Bøger af Stephen Donald Huff

He returns to keep their lawn year upon year, from his youth to middle-age, and never a charge or missed appointment. Their lawn is immaculate, their hedges invariably neat and trimmed, their fall leaves absent, and their home well-kept. Is it a labor of love... or is it something darker... something terrible and secret? It's a burdensome debt to repay. He's choking up every last cent.

Upon hearing of a lost fortune in pure, refined opium, western adventurers stationed in Afghanistan decide to retrieve it despite repeated warnings about the dangers that confront them. When a local guide leads them through the desert into the mountains to a dark and foreboding crack in a towering precipice, they again shrug off the man's dire insistence that they return home. Their decision to enter into the defile is one they will soon regret. Greed can drive a man to dare a deadly waste. Pride can push him to the world's most desolate peaks. In the barren, combat-wracked heart of Afghanistan, evil dwells within a craggy defile, where fame and fortune beckon to the bold and foolish adventurer.

A fleeting shadow skirting the storm-swept shoulder of an isolated country highway, she hitchhikes along the loneliest stretch of pavement in the most deserted hollows of the countryside. When the downpour presses, he insists on giving her a ride despite her demurs. It will be the most fateful companionship he will ever know.

Tarn is a water world, covered from pole to pole by an incredibly deep ocean. Humankind built only one city there. Situated directly on its equator, terraformers strategically emplaced this massive port to continuously exploit the planet's boundless fisheries. Because Tarn orbits its binary system on an extreme axial tilt, each day also measures a year, and because its suns are lethal, Tarn fish only rise to its surface in the darkness. Fishing there is a dangerous business, but the planet's entire economy subsists on the larva of a single enormous predator, which the galactic elite consume as a delicacy. Unfortunately for the common sailor, adult fish are many times larger than the comparatively tiny boats that hunt their offspring, so the death toll climbs after each six month tour. Human labor is cheap. From bloody experience, one outlaw crew has discovered this monster's greatest danger, and they are determined to fight for their lives, heedless of consequence. Though this hunt will be decidedly one-sided, they must finish it. Which is the quarry?

Terminus I - III (Conquest) is a Terminus Series Compendium containing the third trilogy of the series. This special edition contains three complete novels; Terminus, Terminus II (Control) and Terminus III (The Wild Bunch).Terminus Part I: Civilization deconstructed itself like a riot in a madhouse. One minute it all functioned with a standard sort of craziness, and the next it devolved into ten billion psychotic inmates at each other's throats like suddenly sprung animals. In the aftermath, a handful of guilt-wracked holdouts stumble onto a terrible secret. They discover the cause of the catastrophe, but the answers they find only beg further questions. To learn the final truth and save their species, they must cross a blood-soaked wasteland, where they confront and overcome hordes of crazed lunatics and ravenous chimeras to investigate the long-standing enigma we call "Area-51". Post-apocalyptic revenge is sweet!Terminus Part II (Control): Enter Deacon, like a sable crow, this rover appears in the Village during late fall with strange tales of enslaved children and alien invasions. Though they resist Deacon's enticement, a handful of desperate survivors will uncover many unsettling truths about the past, present and future of their species. Most startling of all, they will discover why their thoughts are not their own when influenced by the piper's song of yet another broadcast Terminus Signal.Terminus Part III (The Wild Bunch): Irrepressibly driven by a violent, indomitable desire for revenge, these desperate survivors now stand poised before hades gates, which swing wide at the bottom of an alien spaceport buried beneath Earth's southern pole. Here, the United States Government long ago built its abandoned Amundsen-Scott Base, where they will discover a new source of power long hidden inside the primitive human mind. Consequently, the cosmos may never recover from an Earth-bound exposure to The Wild Bunch.

A trusted agent in the employ of an untrustworthy corporation. He knows too much and he realizes this knowledge will soon necessitate his own liquidation. Will he retire in style to a lavish future, or will his employers violently consign his remains to an unmarked grave? He's tired of the rat race, and he has a plan for a fantastic exit. Sometimes, the rat gets the cheese and the trap springs empty.

After he follows a wealthy runaway debutante from Boston to the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, an American investigator must hire a local guide to lead him into the dense jungles of the Mesoamerican interior in search of her. As they penetrate deeper into the forest, civilization disappears and they find themselves lost amid a mysterious land of bloody legend and savage myth. Within the ruins of a forgotten Mayan city, they ultimately encounter a contemporary death cult and discover the old gods reawakened. Five centuries ago, countless Mayans perished atop the chacmool, their beating hearts ripped from their bodies. Who will make sacrifice tonight when contemporary witches resurrect an ancient religion amid Yucatan jungles?

Deep in the grips of a frigid wilderness, a horrific car accident leaves the top of her car ripped away along with the top of her head, and she reclines in the sedan's front seat, dead. Her unharmed infant child sits strapped into a car seat beside her. Listen to that tiny voice inside your head. Sometimes, the dead speak.

If you had known him as a young man, you would not be surprised to learn that he ended up on the coroner's slab with a bullet hole in his forehead. Yet if you knew him as a man, this is the last fate you would imagine for him. This is one man's tale of the grave, of how he avoided it for so long, and of how he came to it in the end. We all got it coming. The start doesn't always dictate the end, but the end is certain, nonetheless.

This is the true-to-life horror story of a boy born without a name into a lifetime of loss, suffering and sorrow. Bestially abused throughout his formative years, the boy has the appearance of a patchwork monster by the time he arrives at a notorious desert orphanage in Pecan County, Texas. Ostensibly intended to alleviate and soothe the misery of such children, he quickly discovers that Parker House is instead a diabolical nightmare of neglect, exploitation and sadism. There, the boy will travel new realms of torment in the company of his sadistic keepers, Momma and Eugene Parker, who will teach him every low art and mean skill with belt, strap and whip. Stoic and untouched by the damage done to him, the boy named Manga will only learn to live after he selflessly rescues a girl named Heaven.

He is a secret agent assigned to fight a war of time. He serves an alien overlord, which has subjugated humankind through untold generations. They use him to execute subtle manipulations of time and space by sending him on mysterious errands to faraway places and distant times in the past or future. Each journey erodes a bit of his mind, his memory, his personality, and his psyche. As his personality corrodes, he encounters another alien race intent on aiding his struggle for rebellion. Waging a genocidal war through time and space, can he preserve his sanity long enough to free his people?

Calamity often follows a violent shout, but we have more to fear from the occasional wee, wicked whisper. This is the medium of humanity's most despicable tongue, for a quick whisper is the requisite mode of lies, the self-serving gloat of torment, the insidious confidence of slander, and the preferred protocol of psychosis. Lovers reveal their most intimate and personal secrets on a breathless hiss, while murderous psychopaths use the same hushed voice to lure intended victims. Listen to the wicked whispers of vain success in "Ravenous Is the Void" and "She Comes, the Devil". Voyage into the surreal with "Eidetic", "The Machine's Manifesto", "Ed? Is That You?", "The Wrong Side of Backwards", "Paw Paw Conjures", and "We are for Texas". Satisfy your science fiction 'sweet tooth' with "The Violent Kind", "Emerald Planet", "The Hole", "Long Is the Journey, Short Is the Sojourn" and "Zu-Zu's Petals", before you travel into the past through "Toltaca" and "Forever Comes the Storm". When you catch your breath, try to shake off the chills emanating from "The House Next Door", "Scraps", "Mortimer's Last Race", "Shit", "The Disturbing Case of: Rain", "A Working Man", "Through the Meadows Go", "Jo-Jo's Big Day", "Vengeance Is Mine", and "Black River".

Forty years a soldier. Forty years a spy. Forty years an international trafficker of weapons and drugs. All, the accomplishments of one nameless man, a "spook". From the frozen highlands of Korea, through the sweltering hinterlands of Vietnam, into the arid wastes of Afghanistan and Iraq, then across the Atlantic to the oppressive deserts of Mexico, his career followed an opium highway through the highlights of modern history. His perspective will change you. With all the powerful innovations of modern technology, no nation on Earth has succeeded in closing its borders to the illegal trade of drugs and weapons. One man can tell you why.

Insomnia is a special kind of torture. Its short-term effects are something everyone experiences from time to time, but its long-term effects are known only to an unfortunate few. These effects include panic attacks, paranoia, and phobias. Eventually, hallucinations and convulsions become noticeable, followed by symptoms of dementia, coma and then death. Inevitably, the difference between waking and sleeping dissolves and the two become inseparable. After months of restlessness, a chronically sleepless man loses the ability to differentiate between nightmares, daydreams and reality. While wandering a slumbering city in this dysfunctional condition, he discovers a sinister secret.

His pranks are sinister and macabre, but each one offers a critical life lesson to his hapless victims. His neighbors, coworkers, and acquaintances rarely associate their strange misfortunes with the odd young man in their midst. Yet he is always watching, always aware, and his cunning mind is inevitably filled with delightfully perverse plans for their future. Any outcome is possible given proper context, impeccable timing, and the right props.

They are the perfect couple, if perfection is a measure of lies and deception. They travel from town to town, conning their way across country working confidence games, large and small. When their past turns up to haunt them, they both quickly realize they are but hours away from certain death. Life then becomes a contest of ruthless cunning, but this is a game they play well. Tell the victims what they want to hear. Gain their confidence. Gain their trust. Then rob them blind! We are never more alive than we are when facing death.

Black eyeliner. Black lashes. Black lips. Black hair. Through it all, peers the white-cake face of Darling Girl Jones, orphan.From time to time, she awakens in her academy dorm room to find an ethereal spirit haunting her bed. Never disturbing, always intriguing, such an event is a certain promise of ghoulish adventure and mortal danger. Most girly-girls might scream.Not Darling Girl. Orphaned young and, so, relegated to the care of starchy Miss Jenkins, head-mistress of her all-girls boarding school, Darling is no stranger to hardship and unquiet spirits.Today, in the company of a hippy ghost and a homeless Vietnam veteran, Darling will play a vital role in the city's Memorial Day ceremony. The stage is set for sundown at the National Cemetery, and the fireworks are sure to be bloody.

When we dream of falling, we inevitably awaken at the moment of impact. When we run for our lives from nightmare monsters, we invariably rouse before the bloodthirsty end. Myth and folklore imply we die in the waking world when we die in our dreams, and this is why living human beings never dream all the way through such slumberous events. This assertion begs a question. How many of the dead have suffered such fates? Countless anonymous people populate our night visions. Who are they? What becomes of them when we lay violent hands upon them in lividity of dreams?

An unknown client contracted him to assassinate a quirky, unassuming middle-aged man with no apparent enemies and no violent tendencies. After his first attempt fails, the distraught hitman determines to learn what went wrong. During his covert discussions with his target, he hears an unusual story of astounding survival and astonishing physical endurance. How can one man survive so many attempts on his life? Is it a curse or a blessing? No matter how he tries, he cannot kill the Forever Man.

Born into a wealthy family, Mercy Worth will enjoy every privilege that unimaginable riches can provide, but she will never know love. Her hair and eyes as dark as a starless night sky, from her first day on the planet she is unnaturally watchful and observant. Her intelligence is alien and terrifying, universally unnerving to all except her legal guardian. A tall, brooding attorney, he will watch over her rise to power with both fear and covetous jealousy as he becomes convinced she is the Biblical Satan. No baby was more beautiful than Mercy, in pink. No toddler was more darling than Mercy, in yellow. No bride more brilliant than Mercy, in white. And humankind has never known anything as terrible as Mercy, in black.

In a utopian future, humanity divides itself into two kinds. A vast majority of citizens represent the first kind, and they are as physically flawless as they are psychologically perfect. Second-kind live apart, confined to the Deviant Compartment. They are the last damaged remnants of a primitive past defined by genetic ambiguity and reproductive anarchy. They are also humanity's last hope. Where "separate but equal" transforms from innocuous fringe slogan into accepted social norm, the resultant peace becomes a fatal disease of compromise and inadequacy.

She's twelve years old and she's desperately in love with the fourteen-year-old boy who lives next door. He knows her as his best friend, but he's too preoccupied with his own travails to return her affection.Since his mother went missing three years previously, his father has become ever more violent and abusive. Now, each act of violence pulls him further and further from Dorry's loving embrace, and she'll do anything to save him.

The universe is a strange, all but impenetrable mystery. Every scientific advance sponsors countless new questions, and every new explanation spawns immeasurable unknowns. How can dinosaurs of all kinds and from all epochs of evolution suddenly and randomly appear all over the world? What would you do with a tyrannosaurus peering through your bedroom window? How would you deal with pterosaurs soaring above your roof? His is an unpredictable world surrounding an entirely too predictable suburban neighborhood. Then everything changes. One thing is certain, during a plague of prehistoric thunder lizards, a feisty poodle can come in handy!

A thousand years ago, stoic Norsemen built resilient ocean-going longboats from wood and iron. Through four centuries of conquest, in these robust vessels countless Viking adventurers set forth from homelands of ice and snow to claim victory or Valhalla along far western horizons. Cast into a vast, hostile ocean aboard a small longboat, a handful of stoic Norse mercenaries gamble their lives in pursuit of freedom and fortune. All are bound for horizons of history, inevitably destined to find their eternal home among sagas of the never seen.

When too many children go missing in the rivers and bayous coursing through Houston, Texas, one man draws a frightful conclusion. Gathering anecdotal evidence to support his suspicions, this amateur sleuth must eventually take his allegations to proper detectives, but he will only get one chance to prove his case without simultaneously inviting doubts about the state of his mental health. A mysterious fiend comes with rain, sleek as shadows and deadly as a swirling draw. In his wake, heartbreak and unending sorrow.

In a dystopian future, humankind has lost its love of violence. Peace has so long ruled the land that we have lost all means of confronting the resurgence of a genocidal revolution, which threatens to reduce human society to a state of chaos and anarchy. The most vulnerable citizens face annihilation as they confront the revolution's inevitable success. Only one defense stands between them and oblivion. They are genetically modified warriors, bred and born to fight. They are Reapers. He has been biologically engineered to do one thing: fight for the survival of his people. Can one Reaper make a difference?

On a sunny afternoon, he meets the love of his life and the bane of his existence in the same event. She is beautiful, wealthy and sweet. Unfortunately, she is also the mother of an extremely intelligence and overly protective five-year-old boy who takes enormous delight in tormenting her mother's suitors. "You look like you're made out of doo-doo." Is theirs a match made in heaven or hell? Can he survive her preschool son's animosity to prove his love for them both?

Built of stone with untold expenditures of human blood and sweat, it is an ancient city standing above the towering canopies of an endless primordial forest. For generations, human sacrifices fed her before her magic failed and her inhabitants abandoned her. She will return to the forest, creeper on creeper, root upon root. This is her story. This is the story of Toltaca.

A contemporary incarnation of Janus, the two-faced god, Mordrake is not one man, but two, for he lives with a conjoined, parasitic twin. He is both Adonis and demon, gentleman and lunatic, and he has eyes in the back of his head. He is Mordrake and Mordrake's Whisper, the former a handsome young gentleman of renown and refinement, and the latter a silent, sinister mask fixed to the back of Mordrake's head. Though speechless, the mask of this parasitic twin frowns when its master laughs and it rejoices when Mordrake weeps, while hideous, vile and hateful, it incessantly whispers unspeakable ideations into its master's thoughts, ever pushing Mordrake to the limits of madness. He is not one man, but two. Angel and demon. Master and monster. Which will you meet?

Human beings are abundant. Yet for every person on Earth, countless insects thrive, chewing through the roots and underpinnings of nature. This year, it will be a very good year for bugs! An ocean of insecticide cannot suppress their demonic hordes. They could easily dominate the planet. Why not?