Entire novels are often written about a single crime, detailing every gruesome, dark detail until the last drop of blood spatters across the page. Yet in this mystery anthology, renowned editor and author Otto Penzler weaves together to heart-stopping effect more than ninety tales of brutality, terror, and unexpected demise, with each story told in a swift one thousand words or less.

These crimes may be fast in both form and fallout, but none lack the dark impulses that too often guide human hands to ill ends. Prepare to be transported into the diabolical schemes of criminal masterminds…into robberies and pranks gone horribly awry…into closets crammed with skeletons…into families bound not by love but wickedness.

Authors include Peter Blauner, Ken Bruen, Rob W. Hart, K. A. Laity, Tasha Alexander, Patricia Abbott, Bruce DeSilva, Chuck Caruso, Gregory Gibson, Joe R. Lansdale, and many more.

• Chapter 1 – Writing Every Day in Three Easy Steps
• Chapter 2 – Customizing Your Daily Writing Chain, The Basics
• Chapter 3 – You Have More Time Than You Think!
• Chapter 4 – Taking a Mulligan
• Chapter 5 – Make Peer Pressure Your Friend
• Chapter 6 – What About Revising?
• Chapter 7 – Customizing Your Daily Writing Chain, Advanced Options
• Chapter 8 – Getting Unstuck
• Chapter 9 – Jumping in the Deep End with NaNoWriMo
• Chapter 10 – Using the Chain in Everyday Life
• Chapter 11 – A Time to Let Go Of the Chain?
• Chapter 12 – Putting It All Together
• Bonus Features Introduction
• Bonus Feature #1 – Seven Things to Do When You Feel Like You're Losing Your Mind
• Bonus Feature #2 – Advice on Advice
• Bonus Feature #3 – Rejecting Rejection
• Bonus Feature #4 – How Twitter Works for Writers
• Bonus Feature #5 – The Life of a Short Story: Idea to Publication
• Appendix A – Resource List

The Legend Continues…

Twenty-four heart-rending tales with elements of terror, mystery, and a nightmarish darkness that knows no end.

Welcome to my lake. Welcome to where dreams and hope are illusions…and pain is God.

• This anthology begins with Joe R. Lansdale’s The Folding Man, one of his darkest stories ever written.
• Kealan Patrick Burke’s Go Warily After Dark pulls us into a desolated world, and reminds us of the price of survival: a guilt that seeps into the marrow.
• Damien Angelica Walter’s Everything Hurts, Until it Doesn’t places us in the middle of a family whose secrets and traditions are thicker than blood.
• Jennifer Loring’s When the Dead Come Home explores a loss so dark, that even the stars are sucked into its melancholic vacuum.

In the spirit of popular Dark Fiction and Horror anthologies such as Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories and Behold: Oddities, Curiosities and Undefinable Wonders, and the best of Stephen King’s short fiction, comes Crystal Lake Publishing’s Tales from The Lake anthologies.

This fourth volume of Speculative Fiction contains the following short stories:

• Jennifer Loring – When the Dead Come Home
• Joe R. Lansdale – The Folding Man
• Kealan Patrick Burke – Go Warily After Dark
• T. E. Grau – To the Hills
• Damien Angelica Walters – Everything Hurts, Until it Doesn’t
• Sheldon Higdon – Drowning in Sorrow
• Max Booth III – Whenever You Exhale, I Inhale
• Bruce Golden – The Withering
• JG Faherty – Grave Secrets
• Hunter Liguore – End of the Hall
• David Dunwoody – Snowmen
• Timothy G. Arsenault – Pieces of Me
• Maria Alexander – Neighborhood Watchers
• Timothy Johnson – The Story of Jessie and Me
• Michael Bailey – I will be the Reflection Until the End
• E.E. King – The Honeymoon’s Over
• Darren Speegle – Song in a Sundress
• Cynthia Ward – Weighing In
• Michael Haynes – Reliving the Past
• Leigh M. Lane – The Long Haul
• Mark Cassell – Dust Devils
• Del Howison – Liminality
• Gene O’Neill – The Gardener
• Jeff Cercone – Condo by the Lake

With an introduction by editor Ben Eads. Cover art by Ben Baldwin. Proudly represented by Crystal Lake Publishing – Tales from The Darkest Depths.

Additional book categories:

• Horror
• Suspense
• Thriller
• Mystery
• Short stories
• Anthologies
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It's only time travel. What could go wrong?

Let us show you!

What you hold in your hands is a singular opportunity to witness paradox at its worst! When it comes to time, all things are relative, including the elasticity of causality. Writers from all over the world have come together to bring you a wide array of tales from witty and whimsical to dark and dire, exploring the age-old axiom: when you tick-off time, sooner or later, he's going to quantum your physics.

Here is a tachyon of what you can expect in this cosmic collection of temporal distress: ancient artifacts, mad scientists, and wardens of time. There are government conspiracies, corporate cover-ups, presidential assassinations, and deadly betrayals. And what science fiction-fantasy collaboration would be complete without impending Armageddon, a host of doomsday invaders, tears in the time space, and killer robot bunnies?

There is so much more! I hope this has been enough perturbation to convince you to crack open this event horizon into crumbling alternate dimensions, and read about the hapless byproducts of warped imaginations.