New Releases by Ben H. Winters

AS IF THE HOLIDAYS WEREN’T HORRORIFIC ENOUGH?! EC Comics and Oni Press are BACK to stab your stocking for the second year running with all-new, all-terrifying tales of holiday horror and Christmastime catastrophe as SHIVER SUSPENSTORIES slays again! In this year’s giant-sized, 56-page tome of gruesomely gift-wrapped delights: We’re tying perpetual naughty-listers David M. Booher (Canto), Melissa Flores (Biker Mice from Mars), George Northy (Yuletide), and Ben H. Winters (Benjamin) to the dried-out Christmas tree in the family parlor . . . and gathering ‘round as artistic Tormentors-in-training Sami Kivelä (Abbott), Dan McDaid (Shazam!), and more surprise guests throw a few lit matches their way to get this old-fashioned solstice sacrifice started in style! Yes, we know: It smells like dinner might be getting a little overdone! Never fear, because EC’s newest annual tradition also comes complete with an extra-added EC Comics classic—newly restored back to its authentic original coloring! As you sift through the charred remains, just remember: SHIVER SUSPENSTORIES is here to bring the horror back to the holidays . . . and we wouldn’t want it any other way!

Getting into a car is the most dangerous thing most of us do every day. Learn expert advice for handling scary scenarios behind the wheel: How to drive down a flight of stairs How to pee in the car while stuck in traffic How to bail out of a car at high speeds . . . and more survival strategies that fit in your glove compartment.

I’m saying all of that was never real in the first place. It is not that you will cease to exist, Marcus, it is that you never really existed in the first place. That life was always an illusion. Your dreams were always temporary. Your memories were always an invention. But you know, let’s be honest, that’s how it is for most people, when you get right down to it. You think you have this future. You think you have this past. But everything is always going away. Everything is always in the process of coming to nothing. But what I’m telling you, Marcus, is that I am different. For some cosmic reasons impossible to understand, I matter. I have a chance to save the universe . . . and you have a chance to save me. That is more—so much more—than most people ever get.” —Benjamin J. Carp, novelist (Deceased. Robot? Ghost? Alien?) From Philip K. Award–winning writer Ben H. Winters (EC’s Cruel Universe) and extraordinary artist Leomacs (Basketful of Heads), the prestige-format examination of a dead science-fiction icon’s unexpected return to Earth concludes with a mind-bending meditation of existence itself.

Legendary science-fiction novelist Benjamin J. Carp has just been resurrected 40 years after his death . . . and that’s not even the strangest thing that’s going to happen to him today. In an effort to unravel the mystery of author Benjamin J. Carp’s unexpected reappearance, Benjamin and his newfound companion, Marcus, travel to the arid Joshua Tree desert, where they discover the secret lair of a cabal of scientists eager to revive the minds of some of history’s greatest thinkers in an effort to save humanity from its greatest weakness: lack of imagination. Are they to be believed . . . or is this just more sci-fi hokum torn from a chapter in one of Carp’s beloved novels? Edgar Award nominee and Philip K. Dick Award–winning novelist Ben H. Winters (EC’s Cruel Universe, The Last Policeman Trilogy) teams with rising star Leomacs (EC’s Epitaphs from the Abyss, Basketful of Heads) to recite the next haunting chapter of 2025’s mesmerizing science-fiction daydream with profound implications for the fate of the universe, as delivered in a prestige, ad-free format.

IN ONE L.A. MOTEL ROOM, A COSMIC QUEST IS ABOUT BEGIN. . . . Edgar Award nominee and Philip K. Dick Award–winner Ben H. Winters (EC’s Cruel Universe, The Last Policeman Trilogy) and rising star Leomacs (EC’s Epitaphs from the Abyss, Refrigerator Full of Heads) unravel a three-part, prestige format series exploring the hallucinatory second life of a brilliant author who imagined our desperate future but never imagined he’d become part of it . . . More than just a writer, more than just a science-fiction icon, Benjamin J. Carp was a cultural revolutionary. Across 44 novels and hundreds of short stories—including the counterculture classic The Man They Couldn’t Erase—Carp pushed the boundaries of literary respectability for the sci-fi genre and his readers’ perception of reality itself . . . until decades of amphetamine abuse and Southern California excess finally ended a mind-bending career that always just escaped mainstream success. He died in 1982. Until 2025 . . . when Benjamin J. Carp awakens, alive, in a burned-out motel on the fringes of Los Angeles. He remembers dying. He knows he shouldn’t exist. Is he a dream? A robot? A ghost? A clone? A simulation? In his own time, Carp pondered all of these scenarios intensely through his fiction—and, now, as he treks from Studio City to Venice Beach and onward into the paranoid sprawl of 21st-century Los Angeles, he will be called to investigate his greatest mystery yet: himself. In the tradition of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly and Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice comes a uniquely fascinating and hilariously deranged excursion into the metatextual nexus where existence and oblivion, past and future, genius and madness, and glitter and grim reality all meet just beyond Hollywood Boulevard . . .

In this "virtuoso,” “jaw-dropping” and “stellar technological thriller” (Publishers Weekly, Starred Review), a mother engulfed by her own mid-life crisis stumbles upon a dark conspiracy to harvest and sell people''s time. What if time could be taken from us—the minutes, the hours, the years of our lives, extracted like organs taken for transplant? What would it mean for the world? And what would it do to the person from whom it’s taken? Grace Berney is a mid-level bureaucrat in the Food and Drug Administration, a woman who once brimmed with purpose but somehow turned into a middle-aged single mom with a dull government job and a melancholy sense that life has passed her by. Until the night a strange photo comes across her desk, of a young woman in a hospital bed who has been subjected to a mysterious procedure. Against orders and against common sense, Grace sets out to bring the girl to safety, and finds herself risking her job, her future, and her life on whether she can find the missing girl before an obsessive and violent mercenary who’s also looking. Big Time is a fast-paced thriller and a metaphysical mystery about the very nature of our lives.

Susan and Alex Wendt have found their dream apartment in a gorgeous Brooklyn brownstone. Sure, the landlady is a little eccentric. And the elderly handyman drops some cryptic remarks about the basement. But the rent is so low, it’s too good to pass up. Big mistake. Susan awakens every morning with fresh bug bites, but neither Alex nor their daughter, Emma, has a single welt. An exterminator searches the property and turns up nothing. The landlady insists her building is clean. Susan fears she’s going mad—until she makes a chilling discovery in the bonus room. Filled with Hitchcockian suspense, The Bonus Room is a horrifying tale of a dream home that becomes a nightmare. Previously published in 2011 as Bedbugs.

C'est dans ta tête, chérie... À Brooklyn Heights, quartier prisé de New York, Susan et Alex Wendt ont enfin trouvé l'appartement de leurs rêves ! Certes, la propriétaire, qui vit au rez-de-chaussée, paraît un peu excentrique, mais quelle importance ? Susan, qui s'était arrêtée de peindre à la naissance de leur fille, Emma, va enfin pouvoir reprendre ses toiles. Pour le jeune couple, un nouveau départ s'annonce... Sauf que. Un redoutable fléau s'est invité dans le home sweet home des Wendt. Des punaises de lit. Envahissantes, assoiffées de sang, et apparemment indestructibles. Invisibles, également, sauf pour Susan. Inexorablement, la petite mécanique du bonheur domestique se détraque. Est-ce le fruit de son imagination ou une véritable invasion ? A moins que la jeune femme au bord de la crise de nerfs soit, tout simplement, en train de perdre la raison ? Apprêtez-vous à ne pas fermer l'oeil de la nuit ! Jouant avec nos obsessions et nos angoisses les plus intimes, Ben H. Winters nous prend au piège d'un récit d'une rare intensité, aussi dérangeant que captivant.

From the "inventive...entertaining and thought-provoking" (Charles Yu) New York Times-bestselling author of Underground Airlines and Golden State, this sweeping legal thriller follows a sixteen-year-old who suffers from a neurological condition that has frozen him in time—and the team of lawyers, doctors, and detectives who are desperate to wake him up. In 2008, a cheerful ambulance-chasing lawyer named Jay Shenk persuades the grieving Keener family to sue a private LA hospital. Their son Wesley has been transformed by a routine surgery into a kind of golem, absent all normal functioning or personality, walking in endless empty circles around his hospital room. In 2019, Shenk—still in practice but a shell of his former self—is hired to defend Wesley Keener’s father when he is charged with murder . . . the murder, as it turns out, of the expert witness from the 2008 hospital case. Shenk’s adopted son, a fragile teenager in 2008, is a wayward adult, though he may find his purpose when he investigates what really happened to the murdered witness. Two thrilling trials braid together, medical malpractice and murder, jostling us back and forth in time. The Quiet Boy is a book full of mysteries, not only about the death of a brilliant scientist, not only about the outcome of the medical malpractice suit, but about the relationship between children and their parents, between the past and the present, between truth and lies. At the center of it all is Wesley Keener, endlessly walking, staring empty-eyed, in whose quiet, hollow body may lie the fate of humankind.

The debut title in a new city-based anthology series featuring all-new stories with speculative, sci-fi, and paranormal themes—each using distinct neighborhood settings as a launching pad. "A stimulating anthology of 14 futuristic L.A. fables . . . Some of the best of these tales seem illumined by the humanistic spirit of the late Ray Bradbury, poet laureate of Southern California fantasy literature." — Wall Street Journal As an incubator of the future, Los Angeles has long mesmerized writers from Aldous Huxley to Octavia E. Butler. With its natural disasters, Hollywood artifice, staggering wealth and poverty, and urban sprawl, one can argue that Los Angeles is already so weird, surreal, irrational, and mythic that any fiction emerging from this place should be considered speculative. So, bestselling author Denise Hamilton commissioned fourteen stories (including one of her own) and did exactly that. In Speculative Los Angeles, some of the city's most prophetic and diverse voices reimagine the metropolis in very different ways. In these pages, you'll encounter twenty-first-century changelings, dirigibles plying the suburban skies, black holes and jacaranda men lurking in deep suburbia, beachfront property in Century City, walled-off canyons and coastlines reserved for the wealthy, psychic death cults, robot nursemaids, and an alternate LA where Spanish land grants never gave way to urbanization. As with our city-based Akashic Noir Series, each story in Speculative Los Angeles is set in a distinct neighborhood filled with local color, landmarks, and flavor. Since the best speculative fiction provides a wormhole into other worlds while also commenting on our own, that is exactly what you'll find here. Featuring brand-new stories by: Charles Yu, Aimee Bender, Lisa Morton, Alex Espinoza, Ben H. Winters, Denise Hamilton, Lynell George, Stephen Blackmoore, Francesca Lia Block, Duane Swierczynski, Luis J. Rodriguez, A.G. Lombardo, Kathleen Kaufman, and S. Qiouyi Lu.

From award-winning, New York Times bestselling novelist Ben H. Winters comes a mind-bending novel set in a world governed by absolute truth, where lies are as dangerous as murder. In a strange alternate society that values law and truth above all else, Laszlo Ratesic is a nineteen-year veteran of the Speculative Service. He lives in the Golden State, a nation standing where California once did, a place where like-minded Americans retreated after the erosion of truth and the spread of lies made public life and governance impossible. In the Golden State, knowingly contradicting the truth is the greatest crime -- and stopping those crimes is Laz''s job. In its service, he is one of the few individuals permitted to harbor untruths, to "speculate" on what might have happened. But the Golden State is less of a paradise than its name might suggest. To monitor, verify, and enforce the truth requires a veritable panopticon of surveillance and recording. And when those in control of the facts twist them for nefarious means, the Speculators are the only ones with the power to fight back.

The bestselling book that asks the question: what would present-day America look like if the Civil War never happened? A New York Times bestseller; a Goodreads Choice finalist; named one of the Best Books of the Year by NPR, Slate, Publishers Weekly, Hudson Bookseller, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Kirkus Reviews, AudioFile Magazine, and Amazon A young black man calling himself Victor has struck a bargain with federal law enforcement, working as a bounty hunter for the US Marshall Service in exchange for his freedom. He''s got plenty of work. In this version of America, slavery continues in four states called "the Hard Four." On the trail of a runaway known as Jackdaw, Victor arrives in Indianapolis knowing that something isn''t right -- with the case file, with his work, and with the country itself. As he works to infiltrate the local cell of a abolitionist movement called the Underground Airlines, tracking Jackdaw through the back rooms of churches, empty parking garages, hotels, and medical offices, Victor believes he''s hot on the trail. But his strange, increasingly uncanny pursuit is complicated by a boss who won''t reveal the extraordinary stakes of Jackdaw''s case, as well as by a heartbreaking young woman and her child -- who may be Victor''s salvation. Victor believes himself to be a good man doing bad work, unwilling to give up the freedom he has worked so hard to earn. But in pursuing Jackdaw, Victor discovers secrets at the core of the country''s arrangement with the Hard Four, secrets the government will preserve at any cost. Underground Airlines is a ground-breaking novel, a wickedly imaginative thriller, and a story of an America that is more like our own than we''d like to believe.

La fin du monde arrive. Dans quelques semaines, l'astéroïde Maïa va s'écraser quelque part, et c'en sera fini de notre jolie planète bleue. La société ? Un champ de ruines. L'ordre et la loi ? De vagues souvenirs. Nombreux, déjà, sont ceux qui ont choisi d'en finir ou de s'évanouir dans la nature. Pas Hank Palace. Car, même s'il n'est plus officiellement flic, Hank demeure un homme de principes et de convictions. Et quand Martha Cavatone, la chère nounou de son enfance, vient lui demander de retrouver son mari mystérieusement disparu, il s'avère incapable de dire non. Mais sait-il vraiment dans quelle aventure il s'embarque ? A travers une Amérique désormais livrée à un chaos généralisé - entre dérives hédonistes et violence éruptive -, [épopée à deux roues de Palace, qui part sur les routes accompagné de son chien Houdini, ressemble furieusement à une quête de la dernière chance. Et les questions abondent, obsédantes. Due reste-t-il à espérer quand tout s'écroule autour de vous ? Due cherche Hank, au fond ? Et que trouvera-t-il au bout de son chemin ? Deuxième tome d'une trilogie unique en son genre qui, à mesure que le danger se rapproche, monte inexorablement en puissance, J -77 se révèle tout à la fois une enquête policière aux développements inattendus, la chronique détaillée d'un monde à l'agonie, et la description en profondeur d'un personnage à nul autre pareil, animé par un inflexible sens du devoir. Hank Palace est-il trop humain pour ce monde ?

Qual o sentido de se investigar um crime quando o planeta tem apenas seis meses de vida? O detetive Hank Palace enfrenta essa questão desde que o asteroide 2011GV1 foi avistado em rota de colisão com a Terra. Em face da tragédia iminente, a maioria das pessoas abandona seus trabalhos, casas e famílias e as instituições começam a ruir, mas Palace insiste em investigar um suposto suicídio. Ganhador dos prêmios Edgar, dedicado à literatura policial e de mistério, e Philip K. Dick, voltado para livros de ficção científica, O último policial é a combinação perfeita do clássico romance noir com o melhor da ficção científica atual. Primeiro de uma trilogia, o livro pinta um retrato fascinante dos Estados Unidos pré-apocalipse através de um enredo original e envolvente e de um protagonista carismático. "Estranha, bela e assumidamente apocalíptica. Uma das minhas séries de mistério favoritas." – John Green

Concord, New Hamsphire. Hank Palace est ce qu'on appelle un flic obstiné. Confronté à une banale affaire de suicide, il refuse de s'en tenir à l'évidence et, certain qu'il a affaire à un meurtre, poursuit inlassablement son enquête. Hank sait pourtant qu'elle n'a pas grand intérêt puisque, dans six mois il sera mort. Comme tous les habitants de Concord. Et comme tout le monde aux États-Unis et sur Terre. Dans six mois en effet, notre planète aura cessé d'exister, percutée de plein fouet par 2011GV1, un astéroïde de six kilomètres de long qui la réduira en cendres. Aussi chacun, désormais, se prépare-t-il au pire à sa façon. Dans cette ambiance pré-apocalyptique, où les marchés financiers se sont écroulés, où la plupart des employés ont abandonné leur travail, où des dizaines de personnes se livrent à tous les excès possibles alors que d'autres mettent fin à leurs jours, Hank, envers et contre tous, s'accroche. Il a un boulot à terminer. Et rien, même l'apocalypse, ne pourra l'empêcher de résoudre son affaire. Sans jamais se départir d'un prodigieux sens de l'intrigue et du suspens, Ben H Winters nous y propose une vision douloureusement convaincante d'un monde proche de l'agonie. Le lecteur est tiraillé par cette interrogation lancinante : que ferions nous, que ferions nous réellement si nos jours étaient comptés.

A follow-up collection of spooky stories in verse is comprised of thirty tales about the scary-but-fun things that haunt kids'' nightmares.

La popularísima novela de Jane Austen convertida en una enternecedora historia de amor con nuevas escenas pobladas de gigantescas langostas, pulpos voraces, serpientes marinas de dos cabezas y otros monstruos. Cuando las hermanas Dashwoods son expulsadas de su hogar, van a vivir a una isla llena de criaturas salvajes y oscuros secretos. Elinor, la más sensata de las dos, se enamora de Edward Ferrars, mientras a su hermana Marianne se la disputan el apuesto Willoughby y el temible coronel Brandon, mitad hombre y mitad monstruo. ¿Podrán las bellas hermanas encontrar el amor verdadero? ¿O caerán presas de los tentáculos que todo el tiempo intentan agarrarlas de los talones? De los creadores del éxito internacional Orgullo, prejuicio y zombis llega este magistral retrato de la Inglaterra de la Regencia que combina los mordaces apuntes sociales de Jane Austen con escenas ultraviolentas de monstruos surgidos de las profundidades el mar.

Come on up to the attic Come up if you dare Climb up the rickety ladder— Come up and see what’s there… Ben H. Winters brings the fear factor to this collection of thirty spooktastic rhyming stories about witches, zombies, vampires and more! Featuring eerie illustrations by Adam F. Watkins, this book is perfect for nights around the campfire and slumber party ghost stories. Be sure to keep a flashlight close!

Susan e Alex non hanno dubbi: è la casa perfetta. In quel quartiere e a quel prezzo, non potrebbero trovare di meglio. E c'è persino una stanzetta in più - non segnalata nell'annuncio -, ideale per le esigenze di Susan, che ha deciso di lasciare il lavoro per dedicarsi a tempo pieno alla figlia, la piccola Emma, e alla sua grande passione, la pittura. Inoltre la signora Scharfstein, la padrona di casa che abita al pianoterra, sembra proprio una simpatica e disponibile vecchietta. Ma, ben presto cominciano ad accadere cose strane, che turbano la quiete domestica: nel suo studio, Susan sente un odore sgradevole, che nessun altro percepisce. Poi, una mattina, nota che la federa del suo cuscino è sporca di sangue e che il suo corpo è costellato da quelli che sembrano i morsi di qualche insetto. Tuttavia né la figlia né il marito hanno quei segni. Per non correre rischi, Susan chiama una ditta di disinfestazione, che però non trova nulla. Sembra una follia, eppure lei è convinta che la casa brulichi d'insetti: sono lì, annidati da qualche parte, non c'è altra spiegazione. Mentre la signora Scharfstein diventa sempre più invadente e il marito preoccupato, Susan capisce di dover dimostrare a tutti che non è paranoica. Altrimenti potrebbe rischiare di perdere non soltanto quell'appartamento, ma anche la sua famiglia.Considerato dalla critica il degno erede di Rosemary's Baby e dei classici della suspense psicologica, Una casa perfetta è un thriller in cui il labile confine tra realtà e immaginazione diventa un luogo oscuro e molto pericoloso?

Detective Hank Palace has faced this question ever since asteroid 2011GV1 hovered into view. There’s no chance left. No hope. Just six precious months until impact. The economy spirals downward while crops rot in the fields. Churches and synagogues are packed. People all over the world are walking off the job—but not Hank Palace. He’s investigating a death by hanging in a city that sees a dozen suicides every week—except this one feels suspicious, and Palace is the only cop who cares. The first in a trilogy, The Last Policeman offers a mystery set on the brink of an apocalypse. As Palace’s investigation plays out under the shadow of 2011GV1, we’re confronted by hard questions way beyond “whodunit.” What basis does civilization rest upon? What is life worth? What would any of us do, what would we really do, if our days were numbered?

There has been a shocking crime at Mary Todd Lincoln Middle School. In a glass case in the front hall, a trophy—the trophy, the first trophy ever won in the school’s lackluster competitive history—has been stolen. Even more horrifying, an outraged Principal Van Vreeland has canceled everything fun until the trophy is back, including the eighth graders’ long-awaited, once-in-a-lifetime field trip to Taproot Valley. Rock climbing, ropes courses, ecology hikes, s’mores . . . all gone! Luckily, Bethesda Fielding is on the case. As self-appointed sleuth extraordinaire, Bethesda’s confident she’ll be able to track down the culprit in no time and save her class trip! Except it seems like the more she searches for answers, the more mysteries she reveals. . . . Can Bethesda solve this baffling mystery—or are the eighth graders doomed for a Week of a Thousand Quizzes instead?

FOR RENT: Top two floors of beautifully renovated brownstone, 1300 sq. ft., 2BR 2BA, eat-in kitchen, one block to parks and playgrounds. No broker’s fee. Susan and Alex Wendt have found their dream apartment. Sure, the landlady is a little eccentric. And the elderly handyman drops some cryptic remarks about the basement. But the rent is so low, it’s too good to pass up. Big mistake. Susan soon discovers that her new home is crawling with bedbugs . . . or is it? She awakens every morning with fresh bites, but neither Alex nor their daughter Emma has a single welt. An exterminator searches the property and turns up nothing. The landlady insists her building is clean. Susan fears she’s going mad—until a more sinister explanation presents itself: she may literally be confronting the bedbug problem from Hell.