Showing results by author "Bryan Cassiday" in All Categories

Prepare for extreme horror. This unique collection of 10 stories features a range of international talent: award-winning authors, masters of horror, rising stars, and fresh new voices in the genre. Take care as you reach into these dark places, for the things here bite, and you may withdraw a hand short of a few fingers.

A distressed young woman falls under the spell of a homicidal maniac and becomes his partner in murder in this disturbing psychological thriller. Pondering suicide sitting on a Malibu dock one night after running away from home, doe-eyed young Mina Deerling meets smooth-talking Gage Catton, who is trying to load his wife’s body wrapped in a blanket onto his boat. When Catton finds out to his shock that his wife is still alive in the blanket, he talks the distraught Mina into helping him finish her off with his knife.

Larry, a college student who is driving through the Mojave Desert to a party in Las Vegas, encounters a bus driver who has other ideas. What starts out as an annoying hit and run turns into something decidedly more deadly, with Larry's life at stake on a desolate stretch of highway.

The world has turned. Plague-infected, flesh-eating zombies now infest the earth. Black ops agent Chad Halverson of the CIA's top secret National Clandestine Service and a motley band of survivors must do everything they can to survive one more day, even as they try to find out what caused the pandemic.

America has been devastated by both plague and the nuclear weapons used to kill off the infected flesh-eating creatures that roamed across the land preying on human beings. National Clandestine Service black ops agent Chad Halverson and dress designer Victoria Brady take refuge in a blast shelter in the Nevada desert when an A-bomb is dropped on Las Vegas at the behest of the president of the United States. Halverson and Victoria are forced to leave the safety of their cement shelter when they run low on water.

Unhinged consists of ten stories that plumb the subterranean depths of the human mind to uncover the horrors that lie within. These stories plunge you into a world of murder, mayhem, and psychosis where anything goes, and your worst nightmare could be lurking around the next corner in the guise of something as innocuous looking as a ventriloquist’s dummy, where even an insane asylum offers no refuge.

Seven characters find themselves trapped inside an elevator during a zombie apocalypse. The narrator, the last passenger to occupy the elevator, tells them that his wife, who was murdered by a zombie, told him as she died in his arms that she saw one of the passengers get bitten by a zombie before the person ducked into the elevator, but she died before she could describe the victim to him. The terrified passengers know that the victim will soon turn and attack them. They must determine who it is and kill him or her before it is too late - if they don't kill each other first trying to find out.

Ivy, a Los Angeles real estate agent plagued with self-doubts thanks to an overbearing mogul father, is assaulted by two avatars in a metaverse called Rabbit World owned by her husband Orion. Traumatized, she refuses to sell property in Rabbit World, believing the metaverse is unsafe.

After the crass but successful fashion designer Max Reed, who exploits violence in his ads by shooting them at actual murder scenes, is blown up in his penthouse office, police watch a CCTV video of the person who delivered the bomb to Reed’s office and peg private investigator Scott Brody as the killer. The truth is, Brody didn’t know he was delivering a bomb. The local LA mobster Sal Andrasi duped Brody into thinking he was delivering a bowling ball to Reed. In order to clear his name, Brody must find the real killer. Which turns out to be more difficult than it seems.

In this terrifying psychological thriller with occult overtones, Scott Brody, a Los Angeles PI, is hired by Evelyn Martin to find her missing brother Tyler Keogh, a well-to-do aeronautical engineer and a member of the local Mensa board of directors. As Brody conducts his search, he keeps discovering victims of a serial killer who leaves clues connecting the murders to a hopped-up cult that collects Nazi SS Totenkopf memorabilia and worships Li Grande Zombi, a voodoo snake god.

Struggling horror novelist Bart Dillinger doesn’t accept the official police report that says his girlfriend actress Jackie Merced committed suicide by shooting herself while driving off a cliff. He hires PI Ethan Carr to find out how she really died. Carr discovers secrets Dillinger didn’t know about her which reveal she was more complicated than even he knew. Carr also discovers she belonged to a clandestine club of masked members in Hollywood who like to play games. These members include politicians and other movers and shakers. And the games they like to play are deadly.

An Antarctic ice station comes under attack by a virus from outer space during a subzero blizzard. Venusians subject an Earthling to the torture of having to live over and over again his murder trial for the killing of his friend. An exorcist suspects a child is possessed, but who is doing it and why? Is it a demon or something even more terrifying? A Special Forces soldier with a death wish can't figure out why the government has saved him from his spaceship's crash landing. When he does, it's too late.

Haunted by self-loathing, Ethan Carr quits the Los Angeles Police Department after he accidentally shoots to death an innocent boy on one of his assignments. Years later, he sets up shop as a private investigator and is hired by Richard Herbert to protect him from being assassinated for 24 hours until he meets his son. Herbert is on the lam from his employer US Cyber Command at the National Security Agency campus in Fort Meade, Maryland.

The end of America is near. A plague that kills its victims and resurrects them as flesh-eating ghouls has decimated the American population, forcing what's left of the government to take shelter underground in the Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center in Virginia. President Cole must decide whether to start nuking his own country in order to save it from the virus that has a hundred percent kill ratio. Whether America survives or not, it will never be the same.

What would you do if they were your daughters? As a zombie virus sweeps across the world in a matter of days, eighteen-year-old Siamese twins attached at their brain are attacked by a zombie in Los Angeles. Only one of the twins, Krissy, gets bitten and infected with the virus that turns her into a flesh-eating ghoul. Sami isn’t bitten and for some reason doesn’t become infected, even though they share a brain. She is somehow immune. Distraught, their father agonizes over what to do. There is no cure for the virus other than the killing of the diseased brain. The problem is the twins ...

Police investigate the murders of 13-year-old Lucinda Pugh's parents, who died in their beds after somebody soaked them in gasoline and set their house on fire in their hometown of Santa Loma, California. All evidence points to Lucinda as the emotionally ill culprit, despite lack of motivation on her part. When an exorcist attempts to exorcise her, Lucinda reveals that an alien invasion of Earth is imminent, and her parents' murders are just the beginning of a full-fledged assault.

United States Senator John Stockwall of Texas is kidnapped on the doorstep of his house in McLean, Virginia. That's just the beginning of a conspiracy hatched to shake America to its very foundations. The trail of the kidnappers leads Nick McQueen, who is a CIA hit man and a - fugitive from the authorities, to a brutal murder on the casino-lined, neon playgrounds of Las Vegas. The al-Qaeda kidnappers plan to broadcast live on national TV a stage show - managed to humiliate and terrorize the American public.

The feuding McQueen brothers must bury the hatchet long enough to thwart a conspiracy to assassinate a world leader in seventy-two hours. But which leader? Nick McQueen is a down-at-the-heels journalist in Los Angeles who seeks the truth and has trouble getting along with his bosses. His brother Barry is a CIA hit man plagued by personal demons who cares only about national security. Barry dupes Nick into joining the CIA and helping him prevent the Basque hit man from carrying out the contract at a summit in Pike National Forest in Colorado.

FINALIST, BestThrillers Book Awards in Horror 2023 Phoebe is running for her life after discovering a dark secret about the police. She saw them murder individuals suspected of being infected with the lethal Novamors virus, including her father, who wasn't infected. Not only are the cops after her, but a sociopathic hit man hired by her vindictive wealthy father-in-law is hot on her trail. Meanwhile, infected maniacs are overrunning the city and cannibalizing citizens. The governor has locked down the city and ordered all comms with the outside world jammed while police are blocking the ...

Necromaniac depicts the harrowing descent of a thirty-three-year-old woman who fears she is losing her grip on sanity. Or is she being possessed? Managing a crematorium, where she also lives as a virtual recluse harboring a dark secret and taking refuge from the world, Libby Genet fears she is going mad when she feels an uncontrollable urge to kill. When her psychiatrist can’t cure her, Libby comes to the conclusion that she might be in the process of being possessed, since she hears a voice in her head which keeps commanding her to commit murder. Fighting to take control of her life, she...