In the twelve unforgettable tales of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, the strange is made familiar and the familiar strange, such that a girl growing wings on her legs feels like an ordinary rite of passage, while a bug-infested house becomes an impossible, Kafkaesque nightmare. Each story builds a new world all its own: a group of children steal a haunted doll; a runaway bride encounters a sea monster; a vendor sells toy boxes that seemingly control the passage of time; an insomniac is seduced by the Sandman. These visions of modern life wrestle with themes of death and technological consequence, guilt and sexuality, and unmask the contradictions that exist within all of us.   Mesmerizing, electric, and wholly original, Kim Fu’s Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century blurs the boundaries of the real and fantastic, offering intricate and surprising insights into human nature.

Life changes at the orphanage the day seven-year-old Marina shows up. She is different from the other girls: at once an outcast and object of fascination. As Marina struggles to find her place, she invents a game whose rules are dictated by a haunting violence. Written in hypnotic, lyrical prose, alternating between Marina’s perspective and the choral we of the other girls, Such Small Hands evokes the pain of loss and the hunger for acceptance.

A mind-bending speculative thriller in which the sudden appearance of a mountain in the middle of the Pacific Ocean leads a group of scientists to a series of jaw-dropping revelations that challenge the notion of what it means to be human. An enormous snow-covered mountain has appeared in the Pacific Ocean. No one knows when exactly it showed up, precisely how big it might be, or how to explain its existence. When Harold Tunmore, a scientist of mysterious phenomena, is contacted by a shadowy organization to help investigate, he has no idea what he is getting into as he and his team set out for the mountain. The higher Harold’s team ascends, the less things make sense. Time moves differently, turning minutes into hours, and hours into days. Amid the whipping cold of higher elevation, the climbers’ limbs numb and memories of their lives before the mountain begin to fade. Paranoia quickly turns to violence among the crew, and slithering, ancient creatures pursue them in the snow. Still, as the dangers increase, the mystery of the mountain compels them to its peak, where they are certain they will find their answers. Have they stumbled upon the greatest scientific discovery known to man or the seeds of their own demise? Framed by the discovery of Harold Tunmore’s unsent letters to his family and the chilling and provocative story they tell, Ascension considers the limitations of science and faith and examines both the beautiful and the unsettling sides of human nature.

Alexandra grew up hungry. Hungry for food, hungry for safety, hungry for love. Which is why she's worked so hard to have it a beautiful home, a gorgeous doctor boyfriend, and an ambitious job matching individuals with... unconventional emotional responses. Sure, her clients may sit somewhere on the psychopathy scale. But they're not the dangerous, murderous kind. They're doctors, lawyers, teachers, and everyone deserves love.And that's exactly what Alex thinks she's found. Love. So she's floored when she arrives to her dinner with her boyfriend, expecting a ring in a little box, and instead finding her best friend sat at the table with him. They have news. They're together now. And apparently her birthday dinner is the best time to share the news.Suddenly, Alex's world implodes. She has lost the two people in the world closest to her, her only support. She's utterly alone, her future in pieces. So when she unexpectedly bumps into a client, Rebecca, and Rebecca seems to want to be friends, it feels like a lifeline. But then Alex's now ex turns up dead, then more people around her seem to be dropping like flies. And she can't help but wonder if this new friendship is a match made in hell.

An actress desperate to reclaim her fame must survive the real-life plot of the horror movie that made her famous in this psychologically twisted locked-room thriller influenced by '90s slasher films.Twenty years ago, Ella Winters was the it girl. She made a name for herself in Hollywood and throughout America as the final survivor in the cult-classic slasher Grad Night. But the real horror is what happened when the cameras weren’t rolling—something terrible that Ella and her co-stars agreed never to speak of again. Shortly after the movie's premiere, Ella disappeared from the acting scene under the pretense of caring for her ailing mother, hoping for a quiet life out of the spotlight to ease her guilty mind.Now, after her mother’s passing, Ella has decided to return to the silver screen. And with the cast and crew of Grad Night in the process of filming a reunion documentary, Ella has the perfect ticket back into Hollywood's good graces. Weighed down by the secret she’s been keeping all these years, Ella apprehensively makes the trip to the original set—a cabin in rural Tennessee—to reunite with her castmates for the first time in over a decade. But when the actors begin to meet the exact gruesome fates of the characters they originally played, falling victim to someone dressed as the Grad Night villain, it's clear their secret is out.Now, the question Can the final girl survive one last nightmare?

In the twelve unforgettable tales of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, the strange is made familiar and the familiar strange, such that a girl growing wings on her legs feels like an ordinary rite of passage, while a bug-infested house becomes an impossible, Kafkaesque nightmare. Each story builds a new world all its own: a group of children steal a haunted doll; a runaway bride encounters a sea monster; a vendor sells toy boxes that seemingly control the passage of time; an insomniac is seduced by the Sandman. These visions of modern life wrestle with themes of death and technological consequence, guilt and sexuality, and unmask the contradictions that exist within all of us.   Mesmerizing, electric, and wholly original, Kim Fu’s Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century blurs the boundaries of the real and fantastic, offering intricate and surprising insights into human nature.

Come meet The Liar, The Secret Keeper, The Crybaby, and the rest. Nine children travel with their families to their Grandfather's vacation property, where strange things begin to happen: eyes blink from the bottom up, mushrooms ooze blood, people's faces don't hang right anymore-except they do, once you look more closely. Transformations warp the children's sense of time and place, the very land itself seeming to encroach upon them. As The Liar watches the children succumb one by one to an unknown fate, she must make sense of absent stars in the night sky, vials of amber liquid that taste of milk, a funny little rope tied in knots. She's faced with a choice: join or resist, only the choice is not so simple. Set in The Grandfather's Lake House as he continues to extend his property lines and told in the eerie we of the children, Root Rot explores predatory family dynamics, the boundaries of bodies and home, and how individuals choose to participate in or push back against structures that would harm them.

Life changes at the orphanage the day seven-year-old Marina shows up. She is different from the other girls: at once an outcast and object of fascination. As Marina struggles to find her place, she invents a game whose rules are dictated by a haunting violence. Written in hypnotic, lyrical prose, alternating between Marina’s perspective and the choral we of the other girls, Such Small Hands evokes the pain of loss and the hunger for acceptance.

Casey is nineteen, struggling and social media obsessed. When her favorite StreamVid star, Della, falls ill, Casey takes it upon herself to set up a fund to foot her medical bills. However, when Casey's online obsession bleeds into her IRL world, things go sideways and it becomes all too clear that Della might not be who she seems. PARASOCIAL is a Florida Gothic meditation on obsession, social media, and the lengths people will go to achieve online success.

A mind-bending speculative thriller in which the sudden appearance of a mountain in the middle of the Pacific Ocean leads a group of scientists to a series of jaw-dropping revelations that challenge the notion of what it means to be human. An enormous snow-covered mountain has appeared in the Pacific Ocean. No one knows when exactly it showed up, precisely how big it might be, or how to explain its existence. When Harold Tunmore, a scientist of mysterious phenomena, is contacted by a shadowy organization to help investigate, he has no idea what he is getting into as he and his team set out for the mountain. The higher Harold’s team ascends, the less things make sense. Time moves differently, turning minutes into hours, and hours into days. Amid the whipping cold of higher elevation, the climbers’ limbs numb and memories of their lives before the mountain begin to fade. Paranoia quickly turns to violence among the crew, and slithering, ancient creatures pursue them in the snow. Still, as the dangers increase, the mystery of the mountain compels them to its peak, where they are certain they will find their answers. Have they stumbled upon the greatest scientific discovery known to man or the seeds of their own demise? Framed by the discovery of Harold Tunmore’s unsent letters to his family and the chilling and provocative story they tell, Ascension considers the limitations of science and faith and examines both the beautiful and the unsettling sides of human nature.

Violence was his first language. A nameless Deaf teen escapes his father's basement after years of imprisonment. Bloody, alone, and without language, he stumbles through the Saskatchewan prairies and lands in a psychiatric facility, where he meets Felix, another Deaf teen. Felix—cunning and ambitious—teaches the nameless narrator Sign Language and begins to mold the abused teen's mind. But mold into what?

Under 30,000 feet of water, the exploration rig Leaguer has discovered an oil field larger than Saudi Arabia, with oil so sweet and pure, nations would go to war for the rights to it. But as the team starts drilling exploration well after exploration well in their race to claim the sweet crude, a deep rumbling beneath the ocean floor shakes them all to their core. Something has been living in the oil and it's about to give birth to the greatest threat humanity has ever seen.

Sissy and Lola are best friends, next-door neighbors, and now… murder solvers? When Sissy picks up a lost flip-phone and follows the instructions from the stranger on the other line, she and Lola are flung into an investigation of a grisly crime. With each new phone call, the girls are dug deeper into a conspiracy that threatens their lives—and possibly their friendship. But with no way to escape the dreaded calls, the only way out is to unravel the mystery.

In this follow-up to #1 New York Times bestselling author Ruth Ware’s multi-million copy mega-hit The Women in Cabin 10, Lo Blacklock returns to attend the opening of a luxury hotel, only to find herself in a white-knuckled race across Europe. When the invitation to attend the press opening of a luxury Swiss hotel—owned by reclusive billionaire Marcus Leidmann—arrives, it’s like the answer to a prayer. Three years after the birth of her youngest child, Lo Blacklock is ready to reestablish her journalism career, but post-pandemic travel journalism is a very different landscape from the one she left ten years ago. The chateau on the shores of Lake Geneva is everything Lo’s ever dreamed of, and she hopes she can snag an interview with Marcus. Unfortunately, he proves to be even more difficult to pin down than his reputation suggests. When Lo gets a late-night call asking her to come to Marcus’s hotel room, she agrees despite her own misgivings. She’s greeted, however, by a woman claiming to be Marcus’s mistress, and in life-or-death jeopardy. What follows is a thrilling cat-and-mouse pursuit across Europe, forcing Lo to ask herself just how much she’s willing to sacrifice to save this woman…and if she can even trust her?

G. T. Karber, the creator of the popular online daily mystery game Murdle, presents the first collection of 100 original murder mystery logic puzzles―a perfect gift for armchair detectives and puzzlers to hone their minds and solve a series of crimes. Who committed the ghastly deed? What weapon was used to dispatch the victim? Where did the calculated demise occur? Join Deductive Logico and investigate murders most foul in Volume 1 . The first of their kind, these humorous mini-mystery puzzles challenge you to find whodunit, how, where, and why. Examine the clues, interview the witnesses, and use the power of deduction to complete the grid and catch the culprit. Together, you’ll uncover a buried secret beneath all of the murders and a message that can only be decrypted when you’ve solved them all. Packed with illustrations, codes, and maps, and brimming with wit and intrigue , Volume 1 is the must-have detective casebook for the secret sleuth in everyone.

A young and socially awkward girl with no regard for human life confronts her own average life armed with nothing but friendship and knives.

You won’t find a more hardcore eighties-slasher-film fan than high school senior Jade Daniels. And you won’t find a place less supportive of girls who wear torn T-shirts and too much eyeliner than Proofrock, nestled eight thousand feet up a mountain in Idaho, alongside Indian Lake, home to both Camp Blood – site of a massacre fifty years ago – and, as of this summer, Terra Nova, a second-home celebrity Camelot being carved out of a national forest. That’s not the only thing that’s getting carved up, though – this, Jade knows, is the start of a slasher. But what kind? Who’s wearing the mask? Jade’s got an encyclopedic recall of every horror movie on the shelf, but… will that help her survive? Can she get a final girl trained enough to stop all this from happening? Does she even want to? Isn’t a slasher exactly what her hometown deserves? This new novel by the New York Times bestselling author of The Only Good Indians, Stephen Graham Jones, called “one of our most talented living writers” by Tommy Orange, explores the changing landscape of the West through his distinct voice of sharp humor and prophetic violence. Go up the mountain to Proofrock. See if you’ve got what it takes – see if your heart, too, might be a chainsaw.