The skeletons in the closet have nothing on the one in your backyard. Freshly divorced and grieving the death of her father, Josie Lauer has caged herself inside her home. To cope with her losses, Josie follows a strict daily routine of work, playing with her dog, Po, and trying to remember to eat a decent meal--and ending each night by drinking copious amounts of vodka. In other words, she is not coping at all. Everything changes when Josie wakes to find a small shrub has sprouted in her otherwise dirt backyard the morning after yet another bender. Within hours, the vine-like plant is running amok--and it's brought company. The appearance of the unwieldly growth has also heralded the arrival of a busybody new neighbor who insists on thrusting herself into Josie's life. The neighbor Josie can deal with. The talking skeleton called Skelly that has perched itself in Josie's backyard on a throne made of vines, however, is an entirely different matter. As the strangely sentient plant continues to grow and twist its tendrils inside Josie's suddenly complicated life, Josie begins to realize her new neighbor knows a lot more about the vines and her bizarre new visitor than she initially lets on. There's a reason Skelly has chosen to appear in Josie's suddenly-blooming backyard and insists on pulling her out of her carefully kept self-isolation. All Josie has to do is figure out what that reason is--and she has only a few days to do it, or else she might find herself on the wrong side of catastrophe. LITTLE BIRD is a story about found family, no matter how bizarre.

It's 2025. Sisters, Doris and Thea, exist worlds apart, despite living within a few miles of one another. Doris with her regular home and regular husband and regular job, and Thea slinking along the edges of society, solitary and invisible. When a storm of biblical proportions strikes, the wayward sisters are begrudgingly forced together as the rain waters rise, each attempting to survive both the flood and each other. One year later, Thea--now calling herself Sestra--floats throughout a ravaged, flood soaked world. Her former life drowned beneath metric tons of water, she and her only companion, Robert, battle starvation, heatstroke, and the monstrous creatures called Posies that appeared alongside the flood. When they run across what they assume to be an abandoned tugboat, their journey takes a new turn, and the truth about the flood and the monsters seems more intricately linked to Thea's past then she may realize.

Eight chilling tales to read under the Cold Moon. A tinker's son acquires a cursed soul. A dying woman is haunted by her own reflection. An uninvited presence haunts a Christmas seance. A festive holiday turns macabre. Despite the twinkling lights and steaming cocoa, the end of the year is the darkest time of the year-a season of short days, long nights, and cold skies. In this special anniversary anthology, the authors of Black Spot Books mix Ye Olde Yuletide hauntings with modern-day holiday horrors to weave a chilling new collection of dark winter tales. From frozen forests stalked by eerie Christmas ghosts to rotting gifts of winter malice, the spirits of Christmas come home for the holidays in the Dead of Winter.