Pushing forward into a new frontier is always dangerous, but when you're almost 1500 light years from home and something goes wrong its all to easy for everything to spiral out of control unless tough, often impossible, decisions are made. Connected via a a series of Gates that allow navigation through an endless void of vacuum, Space Station Benson sits in the Veil Nebula supporting a series of mining asteroids that collect the ore needed for the next outward expansion. A team nearing the end of their mission on one of these asteroids has gone suddenly silent after triggering a distress beacon. The station's commander deploys a rescue mission lead by Jake Dixon - a man with a reputation as a hero or perhaps a murderer after a previous rescue mission lost a ship, but saved the station. What Jake finds on the asteroid will threaten not only his team and the hundreds of lives on Benson but perhaps threaten Earth itself. Edge of the seat story telling combined with incredible art create a new vision of space exploration meets horror where each turn of the page brings you closer to a maelstrom of madness and destruction. Join us as Dixon and his team come up against Dr. Dole Andersen a man with a secret so terrible that he threatens to pull us all into Hell with him. Join rescue crews, scientists, investigators, special forces soldiers, families and monsters, sacrifice and chaos. Join us as we face inhuman terror and incredible heroism. Join us in another far flung adventure set on the edge of a universe under the watchful eye of The Horror Master, John Carpenter, himself. Join us in the VORTEX. 256 pages of heart-stopping horror plus bonus pages that gives you a glimpse behind the curtain at how the series is created.

When the moon-bound crew of Gaia stumbles across an enormous alien vessel, more technologically advanced than their own, priorities change. The mystery deepens when the crew discovers the name of the vessel along the hull… written in English: VAULT. John Carpenter's Tales of Science Fiction: VAULT is the entire first story of John Carpenter’s monthly anthology series collected for the first time in Trade Paperback.

Marnie Young, an executive assistant in San Diego, is a sweet girl who wouldn’t hurt a fly. She’s also super lonely. But one night, without warning, Marnie has a violent seizure; co-workers recoil in horror as she writhes on the floor. Two days later, Marnie wakes up in a hospital room. As her vision comes into focus, she sees 17 doctors and nurses dead on the floor, blood splattered everywhere. Soon she discovers the shocking truth: Marnie has become lethal, and everyone who comes within three feet of her dies instantly! Which is really going to mess up her dating life (if she had one). Is there a cure? Will anyone ever get close enough to find out?

August 1977. Astronomers detect the so-called "WOW" signal: a burst of sound from deep space, near the constellation Sagittarius. The signal is believed to be extraterrestrial in origin. The next month, the astronomers send a reply. Boy, is that a huge mistake. Because more than four decades later, the alien intelligence has sent an invasion force of exactly one photon-and it's the kind of microscopic threat we could have never seen coming... In a desert town one hour north of L.A., Lieutenant Ron Pinkerton watches in horror as law-abiding citizens begin to lose their minds-and the laws of gravity. And then astrophysicist Marisa Stringfellow appears, telling Pinkerton the craziest thing he's ever heard: an alien entity is taking over minds one by one and using their hijacked bodies to create as much mayhem as (in)humanly possible. The tell-tale sign: a violent twitch that means: goodbye, nervous system. And now humanity's last chance lies in the hands of hardboiled cop and a heartbroken scientist... that is, until one of them begins to twitch.

Humanity has moved on after the Benson Disaster. In the decades following the loss of the space station along with almost its entire crew a new kind of life has been forged out even further into the Veil Nebula aboard a new type of habitat: The Barringer. But a connection back to Jake Dixon, the man who sacrificed everything to stop a nameless horror reaching Earth, now pulls back those few survivors and an all-new crew to face fresh monsters and familiar terror. From Earth to the cold vacuum of space light years away, from the fragile artificial environment of space stations to the frozen terror of a dead planet... brace yourself. Mankind believes it has tamed the organism freed from the dark years ago. Survivors believe they have seen the last of that horror and those that died stopping it. What they don't know is that they're in John Carpenter's universe and all bets are off. The tendrils are back! The heroics are bigger! The monsters are nastier! And the ride is far from over as the VORTEX reopens.

After the death of her mother, a young girl moves away to the country with her father. Angry and grief-stricken, Monica Bleue must find a new life away from her friends, her school and everything that was familiar to her. Though she's not speaking to her dad, she begins to find her way out of her heartache from the country serenity around them. But while out wandering the forests near their home, she comes face to face with a hidden horror that changes their lives forever. Monica and her father search for answers to her newly transformed state, and together they bond as she learns to harness the monstrous powers she now possesses. But there's a sinister evil lying low in their small country town... and the number of missing children is climbing. Monica may be the only one with the power to uncover the secret, but as she begins to unravel the mystery, finding a savage killer only puts her and her father deeper in danger.

At Tattersall Prison, a max-lock for the baddest of the bad, sleepless nights are the norm… until a fireball from the sky turns the night shift into a nightmare — trapping guards and cons on the inside, cops on the outside, and escapees in-between… all of them threatened by a hideous alien invader which needs nice, warm human bodies in which to incubate. From the outside, it looks like a replay of Waco, but from the inside, it’s more like Dante’s first draft of the Inferno. Psychotic Fraiser Bonner leads an army of convicts with a grudge against lead guard Wayne Jessup, whose crew is marooned inside with no means of exit. Black ops spook Elaine Farris tries to call the shots as captive guards get executed by Bonner. Farris dreads the moment she will have to call in her “expert,� Conrad Gant, whose life she destroyed six years earlier. Why? Because Gant knows about the alien interlopers, who use the human form as a chrysalis and shed the envelope of flesh to produce Earth-compatible conquerors… and Gant was hounded into silence by Elaine and her fixers. Now the clock is ticking and there’s an invasion to be stopped, as minute by minute, guards perish and alien numbers grow stronger, with the aim of spilling out of the prison cordon and into the rest of the world. It’s a hostage situation. It’s a battle between species. It’s Earth's most serious Standoff. The Standoff is the third entry in John Carpenter’s Tales of Science Fiction, created especially for Storm King’s John Carpenter and Sandy King by David J. Schow. All five issues are collected here to offer a chapter play that’s half suspense thriller, and half science fiction fever dream. Whose side would you take? It’s time to lock and load for The Standoff… and watch out for those nasty, flying alien bugs every step of the way.