Virga Bone

"It's impossible to imagine another writer in America who is better than Craig Childs at elegizing the fearsome and confounding appeal of our most austere landscapes." —KEVIN FEDARKO, author of The Emerald Mile From the author of The Secret Knowledge of Water and Atlas of a Lost World comes a deeply felt essay collection focusing upon a vivid series of desert icons—a sheet of virga over Monument Valley, white seashells in dry desert sand, boulders impossibly balanced. Craig Childs delves into the primacy of the land and the profound nature of the more–than–human. CRAIG CHILDS is the author of more than a dozen books on nature, adventure, and science, including The Secret Knowledge of Water and Atlas of a Lost World. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Outside. Recipient of the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award and the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award, he lives in Colorado.

THE TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY EDITION She looked like everyone’s grandmother: white-haired, plump, bespectacled, and kindly. Only Dorothea Montalvo Puente’s eyes, black and hard behind her glasses, hinted at the evil that lurked within. She was the rarest of murderers, a female serial killer—probably the most cold-blooded ever recorded in the annals of crime. This shocking story of the gruesome murder of seven men for profit comes from bestselling author William P. Wood, the Deputy D.A. who had earlier prosecuted Puente for drugging and robbing elderly people. He knew intimately the malice that coursed through her veins, and thought he had seen the last of this callous and calculating woman. But her chameleon-like deviousness helped her reappear as a sweet, benevolent landlord—and later allowed her to escape police custody as they stood in her yard surrounded by the gaping graves. The Bone Garden chronicles the discoveries that ignited a media firestorm and transfixed a nation, putting an entirely new face on evil in this country.

DIVA woman gives birth to a child whose evilness threatens all mankind/divDIV /divDIVMary Kate is an ordinary woman: a waitress in a diner, stuck in a loveless marriage to an English-major-turned-cabbie. But whoever assaults her in a New York City alley is far from ordinary. As the man’s icy grip burns her skin, she couldn’t grasp the dark fate that awaits her./divDIV /divDIVThe rape leaves her carrying a child, who she and her husband name Jeffrey. As they try to live as a family, a mysterious force poisons them against each other. Finally overcome with hate for her husband, Mary Kate kills him, sending herself to jail and the child to an orphanage. There the boy takes a new name, Baal, and develops sinister powers that flourish as he approaches adulthood. When Baal becomes a man, the whole world will tremble before him./div

Three novels of creeping horror from the New York Times–bestselling author who “delivers terror with skillful ferocity” (Publishers Weekly). This collection from the Bram Stoker and World Fantasy Award–winning author of the Matthew Corbett novels includes: The Night Boat A scuba diver discovers a sunken Nazi U-boat. He dislodges it by detonating an unexploded depth charge, but back on the surface, he hears a strange sound from within the hull. So he opens the long-closed hatch—and learns that some things are better left buried. Baal Born of a violent assault, a boy winds up in an orphanage. There he renames himself Baal and hones sinister powers that will one day be unleashed upon the world . . . Bethany’s Sin The Reid family is happy to move into the pleasantly quaint small town known as Bethany’s Sin—until they learn about the secretive cult that holds sway over the community . . . “A true master of the Gothic novel.” —Booklist