Showing results by author "Stephen Huff" in All Categories

The mean streets of Skid Row teem with unhappy characters. Each has his or her own sordid tale to tell about their current condition and the sorry fate that deposited them there. Meet ""Narrator"", a documentary film maker who has come to interview these hapless souls. His latest story will focus on a minor mystery with major implications. Who killed Cassandra's cat? And why?

A new breed of adventurer has returned to the Serpentine’s abandoned frontiers, rising curious and enlightened from a dark age of internecine warfare, social isolation, and grudging interstellar commerce. Forsaking material greed, these altruistic investigators come seeking only truth. They will ultimately resolve many long-standing mysteries while making fabulous discoveries, but the fatal costs and disturbing consequences of their success will drive them all beyond the limits of extremity.

A former pro-footballer fallen from grace and bitter with his eventual fate, Johnny Bullet commits a horrible crime in the name of revenge. Running from his demons through a foreboding countryside, he hopes to escape his future, only to find it at the very far away ends of it all.

Hunted runaways fleeing bestial keepers across a desert wasteland. Bound for Sanctum. A boy named Manga. A girl named Heaven. Each a patchwork monster born of strap, stitch, and scar, bestially abused but unbroken. Unbeaten. Not so badly undone that they have forsaken their sense of humanity. For they have yet to abandon all hope. This is their struggle. In love. For freedom.

In the aftermath of a genocidal galactic invasion, a remotely isolated colony cut off from all sources of resupply must devise a desperate plan to save themselves from certain annihilation. Their best hope for success resides in a derelict ship and its volunteer captain, Paladin, a genetically modified warrior descended from an elite race of martial experts. Before her motley crew can return home, they must somehow survive the shocking terrors that they discover hidden among the planets and moons of mysterious Deadfall.

Heaven has gone missing from Sanctum and the boy named Manga must somehow rescue her from the malign possession of Momma Parker and her demented husband. Gathering the aid of new friends, Kincaid and Gene-Jeannie, he will stage a violent revolt against his detested abusers. Time is short and hardships are many. Only hours remain to save a girl named Heaven.

In a limb-mangling medical emergency, semi-sentient robots will save your life, but they will also steal your identity, pilfer your belongings and assault your unconscious body at the same time. Welcome to your future! Amid consequential threats of a social apocalypse and serial exhibitions of public urination, one dedicated bureaucrat will risk his lives (plural) to do the impossible. With only hours to spare before a solar catastrophe entirely obliterates human civilization, he must somehow blast fifty billion neurotic citizens safely across the cosmos.

He's tall, lanky, flabby and sloppy, and his taste for women is low and vulgar. The women he dates dote and fawn over him, and Bernie wallows in it all, much to the disgust and morbid curiosity of his co-workers, who have labeled his penchant for love's baser side "Bernie's Thing". Many women will say “size doesn't matter”. Bernie knows the truth.

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. This is the story of his downfall and ultimate fate. Nobody escapes.

She's twelve years old and she's desperately in love with the fourteen-year-old boy who lives next door. He knows her as his best friend, but he's too preoccupied with his own travails to return her affection. Since his mother went missing three years previously, his father has become ever more violent and abusive. Now, each act of violence pulls the boy further and further away from Dorry’s loving embrace, and she'll do anything to save him.

He is a secret agent assigned to fight a war of time. He serves an alien overlord, which has subjugated humankind through untold generations. They use him to execute subtle manipulations of time and space by sending him on mysterious errands to faraway places and distant times in the past or future. Each journey erodes a bit of his mind, his memory, his personality, and his psyche. As his personality corrodes, he encounters an alien race intent on aiding his struggle for rebellion in time.

God's second son. Humankind's second sin. His crime, the first crime. Therefore, the greatest. After he murdered his brother, the bloody stone tumbled from his left hand, and he covered his youthful victim with earth. This, a tale told endlessly throughout eons of human existence. Yet history has always told it wrong, for his is a story without end.

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.

To earn extra money, he volunteers for service in Afghanistan as a civilian technologist. After his capture by bloodthirsty jihadists, he confronts his worst nightmare with eyes wide open. Once he manages to escape, he will learn a terrible truth while hitching a ride on the poppy express.

She’s a castaway fourteen-year-old orphan, all alone in the world, but she knows where she’s going, because she knows where she’s been! Nobody can tell her anything she hasn’t already heard! Except... this guy... this older guy... he makes such sweet promises! He tells her only what she wants to hear and nothing that bugs her... until one night... the night of Halloween and her fifteenth birthday......something terrible happens!

To date, all indications tell us we are the only intelligent form of life currently inhabiting our Milky Way Galaxy. Aliens may survive in government laboratories, but they are naturally difficult to record with any convincing fidelity. Yet yesterday’s far-out conspiracies too often become today’s startling headlines given a bit of unwanted exposure. Pause one moment now to take note of a shadow-bound summons, but beware. Your paranoid shade whispers. Such twisted threads weave life’s strange tapestry. Of sinister phenomena, here find abundant evidence, and of aliens, eleven.

Darling Girl's Halloween Carol tells the tale of Halloween and her fifteenth birthday, when something terrible happens! Darling Girl's Memorial Day Fireworks sets her in the company of a hippy ghost and a homeless Vietnam veteran - the stage is set for sundown at the National Cemetery, and the fireworks are sure to be bloody. Darling Girl's Christmas Egg is about Christmas Eve, which means all-you-can-eat pancakes with real maple syrup at her boarding school. Of course, Darling Girl's holidays are never so easy and a ghost with a serious problem is certain to spoil her fun!

Denizens of Watami are more human than human. When a deviant dictator determines to exploit the deep-seated animosities that inevitably follow, he finds the peace-loving Nascosi ‘morphs’ to be easy targets and convenient scapegoats. Genocide ensues. Rising in their place Anzian-kind will easily dominate their unmodified enemy. Afterward, humankind will be unknown.

Declared missing-in-action while serving in Afghanistan, her eldest son's disappearance leaves a massive whole in this mother's life. Her misery cannot be assuaged by human sympathy or the keepsakes of memories. Many refuse to believe that a mother's love for her children can transcend time. She and her son know the truth.

Black eyeliner. Black lashes. Black lips. Black hair. Through it all, peers the white cake face of Darling Girl Jones, orphan. From time to time, she awakens in her academy dorm room to find an ethereal spirit haunting her bed. Today, in the company of a hippy ghost and a homeless Vietnam veteran, Darling will play a vital role in the city’s Memorial Day ceremony. The stage is set for sundown at the National Cemetery, and the fireworks are sure to be bloody.