An Alien’s Guide to Conquering the Earth

It’s a pseudo-nonfiction, ‘how-to’ military handbook for aliens intending to conquer the Earth. It both looks at how all the elements are handled in SF, and satirizes them, and then brings real-world science, history, and military sciences to show how it should be done.

It goes without saying that any military campaign must be planned in ways depending upon some basic factors: The logistics of where your enemy is in relation to your own forces, environmental factors, and, most importantly, ‘why’ you’re fighting this campaign. This book intends to take these basic factors, and apply them to the purpose of conquering the planet known to the natives as Earth.

“My name is John Doe. I’ve been dead for ten years.”

I have no heartbeat, no breath, no smell, just cold, clammy flesh animated by something I don’t understand. So I sell my dead flesh to the highest bidder. If the price is right, I’ll kill for you, steal for you, or save your life for you. There’s no mystery you can’t hire me to solve… apart from this one.

The bent copper torn apart in his flat by something not quite human. The hidden rooms underneath the Tower of London. The hollow-eyed boxer, Morse, and strange, strange Mr Smith with his head full of the future. And the secret they found. The secret of who I am. A secret so big and black and terrible that it changed everything we thought we knew about existence. And now I’m the only person who can stop the end of all life on this planet…

…I, Zombie!

The Cthulhu Mythos Bundle at DriveThruFiction.com includes 9 eBooks, 1 Audiobook, and 1 Soundtrack with stories from Dennis Detwiller, Kenneth Hite, Greg Stolze, Robin D. Laws, Brian LeTendre, and more. As well as classic tales from H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and others who defined the genre.

The Bundle saves you about $22 off the regular price of these digital goodies (or 40%) and will only be available for a limited time at DriveThruFiction.com.

To coincide with the 200th anniversary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe, this anthology celebrates the depth and diversity of one of the most important figures in literature. Compiled by multi-award winning editor, Ellen Datlow, it presents some of the foremost talents of the genre, who have come together to reimagine tales inspired by Poe.

Sharyn McCrumb, Lucius Shepard, Pat Cadigan, M. Rickert, and more, have lent their craft to this anthology, retelling such classics as “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Masque of the Red Death,” exploring the very fringes of the genre.

Don’t embrace the darkness. Fear it.

The Gothic is the most enduring literary tradition in history, but in recent years friendly ghosts and vegetarian vampires threaten its foundations. The New Gothic is a collection of short stories which revisits the core archetypes of the Gothic – the rambling, secret-filled building, the stranger seeking answers, the black-hearted tyrant – and reminds us not to embrace, but to fear the darkness. A dozen tales of terror fill this anthology including an original, never-before-seen story from the godfather of modern horror, Ramsey Campbell.

Flames Rising is pleased to present a selection of excerpts from this collection.

It’s sold more than 150,000 copies worldwide since 2009 and spawned its own genre of ‘Godpunk’; now the best-selling Pantheon series draws to a close with James Lovegrove’s Age of Shiva!

The latest stand-alone title in this action-packed military SF series brings you a world where the multitude of Hindu gods hold sway and a simple comic book artist finds himself trapped in the middle! Zachary Bramwell, better known as the comics artist Zak Zap, is pushing forty and wondering why his life isn’t as exciting as the lives of the superheroes he draws. Then he’s shanghaied by black-suited goons and flown to Mount Meru, a vast complex built atop an island in the Maldives. There, Zak meets a trio of billionaire businessmen who put him to work designing costumes for a team of godlike super-powered beings based on the ten avatars of Vishnu from Hindu mythology. The Ten Avatars battle demons and aliens and seem to be the saviours of a world teetering on collapse. But their presence is itself a harbinger of apocalypse. The Vedic “fourth age” of civilisation, Kali Yuga, is coming to an end, and Zak has a ringside seat for the final, all-out war that threatens the destruction of Earth.

Don’t embrace the darkness. Fear it.

The Gothic is the most enduring literary tradition in history, but in recent years friendly ghosts and vegetarian vampires threaten its foundations.

The New Gothic is a collection of short stories which revisits the core archetypes of the Gothic – the rambling, secret-filled building, the stranger seeking answers, the black-hearted tyrant – and reminds us not to embrace, but to fear the darkness.

A dozen tales of terror fill this anthology including an original, never-before-seen story from the godfather of modern horror, Ramsey Campbell.

Windows into the fantastic, from crypts to cobras, swords to submarines, rubies to railroads, heaven to hell and places stranger still. Heroes, horrors, and hijinks–both original to this collection and reprinted from a variety of sources–from the mind of Ari Marmell, author of The Conqueror’s Shadow, The Goblin Corps, Darksiders: the Abomination Vault, the Widdershins Adventures series, and more.

In Strange New Words, let Ari Marmell guide you through over a dozen windows into the fantastic.

In the land of Eranon, the Reach is a desolate place where people journey to forget who they are. Now, a menace rises from this wasteland, and he is hunting for someone. To keep the madman and his chaos behind the Reach, four adventurers with haunted pasts must rise to the challenge. But how can failed heroes bring hope to others when they doubt themselves?

Originally published in 2006 as a tie-in novel to the Chronicles of Ramlar role playing game, Into the Reach is now re-released in a newly edited e-book edition.

Flames Rising is pleased to present the first chapter of this new edition by Alana Abbott.

There is no yellow brick road here. No emerald city. No lollipop guild. This is the Australis Penal Colony, a continent sized prison referred to the world over as the Outcast Zone. Built to contain the world’s most dangerous criminals, OZ ended up the dumping ground for everything polite society deemed undesirable.

From inside this place a garbled message proves Dorothy’s father is still alive, trapped in a prison with only one way in and no way out. Into this place 17-year-old Dorothy must go if she wants to find her father and keep the promise she made to her dying mother.

DriveThruFiction.com to Offer Charity eBook Bundle for its Read and Feed America Drive

DriveThruFiction.com has partnered with over 30 publishers to offer a $20 charity bundle of eBooks. Proceeds of the Read and Feed America charity bundle, which has a retail value of over $150, will be donated to the nationally-recognized Feeding America organization.

“I’m happy that we are able to partner with some great publishers like Margaret Weis Productions, Apex Book Company, and Renegade Arts, just to name a few.” Matt M McElroy, DriveThruFiction’s Director of Marketing said. “Not only will readers get a great deal on some excellent fiction, they’ll be contributing to a very worthy cause while they scoop up this great deal.”

Since June 2011, DriveThruFiction.com has offered customers the chance to make a $5 direct donation to Feeding America. This new $20 DriveThruFiction Charity Bundle offers participating publishers an opportunity to provide customers with an excellent selection of eBooks and raise money for this well-respected charity.

Welcome to Glitter & Mayhem, the most glamorous party in the multiverse.

Step behind the velvet rope of these fabulous Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror tales of roller rinks, nightclubs, glam aliens, party monsters, drugs, sex, glitter, and debauchery.

Dance through nightclubs, roller derby with cryptids and aliens, be seduced by otherworldly creatures, and ingest cocktails that will alter your existence forever.

Your hosts are the Hugo Award-winning editors John Klima (Electric Velocipede) and Lynne M. Thomas (Apex Magazine), and the Hugo-nominated editor Michael Damian Thomas (Apex Magazine).

We are like you. We live in your cities, we laugh at your jokes, we share your good times and your bad ones. We meet you in clubs and back alleys, at glamorous parties and dive bars. We need you, to sate our endless hunger. We are your Kindred.

They are the smoke and the darkness, things that could have been you or us, creatures of hunger that humanity stole the night from. They are the Strix.

This anthology chronicles our struggle, and unveils the schemes and atrocities of Kindred and Strix alike.

The Strix Chronicle Anthology is available now in eBook formats at DriveThruFiction.com!

Pulse-pounding action meets cosmic horror in this exciting collection from the rising stars of the New Cthulhuiana.

Steel your nerves, reach into your weapons locker, and tie tight your running shoes as humanity takes up arms against the monsters and gods of H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. Grab your pistols, your knives, your gearpunk grenades. Confront deep ones, mi-go, and flying polyps. Fight in the past, present and future, from the birth of the shotgun to the end of the world. Escape by car, carriage, and hot air balloon. Above all, remember to count your bullets…you may need the last one for yourself.

Shotgun v. Cthulhu is now available in multiple eBook formats at DriveThruFiction.com!

THERE HAVE BEEN EIGHT PREVIOUS WORLDS.

Each world stretched across vast millennia of time. Each played host to a race whose civilizations rose to supremacy but eventually died or scattered, disappeared or transcended. During the time that each world flourished, those that ruled it spoke to the stars, reengineered their physical bodies, and mastered form and essence, all in their own unique ways.

Each left behind remnants.

The people of the new world—the Ninth World—sometimes call these remnants magic, and who are we to say they’re wrong? But most give a unique name to the legacies of the nigh-unimaginable past. They call them…

Tales from the Ninth World is available now in multiple eBook formats at DriveThruFiction.com!

Ex-adventurer Max Gibson just made the biggest mistake of his life, and all of Dragon City is going to pay for it. Because of him, there’s nothing to stop the Ruler of the Dead from renewing her centuries-old war on the city Max and thousands of other souls call home. He would volunteer to be at the vanguard of those brave soldiers standing strong against her horde — if he hadn’t been tossed into the Garrett, the most impregnable prison on the planet, instead.

The Imperial Guard would have executed him for his crimes on the spot if the heir to empire — a young dragonet still wet behind his wings — hadn’t imprinted himself on Max at the moment he hatched. Separated from his scaly ward and anyone who might call him friend, there’s little Max can do but watch the city’s defenses crumble before the Ruler of the Dead’s relentless zombie army.

The End Times have come to Dragon City, and if Max doesn’t find a way out of his cell soon, he’s going to be the last person alive to see it.

End Times in Dragon City is available now in eBook and Print formats at DriveThruFiction.com!

Nearly two decades have passed since the fall of the United States. And the rise of the church to fill the void. Nearly twenty years since Ian Sumner lost his father. And the dead took to the streets to dine on the living. Now Ian and a lost band of survivors are trapped in the wilderness, miles from safety. Pursued by madmen and monsters, they unravel the secrets of the plague…and walk the line of heresy. Now Ian and this troop need to do more than just survive. More than ever, they must learn to live.

Dead Things has been called “an amalgam of Clerks and everything Crichton and Zombieland.”

Dead Things is available now in PDF format at DriveThruFiction.com!

Hard Times Have Come to Dragon City

Retired adventurer Max Gibson has seen better times. Ever since he and his treasure-hunting friends struck it big and called it quits a decade back, it seems like things have slid downhill.

It’s hard enough to scrape by in a sprawling mountain city in which elves and dwarves live higher than humans in every way. It’s worse at night, when the groans of the zombies laying an eternal siege to the city provide a ceaseless reminder that the Dragon Emperor himself is the only thing that keeps the hordes of hungry dead from storming the walls.

Hard Times in Dragon City is available now in eBook and Print formats at DriveThruFiction.com!

Pinnacle Entertainment has expanded the Deadlands Noir setting with two new fiction eBooks, Tenement Men by Shane Hensley and Blood & Roses by John Goff, both are available now at DriveThruFiction.com.

Hensley also has a new thriller tale that is not related to the Deadlands setting, called Texter, available in eBook formats.

Book three of the internationally bestselling urban fantasy series by the author of EYES TO SEE and BY THE BLOOD OF HEROES.

When Knight Commander Cade Williams discovers that his wife, Gabrielle, is not truly dead, but held in some kind of arcane stasis between the lands of the living and the lands of the dead, he vows that nothing will stop him from freeing her soul from the prison surrounding her.

But his vow is tested right from the start when an old friend calls on him to help protect the city of Boston from the ancient scourge that threatens to destroy it, leaving Cade with a heart-breaking choice: Do his duty and save the innocent lives he has sworn to protect or forsake them all in order to rescue the one for whom he would brave the walls of hell itself?

A Tear in the Sky is available now in eBook formats at DriveThruFiction.com!