Showing results by narrator "Matt Godfrey" in All Categories

Lee Child selects the 20 best mystery short stories of the year, including tales by Stephen King, Sara Paretsky, and many more. Under the auspices of New York City's legendary mystery fiction specialty bookstore, The Mysterious Bookshop, and aided by Edgar Award-winning anthologist Otto Penzler, international best seller Lee Child has selected the 20 most suspenseful, most confounding, and most mysterious short stories from the past year, collected now in one entertaining volume.

Come and ride with the outlaw bikers in California in the glory days of the '60s and '70s. During the wild times of choppers and gang brawls, action and violence that seemed to know no end. Times that cannot be recreated today. Girls, guys, guns, and bikes. Living a life like no other.

In the aftermath of a hurricane, a series of strange events plague the coastal waters off Florida. People go into the water and never return. Corpses of killer whales drift ashore, ravaged from enormous bite marks. A fishing trawler is found adrift, with a mysterious gash in its hull. Transferred to the coastal town of Merit, police officer Leonard Riker uncovers the horrible reality of an enormous thresher shark lurking off the coast. Forty feet in length, it has taken a territorial claim to the waters near the town harbor.

In the aptly titled Offbeat, Richard Matheson, a modern master of strange fiction, offers 13 excursions into the unsettling and bizarre. In these stories you will encounter a major league pitcher with a horrific secret for his astonishing success; an ordinary man who wakes to find himself in a silent, empty world; a death row prisoner with an extraordinary explanation for his innocence; and a novelist whose fictional creations transcend the printed page.

Varg has already completed no few tests in order to consider himself an experienced survivor in this world of zombies. But will that actually be enough? After all, fate is no slacker, the system neither, and it is quite probable that these two capricious ladies have joined forces.

The northern mountain village offers protection from the threat of dragons, but is a difficult place, especially for a misfit like Jason Dreshen. His days are spent hunting for food for his family, praying for warmth, and trying to hide his strange silver eye that grants him dragon sight. When a stranger visits during the local Freedom Festival searching for a different kind of dragon, everything changes.

Anyone familiar with H. P. Lovecraft's work knows of the Necronomicon, the black-magic grimoire he invented as a literary prop in his classic horror stories. There have been several attempts at creating this text, yet none stand up to Lovecraft's own descriptions of the Necronomicon...until now. Fans of Lovecraftian magic and occult fiction will delight in Donald Tyson's Necronomicon, based purely within Lovecraft's own fictional universe, the Cthulhu Mythos.

After a tragic accident at work, all Grady Miller wanted was an escape. He finds it months later with two of his closest friends. Together, the three of them travel south to Prism Lake for the upcoming holiday, where they plan on spending the sunny weekend drinking, grilling, and relaxing. But when a series of monstrous blizzards cover the Eastern United States in feet of snow, knocking out communications and making the roads impossible to drive on, they realize their weekend of fun could turn into a lifetime of survival.

Felix Allsey is a travel writer with a keen eye for the paranormal, and he's carved out a unique, if only slightly lucrative, niche for himself in nonfiction; he writes travelogues of the country's most haunted places, after haunting them himself. When he convinces the owner of the infamous Rotterdam Mansion to let him stay on the premises for two weeks, he believes he's finally found the location that will bring him a best seller. Then things start going wrong: screams from upstairs, figures in the thresholds, and more than what should be in any basement.

Demon lights, granted wishes, strange things, and brutal love at the Lucky Lounge Motel. A haunted sister, desperate parents, a little human touch, and the end of the world. These are the stories whispered among dead leaves, the script etched bare for all to see. Welcome to Glenn Rolfe’s Land of Bones, 14 tales of the strange and macabre.

Who is Francis Fox? A charming English teacher new to the idyllic Langhorne Academy, Fox beguiles many of his students, their parents, and his colleagues at the elite boarding school, while leaving others wondering where he came from and why his biography is so enigmatic. When two brothers discover Fox’s car half-submerged in a pond in a local nature preserve and parts of an unidentified body strewn about the nearby woods, the entire community, including Detective Horace Zwender and his deputy, begins to ask disturbing questions about Francis Fox and who he might really be.

Hugh Walpole (1884-1941) was one of the most popular and prolific English authors of his time, best known for his historical fiction and novels for boys. But it was in the field of the macabre and supernatural that Walpole was at his best, and this collection of 16 tales contains many of his finest.

Set in 1991, just as Star Trek: The Next Generation has rocketed the cast to global fame, the young and impressionable actor Brent Spiner receives a mysterious package and a series of disturbing letters, that take him on a terrifying and bizarre journey that enlists Paramount Security, the LAPD, and even the FBI in putting a stop to the danger that has his life and career hanging in the balance.

Jackson Lee is a well-known adventure vlog influencer. He and a small support crew have been cashing in on the video craze with phenomenal, hair-raising exploits for years. Their latest undertaking is way beyond anything they've ever done. It's extremely dangerous and, worse, highly illegal. Never would Jackson have imagined those risks to be the least of his worries.

Three full-length time travel books and a short story from the magical Middle Falls universe: The Stubborn Lives of Hart Tanner, The Alternative Lives of Aiden Anderson, The Heartfelt Life of Max Hartfield, and The Encore Lives of Effie Edenson.

When a coronal mass ejection threatens to send the United States back to the Stone Age, Jim Graves must rush to prepare his family for the coming apocalypse. As the world around him plunges into anarchy, can he rise to the occasion? Jim's love for his family and will to survive are put to the ultimate test.

Cults prey on the very attributes that make us human: our desire to belong, to find a deeper meaning in life, to live everyday with divine purpose. Their existence creates a sense that any one of us, at any time, could step off the cliff’s edge and fall into that daunting abyss of manipulation and unhinged dedication to a misplaced cause. Perhaps it’s this mindset that keeps us so utterly obsessed and desperate to learn more, or it’s that the stories are so bizarre and unsettling that we are simply in awe of the mechanics that make these infamous groups tick.

After the devastating events on Prism Lake, Grady and the other survivors head south, hoping to find safety in one of the rumored "Cities of Light". But as they embark on their journey, they quickly discover the monsters aren't the only things out in the snow they must fear.

When Boady Sanden first receives the case of Elijah Matthews, he’s certain there’s not much he can do. Elijah, who believes himself to be a prophet, has been locked up in a psychiatric hospital for the past four years, convicted of brutally murdering the pastor of a megachurch. But as a law professor working for the Innocence Project, Boady agrees to look into Elijah’s file. When he does, he is alarmed to find threads that lead back to the death of his colleague and friend, Ben Pruitt, a man shot to death four years earlier in Boady’s own home.

It’s spring break in the Outer Banks, and the islands are swarming with rich tourists. The last thing JJ and John B want to do is spend their week watching Kooks in action, so they plan a fishing getaway to the notoriously dangerous Frying Pan Shoals - nicknamed “Graveyard of the Atlantic” for good reason. Turns out they aren’t the only adventure-seekers at sea. Soon after they set sail, the friends run into the captivating Savannah, who hitches a ride aboard the HMS Pogue when the weather worsens and her boyfriend leaves her stranded.