Search Worlds Without End

For Renata Burgess--wife, mother, social worker and writer--Friday, March 18, 1988 is just the start of a busy weekend. Her daughter's going to a birthday party sleepover. Her elder son will be over for Sunday dinner, her nine-year-old boy clamouring to have a friend over. Just a normal Friday. Until 8:20 pm--when one of her children is found dead.

Wrenched by shock and grief into currents of reality of which she's never previously been aware, Renata struggles to come to terms with her loss. As she learns to live day to day and moment to moment with the pain, she embarks on an eerie journey through an underworld inhabited by monstrous and seductive creatures that threaten both her sanity and her physical survival. She travels not only downwards but also backwards in time. Finding herself thrown into the lives of other mothers at the moment of their bereavement, Renata takes her first step towards healing--recognizing the fact that she is simply part of an infinite process...

Things happen when Greg is around...all kinds of things bet broken, yet you can't relaly say he's destructive because you never see him break anything. Other kids are getting hurt or getting into trouble all the time, yet you can't put your finger on just what he does...it's as if he spends all his energy being furious withthe world; anger is the only consistent thing he's ever had and he'll hold on to it with a vengeance.

When Breanne Novak adopts eleven-year-old Greg, she knows she has troubles ahead. But Greg has an uncanny ability to *make things happen* and Breanne soon realises that she had been totally unprepared for the full impact of the struggle about to rock her life.

VAMPIRE SON

An opalescent sun sets behind the ragged black cliffs of the Northwest. The women, sated from a full season of feeding, hibernate while the precarious convoy carrying them moves south. The reckoning awaits.

He is a creature of disappointment and disillusionment, one of the weaker sex, shadowed by a dream that will not go away. His one faith, his only faith, is family. But on this journey south his faith will unravel.

In this twilight, the vampires tribe's caravan hurtles toward an uncertain future. Their fearsome legacy will be challenged by a son who must overcome his great weakness to save an innocent from the terrible secret of his blood brethren.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Magic: An Anthology of the Esoteric and Arcane (2012), edited by Jonathan Oliver. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Seven (2013), edited by Jonathan Strahan.

A voice whispers in her ear at night, promising her a new life, urging her to let go of the reality she knows. The voice could only belong to one person, her brother Ethan, but his body, broken by drugs, lies cold in the morgue. An invisible hand has opened the door for Lucy and her sisters and though Lucy questions her parents they have receded into their private existence where nothing can touch them.

Lucy is quickly losing touch with her reality of white fences and pristine lawns. She is drawn beyond that door into the dark abyss where her brother waits and evil is hiding in the shadows. Each day the voice grows stronger, demanding that she journey far away to the place that stole her brother's mind and body. As the secret unfolds, the Prodigal emerges.

Regret and denial haunt the ghost town of Revenant. It is the last chance for the living to give the dead and gone the gift of freedom. The pedophile, the mother who talks to her dead children, the father with an image of his son before the accident, the little boy yearning for his birth mother and a girl morning her phantom aborted baby, all congregate in Revenant for the final judgment. Either let them go or spend eternity in a vast wasteland, endlessly floating.

There is a presence in Revenant: ancient, powerful and hungry. To continue her endless suffering, she must feed on the souls of the tormented. All she has to do is wait, and they will be drawn to her for a final kiss. Welcome to Revenant, enjoy your stay in the land of the dead.

Leila Blackwell suffers from keratitis, a condition that, coupled with prior eye problems, is slowly robbing her of her sight. Nevertheless, she stubbornly tries to maintain a "normal" lifestyle, often forsaking the companionship of her lover Cathy to act independently, as any fully sighted person might do. It's thus that she finds herself alone in a public rest room when a familiar male voice penetrates the silence, saying, "Don't be afraid, I won't hurt you."

Leila finds herself kidnapped and confined in a basement, slowly and steadily losing her sight, as she is forced to engage in a battle of wills with a man who believes he is acting to save her soul. Through a series of harrowing escapes and confrontations with obstacles both real and self-imposed, Leila must try to survive to reach freedom, and her life, without losing her sanity in the process.

The Devil, they say is in the details. The little things. The small decisions we make every day. But for the Harkness family, this expression is all too literally true. For many years the members of this family have gotten seemingly helpful advice at key moments in their lives from a mysterious - and very persuasive stranger. -- He doesn't always look the same. His name may be different. But he's always around whenever some sort of decision needs to be made. And what he says makes so much sense. His influence on the Harkness family seems slight at first. But before anyone realizes it, the strange man is leading them down some very dangerous - and terrifying - roads indeed.

Two interwoven memoirs of love, loss, and family with a haunted, frightening edge.

In 2000, American Fantasy Press published an unassuming chapbook titled The Man on the Ceiling. Inside was a dark, surreal, discomfiting story of the horrors that can befall a family. It was so powerful that it won the Bram Stoker Award, International Horror Guild Award, and World Fantasy Award--the only work ever to win all three. Now, Melanie Tem and Steve Rasnic Tem have re-imagined the story, expanding on the ideas to create a compelling work that examines how people find a family, how they hold a family together despite incomprehensible tragedy, and how, in the end, they find love.

Loosely autobiographical, The Man on the Ceiling has the feel of a family portrait painted by Salvador Dali, where story and reality blend to find the one thing that neither can offer alone: truth.

WFA and Stoker Award winning novelette.

The Man on the Ceiling is the Tems' stunning semi-autobiographical short story about living with the devastating fears that lurk in our everyday lives. An examination of common dreads that will haunt you every time you see a shadow cross a wall or hear a noise in the dark, especially in the safety of your own home.

The story was originally published as a chapbook. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Fourteenth Annual Collection (2001), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and Poe's Children: The New Horror: An Anthology (2008), edited by Peter Straub. The story is included in the collection In Concert: The Collected Speculative Fiction of Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem (2010) and was expanded to the full novel The Man on the Ceiling (2008).

When Marshall, an elderly patient with Alzheimer's disease, begins to see a mysterious woman named Faye, no one at the Tides Nursing Home thinks much of it, until his daughter, Rebecca, learns that he was once married to a disturbed, violent woman named Faye--whom her father believes has returned.

For Alexandra Kove, the path of her life took her far from the claustrophobic forest where her father raised her. She believed that she had to escape, that her only road was away from the family and circumstances of her birth. Now, her road has turned back, converged with the paths of the family she thought was safely in her past.

EYES OF THE WOLF, EYES OF THE WOMAN

On a moonlit night in Denver a young girl runs--half transformed, half starving, half innocent. Behind her stretches a legacy of strong women, each possessed by the girl and the terror of the changing.

Save her, or consume her.

Four sisters lived in four houses. Now their female descendants, steeped in blood and sacrifice and rage, cling to their essence and their ancient rituals while Deborah, runaway, uninitiated, threatens their survival.

The family of hunters hunts her down--racing on all fours through the streets of the city and the canyons, gripped by their own quarrels and regrets and their desperate, essential love for one another. They are driven by the need to run, to hunt, driven by the insistent itching of the hair that lies hidden between the flesh and the skin.

On the night of her fortieth birthday, Charlotte Tobias created her perfect lover. But soon he was eveything that she would come to dread as she slid into a voyage through anger and madness and loss, towards the truths that lie just beyond consciousness.

Twenty-year-old Valerie Kittridge is horrified to learn that her father has had a stroke. As an only child and with her mother dead, her father is all she has in the world, and she leaves her life as a film student in California to nurse her father back to health. On her wild, late-night car ride to Duerme, the small town in New Mexico where her father lives with his girlfriend, she is besieged with a host of strange and terrifying dark omens and flashbacks to her childhood. For there is something waiting for Valerie at Duerme, not just her stricken father, but an irresistable stranger who had saved her life many years ago-the man of her dreams.

In Witch-Light, Nancy Holder and Melanie Tem collaborate on the second of their fascinating demon-lover stories. The first one, Making Love, was a sensual variation on the Frankenstein theme. Witch-Light is the mesmerizing story of a dark, mysterious, devastatingly handsome man named Gabriel, a bruja, or male witch, who draws Valerie into a twisted romance that will take her to the very edge of love and obsession.

Full of the magic and mystery of the Southwest, Witch-Light is a bittersweet, compelling mix of romance, horror and fantasy, a dark journey into a strange and wonderful world of folk magic, superstition, and obsessive love that knows no bounds.