Nightmare City

What should have been an ordinary morning is about to spiral into a day of unrelenting terror. As a reporter for his high school newspaper, Tom is always on the lookout for an offbeat story. But from the moment he woke up this morning, his own life has been more bizarre than any headline could ever tell. The streets of his town are suddenly empty and silent. A strange fog has drifted in from the sea and hangs over everything. And something is moving in that fog. Something evil. Something hungry. Closing in on Tom. Tom’s terrified girlfriend Marie says the answers lie at the Santa Maria Monastery, a haunted ruin standing amidst a forest blackened by wildfire. But can he trust her? A voice that seems to be coming from beyond the grave is warning him that nothing is what it seems. Only one thing is certain: with his world collapsing around him, Tom has only a few hours to recover the life he knew—before he, too, is lost forever in this nightmare city.

What lurks in the damp recesses of urban existence? These new tales of weird fiction are a blend of urban horror, pulp noir and dark fantasy. Lovecraftian horrors and Cthulhu Mythos monsters have never been this gritty. From haunted Kingsport across the globe to shadowy Berlin and the otherworldly music of Bangalore. From kind, sexy neighbors to cyberpunk paranoia an The King in Yellow. A journalist's search with unexpected results. What really happened to Walter Gilman, and what is the origin of the witch Keziah Mason? And witness humanity fail against the forces from beyond. From weird sounds to screams of madness. Entropy. Chaos. Disorder. Death. Beneath cities, on the outskirts of ruined, aeon-old cities and INSIDE cities. The stench, the decay, the hopelesness... it is everywhere. Welcome to URBAN CTHULHU: NIGHTMARE CITIES.

Twenty long-unavailable stories by Dashiell Hammett, the author of The Maltese Falcon and the incomparable master of detective fiction. In the title story, a man on a bender enters a small town and ends up unraveling the dark mystery at its heart. A woman confronts the brutal truth about her husband in the chilling story "Ruffian's Wife." "His Brother's Keeper" is a half-wit boxer's eulogy to the brother who betrayed him. "The Second-Story Angel" recounts one of the most novel cons ever devised. In seven stories, the tough and taciturn Continental Op takes on a motley collection of the deceitful, the duped, and the dead, and once again shows his uncanny ability to get at the truth. In three stories, Sam Spade confronts the darkness in the human soul while rolling his own cigarettes. And the first study for The Thin Man sends John Guild on a murder investigation in which almost every witness may be lying. In Nightmare Town, Dashiell Hammett, America's poet laureate of the dispossessed, shows us a world where people confront a multitude of evils. Whether they are trying to right wrongs or just trying to survive, all of them are rendered with Hammett's signature gifts for sharp-edged characters and blunt dialogue. Hammett said that his ambition was to elevate mystery fiction to the level of art. This collection of masterful stories clearly illustrates Hammett's success, and shows the remarkable range and variety of the fiction he produced.

THEY CALL IT "THE CITY OF A HUNDRED ROWS". City of Dreams & Nightmare is the first in a series of novels set in one of the most extraordinary fantasy settings since Gormenghast - the ancient vertical city of Thaiburley. From its towering palatial heights to the dregs who dwell in The City Below, this is a vast, multi-tiered metropolis, and demons are said to dwell in the Upper Heights... Having witnessed a murder in a part of the city he should never have been in, street thief Tom has to run for his life. Down through the vast city he is pursued by sky-borne assassins, sinister Kite Guards, and agents of a darker force intent on destabilising the whole city. Accused of the crime, he must use all of his knowledge of this ancient city to flee a certain death; his only ally is Kat, a renegade like him, but she has secrets of her own... File Under: Fantasy [ Towering City | Ancient Secrets | Murder Most Foul | Kite Guard! ]

Yi Hao was originally a peerless expert of the Everlasting Continent, but he was schemed to death by disciple Gong Yangjun. A thousand years after his rebirth, Gong Yangjun dominated the mainland. In this life, I will change my fate and take back what belongs to me!

This text examines Ridley Scott's 'Blade Runner' in context of adaptation, both from the original novel but also as graphic novel, computer game and series of books. It also looks at the identities of the characters, particularly with reference to influences and realities.

[CALL OF CTHULHU ROLEPLAYING] The Keeper's Companion is an invaluable resource for gamemasters. The material includes advice for new keepers, a lengthy study of Mythos artifacts, a learned discussion of many occult books, an up-to-the-moment description of every facet of forensic medicine, a thorough revision and expansion of the game skills (including nearly two dozen new ones), and the entire text of The Keeper's Compendium, somewhat updated -- forbidden books, secret cults, alien races, and mysterious places. Additional short essays and features round out this book -- more than 100,000 words!

How can we understand the infinite variety of cities? Darran Anderson seems to exhaust all possibilities in this work of creative nonfiction. Drawing inspiration from Marco Polo and Italo Calvino, Anderson shows that we have much to learn about ourselves by looking not only at the cities we have built, but also at the cities we have imagined. Anderson draws on literature (Gustav Meyrink, Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hasek, and James Joyce), but he also looks at architectural writings and works by the likes of Bruno Taut and Walter Gropius, Medieval travel memoirs from the Middle East, mid-twentieth-century comic books, Star Trek, mythical lands such as Cockaigne, and the works of Claude Debussy. Anderson sees the visionary architecture dreamed up by architects, artists, philosophers, writers, and citizens as wedded to the egalitarian sense that cities are for everyone. He proves that we must not be locked into the structures that exclude ordinary citizens--that cities evolve and that we can have input. As he says: "If a city can be imagined into being, it can be re-imagined as well.”