Beloved, best-selling science writer Mary Roach’s classic, now with a new epilogue. For two thousand years, cadavers—some willingly, some unwittingly—have been involved in science’s boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. They’ve tested France’s first guillotines, ridden the NASA Space Shuttle, been crucified in a Parisian laboratory to test the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, and helped solve the mystery of TWA Flight 800. For every new surgical procedure, from heart transplants to gender confirmation surgery, cadavers have helped make history in their quiet way. Stiff investigates the strange lives of our bodies postmortem and answers the question: What should we do after we die?

A young mortician goes behind the scenes, unafraid of the gruesome (and fascinating) details of her curious profession. Most people want to avoid thinking about death, but Caitlin Doughty—a twenty-something with a degree in medieval history and a flair for the macabre—took a job at a crematory, turning morbid curiosity into her life’s work. Thrown into a profession of gallows humor and vivid characters (both living and very dead), Doughty learned to navigate the secretive culture of those who care for the deceased. Smoke Gets in Your Eyes tells an unusual coming-of-age story full of bizarre encounters and unforgettable scenes. Caring for dead bodies of every color, shape, and affliction, Doughty soon becomes an intrepid explorer in the world of the dead. She describes how she swept ashes from the machines (and sometimes onto her clothes) and reveals the strange history of cremation and undertaking, marveling at bizarre and wonderful funeral practices from different cultures. Her eye-opening, candid, and often hilarious story is like going on a journey with your bravest friend to the cemetery at midnight. She demystifies death, leading us behind the black curtain of her unique profession. And she answers questions you didn’t know you had: Can you catch a disease from a corpse? How many dead bodies can you fit in a Dodge van? What exactly does a flaming skull look like? Honest and heartfelt, self-deprecating and ironic, Doughty's engaging style makes this otherwise taboo topic both approachable and engrossing. Now a licensed mortician with an alternative funeral practice, Doughty argues that our fear of dying warps our culture and society, and she calls for better ways of dealing with death (and our dead).

In 1328, Bruges is under siege by the Chatelaine of Hell and her army of chimeras -- humans mixed with animals or armour, forged in the deep fires of the Hellbeast. At night, revenants crawl over the walls and bring plague and grief to this city of widows. Margriet de Vos learns she's a widow herself when her good-for-nothing husband comes home dead from the war. He didn't come back for her. The revenant who was her husband pulls a secret treasure of coins and weapons from under his floorboards and goes back through the mouth of the beast called Hell. Margriet killed her first soldier when she was 11. She's buried six of her seven children. She'll do anything for her daughter, even if it means raiding Hell itself to get her inheritance back. Margriet's daughter is haunted by a dead husband of her own, and blessed, or cursed, with an enchanted distaff that allows her to control the revenants and see the future. Together with a transgender man-at-arms who has unfinished business with the Chatelaine, a traumatized widow with a giant waterpowered forgehammer at her disposal, and a wealthy alderman's wife who escapes Bruges with her children, Margriet and Beatrix forge a raiding party like Hell has never seen.

You’re supposed to dream about your wedding day. But mine was hell. For one forbidden moment, Theo gave me an escape—seeing me as more than just a pawn, offering a final wish to help me endure. Then my life with Rafe, my captor and monster, began. To him, I’m nothing but a vessel to break. Pain consumes me, but I remember Theo’s touch, the promise in his eyes, the life I could have had. He’s out there, trapped by the memory of me, just as I am haunted by him. My savior. The only man who ever cared. I pray he’ll find me, save me, and bring me back to that moment before the darkness swallowed me whole. To Have and to Hold is a full-length taboo novel with pitch black themes.

Four full-length novels of filthy, forbidden romance.... The Virgin and the BeastEverything has its price, even virginity...and Xavier is willing to pay.Daddy’s Sweet GirlSarah gets a new step-father...and a new step-brother. Family ties have never been so twisted. Hurt So GoodIt’s the single most forbidden of female fantasies. Most are ashamed to speak it out loud, much less ask for it, and usually so is Miranda...until Dylan Lennox comes along.Without RemorseThe moment I saw her, I knew I was going to break all the rules. Because I’m taking her for myself. Please note that these books are dark romances with intense scenes and include very dark fantasies. Check author's website for TWs.

Absurd philosophies, dark surrealism & the end of the human race... God hates you. All of you. He closed the gates of Heaven & wants you to rot on Earth forever. Not only that, he is repossesing your souls & feeding them to a large vagina-like machine called the Walm-an interdimensional doorway that brings His New Children into the world. He loves these new children, but He doesn't love you. They are more interesting than you. They are beautiful, psychotic, magical, sex-crazed & deadly. They are turning your cities into apocalyptic chaos & there's nothing you can do about it. Featuring: a narrator who sees his body from a 3rd-person perspective, a man whose flesh is dead but his body parts are alive & running amok, an overweight messiah, the personal life of the Grim Reaper, lots of classy sex & violence, & a motley group of squatter punks that team up with the devil to find their place in a world that doesn t want them anymore.

Mexican Gothic meets The Lie Tree by way of Oscar Wilde and Mary Shelley in this delightfully witty horror debut. A captivating tale of two Victorian gentlemen hiding their relationship away in a botanical garden who embark on a Frankenstein-style experiment with unexpected consequences. It is an unusual thing, to live in a botanical garden. But Simon and Gregor are an unusual pair of gentlemen. Hidden away in their glass sanctuary from the disapproving tattle of Victorian London, they are free to follow their own interests without interference. For Simon, this means long hours in the dark basement workshop, working his taxidermical art. Gregor's business is exotic plants – lucrative, but harmless enough. Until his latest acquisition, a strange fungus which shows signs of intellect beyond any plant he's seen, inspires him to attempt a masterwork: true intelligent life from plant matter. Driven by the glory he'll earn from the Royal Horticultural Society for such an achievement, Gregor ignores the flaws in his plan: that intelligence cannot be controlled; that plants cannot be reasoned with; and that the only way his plant-beast will flourish is if he uses a recently deceased corpse for the substrate. The experiment – or Chloe, as she is named – outstrips even Gregor's expectations, entangling their strange household. But as Gregor's experiment flourishes, he wilts under the cost of keeping it hidden from jealous eyes. The mycelium grows apace in this sultry greenhouse. But who is cultivating whom? Told with wit and warmth, this is an extraordinary tale of family, fungus and more than a dash of bloody revenge from an exciting new voice in queer horror.

Seventeen-year-old Iris Hollow has always been strange. Something happened to her and her two older sisters when they were children, something they can’t quite remember but that left each of them with an identical half-moon scar at the base of their throats. Iris has spent most of her teenage years trying to avoid the weirdness that sticks to her like tar. But when her eldest sister, Grey, goes missing under suspicious circumstances, Iris learns just how weird her life can get: horned men start shadowing her, a corpse falls out of her sister’s ceiling, and ugly, impossible memories start to twist their way to the forefront of her mind. As Iris retraces Grey’s last known footsteps and follows the increasingly bizarre trail of breadcrumbs she left behind, it becomes apparent that the only way to save her sister is to decipher the mystery of what happened to them as children. The closer Iris gets to the truth, the closer she comes to understanding that the answer is dark and dangerous – and that Grey has been keeping a terrible secret from her for years.

Author of sales sensation If We Were Villains returns with a story about a ragtag group of night shift workers who meet in the local cemetery to unearth the secrets lurking in an open grave. Every night, in the college’s ancient cemetery, five people cross paths as they work the late shift: a bartender, a rideshare driver, a hotel receptionist, the steward of the derelict church that looms over them, and the editor-in-chief of the college paper, always in search of a story. One dark October evening in the defunct churchyard, they find a hole that wasn’t there before. A fresh, open grave where no grave should be. But who dug it, and for whom? Before they go their separate ways, the gravedigger returns. As they trail him through the night, they realize he may be the key to a string of strange happenings around town that have made headlines for the last few weeks—and that they may be closer to the mystery than they thought. Atmospheric and eerie, with the ensemble cast her fans love and a delightfully familiar academic backdrop, Graveyard Shift is a modern Gothic tale in If We Were Villains author M. L. Rio’s inimitable style.

"A bizarre and fiercely original splatterpunk phantasmagoria of queerness. Deranged and gleefully weird as f*ck, this is an impressive debut from a singular literary talent." —Eric LaRocca, Bram Stoker Award-nominated author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke Annihilation meets Manhunt in three-time Hugo Award nominee Bitter Karella’s debut horror novel—a gloriously queer and irreverent psychedelic trip into the heart of an eldritch wood and the horrors of (cis)terhood.I see something out there, in the woods. It does not have a face. They call it the King’s Breakfast. One bite and you can understand the full scope of the universe; one bite and you can commune with forgotten gods beyond human comprehension. And it only grows deep in the Pamogo forest, where the trees crowd so tight that the forest floor is pitch black day and night, where rumors of disappearing hikers and strange cults that worship the divine feminine abound. Sarah is a trans woman who makes her living growing mushrooms. When a bad harvest leaves her in a desperate fix, the lure of the King’s Breakfast has her journeying into those vast uncharted woods. But as she descends deeper, she realizes she's not alone. Something in the forest is waking up. It's hungry—and it wants her.  ★ “As eldritch and grimy as the terrifying forest it’s set in. I loved this book!" —Trevor Henderson, author of Scarewaves  ★ "Weird, wild, and oh-so-wretched, Moonflow is the trans botanical horror we need in the world right now." —Drew Huff, author of The Divine Flesh  ★ “Is it legal to have this much fun reading a book? I’m in awe of Karella’s incredible gift for creating biting satire. I had a f*cking blast.” —Joe Koch, Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author of The Wingspan of Severed Hands