A collection of the year’s best mystery short fiction selected by New York Times best-selling and Edgar Award–winning author C. J. Box.

C. J. Box , #1 New York Times best-selling author of the hugely popular Joe Pickett series, selects the best short mystery and crime fiction of the year in this annual “treat for crime-fiction fans” (Library Journal).
 

Tomorrow is coming whether you’re ready or not.

In Darkness, Delight: Fear the Future delivers twenty-two strikingly original tales of terror from Bram Stoker Award®-winners, bestselling authors, genre stalwarts and rising stars.

Includes Emmy-winning, New York Times bestselling author and world-famous magician Penn Jillette’s delightfully wicked short story “The Pain Addict,” which was adapted for a hit sci-fi anthology television series and is available here exclusively for the first time in book format.

Be warned: these are not science fiction stories with a dash of dread. These are visions of the horrifying futures that await us all.

Featuring:

“Airborne,” by Lisa Morton

“Err,” by Michael Laimo

“Daddy's Girl,” by Ben Eads

“Husk,” by Marshall J Moore

“We Have Names, Too,” by Michelle Muenzler

“The Haunting of Asteroid H111,” by Van Aaron Hughes

“Shoulda Read the Fine Print,” Blanche by Ben Lawrence

“Transference,” by Jenn Hopkins

“Game Over,” by Andrew Lennon

“Schroedinger's Head,” by Joanna Koch

“Locusts,” by Dominick Cancilla

“The Pain Addict,” by Penn Jillette

“The Sluggie Rebellion,” by William Meikle

“Noise,” by Max Booth III

“Seeking Harmony with the Infinite,” by Evans Light

“Billy Campbell's Bones,” by Jason Washer

“Survival is an Act of Selfishness,” by Frank Oreto

“Boxed In,” by CS Mergo

“What It Takes,” by Phil Sloman

“Neuroworm,” by Tim Curran

“And the Winner is...,” by Sheldon Higdon

“If I Drive Before I Wake,” by Eric J Guignard

The debut title in a new city-based anthology series featuring all-new stories with speculative, sci-fi, and paranormal themes--each using distinct neighborhood settings as a launching pad.

"A stimulating anthology of 14 futuristic L.A. fables...Some of the best of these tales seem illumined by the humanistic spirit of the late Ray Bradbury, poet laureate of Southern California fantasy literature."
--Wall Street Journal

"[Speculative Los Angeles] is a swath of tales that are both wildly imaginative and emotionally grounded, speculations that not only imagine our possible futures but illuminate the collective anxieties of our unsettled and unsettling present."
--Los Angeles Times

"Speculative Los Angeles is a thrill ride of grand ideas and warnings. Take a place that already defines the future of culture, add fourteen unbound minds, and you get a collection that wows the imagination like no other."
--Michael Connelly, author of the best-selling Harry Bosch series

"The problem of buying books for others can be solved by offering the equivalent of the literary box of chocolates: the anthology...For Californians, or people who just like the West Coast, there's Speculative Los Angeles, edited by Denise Hamilton."
--Washington Post, recommended by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

"Speculative Los Angeles is a new venture from Akashic Books, which has published an impressive series of original anthologies of noir fiction centered on various cities. This is the first in a series doing the same thing for speculative fiction, beginning with LA."
--Locus Magazine

"14 outstanding stories of weird and uncanny happenings in the City of Angels...Each story presents a fresh take on the magic and strangeness of L.A. past, present, and future, and the characters are representative of the diverse region, caught in situations ranging from surreal to chilling. Readers should snap this up."
--Publishers Weekly, Starred review, Pick of the Week

As an incubator of the future, Los Angeles has long mesmerized writers from Aldous Huxley to Octavia E. Butler. With its natural disasters, Hollywood artifice, staggering wealth and poverty, and urban sprawl, one can argue that Los Angeles is already so weird, surreal, irrational, and mythic that any fiction emerging from this place should be considered speculative. So, bestselling author Denise Hamilton commissioned fourteen stories (including one of her own) and did exactly that. In Speculative Los Angeles, some of the city’s most prophetic and diverse voices reimagine the metropolis in very different ways.

In these pages, you'll encounter twenty-first-century changelings, dirigibles plying the suburban skies, black holes and jacaranda men lurking in deep suburbia, beachfront property in Century City, walled-off canyons and coastlines reserved for the wealthy, psychic death cults, robot nursemaids, and an alternate LA where Spanish land grants never gave way to urbanization.

As with our city-based Akashic Noir Series, each story in Speculative Los Angeles is set in a distinct neighborhood filled with local color, landmarks, and flavor. Since the best speculative fiction provides a wormhole into other worlds while also commenting on our own, that is exactly what you'll find here.

• OCTOBER IN THE CHAIR Neil Gaiman
• REFLECTIONS IN BLACK Steve Rasnic Tem
• THE HALLOWEEN MONSTER Alison Littlewood
• THE PHÉNAKISTICOPE OF DECAY James Ebersole
• MEMORIES OF DÍA DE LOS MUERTOS Nancy Kilpatrick
• FRAGILE MASKS Richard Gavin
• BONE FIRE Storm Constantine
• QUEEN OF THE HUNT Adrian Cole
• THE OCTOBER WIDOW Angela Slatter
• BEFORE THE PARADE PASSES BY Marie O’Regan
• HER FACE Ramsey Campbell
• A MAN TOTALLY ALONE Robert Hood
• BLEED Richard Christian Matheson
• THE ULTIMATE HALLOWEEN PARTY APP Lisa Morton
• THE FOLDING MAN Joe R. Lansdale
• I WAIT FOR YOU Eygló Karlsdóttir
• DUST UPON A PAPER EYE Cate Gardner
• NOT OUR BROTHER Robert Silverberg
• THE SCARIEST THING IN THE WORLD Michael Marshall Smith
• THE NATURE OF THE BEAST Sharon Gosling
• THE BEAUTIFUL FEAST OF THE VALLEY Stephen Gallagher
• IN THE YEAR OF OMENS Helen Marshall
• THE MILLENNIAL’S GUIDE TO DEATH Scott Bradfield
• WHITE MARE Thana Niveau
• PUMPKIN KIDS Robert Shearman
• LANTERN JACK Christopher Fowler
• HALLOWEEN TREATS Jane Yolen

A harrowing array of scary stories that all have one thing in common: each either begins or ends with a scream!

R.L. Stine—the godfather of Goosebumps—and some of the most popular authors today bring an unrivaled mastery of all things fearsome, frightening, and fantabulous to this terrifying anthology of all-new scary short stories.

Scream and Scream Again! is full of twists and turns, dark corners, and devilish revenge. Collected in conjunction with the Mystery Writers of America, this set includes works from New York Times bestselling authors telling tales of wicked ice-cream trucks, time-travelling heroes, witches and warlocks, and of course, haunted houses.

Read it if you dare! With twenty never-before-published scary stories from some of the most popular authors today—including Chris Grabenstein, Wendy Corsi Staub, Heather Graham, Peter Lerangis, R.L. Stine, Bruce Hale, Emmy Laybourne, Steve Hockensmith, Lisa Morton, Ray Daniel, Beth Fantaskey, Phil Mathews, Carter Wilson, Doug Levin, Jeff Soloway, Joseph S. Walker, Alison McMahan, Daniel Palmer, Tonya Hurley, and Stephen Ross—it’s sure to leave readers screaming for more.