Stephen Donald Huff

Near the turn of the first century, the Ninth Legion disappeared from frontier borderlands separating Romanized Britannia from the uncivilized lowlands of Caledonia. Between its first deployment there during Agricola's invasion in 84AD and the return of Emperor Hadrian in 122AD, all mention of the Ninth fades from memory. Although history speaks clearly of a massive uprising in the same region during 119AD, no authenticated record confirms the legion's military annihilation on a field of battle, and no evidence confirms its reassignment to any other region of the empire. Contemporary Rome, and all of history, seems to have simply forgotten the Ninth. Until now.Recent archeological discoveries clarify the legion's fate. As outlined in a unique letter penned two-thousand-years ago on a carefully preserved swatch of parchment, Legio IX's mysterious destiny is a tale of political intrigue, financial mismanagement, familial in-fighting, and social upheaval, all intermixed with the unyielding discipline required to keep a Roman legion safe in the field. For the first time since these events unfolded, the fully restored "Governor's Letter" identifies the men, women and children that collectively contrived the disaster. More informatively, the famed missive also clearly implicates its author as a central conspiratorial architect of the plot that resulted in the bloody revolt of 119AD and Legio IX's puzzling disappearance. Bold and thought-provoking, this account of the Ninth's intriguing doom rises from factual foundations constructed of moldering parchments, crumbling bones and toppled stones, all base materials of history's reconstruction.

Corporal Terrance "Tare" McGee, retired, was the prodigal princeling of his Texas trailer park until the United States Army decided to euthanize his former partner, a military working dog, also retired, named 'Perquisite' or, most affectionately, 'Perq'. Driven by un undeniable sense of honor, duty and loyalty, Tare successfully rescued Perq from certain doom amid the veterinary kennels of the local Army base, but reports of violent assault and stolen automobiles only end one way in Texas without regard to motive. Confronting their new status as fugitive outlaws, Tare and Perq pursue their only conceivable course of action when they load Tare's truck with snack foods, drugs and liquor. Collecting an endangered chimp named "Bobo" along the way, they flee into the vast, epic potential of an early Texas evening. This is the true-to-life story of the next forty-eight hours in the lives of a dog and his man and a chimp with a machinegun. Though it relates the bizarre sequence of events that would ultimately place a Squad Automatic Weapon into the hands of a drunken two-year-old primate, this tale cannot adequately rationalize anything else that happened. After all, the who-what-when-where-and-how of a thing are matters of records and databases and, as such, come easily. Alternately, the 'whys' of a thing are human constructs fashioned of secretive thoughts, perverse motivations and, oftentimes, deluded ideations - as to the nature of these concepts then, bystanders, witnesses and passersby can only guess. At the least, this lyrical American fable will ultimately provide one startling insight into the nature of the human condition... a monkey with a machinegun is not always an entirely undesirable happenstance.

Dire questions inevitably linger when someone disappears from a troubled marriage... from a troubled life... from the entire world. When Efren Sinclair's wife takes a permanent vacation from their comfortable existence, all eyes turn to him, accusatory and condemning. Everyone is certain he murdered her. Nobody believes the 'woman' calling his children each night before bedtime is Leah Sinclair. Instead, his family and friends suspect her husband has alibied himself with an industrial grade Live-Jack, an artificially intelligent system capable of passing the forensic Turing Test for Sentience.While they cannot charge him since they cannot produce a body, investigators will never believe Mrs. Sinclair is alive until she appears physically before the court, and this she has vowed never to do. Though she refuses to return home, the mysterious person communicating with her family via commlink appears, speaks and acts with exacting mimicry of Leah Sinclair, replete with all her quirks, memories and flaws. The performance is utterly convincing. After relentless proof-of-life interactions with his absent 'wife', even her husband begins to doubt his grasp on reality. More curiously still, his relationship with his beloved children eventually takes a disturbing turn for the fantastic. Perhaps we all should ask... Which is real? Which is Live-Jack?

If the trials of childhood form the adult, then Stanley Newberry is growing into a grotesquely misshapen lump of a thing. All the popular people tell him so. Since he first met his classmates in grade school, Fat Stanley has singly borne the brunt of their endless insults, taunts and abuses. Passing from eighth grade to their first year in high school, purple-nurples and Indian-burns have long since given way to chocolate-swirlies and blackened eyes, but Fat Stanley has grown wiser and warier, too.Bastard twins born of terror and torment, fear and cynicism render him increasingly aware of their malicious overtures. Each year, his tormentors must develop evermore elaborate pretexts to draw the fat kid out of his shell, but each summer also returns him to their academic fold, fatter, uglier and weirder than the season gone before. When eventual bouts of suburban boredom inevitably turn their heads, Fat Stanley will always be his classmates' most fascinating social obsession and their greatest sadistic challenge.This school year, his dedicated torturers have fabricated their most elaborate ruse to date. Epic in its scope and intended effects, Fat Stanley's detractors will relentlessly promote and prosecute their malign project through the course of the fall, and then long into winter. Each progressively humiliating and destructive prank will build to the next until the entire community ultimately reels from its bloody climax. Fat Stanley will not survive it and in the aftermath a guilty few will envy the dead.

On Friday of Easter weekend in Juglan, Texas, many strange events distract from the festivities. Telephone service is sporadic and failing. Fires burn out of control. Police services are nonexistent. The dead and the dying accumulate on the streets. Before the village's clocktower chimes midnight, many of its citizens will perish and the city itself will lie in flaming ruins.This is the terrible revenge of Nelson Sedgewick. For years preceding this heinous act he has brooded within the ramshackle ruins of his lifelong obsession, his self-styled "Animal Emporium and Family Fun Circus". An unlicensed roadside attraction presenting animal performances during a period of declining support for such displays, the Emporium is emblematic of the pathological disconnect between reality and Sedgewick's mad dreams. Deceived by the grandeur of his visions and his own misplaced self-confidence, the would-be ringmaster invested heavily in his enterprise before it inevitably failed, and now he blames the village for his ruination.Tonight, he will exact retribution with his army of demented circus animals, all of them recently starved, beaten and conditioned to crave human flesh. City parks will crawl with deadly serpents. Its waterways will team with ravenous reptiles. Its alleys will be the haunt of stealthy leopards, and roving packs of enraged hyenas will prowl its streets. Tonight, Nelson Sedgewick and his Animal Emporium will redefine 'family fun'.

Corporate lobotomies. Psychotically amorous semi-sentient bots. Endless corridors. Countless unlabeled doors, all viciously locked. A lethally dysfunctional social infrastructure rife with corruption, inefficiency, and crime. Spiraling homicide rates... Welcome to your corpulent, overpopulated future Here, everyone loves you, because everyone wants to screw you before they sell your living body to illegal pharmaceutical tumor-farms, which are also a popular method of suicide, because death-by-tumor is not as bad as many (though it is also worse than some). In this world, a much-hated dumbass-of-a-scientist long ago determined the universe would always expand faster than the pace of technological advancement. The result? Every human being on the planet knows nobody will ever, ever, ever (three evers) bust free of this crappy solar system. Combine this discouraging news with an ever-lengthening lifespan, and you get fifty-billion dysfunctional, bored-out-of-their-mind psychotics with nothing better to do than fixate on you as the object of their destruction. Good luck, and have a nice day

He is the worst of the worst; a perverted deviant and an elusive killer who presents himself as an old-fashioned country preacher. She is the distraught widow of a man who successfully embezzled a fortune. With her two young children, she lives amid the dilapidated ruins of a declining estate named Slate Gardens, where rumor insists three million dollars remains hidden. Beguiled by the preacher's psychotic manipulations, the widow takes him into her home as her second husband and a malign father to her vulnerable son and daughter. She longs for companionship and love. He craves only profit.A paroled convict and undetected serial killer murders a notorious embezzler in a prison shower, having confirmed the presence of a fortune hidden somewhere on the grounds of his victim's former home, Slate Gardens. Using all the guile of a handsome though psychopathic country parson, he will seduce and possess the man's lonely widow and then overpower her children in an obscene quest for stolen wealth.

Mad pathos fetish broods while the black brow is creased to contemplate all manner of undoing, lays a thumb to the blade beneath a leering, sanguine eye and yearns unspeakably for a final message from God. Gross pathos fetish seethes to feed upon frustrations and terrors until the mind of a single lunatic is filled with dreams of dark endeavors that become a horror of blood, until pale the gaping face festooned in spider webs of splatters beholds a hand trembling at the wound, and moans out a final message to God. Drear pathos fetish blooms, that from an unwholesome vacuum, that from a fog of unfocused movements, a single buoying thought is borne, which thought becomes a thing of steel and lead and of murders' rich rewards; which thought looses fate's prolific forefinger within the guard to draw down the roughly righteous intent of God. Cruel pathos fetish feeds ever at the salted bonds of sanity as rats' teeth at the hemp, strands snapping, snapping to withstand the vigor of the unbearable load and let it down soft by inches, that each maddening hitch force a quick breath and quicker prayers to God.Poetry knits the fabric of our dreamtime dominions. Both are without substance, and both present the subjective essence of a spinning compass. Embrace such insight, if you must, but do so at your own risk - nothing here will light your darkness.

I have never seen so far into anyone's eyes as I saw into yours that day. Ever green, I had expected to find them. stagnant pools long left to lay, still and tepid. Yet, they were filled to astounding depth with colors I had not hoped to see, and movement that shimmered the deep far beyond my measure, far beyond my reach, lucid as noon shallows, clear as summer seas, verdant in the distance like impossible meadows we never touch but dream to see. Troubled as they were and unfocused, in them, still and crystalline, reflected me... and my own eyes liquid, reflecting you. There in the mysterious grips of your waste, struggles this wretch where he so longs to be, for I could guess where your focus was lost to endless, vacant leagues, as I stood there beside you that day on the shores of your unfathomable seas. Reduced to nothing, I saw you on the far side, staring back at me. Spoken aloud, poetry is the ultimate masochistic mouthwash. Used regularly, it will sponge your brain and fire your breath. So, crack these covers, sip, swish, and rinse. In time, your silly sense of well-being will slip away, and your brain germs will never feel the same way, again.

Incongruity, in all its fine, reeking regalia, found a place in my young, fertile heart, so all the while thereafter my struggle was one of difference, for the greater scheme of things is an endeavor to know that which is unknown. On having come to understand a thing previously incomprehensible, luster fades, its draw recedes, and that thing, like a coin in a collection, is put away, to be occasionally admired but mostly forgotten; so, it is named a possession, and is no longer counted among desires.Song is either the progenitor or most favored partner of poetry; either may be spoken or sung. For better or worse, the vast bulk of it is scat, the mere fodder of time, which already piles miles deep beneath our feet. One day, it will inevitably pile high above our rotting bones.

I heard the call, the tone of it teasing, a broadcast chorus of incessant singing amid devilish choirs of insidious patter, the dry rasping of scales and portentous matter to cast shadows of sounds among us that must listen, beyond maddened distraction, inaudible vision. For I heard the call, the lies of it pleasing, then I followed it blindly where it would lead me. Beyond death and disaster through ranges of never, I learned listening is ruin and blindness is error. I cursed blackness of bruises, I despised the tender of capital expenditures and I as the lender. I heard the call, and I hated its message, for pipedream pursuits earn the wickedest of blessings, and the laziest among us are perhaps the smartest. The happiest of our number is the unhappy artist; they too quickly learned how nothing is of matter - not the singers, not the choir, not the subject of the patter. Often, the most popular modern poetry demonstrates a determined morbidity, and many of our most beloved poets perished by their own hands. Doing so, they left behind countless keepsakes of grief, but I will not label their passage as 'tragic'. I believe a martyr's suffering demands happy witness. Otherwise, why hang upon a cross?

In a utopian future, humanity divides itself into two kinds. A vast majority of citizens represent the first kind, and they are as physically flawless as they are psychologically perfect. Second-kind live apart, confined to the Deviant Compartment. They are the last damaged remnants of a primitive past defined by genetic ambiguity and reproductive anarchy. They are also humanity's last hope. Where "separate but equal" transforms from innocuous fringe slogan into accepted social norm, the resultant peace becomes a fatal disease of compromise and inadequacy.

Insomnia is a special kind of torture. Its short-term effects are something everyone experiences from time to time, but its long-term effects are known only to an unfortunate few. These effects include panic attacks, paranoia, and phobias. Eventually, hallucinations and convulsions become noticeable, followed by symptoms of dementia, coma and then death. Inevitably, the difference between waking and sleeping dissolves and the two become inseparable. After months of restlessness, a chronically sleepless man loses the ability to differentiate between nightmares, daydreams and reality. While wandering a slumbering city in this dysfunctional condition, he discovers a sinister secret.

During the summer of 1968, the Nightland, Incorporated carnival stopped in suburban Pecan Groves, Texas to stage a one-week show. Its performances paralleled a three-man prison escape, the miraculous resurrection of a cherished young boy, and the mysterious appearance of a young lady with a potent pedigree. If the squalor of its Freak Show and the rigged games of its midway are now known only within the faded archives of history, then contemporary society is its primary benefactor and direct ancestor. We see its shadows and hear its echoes everywhere. Welcome to the Freak Show. We are it.

A contemporary incarnation of Janus, the two-faced god, Mordrake is not one man, but two, for he lives with a conjoined, parasitic twin. He is both Adonis and demon, gentleman and lunatic, and he has eyes in the back of his head. He is Mordrake and Mordrake's Whisper, the former a handsome young gentleman of renown and refinement, and the latter a silent, sinister mask fixed to the back of Mordrake's head. Though speechless, the mask of this parasitic twin frowns when its master laughs and it rejoices when Mordrake weeps, while hideous, vile and hateful, it incessantly whispers unspeakable ideations into its master's thoughts, ever pushing Mordrake to the limits of madness. He is not one man, but two. Angel and demon. Master and monster. Which will you meet?

Nightland resides within an extraordinary region of time and space bound only by limits of sheer imagination. Its ephemeral pinnacles soar near the apex of human aspiration while its abysmal valleys plunge deeply into the darkest landscapes of global apocalypse. It is alternately violently wild and oppressively regimented. Nightland is older than all of recorded human history and it is many things to come. Remember the past with a robust, bloody gaze when you read "Saga of the Never Seen" and "The Templar Chalice". Linger there awhile to ponder a few of our most disturbing ancestors with "Mordrake's Whisper" and "Bloody Cain". Step away from the doldrums of contemporary political correctness to witness the old-fashioned Freak Show of "Nightland, Incorporated" and "Harkonen", and then delve into the depths of human evil in "Ever for Her", "Spook", "Gem's Machine", and "The Chacmool Sacrifice". Finally, allow your imagination to run wild through the hinterlands of Nightland, where "Rats " and "Skitters" rule and there find your inner freak among the denizens of "Second-Kind" and "Interior Spaces".

After he follows a wealthy runaway debutante from Boston to the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, an American investigator must hire a local guide to lead him into the dense jungles of the Mesoamerican interior in search of her. As they penetrate deeper into the forest, civilization disappears and they find themselves lost amid a mysterious land of bloody legend and savage myth. Within the ruins of a forgotten Mayan city, they ultimately encounter a contemporary death cult and discover the old gods reawakened. Five centuries ago, countless Mayans perished atop the chacmool, their beating hearts ripped from their bodies. Who will make sacrifice tonight when contemporary witches resurrect an ancient religion amid Yucatan jungles?

Forty years a soldier. Forty years a spy. Forty years an international trafficker of weapons and drugs. All, the accomplishments of one nameless man, a "spook". From the frozen highlands of Korea, through the sweltering hinterlands of Vietnam, into the arid wastes of Afghanistan and Iraq, then across the Atlantic to the oppressive deserts of Mexico, his career followed an opium highway through the highlights of modern history. His perspective will change you. With all the powerful innovations of modern technology, no nation on Earth has succeeded in closing its borders to the illegal trade of drugs and weapons. One man can tell you why.

God's second son. Humankind's second sin. His crime, the first crime. Therefore, the greatest. After he murdered his brother, the bloody stone tumbled from his left hand, and he covered his youthful victim with earth. This, a tale told endlessly throughout eons of human existence. Yet history has always told it wrong, for his is a story without end. A fallen angel or a cursed man, one incarnate immortal soul walks among humankind through endless centuries of history. He is as irredeemable as he is unrepentant.

They are five rough characters in service of the mysterious and powerful Heart Witch of the Gods. She has tasked them to enshrine the latest acolytes of her Sinister Profligate Palm, a jewel-encrusted platinum talisman of unknown power. Follow them through benighted crevasses of the nation on a quest to recruit their sinister counterparts from the ranks of underworld outcasts, vagabonds and felons. A career burglar, doomed prostitute, football player rapist, psychotic teen, and precognitive child form an unholy alliance. What comes next?