In the longest story in this collection, an eleven-year-old girl has a strange adventure in an overgrown garden, and probably saves the world from a fate worse than any conventional apocalypse. Her parents would undoubtedly think that she‰Ûªs been dreaming if she attempted to explain what had happened, but that‰Ûªs what parents do, because they think it‰Ûªs what they ought to do. The other... [click here for more]
Long-undisturbed Tenebrion Wood, identified in the Domesday Book and named by the Romans after a kind of "night-sprit," stands in the way of a road development.
Environmentalist Steve Pearlman recruits a number of investigators to examine the site in order to find some justification for its defense, including entomologist John Hazard.
At first, the wood does not seem to be of any special... [click here for more]
Sheena is a vampire from Leeds who works in a call center, and has a dark secret that even she doesn't know about. Her boyfriend has to discover it the hard way, alas.
Like the other two vampire stories included in the book, both of which feature vampire babies, "Sheena" is a love story, which shares the life-enhancing attributes common to all love stories.
Here are ten tales of the fantastic,... [click here for more]
When Steve, a hapless school teacher, consults a hypnotherapist to solve his personal problems, he "remembers" being abducted by aliens. When he starts attending sessions of Alien Abductees Anonymous (AlAbAn), he sees a pattern in the stories being told, and thinks his own experiences might provide a key. While his love life continues to deteriorate, Steve must grapple with questions of where the aliens... [click here for more]
At an 1847 revival of Meyerbeer's opera Robert le Diable, the ghost of Blaise Thibodeaux, the author of La Raisonance du temps, appears in one of the boxes, just as Thibodeaux had predicted to Auguste Dupin that it would, thirteen years before.
Unfortunately, Dupin is unable to attend the performance, leaving his uninformed friend and narrator Reynolds to try to make sense of the apparition and all... [click here for more]