Enter the dark, mycelia-laden world of mushroom horror: • A food blogger hunts for a killer recipe. • Ceaseless rain drives a lonely man into his fungus-covered town. • A grieving son purchases a kit to regrow his dead mother. This anthology explores the mysterious world of fungi, spores…and things that dwell in the dim forest under the rotting leaves. Here you’ll find 31 stories and 5 poems of quiet, cosmic, and body horror—plus subtle humor. Works examine themes of loneliness, desire, consumption, and connection with what lurks in the shadows. Edited by Carol Gyzander and Rachel A. Brune, Dark Spores is the fourth volume in the Stories We Tell After Midnight horror series. Devour these stories—before they devour you! Featuring works by Meghan Arcuri, Rachel A. Brune, Samantha Bryant, R. E. Carr, James Chambers, Rick Claypool, Randee Dawn, Teel James Glenn, Maxwell Ian Gold, Timothy Granville, Rob Grimoire, Carol Gyzander, John G. Hartness, Pedro Iniguez, Jo Kaplan, Nicholas Kaufmann, Ariana Khaim, Gwendolyn Kiste, Nicole Givens Kurtz, Jamie Lackey, Gordon Linzner, M. Lopes da Silva, Lee Murray, Victoria Nations, Candace Nola, Gregory Norris, Tonia Ransom, Daniel Roop, Jef Rouner, Rebecca Rowland, Sumiko Saulson, Shannon Scott, Angela Yuriko Smith, Sara Tantlinger, Elizabeth Twist, and L. Marie Wood. With a special foreword by Clay McLeod Chapman, author of Ghost Eaters: A Novel. Cover: Lynne Hansen

For millions of years man and rats had been natural enemies. But now for the first time - suddenly, shockingly, horribly - the balance of power had shifted and the rats began to prey on the human population.

It has a dark past--one in which a number of humans were killed. A past that caused it to christen itself “Murderbot." But it has only vague memories of the massacre that spawned that title, and it wants to know more. Teaming up with a Research Transport vessel named ART (you don’t want to know what the “A” stands for), Murderbot heads to the mining facility where it went rogue. What it discovers will forever change the way it thinks. Alternate cover of ISBN 9781250186928. Another cover edition can be found here

ASIN B08H831J18 moved to the more recent edition Centuries before, robots of Panga gained self-awareness, laid down their tools, wandered, en masse into the wilderness, never to be seen again. They faded into myth and urban legend. Now the life of the tea monk who tells this story is upended by the arrival of a robot, there to honor the old promise of checking in. The robot cannot go back until the question of "what do people need?" is answered. But the answer to that question depends on who you ask, and how. They will need to ask it a lot. Chambers' series asks: in a world where people have what they want, does having more matter?