books, and its overuse has cheapened the word. For that reason I invite you to link to the page of dazzling reviews heaped on the book when it was published in a limited edition by Subterranean Press. There you will see “great” used five times, so you don’t need to take my word for it.

You won’t see the word “Masterpiece” used in those reviews. That one is mine. Sex and Violence in Hollywood is one of the finest novels I have ever been privileged to represent. The book is horrifying, but why should that come as a surprise? Garton, a Horror Writers of America Grand Master as well as a Bram Stoker nominee for his horror novel Live Girls (also an E-Reads book), is indeed a master of the genre. But Sex and Violence in Hollywood is so appalling it completely transcends the horror genre.

Here are some excerpts from other reviews:

• I would advise you to not begin reading this book right before you have something important scheduled, such as performing surgery, or need to get anything constructive done, because you will NOT be able to put it down once you’ve started. Rusty Martin, Barnesandnoble.com
• It is almost impossible to put down!… I’ve already awakened my husband a couple times laughing out loud. The scenes are so vivid I can almost touch them. This is a great book! Horrornet.com
• You are in for one mean, hard, vicious ride; it’s about as searing a satire as you’re likely to encounter. I defy anyone to survive the last 50 pages unshaken. Gary Braunbeck, (Gorezone.com)
• I think this is hands down the best things you’ve ever written. It quickly passed Live Girls, Dark Channel and all my other favorites. And that ending…Damn! Horrornet.com
• Sex and Violence in Hollywood is a realistic, non-supernatural melodrama of greed, murder, and twisted family relations that offers exactly what the plainspoken title promises….It’s a kinetic, plot-driven novel filled with cliffhangers, betrayals, unexpected developments, and moments of stark, disturbing violence. It’s also, at times, a very funny book, filled with cogent observations of an insular, narcissistic society. Sex and Violence possesses wit, energy, and a relentless momentum that carries the narrative steadily forward. At its best, Garton’s latest has the raw, in-your-face power of a Quentin Tarrantino film. It comes highly recommended to anyone looking for a nasty, colorful, high adrenalin good time. Bill Sheehan , Locus

What is Sex and Violence in Hollywood about? Adam Julian, son of a Hollywood screenwriter, has a life many would kill for… and some would kill to keep. He’s tangled in a web of forced sex, coerced into robbery, and it’s only a short step to killing as a choice. At the center of the book is a sensational murder trial (which oddly resembles the O.J. Simpson case). Drenched in the glamor and sleaze of highline and lowlife Hollywood, Garton’s take on the criminal justice system, turned inside out and upside down by showbiz at its best and worst, is a panorama of crime, corruption and violence.

You can purchase Sex and Violence in Hollywood as either an e-book or a trade paperback.

Richard Curtis

Bestselling Japanese horror novelist Koji Suzuki has brought out his latest thriller, entitled Drop, on toilet paper rolls, according to the New York Times’s Rocky Casale, who reports that a friend of his was so terrified by the story, “she was frightened to be alone in the bathroom.” The print job was provided by a company that makes paper products for public restrooms.

If you’re wondering how you bookmark the story, Casale explains that “each roll contains several copies of the novella so that you can easily pick up the narrative where you left off.”

As a publishing professional I’m in favor of any medium that generates revenue for authors. But Suzuki’s story, about a goblin who dwells in a public bathroom, is not going to be of much comfort to those who are already terror-stricken about toilets such as Jody Morse, whose account on the website Associated Content, Toilet Phobia: My Unusual Fear of Toilets, makes some of Stephen King’s toe-nibbling under-the-bed imps look absolutely benign by comparison.( Suzuki has been described as the Stephen King of Japan.)

“When I was about four years old, my cousin told me that a scary clown lived in the toilet,” Morse explains. Just when she thought she’d outgrown it, a sixth grade health teacher told her class that you can contract pubic lice from public toilet seats. From that point on she did everything she could to avoid going out or from going to the bathroom when she did. The last straw was a nature show portraying how “snakes can crawl up through your pipes and into your toilet. In this case, the snake was some type of Python. Once again, my childhood fear is back.

“After watching this special, I did a little bit of research on how often people find snakes in their toilets. Although I only could find three cases in which families have found snakes (mainly pythons) in their toilets, there are other people who have found other types of animals in their toilets. For example, there was one case in which an iguana climbed into the toilet. In another case, a squirrel, who had also somehow managed to climb up through the pipes, ended up scratching a lady when she sat down on the toilet.”

If you think Suzuki’s Drop is going to scare the shit out of you, maybe you’d better read it in a library.

RC
Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Dean R. Koontz described Dan Simmons’s Song of Kali as, “The best novel in the genre I can remember. Dan Simmons is brilliant!”

In Calcutta, arguably the world’s most crime-ridden city, nightmares become real and evil is defined by frightening occurrences. When an American family finds themselves encircled by the terrors of this land, lurid events befall them and life takes on a new meaning – death.

Winner of the World Fantasy Award, Song of Kali will chill the blood and frighten even the most jaded of horror fans.

– RC