A husband hell-bent on revenge hunts a Wereshark...A Russian mail order bride with a fishy secret...Crabs with a collective consciousness...A vampire who transforms into a Candiru...Zombie piranha...Bait that will have you crawling out of your skin and more. Drawing on horror, humor with a helping of dark fantasy and a touch of deviance, these 19 contemporary stories pay homage to the monsters that lurk in the murky waters of our imaginations. If you thought it was safe to go back in the water...Think Again

Vietnam 1970. A green hell where death waits behind every tree, in every pooling shadow, and in every mist-haunted hollow. Boobytraps and bullets, landmines and rockets. Mike McKinney went to write about the war, about the terror and frustrations, soldiers and people and a landscape forever altered by the conflict...but he ran across something even worse: a primeval horror straight out of the darkest Vietnamese folklore. A monstrosity that stalks human heads among the twisted, jungled hills of the Central Highlands. Now it is hunting him. And nothing can stop it.

Nearly 200 years ago they turned Cobton into a graveyard. They rose from the darkness and drained it dry, feeding off its citizens, one by one by one, their terrible thirst sparing no one. The village was shunned as cursed ground, its tall, narrow houses fell to decay. The Resurrection. Now the haunted ruins of Cobton have been rebuilt as a tourist trap. A TV crew descends on it one cold winter night and is trapped there by a howling blizzard that shuts them off from the world. And in the subterranean, charnel darkness below...the evil is reawakening, ancient hungers renewed. The Colony is rising. Their thirst is unspeakable. And for the TV crew, it's Hell on Earth.

William Zero, a.k.a. Dr. Blood-and-Bones. One of the most infamous butchers in U.S. history, a serial killer who skinned and dissected his victims. He killed a dozen people and then vanished without a trace. Now his deranged son, Eddy, is searching for him. He believes his father escaped into an alternate reality and the only way to follow him is by recreating his crimes and opening the doorway to Hell. And as Eddy hunts his father, he is hunted. Dr. Lisa Lochmere, a psychiatrist is hot on his trail, motivated by sexual obsessions she can't even begin to understand. When she was a teenager she had an affair with an older man that turned into brutal abuse. Years later, she discovered her lover was none other than William Zero. And ever since, despite herself, she has had a certain sexual compulsion concerning him. A compulsion that only grew when Eddy was placed under her care at an asylum, only to be released by her superiors prematurely. Now she has tracked Eddy to San Francisco-the scene of his father's crimes. She intends to find him, telling herself it's for his own good and a book she wants to write, but in reality the reasons are much more personal. She has enlisted the help of James Fenn, a homicide detective, who wants to help her, but in reality has fallen in love with her, a woman who can know no love, only obsession. As Eddy kills and kills again and Fenn falls deeper in love with her, Lisa is drawn to the house where Zero dispatched his victims, believing it to be the place where Eddy is most likely to go. But it isn't Eddy she finds there, but something far worse. Nothing-and no one-is what they seem in the House of Skin.