Books published by JournalStone

Four novellas about the return of Cthulhu in a dystopian, climate-ravaged landscape.

A homeless man plagued by hideous nightmares awakens in a hospital with no knowledge of how he came to be there. When he accepts the help of an organization that assists the downtrodden, he finds himself in a strange apartment building that may very well hold the key to his terrifying visions and forgotten past...A pregnant woman on the run, haunted by her own bleak dreams and an out of control drug problem, speeds down a highway in the dead of night, only to crash when she sees something terrifying on the side of the road. Charged with driving drunk and drug possession, she reports to a mysterious halfway house rather than face jail time, unaware of the horrifying fate that awaits her.After unexpectedly losing his job, a carefree young salesman agrees to a drunken night on the town with an enigmatic older man he barely knows, unaware that it will soon lead to the terrible truth behind not only his own life, but those lost souls that came before him.In the bowels of a haunted apartment building, along the dark and lonely highways to Hell, in a city of night, foggy streets and shadow-filled alleys, their stories and lives merge in a fever dream of profane hunger, sex, savagery, blood and endless fire. These are the passengers of night. This is Blue Hell. 

SOMETHING HAS TAKEN THE CHILDREN OF BLACKWOOD ESTATES. Philip Nada was broken by his own success. Once happy but poor, he’s wealthier than he knew possible, but forced to raise his disabled son alone in the big empty house in Blackwood Estates. As he goes through the motions, expecting nothing, a terrifying supernatural phenomenon steals his boy from him. But it isn’t just his son, it’s every single child at home in Blackwood Estates when their subdivision is encircled by a mysterious cloud of fog.These children are no longer children. They are possessed of something impossible, something from a different time, and a space unimaginable. Something hungry for blood, and insatiable for murder. By day they hunt, but by night they hide, terrified of something even worse, something without form, something that hunts the Outer Dark, and now the interior of their diminishing world.Phil must find strength to save his son from this otherworldly possession, and lead the survivors away from the damned world of Blackwood Estates. Away from help or hope, they find themselves in a fight to the death with an intrusion from another space and another time.Phil will have to join forces with an unlikely set of allies, but can a broken man find the strength to defend what little he has left?

“It’s time to declare John Hornor Jacobs as a major author: every sentence he writes feels drawn from a pit of ∩¼üre and hammered into a sword.” —Daniel Kraus, New York Times bestselling co-author ofA terrifying collection of horror and crime noir from the author of Southern Gods and A Lush and Seething Hell.Featuring ten tales, two never before in print, Murder Ballads and Other Horrific Tales is an exciting glimpse into the dark territories of the human heart.These are coming-of-age stories. Stories of love and loss, grief and revenge. Survival and redemption. From old gods to malevolent arti∩¼ücial intelligences, vampires to zombies to ghosts, Jacobs exposes our fears and worst imaginings.CONTAINS THE SEQUEL TO SOUTHERN GODS“Jacobs demonstrates masterful control of his eclectic themes and frequently propels them into unexpected and pleasingly original territory… Offers plenty to keep genre fans hooked.” —Publishers Weekly

It's only as haunted as you are.After two raids turn up zero evidence, narcotics detective Dwayne Spare infiltrates a crumbling apartment building where a suspected manufacturer of krokodil is hiding—but finds something much worse. The chemist Gerald Metzger isn't after money; he's lulling his most 'dedicated' customers into catatonia, to make contact with an eldritch being. When Dwayne's cover is blown, he becomes Metzger's new test subject, an involuntary pilgrim into a world where "it's all just in your head" is far from a reassuring statement.

A couple are caught in a violent snowstorm as they ascend notorious Harrow Mountain in Chi Bay, Alaska for a getaway at a Forest Service remote cabin, only to discover that what awaits them is far worse than any blizzard.An archbishop must prowl the streets of the ancient Roman city of Trier, penance for the ultimate sacrilege.On an earth decimated by plague, a survivor fraught with guilt carries on his person a specialized strain of that plague with the teetering intent of unleashing it upon an unsuspecting world again, this time to even more devastating effect.A novelist is tormented by hellish visions of Henry Fuseli's macabre painting The Nightmare.A man haunted by family tragedy takes his girlfriend to Lake Garda, Italy, where secrets reside, secrets that could destroy both of them.These and other strange, dark avenues await the curious among the monks of a separate cloth.

In a dying coastal town near Cape Cod, Stanley Falk lives a quiet and unassuming life as a dishwasher. A shell of what and who he once was, Stanley is a man with a dark and violent past who does his best to forget by drinking it all away. But one morning he awakens to find his meager bank account emptied and his memory of the drunken evening prior wiped clean. Vague memories and terrible nightmares of evil gods, distant planets and a hideous room where torture has been practiced and blood flows like water haunt his every waking moment. Something depraved is intent on dragging him back into the same pit of darkness he's fought his entire life to crawl out of, and now there are others, in the shadows, watching his every move and luring him closer to a truth beyond comprehension...beyond evil...beyond anything he's ever imagined possible.You worship what you do not know.

Luke Thacker is a drifting hobo in Depression-era America, riding the rails of the nation and surviving by crumbs and hope. Along the way, he learns the iconography of transients-the Hobo Code-better than anyone else, and deciphers a secret that thrusts him into Athanasia, the middle ground of memories.Here he learns that all around us is the realm of the deadeye, where the deceased persevere by how they are remembered. The memories Luke meets will do anything to never be forgotten, whether by trickery, violence, or daring.Luke learns, too, that what's remembered yesterday is not always the same as what will be remembered tomorrow, and he sets off to keep alive the memories of those he loves in the way a 'bo does best: telling tales of old legends, and making up new ones alike.Now, fifty years later, the tall crossbucks of Luke Thacker are repeated by homeless King Shaw, who's struggling to keep Luke's own legend alive and with it, perhaps, his own.'Cause it don't matter if you rob banks with a dead John Dillinger, are hunted over the years by vengeful Earp brothers, or go against the monstrous railroad guard Smith McCain: when a story is told, all who are part of it become a little stronger.

He’s run away home. That’s what they say every time one of Charley Winslow’s friends vanishes from The Old Cross School for Boys.It’s just a tall tale. That’s what they tell Charley when he sees the ragged grey figure stalking the abbey halls at night.When Charley follows his pet insects to a pool of blood behind a false wall, he could run and let those stones bury their secrets. He could assimilate, focus on his studies, and wait for his father to send for him. Or he could walk the dark tunnels of the school’s heart, scour its abandoned passages, and pick at the scab of a family’s legacy of madness and murder.With the help of Sam Forster, the school’s gardener, and Matron Grace, the staff nurse, Charley unravels Old Cross’ history and exposes a scandal stretching back to when the school was a home with a noble family and a dark secret—a secret that still haunts its halls with scraping steps, twisting its bones into a new generation of nightmares.

Excerpt from the editorial in¿The Journal of New Historical Perspectives, Vol. 3, #4, 2011: On the night of July 15, 1903, Nikola Tesla powered up his 190-foot tower in Wardenclyffe on Long Island's north shore.¿The bolts of energy radiating from the apical dome were visible as far away as New Haven, Connecticut.¿This was the first and last time anyone would witness such a display.¿Three years later, broke and unable to secure further funding, Tesla abandoned the Wardenclyffe tower and his dream of worldwide wireless power.¿He returned to Manhattan where he promptly suffered a nervous breakdown.¿ So say the history books.¿ ¿ But new evidence has surfaced that a shadowy fraternal order stepped in and provided generous funding after J. P. Morgan reneged.¿Witnesses state that testing of the tower continued but only on foggy days when the discharges would not be noticed.¿The final test took place on April 18, 1906.¿Around dawn, in heavy fog, the tower was charged to maximum capacity; across the Atlantic, in¿Abereiddy,¿Wales, two copper prongs attached to a 50-watt lightbulb were thrust into the ground.¿The bulb lit.¿ Tesla had proved that worldwide wireless power was possible. Why then, at the moment of his greatest vindication, did Nikola Tesla abandon his project?¿What could possibly have transpired at Wardenclyffe that day to so rattle him that he would deny the world his transformative technology? We may never know.

Dreams die in sheds in Suburban Hell, traded for garden decorations so the neighbours can see how well everyone conforms. Matthew was a popstar, once. His band went on and made it without him, so now every night he goes to the shed to jerk off over his keytar, the one Karen wants him to give up so that she can get higher-tier garden decorations. But too much semen could break his beloved instrument, so Matthew builds Sparky, a robot that takes his cum.One night, Sparky comes to life, but soon discovers he has no voice. And why would he? Matthew built him to swallow spunk, not to speak. Left in the shed after he serves his purpose, Sparky sets out on a journey to find a voice. Along the way he meets Sandy, a robot like him, only Sandy is powered by a different man, an evil man. Together, Sparky and Sandy scour every inch of their neighbourhood, breaking into nearby garden sheds, exposing the neighbours, all in search of a voice for Sparky the Spunky Robot.

In Medieval Scotland, an English soldier endures a devastating battle only to discover what comes in the night for the blood of war. An itinerant rider chases a crooked dream to a grim finale in the bleak, lonely desert of Old West Texas. The last surviving member of a New England family investigates his flooded ancestral home and the shocking final chapter of his family tree. An arranged marriage deep in the forest for a man on the run turns into a nightmare he could never have imagined in his darkest moments.From Ed Kurtz, the acclaimed author of At the Mercy of Beasts and Bleed, comes a new collection of dark fiction that will take you on a journey of horrific visions summoned into the bloody battlefields of medieval Europe and the desolate wastelands of the post-Civil War Southwest, from undead horrors in Tsarist Russia to a painful and horrifying parenthood that could only happen to two desperate criminals at the end of their rope. Tales of mythic, bloodthirsty creatures collide with contemporary demons and nature gone amok where the weird and the monstrous are conjured by ill intentions and best laid plans. This is BLOOD THEY BROUGHT.

Rose McFarland is a trained killer-a Memphis S.W.A.T. sniper with a secret. Her team knows about the burn scars that lurk under her clothes, a legacy of the house fire that killed her father and brother sixteen years before. Her supervisors know that she spent two years in a rehabilitative facility, healing and learning to cope with the emotional trauma of the fire. But no one knows about the visions that drove her there, angry spirits that consumed her childhood, alienated her from her family and made her doubt her own sanity-the Whispers. When Charlie Akers, a half-brother she never knew, ends up on the wrong side of Rose's rifle, she unwittingly sets off a chain of events that puts her family in the middle of increasingly dangerous paranormal visitations. Charlie won't stay dead, and soon ghosts from Rose's past are creeping back into her life. People she's killed in the line of duty, family she thought long buried, every one of them under the influence of Rose's greatest fear, the Whispers themselves. As the walls between our world and the world of the dead grow thin, Rose will have to face her old nightmares to stop the Whispers from breaking free. If she can't, it won't just be Memphis that falls to the dead-there will be no safe place left on earth for the living.

Cameron Horne has it all: an intelligent, beautiful and loving wife, a great home and a successful and important career. His life is the American Dream come true. Until things begin to change.¿Without warning, he exhibits strange behavior he can't seem to control, loses time and memories, has horrific nightmares and finds blood on his hands that may or may not be his own. When a mysterious young man who seems to know the future begins appearing in Cameron's backyard, things go from bad to worse. As voices and visions flood his mind, and shadowy figures watch his every move, something deep inside him comes awake, manifesting in acts of extreme rage and violence.¿ Is he losing his mind, or is something evil stalking him, possessing him from within and turning Cam from the mild-mannered man he's always been into someone else…something else…¿ The truth is coming for Cameron Horne, and there's going to be HELL to pay.

Twenty years ago, journalist Joel Walker wrote a book about a ritual killing. It exploded into a bestseller and became part of the mass Satanic hysteria of the 1980s. However, his story and the evil he investigated were real and left him the victim of a nervous breakdown. For the last two decades, his has been a quiet existence far from his former home in Massachusetts. But when one of his childhood friends is brutally murdered and rumored to have been involved in bizarre medical experiments, Joel is lured back to find out what really happened. Joel must delve deep into the darkness once more, investigating all the way back to his own childhood, and the secrets he and his old friends buried there years ago. But where do paranoia and madness end and real evil begin? With the Orphans of Wonderland.

The dead rose. We fell. But not everyone thinks the war for survival is over. Heroes rise in times of crisis, and STILL OF NIGHT tells their stories… DAHLIA, a bullied high school girl with a love for edged weapons, goes from victim to powerful leader as the zombie apocalypse sweeps through her world. RACHAEL ELLE continues her journey from comic-con cosplayer to actual hero as she encounter a community with a dark and terrible secret. CAPTAIN JOE LEDGER and his best shooters, TOP and BUNNY, head to an overrun San Diego to try and save a possible cure for the virus that is bringing the dead back to unnatural life. And in the wilderness, Joe, Dahlia, and Rachael Elle will come face-to-face with savage gangs, an army of the living dead, and the mysterious and deadly OLD MAN CHURCH. The final battle unfolds in a little town called Happy Valley, where the residents have found their own unique and terrible way to survive the end of the world. But a war is coming, and no one will escape the last great war between the living and the dead. STILL OF NIGHT is the fourth book in NY Times bestseller Jonathan Maberry's bestselling Dead of Night series. George A. Romero called Dead of Night and its sequel, Fall of Night, "The official prequel to Night of the Living Dead as far as I'm concerned."

In a torrential downpour, Phil, Jamie and Martin-three teenage boys-encounter a strange and enigmatic man covered in horrible scars who will change their lives, their destinies and the very fate of their souls forever. When their encounter mistakenly leads to murder, they realize this eerie stranger may not have been a man at all, but something much more…Thirty years later the boys-now men-lead tormented lives filled with horrifying memories of the scarred man and what they did all those years ago in the rain. Phil is a struggling writer, divorced, with a daughter and a mounting drinking problem. Jamie is a defrocked priest with depraved secrets and horrible addictions, and Martin, a madman who thinks himself a god, has vanished into a desolate desert region of Mexico and established a feared and violent blood cult. When Martin's dying mother hires Phil to find her son and bring him home, Phil embarks on a perilous journey that will take him from the seedy streets of Tijuana, to a dangerous and allegedly haunted stretch of desert Mexican road known as The Corridor of Demons. At the end of the road, in an old and previously abandoned church, Martin and his followers wait in the Hell-on-Earth they've created deep in the desert. There will be only one chance for redemption, one chance for salvation, and one chance to stop the rise of an antichrist's bloody quest for demonic power. From the void, came chaos. These are its children.

In a nightmare world of darkness and violence lies a city that is home to those who inhabit the dreams of the living, those who sleep in daylight and struggle to survive the night. But there are some who break the rules, who believe there may be something better out there beyond their city of dreams, those who run in search of a promised land of sunshine and peace. Enter the Dreamcatchers, an elite law enforcement unit assigned to hunt down runners and bring them back, dead or alive. Monk is one of the best, a dark and brooding, by-the-book Dreamcatcher with a reputation for extreme violence. But when his enigmatic wife Julia runs, Monk must break the rules himself, and find her before fate or his fellow Dreamcatchers do. In a hallucinatory quest for redemption, Monk chases the woman he loves across a city of nightmares and into the wastelands, where unimaginable horrors and wonders await them both, and soon learns there are realities far deadlier than their prison of darkness, his love for Julia or a life together in the light. This is the world of darkness, of endless night and doomed dreams. This is the beginning and the end. This is Babylon Terminal.