J. B. Rockwell

"Crimson King is a darkly comical story of a young boy's personal apocowlypse at his grandparent's farm. JB Rockwell milks this wonderfully strange tale of udder catastrophe for all its worth " - Michael Patrick Hicks, author of the Salem Hawley Series and Broken Shells "Echoes of Stephen King here, as a finely drawn cast of ordinary folks encounter the ominous, unstoppable menace of a gruesome red beast. Tension-filled and terrifying." - Colin Sinclair, author of Midnight in the Garden Centre of Good and Evil "...glorious in its batshitness..." - David Moore, SFF Editor, Rebellion Publishing Banished to his grandparent's farm for the summer, Casey soon runs afoul of the Bimiangus: a government experiment gone wrong turned bloodthirsty, moordurous bull.Casey knew there was something wrong with the Bimiangus the moment he laid eyes on it. He just didn't know how wrong until the cows started disappearing, and the farmer who owned it turned up dead. Now the bull with the dodgy pedigree-rumored to be the result of government experimentation, which explains the size of it, the stink of it, the glowing, toxic green eyes-stands accused of murder. But it's got one more target before it goes down: Casey-a ten-year-old boy who never wanted to be on this farm in the first place.

After twenty years spent fighting the alien Kekktekians on the Halgren Defense Coalition's behalf, Captain Thomas Faraday finds himself reassigned to the AI warship Hadrian, and playing watchdog over the terraforming project on Armistice. A quiet, boring job he never wanted, but with a cease-fire in place, his skills aren't really needed. And given his recent trip-up with military secrets, he's lucky to still have a career. What he doesn't know is the tranquility around Armistice won't last long-all it takes is a single ping to obliterate fifty years of peace. That first rogue contact trips Armistice's long range sensors and quickly multiplies into a cascade of failures chewing hungrily through the planetary defense grid. Soon after, a fleet of vessels appear that squawk out Halgren credentials but refuse to respond to any of Hadrian's hails. And something else, something ghostly that lurks in their shadows, cloaking itself in the ships' electronic chatter. Something that feels Kekktekian to Faraday's battle-trained mind, even though it doesn't fit any of their patterns. With an unknown adversary on its way in, Faraday and his crew gear up to defend Armistice. Combat's nothing new, Faraday's built an entire career around war, but this time it's one ship against many. With no help on the way and no chance of reinforcements in sight. And there's more than just a planet at stake here: what's out there threatens a hard-won and still tenuous accord that, if broken, will reignite a centuries-old feud.