Dying is easy. Living is hard. "Step back, back into the world of 1996..." "Dark fiction so numbing cold and cutting edge you better hold onto your ass with your free hand...There are no simple 'entertainments' or cheap grabs for the throat to be found here. Hodge is deadly serious about presenting a world where the worst punishment is the mere fact that you are aware you will probably live to see another day." So wrote critic Stanley Wiater about Brian Hodge's renowned first short fiction collection, The Convulsion Factory. Three collections later, nothing has changed. Well...maybe one or two trifling entertainments. A couple of cheap grabs for some body part or another. But that's about it. There are still plenty of fates worse than death. And the time has now come to advance to the fourth circle of Hell, whose 17 stations include: The award-winning "With Acknowledgments to Sun Tzu," in which a hardened photojournalist glimpses the face behind the atrocities of war... "The Passion of the Beast," a report on the arcane origins and tragic premier of the flipside version of Mel Gibson's most famous movie... "The Firebrand Symphony," which seeds Lovecraftian terrors in the unlikely realms of vintage psychedelia and cinematic sound design... "Brushed In Blackest Silence," the chapter in the life of Dracula's Van Helsing that reunited Hodge with Dell/Abyss mastermind Jeanne Cavelos... "Hate the Sinner, Love the Sin," which finds one of the Middle Ages' seven towers of darkest iniquity thriving in modern-day Los Angeles... Dying is easy. Living is hard. And forces beyond your control have a bone to pick with you.

The Weight of the Dead by Brian Hodge is a dystopian science fiction novelette taking place years after all electronics have been fried by the sun. Two siblings live in an enclave with their father, who's about to be punished for a crime, sparking fierce but secret rebellion by the daughter.

In a review of his first collection, The Convulsion Factory, esteemed critic Stanley Wiater stated, “This writer knows where the sad people, the bad people, and the mad people live.” Indeed. For his expansive command of characters as well as the situations, from the visionary to the grittily mundane, in which he finds them, and for his lyrically crafted prose and skewed perspectives (not to mention his penchant for run-on sentences), Hodge has racked up an eclectic list of comparisons: from Elmore Leonard to Clive Barker, from Honoré Daumier to David Cronenberg, from Carl Jung to Marilyn Monroe*. Now comes his most far-reaching collection yet, 150,000 words chronicling the people, places, and things that his readers have come to expect, but never predict: The dancer who becomes the latest repository for the fervent sexuality that fueled the world’s most ancient cities. The serial killer whose grasp of media symbiosis puts him light-years ahead of the law. The modern-day castrato learning undreamt-of lessons in love, death, and divine madness. The Civil War veteran living a grotesque twist on the Old West myth of the outlaw who never takes off his gun belt. William Faulkner once noted that writers are congenital liars … that if they weren’t liars, they would never have become writers in the first place. In that spirit, Brian Hodge has been enthusiastically lying ever since his earliest mastery of the alphabet, guided by only one stipulation: Never letting a trivial thing like the facts get in the way of the ugly truth. * Sadly, the Monroe comparison is a total fabrication. Stories included in this collection: “Madame Babylon” “The 121st Day of Sodom” “Empathy” “Cancer Causes Rats” “Some Other Me” “Nesting Instincts” “Before the Last Snowflake Falls” “An Autumnal Equinox Folly” “Confession” “Cenotaph” “Far Flew the Boast of Him” “Now Day Was Fled As the Worm Had Wished” “Pages Stuck By a Bowie Knife to a Cheyenne Gallows” “Driving the Last Spike” “Little Holocausts” “Dead Giveaway” “Past Tense” “Our Lady of Sloth and Scarlet Ivy” “The Last Testament” “The Alchemy of the Throat” “Come Unto Me, All Ye Heavy Laden” “Endnotes: From the Gutters of Civilization to Your Discerning Eye”

Pick among the rubble of modern civilization, and listen for the beating of its rusted heart. "Dark fiction so numbing cold and cutting edge you better hold onto your ass with your free hand ... There are no simple 'entertainments' or cheap grabs for the throat to be found here. Hodge is deadly serious about presenting a world where the worst punishment is the mere fact that you are aware you will probably live to see another day." So wrote esteemed critic Stanley Wiater about The Convulsion Factory before ranking it among the 113 best books of modern horror fiction. Its 12 stories are fused together by the recurring motif of decay ... the decay of cities and families, identity and gender, idolatry and love. Among them: "Godflesh" - In pursuit of the ultimate in pleasure, what's ancient is new again. "Androgyny" - What is love? Two souls and one flesh. "Cancer Causes Rats" - The symbiosis between a TV reporter and the serial killer who's making her career metamorphoses toward its inevitable extreme. "Extinctions In Paradise" - Their daily struggle for survival hurtles the street kids of a South American slum into a new phase of evolution. "Liturgical Music For Nihilists" - In the chill of a derelict slaughterhouse, an accidental god awakens and calls to its own. Out of decay comes new life. If only that were the good news...

SUMMARY: Fifty years ago, a blood-red, cloven-hoofed demon was conjured up by Axis powers at the end of World War II, but adopted by the United States government, which gave him the name Hellboy and raised him in secrecy. Today, Hellboy is a top field agent for the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense. He questions the unknown -- then beats it into submission. His latest case: Angels have attacked the Vatican, destroying an entire floor of the building's precious library. That's a new one, even for the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense. The BPRD dispatches Hellboy and his amphibious colleague, Abe Sapien, to investigate. When they arrive on the scene, they discover that thousands of documents from all eras of history have been destroyed -- except for one, saved from the holy fire by an obsessive scholar. His prize? An ancient scroll allegedly written by Jesus the Nazarene -- decades after the crucifixion. Hellboy's first thought is that the scroll was the focus of the seraphim's attack -- but why would heavenly creatures undertake such violence and ruin? The answer to this puzzle will lead Hellboy down a terrifying trail to ancient gods, vengeful demons, and a hidden world made of the purest evil....

"Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from godhood." For Damien, growing up was all about being an outsider in his own home. His mother and brother shared an unfathomable bond that left him excluded from their lives. Yet his earliest, fragmentary memory of them was so nightmarish, their lives were something he ran from as soon as he could. Now an astronomy graduate student in Seattle, Damien is happy with his place as a speck in a cosmos vast beyond comprehension. Until his brother turns up after 13 years, to make amends and seek his expertise on a discovery that may not be of this Earth. The more the world expands to admit the possibilities of a universe stranger than even Damien has imagined, the greater is his urgency to resist being reclaimed by a past that never seemed to want him…until now. Like a collision of galaxies between H.P. Lovecraft and Carl Sagan, Whom the Gods Would Destroy looks to the night skies as the source of our greatest wonder, and finds them swarming with our worst fears. **Review "A strange journey into the human psyche and a reimagining of human history on a cosmic scale. While there is a great deal of science fiction in the novella, there are also several themes from classic horror, and especially Lovecraftian mythos, that is sure to please even a jaded horror reader." -- Examiner.com "Mines existential terror, our fear of our own insignificance, while not skimping on the shock moments and twists. This is a space chiller that gets under your DNA, imbues the stars with horrific potential and makes the reader question humanity's place in the cosmos. Great stuff!" -- Horror Novel Reviews "An incredibly dark tale ... Hodge's writing is tight and suspenseful with the right amount of jolts." -- The Writerly Reader 

Demon est Deus inversus…   They are the Misbegotten — once mortal men and women, from different times and different lands, who have all run afoul of a monstrous deity that remade them into undying predators. They are the creatures of our world’s darkest folklore, who hunger for flesh and blood … but who hunger for revenge most of all.   Beginning with his novellas for Poppy Z. Brite’s acclaimed Love In Vein anthologies, Brian Hodge has been weaving an ongoing story cycle into what’s been called “a mythos every bit as dismal and bleak as Lovecraft’s Elder Gods.”   Worlds of Hurt collects, for the first time, the first four chapters of the Misbegotten mythos into a single volume:   “The Alchemy of the Throat” — A modern-day castrato soprano becomes the latest in a line of indispensible companions to an ancient benefactor. Bram Stoker Award finalist.   “The Dripping of Sundered Wineskins” — The immortal Sisters of the Trinity catapult an Irish stigmatic toward his destiny of being either a saint or a butcher. World Fantasy Award finalist.   “When the Bough Doesn’t Break” — The testament of Saint Patrick the Fallen lures a pair of young seekers to rural Ireland, where an agent of divine retribution waits to be unleashed.   World of Hurt — The short novel that Rue Morgue said “makes Lovecraft’s Old Ones seem downright compassionate.”   Nearly half his life ago, Andrei spent 38 minutes as a corpse. It’s not a secret he shares with many people. Especially these last six years, ever since the comforting lie of tunnels and white lights crumbled away to leave him with the memory of what he really found on the other side of death…   Not Hell, but something worse: a Heaven unlike anything he’d ever been taught to expect.   Now, as Heaven seeks to reclaim him, Andrei awakens to the hidden truths of this world and the next, caught between two sides waging a clandestine war for the soul of the world, in which everything he’s ever taken for granted about good and evil has just been turned upside-down.   When death is no escape, what do you do? Andrei has a desperate need to know, as the clock runs out on the most excruciating moral choice of his life.

A golden time — that's what Chris Anderson, his brother Aaron, and their friends expected of that final summer. Freedom, and lazy, pleasure-filled days before the responsibilities of college and career. An idyll in the seclusion of their newfound hideaway on the shores of three small lakes. But Tri-Lakes is no oasis. A millennium ago it became the focal point of a powerfully malevolent force, and the remnants of an ancient bloodfeud. Hatred is its source. Blood gives it power. Only sacrifice can banish it.

Behind the walls of respectability is a world exploding with crime, sin, and the darkest magic of all… The rain beats down on the hot New Orleans streets. A derelict staggers, no longer a man, but a zombi, a vessel emptied by voodoo sorcery and poured full of another’s will. This is the land of lace curtains and Mardi Gras. This is the world of the bayou and sizzling crawfish and a man in white who can kill at any distance. A storm of corporate greed and cruel vengeance is sweeping through New Orleans, descending on a young advertising executive (Nightlife‘s Justin Gray) who fears he may be selling his soul along with brand names, on a weary ex-CIA agent, and on a Caribbean chauffeur on the run from enemies he can’t understand. Two powerful businessmen, one legitimate, the other a criminal, have built a common empire. Now it is coming apart in a tidal wave of bloodshed and shattered lives, flooding the Delta with voodoo — the dark magic of darker saints.

From the primeval rain forest comes an uncontrolled substance never intended for consumption by the civilized mind… To the warrior-shamans of the Venezuelan forest people, the drug is a sacred substance: part pain, part pleasure, all power. Skullflush is pure psychic whiplash … an exhilarating gateway to an advanced consciousness beyond time and species. Deep in the Amazon, the primitive tribe has kept its secret safe from civilization. Until a rising drug lord ends up with a stolen six-kilo stash, and begins to peddle his prize in the nightclubs of Florida. Tampa’s thrill-seekers are eager to sample the pale green powder. But generations of urbanized decadence have left them jaded, shallow, and weak … too weak to handle the drug’s mystic high. The ancient rain forest chemistry warps bone, muscle, and sinew in their city-soft bodies, setting free the ferocious power of man’s basic nature. On the rebound from a life in ruins, Justin Gray is the sole witness who can connect the fearsome power of skullflush with the carnage left in its wake. A marked man, with a new love and an unlikely ally from the heart of the rain forest, he's forced to learn the ways of the urban jungle, where everyone is both hunter and hunted.

Holiday Bundle Featuring Twenty Novels of Horror and the Occult The fourth of our series of holiday bundles, A Haunting of Horrors, Volume 2 features a mixture of twenty novels and collections of horror and the occult by various award-winning and bestselling authors.  For $2.99, you're getting twenty books containing over two million words in total, and a savings of more than $70 if each title was purchased separately.  This bundle is only available for a limited time, so purchase your copy before it's gone. Titles included in this collection:The Convulsion Factory - Brian HodgeDust of Eden - Thomas SullivanThe Weird Ones - Steve VernonScary Rednecks and Other Inbred Horrors - Weston Ochse & David WhitmanBlood Samples - Jay BonansingaUntcigahunk: The Complete Little Brothers - Rick HautalaKiss Me Like You Love Me - Wednesday Lee FridayRed Dreams - Dennis EtchisonThe Shadows, Kith & Kin - Joe R. LansdaleTryptych - Jack KetchumThe Forbidden Zone - Whitley StrieberThe Last Call of Mourning - Charles L. GrantShadoweyes - Kathryn PtacekWith Wounds Still Wet - Wayne Allen SalleeBlack Leather Required - David J. SchowDefining Moments - David Niall WilsonDelightful Agony - David WhitmanLess Than Human - Gary RaisorDark Ride - Michael LaimoThe Nightmare Frontier - Stephen Mark Rainey