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Paha Sapa, 'Black Hills', is an American Indian shaman who, as a young boy at the Battle of Little Bighorn, believes that he has taken the ghost of the dying General Custer into his body.

Sixty years later, while working as a dynamiter on Mount Rushmore, Paha Sapa plots to blow up the monument. Meanwhile, Custer finds himself trapped in a strange, dark place and begins to write sensuous, heartbreaking missives to his beloved wife.

Thus begins an intricate, visionary story that sweeps across some of the most tumultuous and violent periods of American history, from the old West to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and into our own time and beyond.

Three elderly friends, who possess supernatural powers and who feed off of emotions generated during the murders they orchestrate, meet every year to discuss their game--an ongoing competition of mass murder and vampirism.

This novelette originally appeared in two installments in Omni, September and October 1983. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: First Annual Collection (1984), edited by Gardner Dozois, The Third Omni Book of Science Fiction (1985), edited by Ellen Datlow, Blood Is Not Enough: 17 Stories of Vampirism (1989), edited by Ellen Datlow, and A Taste for Blood (1992), edited by Martin H. Greenberg. The story is included in the collection Prayers to Broken Stones (1991). It was expanded to the full novel Carrion Comfort in 1989.

WFA nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Playboy, June 1993. The story can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Seventh Annual Collection (1994), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling.

An expanded version of the novelette appeared as Dying in Bangkok in the collection Lovedeath (1993). Datlow and Windling chose to reprint the abridged version in their annual, but used the retitled name.

On June 9, 1865, while traveling by train to London with his secret mistress, 53-year-old Charles Dickens--at the height of his powers and popularity, the most famous and successful novelist in the world and perhaps in the history of the world--hurtled into a disaster that changed his life forever.

Did Dickens begin living a dark double life after the accident? Were his nightly forays into the worst slums of London and his deepening obsession with corpses, crypts, murder, opium dens, the use of lime pits to dissolve bodies, and a hidden subterranean London mere research... or something more terrifying?

Just as he did in The Terror, Dan Simmons draws impeccably from history to create a gloriously engaging and terrifying narrative. Based on the historical details of Charles Dickens's life and narrated by Wilkie Collins (Dickens's friend, frequent collaborator, and Salieri-style secret rival), DROOD explores the still-unsolved mysteries of the famous author's last years and may provide the key to Dickens's final, unfinished work: The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Chilling, haunting, and utterly original, DROOD is Dan Simmons at his powerful best.

By overdeveloping Mauna Pele, a resort on the Kona Coast of Hawaii, billionaire Byron Trumbo has unwittingly reopened a centuries-old battle between Pele, goddess of volcanoes, and her immortal enemies. Giants are being spotted, guests turn up dead and dismembered, volcanoes erupt and send lava flowing close to the resort, and Byron must face the wrath of his enemies.

This novelette originally appeared in the collection Lovedeath (1993). It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eleventh Annual Collection (1994).

The United States is near total collapse. But 87% of the population doesn't care: they're addicted to flashback, a drug that allows its users to re-experience the best moments of their lives. After ex-detective Nick Bottom's wife died in a car accident, he went under the flash to be with her; he's lost his job, his teenage son, and his livelihood as a result.

Nick may be a lost soul but he's still a good cop, so he is hired to investigate the murder of a top governmental advisor's son. This flashback-addict becomes the one man who may be able to change the course of an entire nation turning away from the future to live in the past.

A provocative novel set in a future that seems scarily possible, FLASHBACK proves why Dan Simmons is one of our most exciting and versatile writers.

This novella originally appeared in the anthology High Fantastic: Colorado's Fantasy, Dark Fantasy, and Science Fiction (1995), edited by Steve Rasnic Tem, and was reprinted in Omni Online, September 1995. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirteenth Annual Collection (1996), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in Worlds Enough and Time (2002).

In the tradition of Michele Slung's I Shudder at Your Touch, the ard-winning author of Children of the Night explores the fascinating relationship between eroticism and horror in an original collection of psycho-sexual themes, some touched by the supernatural.

Table of Contents:

• Foreword - essay
• Entropy's Bed at Midnight - (1990) - novelette
• Dying in Bangkok - novelette
• Sleeping with Teeth Women - novella
• Flashback - novelette
• The Great Lover - novella
• Notes: About the Real Poets - essay

This short story originally appeared in Nature, September 14, 2000. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 6 (2001), edited by David G. Hartwell.

Read the full story for free at Nature.

WFA nominated short story. It originally appeared in Night Visions 5 (1988), edited by Douglas E. Winter. The story is included in the collection Prayers to Broken Stones (1991).

A relentlessly paced and absorbing tale set in the near future about three mountain climbers who must scale the face of K2 with some very odd company.

This novelette originally appereared in the anthology Redshift: Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction (2001), edited by Al Sarrantonio. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Nineteenth Annual Collection (2002), edtied by Gardner Dozois, and Science Fiction: The Best of 2001, edited by Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber. The story is included in the collection Worlds Enough and Time (2002).

Richard Baedecker thinks his greatest challenge was walking on the moon, but then he meets a mysterious woman who shows him his past. Join Baedecker as he comes to grips with the son and wife he lost owing to his passion for space exploration, his forgotten childhood, and the loss he experienced during the deadly flight of the Challenger. The most difficult exploration of his life is not the cold, rocky crevices of the moon, but the warm interior of his heart. Brilliant and beautifully written, Phases of Gravity is a masterpiece about love and loss that transports readers far beyond the confines of space and time.

A woman returns from the dead with disastrous results for the family who loves her.... An old-fashioned barbershop is the site of a medieval ritual of bloody terror.... During a post-apocalyptic Christmas celebration, a messenger from the South brings tidings of great horror.... From a ghostly Civil War battlefield to a combat theme park in Vietnam, from the omnipotent brain of an autistic boy to a shocking story of psychic vampires, journey into a world of fear and mystery, a chilling twilight zone of the mind.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Harlan Ellison
• The River Styx Runs Upstream - (1982) - short story
• Eyes I Dare Not Meet in Dreams - (1982) - novelette
• Vanni Fucci Is Alive and Well and Living in Hell - (1988) - short story
• Vexed to Nightmare by a Rocking Cradle - (1985) - short story
• Remembering Siri - (1983) - novelette
• Metastasis - (1988) - short story
• The Offering - (1987) - novelette
• E-Ticket to 'Namland - (1987) - novelette
• Iverson's Pits - (1988) - novella
• Shave and a Haircut, Two Bites - (1989) - short story
• The Death of the Centaur - (1990) - novelette
• Two Minutes Forty-Five Seconds - (1988) - short story
• Carrion Comfort - (1983) - novelette

Think you know true fear? You don't.

Think you've read the most chilling book? Not even close.

Think you can't be shocked? Good luck!

Maybe you're ready for the most truly frightening reading experience of your life, the World Fantasy Award-winning novel that's been terrifying readers for over a decade.

Song of Kali.

The year is 1924 and the race to summit the world's highest mountain has been brought to a terrified pause by the shocking disappearance of George Mallory and Sandy Irvine, high on the shoulder of Mt. Everest. By the following year, three climbers - a British poet and veteran of the Great War, a young French Chamonix guide, and an idealistic young American - find a way to take their shot at the top. They arrange funding from the grieving Lady Bromley, whose son also disappeared on Mt. Everest in 1924. Young Bromley must be dead, but his mother refuses to believe it and pays the trio to bring him home.

Deep in Tibet and high on Everest, the three climbers - joined by the missing boy's female cousin - find themselves being pursued through the night by someone... or something. This nightmare becomes a matter of life and death at 28,000 feet - but what is pursuing them? And what is the truth behind the 1924 disappearances on Everest? As they fight their way to the top of the world, the friends uncover a secret far more abominable than any mythical creature could ever be. A pulse-pounding story of adventure and suspense, The Abominable is Dan Simmons at his spine-chilling best.

In 1893, Sherlock Holmes and Henry James come to America together to solve the mystery of the 1885 death of Clover Adams, wife of the esteemed historian Henry Adams--member of the Adams family that has given the United States two Presidents. Clover's suicide appears to be more than it at first seemed; the suspected foul play may involve matters of national importance.

Holmes is currently on his Great Hiatus--his three-year absence after Reichenbach Falls during which time the people of London believe him to be deceased. Holmes has faked his own death because, through his powers of ratiocination, the great detective has come to the conclusion that he is a fictional character.

This leads to serious complications for James--for if his esteemed fellow investigator is merely a work of fiction, what does that make him? And what can the master storyteller do to fight against the sinister power -- possibly named Moriarty -- that may or may not be controlling them from the shadows?

Jeremy Bremen has a secret. All his life he's been cursed with the ability to read minds. He knows the secret thoughts, fears, and desires of others as if they were his own. For years, his wife, Gail, has served as a shield between Jeremy and the burden of this terrible knowledge. But Gail is dying, her mind ebbing slowly away, leaving him vulnerable to the chaotic flood of thought that threatens to sweep away his sanity.

Now Jeremy is on the run--from his mind, from his past, from himself--hoping to find peace in isolation. Instead he witnesses an act of brutality that propels him on a treacherous trek across a dark and dangerous America. From a fantasy theme park to the lair of a killer to a sterile hospital room in St. Louis, he follows a voice that is calling him to witness the stunning mystery at the heart of mortality.

Hope of rescue is dwindling for sailors aboard two ships trapped in the Arctic on the ill-fated 1845 Sir John Franklin Expedition to find the North-West Passage. They have been locked in frozen waters for months. The climate is unbearably frigid, their food supply is spoiling, their fuel is diminishing, and the ice is slowly crushing both vessels and pulling them into the sea.

But the men of ships Erebus and Terror are fighting to survive more than just treacherous conditions... some ungodly monster of unimaginable size, strength, and intelligence is attacking them at random, leaving some bodies unrecognizable and taking others away into the icy night.

Ms. Geiss is the most dedicated fourth-grade teacher imaginable. She goes to extraordinary lengths to make sure her students are presented with every opportunity--showing them slides from her summer vacations during Geography, reading to them from the classics of children's literature after lunch, and providing them with the kinds of learning rewards that they will truly respond to--bite-sized nuggets of human flesh. Because Ms. Geiss' students are pint-sized zombies, and the main tool of her peculiar version of the teaching trade is her trusty Remington .30-06 rifle.

Ms. Geiss is firm but fair, and keeps a disciplined classroom. She has far more trouble from the adults shambling through what's left of town than she does from her students, though a well-bulldozed killing field and the gasoline-filled moat encircling the school usually keeps the worst of the undead marauders at bay. But even the hardest working educators let their guard down sometimes, and after the Tribulations, just one mistake can mean school's out forever.

Bestselling, acclaimed author Dan Simmons' story "This Year's Class Picture" is a zombie tale that could itself be described as best in class, honored by the Stoker, Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Awards.

An extraordinary artist with few rivals in his chosen arena, Dan Simmons possesses a restless talent that continually presses boundaries while tantalizing the mind and touching the soul. Now he offers us a superb quintet of novellas -- five dazzling masterworks of speculative fiction, including "Orphans of the Helix," his award-winning return to the Hyperion Universe -- that demonstrates the unique mastery, breathtaking invention, and flawless craftsmanship of one of contemporary fiction's true greats.

• Human colonists seeking something other than godhood encounter their long-lost "cousins"...and an ancient scourge.
• A devastated man in suicide's embrace is caught up in a bizarre cat-and-mouse game with a young woman possessing a world-ending power.
• The distant descendants of a once-oppressed people learn a chilling lesson about the persistence of the past.
• A terrifying ascent up the frigid, snow-swept slopes of K2 shatters preconceptions and reveals the true natures of four climbers, one of whom is not human.
• At the intersection of a grand past and a threadbare present, an aging American in Russia confronts his own mortality as he glimpses a wondrous future.

In the summer of 1960 in Elm Haven, Illinois, a sinister being is stalking the town's children, and when a long-silent bell peals in the middle of the night, the townfolk know it marks the end of innocence.

Does a Romanian infant's blood hold the key to a cure for AIDS? The Hugo Award-winning author of Summer of Night brings an evil legacy to life in the ultimate vampire novel.

Billionaire Byron Trumbo wants to sell his posh Hawaiian resort to a Japanese investor but must make it appear prosperous while the deal is being struck. Due to the high prices, guests have been scarce. Unfortunately, they are becoming even scarcer as someone or something is kidnapping and murdering them. Drawn by the sketchy news accounts, Eleanor Perry has come to Mauna Pele on a sort of pilgrimage, using her aunt Kidder's 1866 travel diary as a guidebook. The events Kidder chronicled-tales of demons conjured up to rid the island of missionaries-seem to parallel the current events. As volcanoes erupt and vengeful gods and demons become more violent, Eleanor and her fellow guest, the indomitable Cordie Stumpf, attempt to get to the bottom of things.

Dale Stewart's life has become a shadow of what it once was. A respected college professor and successful novelist, he sabotaged his career and his marriage with an obsessive love affair that ended badly.

With darkness closing in on him, Dale decides to return to his boyhood home in Illinois. Drawn by a recurring nightmare that has plagued him since his youth -- and a troubling certainty that something is waiting for him there -- he hopes to exorcise his demons.

In the last hours of Halloween, he reaches the outskirts of the dying town of Elm Haven. There, he moves into the abandoned farmhouse that was once the home of his closest boyhood friend, the strange and brilliant Duane McBride, who lost his young life in a grisly "accident" back in the terrible summer of 1960. Hoping to find peace in isolation, he settles in for the long, harsh winter.

But Dale is not alone. Soon after he arrives, cryptic messages begin appearing mysteriously on his computer screen while he struggles to work on his novel. He sees black dogs roaming the grounds. And an old enemy has reemerged, a bully who seems as determined to persecute Dale as he was in childhood.

On the world called Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, there waits the creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all. On the eve of Armageddon, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion seeking the answers to the unsolved riddles of their lives. Each carries a desperate hope--and a terrible secret. And one may hold the fate of humanity in his hands.

In the stunning continuation of the epic adventure begun in Hyperion, Simmons returns us to a far future resplendent with drama and invention. On the world of Hyperion, the mysterious Time Tombs are opening. And the secrets they contain mean that nothing--nothing anywhere in the universe--will ever be the same.

Two hundred and seventy-four years after the fall of the WorldWeb in Fall of Hyperion, Raoul Endymion is sent on a quest. Retrieving Aenea from the Sphinx before the Church troops reach her is only the beginning. With help from a blue-skinned android named A. Bettik, Raoul and Aenea travel the river Tethys, pursued by Father Captain Frederico DeSoya, an influential warrior-priest and his troops. The shrike continues to make enigmatic appearances, and while many questions were raised in Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion, still more are raised here. Raoul's quest will continue.

In The Rise of Endymion, Dan Simmons brings to a triumphant conclusion one of the most celebrated, compelling, and dramatic science fiction sagas of our time. Brilliant, provocative, unfailingly inventive, the odyssey began with the Hugo Award-winning Hyperion, continued through the critically acclaimed The Fall of Hyperion and Endymion, and now ascends to its greatest heights yet....

The final chapter of this magnificent saga begins with two momentous events: the death and resurrection of Pope Julius XV and the coming-of-age of the new messiah. Her name is Aenea and she is the only person who can counter the pope and his plan to unleash the Pax Fleet, the Church's military wing, on a final genocidal Crusade to gain total dominion over the universe. The Church is allied with the infamous AI Core, which has offered immortality to humankind--or at least to those faithful who pledge total obedience to the Church--but at what terrible price? The Core has its own dark motives and secrets, and only Aenea knows what they are.

Aenea, too, has an ally. Her protector, Raul Endymion, onetime shepherd and convicted murderer, finds her in exile undergoing a strange apprenticeship on Old Earth. Here she has gained access to an information matrix created by the Others--the same mysterious Others who moved Old Earth to save it from the Core. But who are these Others? What has Aenea learned from them? And why has Old Earth been turned into a stage upon which cybrids from the past--from John Keats to Frank Lloyd Wright--repeat historical dramas of human genius for purposes known only to the Others?

The answers to these questions must wait. Together with the android A. Bettik, Endymion and his beloved Aenea embark on a final mission to find and comprehend the underlying fabric of the universe. The surprising nature of this medium and Aenea's ability to instruct her growing army of disciples in its discovery and use could provide the one weapon powerful enough to thwart their enemies while liberating humanity. Meanwhile, the enigmatic Shrike--monster, angel, killing machine--has followed them on their intergalactic sojourn and now stands ready to complete its own mission, revealing at last the long-held secret of its origin and purpose.

In The Rise of Endymion, Dan Simmons masterfully weaves together the complex strands of this extraordinary series. He answers all of the unsolved mysteries posed in the earlier volumes and brings the story full circle to the planet Hyperion, where it all began. A work of unparalleled power and vision, The Rise of Endymion is a masterpiece of the imagination by one of our most gifted writers.

From the towering heights of Olympos Mons on Mars, the mighty Zeus and his immortal family of gods, goddesses, and demigods look down upon a momentous battle, observing -- and often influencing -- the legendary exploits of Paris, Achilles, Hector, Odysseus, and the clashing armies of Greece and Troy.

Thomas Hockenberry, former twenty-first-century professor and Iliad scholar, watches as well. It is Hockenberry's duty to observe and report on the Trojan War's progress to the so-called deities who saw fit to return him from the dead. But the muse he serves has a new assignment for the wary scholic, one dictated by Aphrodite herself. With the help of fortieth-century technology, Hockenberry is to infiltrate Olympos, spy on its divine inhabitants ... and ultimately destroy Aphrodite's sister and rival, the goddess Pallas Athena.

On an Earth profoundly changed since the departure of the Post-Humans centuries earlier, the great events on the bloody plains of Ilium serve as mere entertainment. Its scenes of unrivaled heroics and unequaled carnage add excitement to human lives devoid of courage, strife, labor, and purpose. But this eloi-like existence is not enough for Harman, a man in the last year of his last Twenty. That rarest of post-postmodern men -- an "adventurer" -- he intends to explore far beyond the boundaries of his world before his allotted time expires, in search of a lost past, a devastating truth, and an escape from his own inevitable "final fax." Meanwhile, from the radiation-swept reaches of Jovian space, four sentient machines race to investigate -- and, perhaps, terminate -- the potentially catastrophic emissions of unexplained quantum-flux emanating from a mountaintop miles above the terraformed surface of Mars ...

The first book in a remarkable two-part epic to be concluded in the upcoming Olympos, Dan Simmons's Ilium is a breathtaking adventure, enormous in scope and imagination, sweeping across time and space to connect three seemingly disparate stories in fresh, thrilling, and totally unexpected ways. A truly masterful work of speculative fiction, it is quite possibly Simmons's finest achievement to date in an already storied literary career.

Beneath the gaze of the gods, the mighty armies of Greece and Troy met in fierce and glorious combat, scrupulously following the text set forth in Homer's timeless narrative. But that was before one observer -- Twenty-first Century scholar Thomas Hockenberry -- stirred the bloody brew; before an enraged Achilles joined forces with his archenemy Hector; and before the fleet-footed mankiller turned his murderous wrath on Zeus, Hera, Athena, Aphrodite, Apollo, and the entire pantheon of divine manipulators.

Now, all bets are off.