Bøger af Stephen Donald Huff

Upon opening a time capsule from 1968, the author finds a letter written by a condemned insurance agent from Texas only minutes before his arrest on capital murder charges. The letter relates this agent's downfall at the hands of a crooked police detective and a twisted woman. Though he was undoubtedly innocent of the crime, history long ago recorded his apprehension, trial and execution. By the time you read his letter, fifty years will have passed, and nothing can be done to save its author. His tale is a cautionary one, however, and so well worth reading. Beware of dames, dives, and death.

To earn extra money, he decided to volunteer for service in Afghanistan as a civilian technologist. During training provided by the government, he vowed he would never allow terrorists to easily cut off his head for their propaganda machine. Instead, he determined to make them chase him through the desert first. After his capture by bloodthirsty jihadists in Afghanistan, a young American civilian must confront his worst nightmare with eyes wide open. After he manages to escape, however, he learns a terrible truth. Where will the Poppy Express take him?

Awakening night upon night in a feverish chill, fresh from the throes of disturbing nightmares, one hapless human being ponders the separation of dream and reality. Within phantomic landscapes of half-slumber, he stalks nightfall with a violent, predatory intent, though he inevitably awakens uneventfully in his own home. Eventually, muddy feet betray the truth. Black River runs through the center of Pecan Groves, Texas. Lately, it floats.

I have never seen so far into anyone's eyes as I saw into yours that day. Ever green, I had expected to find them. stagnant pools long left to lay, still and tepid. Yet, they were filled to astounding depth with colors I had not hoped to see, and movement that shimmered the deep far beyond my measure, far beyond my reach, lucid as noon shallows, clear as summer seas, verdant in the distance like impossible meadows we never touch, but dream to see. Troubled as they were and unfocused, in them, still and crystalline, reflected me... and my own eyes liquid, reflecting you. There in the mysterious grips of your waste, struggles this wretch where he so longs to be, for I could guess where your focus was lost to endless, vacant leagues, as I stood there beside you that day on the shores of your unfathomable seas. Reduced to nothing, I saw you on the far side, staring back at me.Spoken aloud, poetry is the ultimate masochistic mouthwash. Used regularly, it will sponge your brain and fire your breath. So, crack these covers, sip, swish, and rinse. In time, your silly sense of well-being will slip away, and your brain germs will never feel the same way, again.

Every stellar rise deserves a cosmic fall. Inhumanly callous and ruthlessly selfish, he made a fortune in predatory mortgage loans prior to the economic collapse of 2008. In its calamitous aftermath, executive handlers staged him for a corporate patsy and left him to answer alone for their collective crimes. Facing financial ruin and certain incarceration, his reduced prospects force him to move his family into a rat-infested bungalow. In the aftermath of his ruin, one man's family confronts an epic plague of vermin when they move into a modest country home. They have all the benefits of human civilization in such a contest, but the rats have the numbers.

Human populations have ballooned to seventy billion. The world teems to capacity with complacent human beings, and only strict adherence to crushing routine maintains order. Despite harsh discipline, the planet's prisons swell with rebels and reprobates. To maintain peace and ease congestion, the International League of Diamond Ballers formed and then passed their game's Rule Number One - condemned criminals can earn their freedom by competing in the One True Game, a lethal five-day spectacle televised around the world to its teeming inhabitants. After his father's execution for rebellion and his subsequent condemnation to the Shallow Island Penal Colony, young Jer Dan decides to dominate society's most deadly game. Unlike his teammates, Jer will not play for freedom.

One of the most pivotal waterborne engagements in history would not be fought ship-to-ship in the traditional fashion of naval warfare, a brutal duel between massive battleships. This titanic contest would be decided without either commander sighting the other, for victory would ultimately be claimed in the skies, aircraft to aircraft. Its outcome directly determined the future of the individual sailor and aviator, but it also indirectly decided the fates of their homelands, as well. For the combatants, Midway was not merely an isolated battle in the larger conflict, rather it would decide the war entirely and the fate of the world thereafter. Will humankind ever fully benefit from the sacrifices made that fateful day in the skies surrounding a tiny Pacific Island?

Lucky to survive the circumstances of his birth, he learned to make the most of a life that might have killed a lesser person. In fact, he learned to thrive. Via crime, he improved himself to the point of obtaining a college education, an enormous bank account, and a veritable army of minions. He proves the road to hell is not always paved with the best of intentions. This is the story of his downfall and ultimate fate. Nobody escapes.

Incongruity, in all its fine, reeking regalia, found a place in my young, fertile heart, so all the while thereafter my struggle was one of difference, for the greater scheme of things is an endeavor to know that which is unknown. On having come to understand a thing previously incomprehensible, luster fades, its draw recedes, and that thing, like a coin in a collection, is put away, to be occasionally admired but mostly forgotten; so, it is named a possession, and is no longer counted among desires.Song is either the progenitor or most favored partner of poetry; either may be spoken or sung. For better or worse, the vast bulk of it is scat, the mere fodder of time, which already piles miles deep beneath our feet. One day, it will inevitably pile high above our rotting bones.

He is the scourge of the night, every bachelorette's worst nightmare. He has already killed many single young ladies, and he will certainly kill again. Tonight, he lingers outside the house of his next intended victim. Watching. Waiting. When he sees her climb the stairs to her bedroom, he knows her time has come. Demonstrating expert skill and terrible discipline, he steals into her home to rouse her from her dreams. This victim will not go as easily as all the rest, however, much to his sinister delight. Every matchmaker claims there is someone for everyone. This old adage is never truer than when one lover whispers it to another on a hiss of desperate sadism. What happens when like evils meet?

Bad things happen to the people that Pablo loves. Bad, bloody things. Indeed, his hapless path through life is littered with the human wreckage of lives badly wasted; of men, women and children inexplicably maimed and murdered. Though his presence is ever the common denominator among the many deaths that surround him, evidence never ties him physically to any of the crime scenes. One frustrated Texas detective believes Pablo is culpable after one fashion or another, but he can never prove his suspicions beyond reasonable doubt. When Pablo's threat becomes personal, however, he is hard pressed to act outside the law. During multiple decades of service to the City of Pecan Groves, Texas, he rose from the rank of patrolman to retire as a well-respected homicide detective. In all that time, he never experienced the sort of luck, both good and bad, exhibited by Pablo Chavez. How far will a lawman go to preserve the institution that he serves?

1943. World War II. The U.S. government drafted him out of his life of normalcy and complacency into the life of a United States Marine Corps officer. After intensive training, he would serve during some of the bloodiest assaults of the war. The violent rigors of combat would teach him the rules of long-term survival amid the most lethal fighting in human history. Those who failed to learn these lessons would not return home to their families. During the bloody throes of combat, all is fair and the only rules that apply are those that promote survival. When confronting evil, what is the nature of right and wrong?

She is educated, determined and ambitious. She has never failed at anything in her life until her child goes missing and is eventually found slain, in pieces. Only her anger delves deeper into hell than her unfathomable grief. She hunts her monster relentlessly in the months that follow. After she finds him, his suffering will be unspeakable. He picked the wrong child and the wrong mother. His act of violence will pale in comparison to her intended retribution.

Wrongfully convicted and long confined in one of the worst prisons in the United States, he is bitter and angry. Despite a million-dollar settlement, his thirst for vengeance cannot be peacefully appeased, and his lust for blood ultimately turns on the sort of crooked prosecutors who ruined his life. From city to city and state to state, he wreaks havoc on the justice system, one civil servant at a time. They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. He agrees.

It's a new approach to criminal rehabilitation. It's tough love at its toughest. There, complete isolation and unending hours of boredom act like an acid drip against the tough granite exterior of its recalcitrant inmates. Though it is a humane system, it offers no mercy to the incorrigible and it has no patience for those who refuse to learn. Only the strongest can long resist, but no human being can resist forever. Unreasonably hard and unforgiving, this prison receives only the worst of the worst, and it serves only one purpose. Despite his vows to break it before it breaks him, he will soon learn time is endless inside solitary confinement.

Declared missing-in-action while serving in Afghanistan, her eldest son's disappearance left a massive whole in this mother's life. Her misery cannot be assuaged by human sympathy or the keepsakes of memories. Although he is certainly dead, she refuses to speak of it and insists he is still alive somewhere out there in the world. On her deathbed, she reveals to her family that he has been calling her every Friday when it rains. A mother's love for her children may transcend time. When it does, who can determine where reality ends and desperate fantasy begin? Only she and her son know the truth.

In a dystopian, apocalyptic future, he is the quintessential survivalist, a heartless loner. The only things that stand between him and death each day are his maxims. He relies on them to manage the violence inherent within a world gone mad, and they are as unforgiving as his soul. Nothing he witnesses or does can bend or break them, until a single unwilling act of kindness alters his philosophy and his outlook with the same stroke of mercy. His maxims keep him alive in a world of harm, no matter the cost or the consequence to those around him. Then she comes along.

In the limitless expanse of the cosmos, intelligence need not be confined to water-filled flesh. For every form of imagination, there is an embodiment of it out there in the void. On this world in this system, everything may be uniquely alive, from the rocks to the sandstorms. How does one conquer the wind? It is an alien intellect in the shifting sands of a waterless planet. Journey here to die. Or be reborn.

Campaigning with Alexander the Great to wage war on a high plateau above an un-named eastern sea, he suffered a bite from a giant canine. His life would never be the same. Wandering through the ages from continent to continent, an immortal, his only distraction from eternity is warfare. Having fought in every major war through human history's long, bloody list of such conflicts, he ultimately finds himself mired flanks-deep in the trenches of World War I. There, he encounters his own kind for the first time in three thousand years, and he realizes the other side is destined to win with such soldiers fighting among their ranks. Immortal and feral, he is the ultimate beast of battle and few live to describe his canny technique. Fur and blood will fly when the most desperate conflict in human history lets slip the dogs of war!

The worst of the worst, he is notorious even within a notorious system. When the most violent prison riot in the history of human corrections threatens to bring down a prison's walls, this consummate gangster will trade inside information for removal of his tattoos, one image at a time. Afterward, he will become a different man. Only a clean skin can provide the key to his cages.

He's a notorious corporate spy. His last job uncovered a disturbing truth long and deeply buried by the powers-that-be. Though his corporate enemies have kept him imprisoned by flying him endlessly around the world, he is neither forgotten nor alone. When a band of anonymous hackers finally locates him within his prison in the sky, they will stop at nothing to free him and expose his discovery. It's a hell of a way to travel!

What becomes of a man born evil, a man so evil that he manages to slay his own mother while still a toddler, a man so wicked that countless nannies and teachers and caregivers follow, a man so deadly that not even Africa's heart of darkness can tolerate him? He must one day find himself bound for Texas, of course!

Corporal Terrance "Tare" McGee, retired, was the prodigal princeling of his Texas trailer park until the United States Army decided to euthanize his former partner, a military working dog, also retired, named 'Perquisite' or, most affectionately, 'Perq'. Driven by un undeniable sense of honor, duty and loyalty, Tare successfully rescued Perq from certain doom amid the veterinary kennels of the local Army base, but reports of violent assault and stolen automobiles only end one way in Texas without regard to motive. Confronting their new status as fugitive outlaws, Tare and Perq pursue their only conceivable course of action when they load Tare's truck with snack foods, drugs and liquor. Collecting an endangered chimp named "Bobo" along the way, they flee into the vast, epic potential of an early Texas evening. This is the true-to-life story of the next forty-eight hours in the lives of a dog and his man and a chimp with a machinegun. Though it relates the bizarre sequence of events that would ultimately place a Squad Automatic Weapon into the hands of a drunken two-year-old primate, this tale cannot adequately rationalize anything else that happened. After all, the who-what-when-where-and-how of a thing are matters of records and databases and, as such, come easily. Alternately, the 'whys' of a thing are human constructs fashioned of secretive thoughts, perverse motivations and, oftentimes, deluded ideations - as to the nature of these concepts then, bystanders, witnesses and passersby can only guess. At the least, this lyrical American fable will ultimately provide one startling insight into the nature of the human condition... a monkey with a machinegun is not always an entirely undesirable happenstance.

Alter the future today by reading this story. Edited untold eons into our future to manipulate their past, our present, the message of this story is tailored word-by-word to exact a desired effect from each reader. The resultant distortion of space and time has a subtle but powerful ability to alter the individual psyche, which exerts an exponential force on the future as it propagates through our population and then countless generations of our progeny to come. The editor of this tale is the last standing Veer, the lone survivor of a time war devastating humankind's future, and she needs your help today!

On a beam of light as in the fog of dreams, a hundred human beings of all ages and walks-of-life find themselves standing on narrow pedestals in a strange auditorium filled with noxious, frigid liquid. With no room to sit or recline, they cannot rest or sleep. They can only shift from foot to foot atop the pedestals, standing for hours then days, their fears unresolved and their fate unknown. Only one man among them, a hardened felon zapped out of solitary confinement, seems to have any answers to their questions. Countless hapless human beings relate tales of alien abductions, and each story harbors some modest kernel of truth. They disappear all over the world. Some of them eventually return home. Yet nobody knows for certain what becomes of the missing while they are gone.

During the summer of 1968, the Nightland, Incorporated carnival stopped in suburban Pecan Groves, Texas to stage a one-week show. Its performances paralleled a three-man prison escape, the miraculous resurrection of a cherished young boy, and the mysterious appearance of a young lady with a potent pedigree. If the squalor of its Freak Show and the rigged games of its midway are now known only within the faded archives of history, then contemporary society is its primary benefactor and direct ancestor. We see its shadows and hear its echoes everywhere. Welcome to the Freak Show. We are it.

No matter how harsh the instruction or inhumane the conditioning, military doctrine cannot replace compassion with uncaring steel. At his post in the bowels of a Japanese submarine, one frightened boy endures the unspeakable slaughter of an illicit war until he reaches a psychological breaking point. Then he begins opening valves that should be closed and closing valves that should be open. Drafted as a teenager into one of the bloodiest and most fanatical navies in history, he will spin the wheels for ill. What causes the discipline of duty to descend into the degradations of madness?

His nickname at work, where his colleagues avoid him like a plague, is "Mr. Accident". Alongside a lonely stretch of road on his way home one evening, he earns his reputation once again. While he sits with a dying youth trapped inside an overturned and crumpled automobile, Mr. Accident tells the boy how he earned his reputation. His is a sordid tale of endless cacophony and disaster, and death follows Mr. Accident like a shadow. Today, he earns his nickname with flare. If you should cross paths with Mr. Accident, beware.

Mad pathos fetish broods while the black brow is creased to contemplate all manner of undoing, lays a thumb to the blade beneath a leering, sanguine eye and yearns unspeakably for a final message from God. Gross pathos fetish seethes to feed upon frustrations and terrors until the mind of a single lunatic is filled with dreams of dark endeavors that become a horror of blood, until pale the gaping face festooned in spider webs of splatters beholds a hand trembling at the wound, and moans out a final message to God. Drear pathos fetish blooms, that from an unwholesome vacuum, that from a fog of unfocused movements, a single buoying thought is borne, which thought becomes a thing of steel and lead and of murders' rich rewards; which thought looses fate's prolific forefinger within the guard to draw down the roughly righteous intent of God. Cruel pathos fetish feeds ever at the salted bonds of sanity as rats' teeth at the hemp, strands snapping, snapping to withstand the vigor of the unbearable load and let it down soft by inches, that each maddening hitch force a quick breath and quicker prayers to God.Poetry knits the fabric of our dreamtime dominions. Both are without substance, and both present the subjective essence of a spinning compass. Embrace such insight, if you must, but do so at your own risk - nothing here will light your darkness.

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?