Blood & Bourbon is a fiercely independent journal run by storytellers for storytellers. We’re here to celebrate all things hard, gritty and raw. True or not-so-true, all we care about is a good story. The kind you tell over too many drinks, too late on a worknight, too far down the street on the other side of town. This is issue #9 of the publication, titled "Magic". It includes contributions from Robert Beveridge, Paula Bonnell, Heather Dobbins, William Doreski, John Grey, James Ross Kell...

Twenty of the best American short stories of 2011, chosen by the New York Times bestselling author of The Secret Chord.The twenty tightly crafted stories collected here by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Geraldine Brooks are full of deftly drawn characters, universal truths, and often surprising humor. Richard Powers's "To the Measures Fall" is a comic meditation on the uses of literature in the course of a life. In the satirical "The Sleep," Caitlin...

Michael M. Hughes’s Blackwater Lights combines the eldritch horror of H. P. Lovecraft with the supernatural thrills of Dean Koontz.When Ray Simon receives a desperate call from his childhood friend Kevin, begging him to come visit, Ray can’t say no. Kevin promises to clue him in on shocking discoveries he has made about weird, half-forgotten events in their past—events associated with a summer camp near Kevin’s home in the small town of Blackwater, West Vi...

A sinister puppet finally makes a new friend.A man learns about his bleak future.A killer has another painful lesson to teach.From the author of LESSONS AND OTHER MORBID DRABBLES comes this terrifying and amusing follow-up. 30 100-word shorts about horrible ghouls, monsters and deranged, bloodthirsty lunatics. In these drabbles, you'll run into kid-hungry goblins, sadistic dolls, zombies and psychopaths who believe that violence can solve just about anything.D...

Living in the Woods in a Tree is an intimate glimpse into the turbulent life of Texas music legend Blaze Foley (1949--1989), seen through the eyes of Sybil Rosen, the woman for whom he wrote his most widely known song, "If I Could Only Fly." It captures the exuberance of their fleeting idyll in a tree house in the Georgia woods during the countercultural 1970s. Rosen offers a firsthand witnessing of Foley’s transformation from a reticent hippie musician to the enigmatic singer/songwriter w...

PRIME SUSPECTMia Sandoval's friend is murdered under mysterious circumstances-and the single mother is a suspect. Her only ally is a man she isn't sure she can trust. Search and rescue worker Dallas Black has a past as harrowing as Mia's own, and the police are suspicious of them both. With no choice but to work with secretive Dallas, Mia discovers he's as complicated as the murder they're forced to investigate to clear her name. Yet as a flood ravages their small Colorado town, a ...

Literary spins on the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres—from Karen Joy Fowler, Neil Gaiman, Jonathan Lethem, China Miéville, and many more.Over the past three decades, the most adventurous practitioners of the literary arts of science fiction, fantasy, and horror have been transforming those genres into something all but unrecognizable. In Conjunctions' game-changing New Wave Fabulists issue, guest editor Peter Straub has put together an...

SOMETIMES THE BIGGEST HORRORS COME IN THE SMALLEST PACKAGES…There's nothing better than a short, sharp slice of flash fiction to get the mind working. 99 Tiny Terrors is an anthology that the reader can dip into for something deliciously dangerous in a short amount of time, or spend an afternoon trolling through blood-soaked stories from all over the world, including Canada, England, Germany, Greece, Ireland, India, Japan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, the United Sta...

Two books, one anthology.The grift. The scam. The double-cross. Blackmail and burglary; murder and larceny. Blood Business tracks the underbelly of human nature as it drags itself through the muck of our lesser angels in twenty-seven crime stories set in this world... and beyond.

Quick fiction for readers on the go!Quick fiction for readers on the go! Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Presents Flush Fiction is a tantalizing collection of 88 short-short stories custom-picked for the Bathroom Reader aficionado. We scoured the nation for talented writers and asked them to send us their best quick reads. The result: mysteries, horror, sci-fi, adventure, plenty of laughs--and a few gasps--in these startling short stories. They’re li...

"It would be our duty, as citizens on this earthto document its end the best way we knowand if that means a second by second updateof the world going up in flames, or down in rain, or crushed under the feet of invading monstersso be it."-- Shivangi NarainNo one understands an apocalypse like the people who have experienced it. Mad Scientist Journal has brought together twenty-three tales of people who have seen the world end. These accounts range ...

"'The doctor tells me I have Alzheimer's.' The truth of my husband's words shook our world. This is my diary written for a time during the ten years of his spiral into another space."There's no question Alzheimer's is a horror for those who are afflicted by it. But what about those who love them? This diary shows what Alzheimer's is like from the other side, the eyes and heart of a wife who is no longer only a wife but a caregiver. It is not an easy story. But that is how Alzheimer...