Books published by Underland Press

The eighteenth Tarot card is the Moon, and those who raise their arms to her know she offers Mercy and Severity in equal measure. This is the great river at night, where wolves howl and all doors are open. All futures are possible, and every truth is elusive. This is the source and passion of Eighteen: Stories of Mischief & Mayhem. These twenty-four stories from voices—old and new—celebrate the inevitability of fate, the horror of prophecy, and the shivering delight of not knowing what comes next.Cross over the threshold with us, and explore the strange, the weird, and the fantastic. Do not fear what lies ahead. It is the same as what came before. The only difference is you. This is Eighteen, and nothing will be the same.Eighteen contains stories from Forrest Aguirre, Darin Bradley, Christopher East, Scott Edelman, Nicole Feldringer, Ben Gamblin, Ingrid Garcia, A. P. Howell, Emma Johnson-Rivard, E. E. King, Jessie Kwak, Shannon Lawrence, Gerri Leen, Mark Mills, Christi Nogle, Tammie Painter, Josh Rountree, Erica Sage, Lorraine Schein, J. Dee Stanley, Richard Thomas, John Waterfall, Wendy N. Wagner, and Todd Zack. It is edited by Mark Teppo

Before email,before the world wide web,before hackers,Before sexting,before always-on GPS,before titanium implants,before Alexa, Cortana, and Siri,before the computer in your pocket was more powerful than the one that sent astronauts to the moon,there was cyberpunk.And science fiction was never the same.Cyberpunk writers-serious, smart, and courageous in the face of change-exposed the naiveté of a society rushing headlong into technological unknowns. Technology could not save us, they argued, and it might in fact ruin us.Now, thirty years after The Movement party-crashed the scene, the cyberpunk reality has largely come to be.The future they imagined is here.With an introduction by Victoria Blake and stories by: William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Jonathan Lethem, Kim Stanley Robinson, David Marusek, Benjamin Parzybok, Cat Rambo, Paul Tremblay, Pat Cadigan, Gwyneth Jones, Mark Teppo, Greg Bear, Lewis Shiner, Rudy Rucker, James Patrick Kelly, John Shirley, Daniel H. Wilson, Paul Di Filippo, and Cory Doctorow.Welcome to your cyberpunk world.

Jamie has escaped from the Pilo Family Circus, but he doesn't remember any of the gruesome details of what he had seen-or done-while under the terrible influence of the clown face paint. His life is normal again. Yet his family and friends don't trust him. The police are still wondering about the night they found him, dressed in a clown outfit with blood on his shoes. And the mother of his missing friend keeps calling and whispering: "Murderer." But there are those who do remember what happened. The circus has a new boss, and he's seeking out past performers and enslaving new cast members. Jamie finds himself drawn back into the dark world of the diabolic big top. But this time, the clown paint has no effect on him. His evil twin-JJ-is dead and buried. Jamie believes there is no way to bring back that twisted side of himself. That is, until the body is found and reanimated...

Over the last decade, Darin Bradley has been dissecting the future-from the prophetic Book that heralded the arrival of Salvage Country in Noise to the impending repossession of our education in Chimpanzee to the harrowing world of voyeuristic terrorism in Noise. Now, with Light Both Foreign and Domestic, he presents a collection of stories that reveal the persistent light of the human spirit, no matter the harrowing darkness that presses down on us.- "Light Both Foreign and Domestic"- "Hotels and Other Forms of Collapse"- "Two"- "The Basement, Borges"- "Slipstring"- "'Seng, Running"- "Fairyland"- "They Would Only be Roads"- "The Dust and the Red"- "oo"- "The Heresy Box"- "Sweet Water"- "Syntagm"- "Stormchasing"- "How Nothing Happens"- "Sleepwalker"Several stories are exclusive to this collection.

Before being sewn-together, Heraclix was dead-merely a pile of mismatched pieces, collected from the corpses of many troubled men. And Pomp was immortal-at least, so she thought. That was before her impossible near-murder at the hands of the necromancer, Heraclix's creator. But when playing God, even the smallest error is a gargantuan weakness. When the necromancer makes his, Heraclix and Pomp begin their epic flight.As they travel from Vienna to Prague to Istanbul and, even, to Hell itself, they struggle to understand who and what they are: who was Heraclix before his death and rebirth? What is mortality, and why does it suddenly concern Pomp? As they journey through an unruly eighteenth century, they discover that the necromancer they thought dead might not be quite so after all. In fact, he may have sealed his immortality at the expense of everyone alive . . .Heraclix and Pomp is a richly textured and decadent read, filled with Baroque ideology and Byzantine political intrigue. Fans of fantasy and historical fiction alike will revel in Aguirre's layered prose and vivid characterizations. Heraclix and Pomp brings the surreal and the macabre to one of history's most violent eras.

Everything you are about to read is true. Mostly.After US Postmaster Theodore Roosevelt showed the Nazis who was boss in 1942, the Postal Bureau--part of the Department of Transportation--ushered in an era of scientific marvels: simulcast via satellite, sub-orbital transnational flights, dazzle pistols, and electromagnetic driverless cars. However, long-simmering feuds between the Shamans of Commerce and the Wizards of Technology were not forgotten, and it isn't until the age of Sputnik and the Space Race that the secret organizations buried deep within the US Weather Service and Census Bureau make their move against the Department of Transportation. To regain control of the Administration, they'll need to rely on older--more esoteric--technologies: astrology, blood rituals, and strange creatures long thought extinct.It's up to G-man Fred Mackey of the Electromagnetic Bureau, Domestic Interference Engineering Section, to figure out how to science America back on track. With the assistance of the enigmatic Assistant Secretary for Innovation and the world's leading specialist in rocket science and all-around occultnik, Mackey tackles the byzantine bureaucracy of a vast government conspiracy that extends from deep space to deep beneath the earth.Welcome to 1970. This is the history you were never taught . . .

The thirteenth Tarot card is Death, and he is a symbol not of the end, but of transformation and rebirth. This is the genesis and root of Thirteen: Stories of Transformation. The twenty-eight authors of this collection are voices-new and old-who are not afraid to explore what comes next. Whether it be a life after death, a life without love, a life filled with hunger, or the life shared by a ghost. These are stories of the weird, the mythic, the fantastic, the futuristic, the supernatural, and the horrific. The ghosts of the past have been eaten by the children of the future: this endless cycle of birth, death, and renewal is the magic of thirteen. Do not fear change. Embrace it. Let Thirteen be the handbook for the new you.

In the classic noir tradition of "Have Gun, Will Travel," Rachel Pollack—one of the world's foremost authorities on the Tarot—gives us the tale of Jack Shade, an occult shaman for hire. Jack Shade has a secret, and this hidden part of his past sends him on a journey through time and space and a great number of metaphysical doorways. From the cosy poker table in the eleventh floor apartment of the Hotel de Reve Noire to the ethereal Forest of Souls to the faded houses along the Gold River, Jack flows in and out of this world. Even when his own duplicate hires him to kill himself, Jack is mercury in motion. Jack the Nimble. Jack the Quick.The Fissure King: A Novel in Fire Stories collects the four existing Jack Shades novellas and shows us Jack's final trick—one last story that finally reveals Jack's true nature.Only Rachel Pollack, one of the world's greatest authorities of tarot and an award-winning novelist and comic book writer, could dream of someone as mischievous and mythopoeic as Jack Shade. The King is dead. Long live the King.