A bizarre series of incidents take place on a usually tranquil lake. Boats are found ravaged, a body torn in two, other people are missing and an injured victim cries of a monster. Chief of Police Morgan Sydney must face the reality that a huge monster is lurking in the lake. With bulletproof scales, territorial aggression, and an insatiable appetite, the beast causes mayhem in the peaceful town.

On September 28th, a geologist working in Death Valley finds a mysterious new cinder cone in very well-mapped area. On October 1, the government of Australia announces the discovery of an enormous granite mountain. Like the cinder cone, it wasn't there six months ago.

Something is happening to planet Earth, and the truth is too terrifying to contemplate

An Amazonian tribe that may or may not exist; a dangerous teenage sorceress - and madness - conspire to stop Jake Kendricks from revealing the truth about a mysterious substance that will end world hunger.

A journey into the deepest, darkest jungles of the Venezuelan Amazon...and a primeval place and time that mankind was never meant to exist in. Ben Cartwright, former soldier, home to mourn the loss of his father, stumbles upon cryptic letters from the past between author Arthur Conan Doyle and his great-great-grandfather who vanished while exploring the Amazon jungle in 1908. Amazingly, these letters lead Ben to believe that his ancestor’s expedition was the basis for Doyle’s fantastical tale of a lost world inhabited by long-extinct creatures.

In a locked Honolulu office building, three men are found dead with no sign of struggle except for the ultrafine, razor-sharp cuts covering their bodies. The only clue left behind is a tiny bladed robot, nearly invisible to the human eye. In the lush forests of Oahu, groundbreaking technology has ushered in a revolutionary era of biological prospecting. Trillions of microorganisms, tens of thousands of bacteria species, are being discovered; they are feeding a search for priceless drugs and applications on a scale beyond anything previously imagined.

Anne Heche reads The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, the story of nine-year-old Trisha McFarland who gets lost in the woods while on a walk with her family. Boston Red Sox closing pitcher Tom Gordon becomes Trisha's imaginary companion - and the key to her survival against an unidentified someone (or some thing) leaving death and destruction in its wake.

Eve Hardaway, newly single mother of one, is on a trip she’s long dreamed of - a rafting and hiking tour through the jungles and mountains of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico. Eve wanders off the trail, to a house in the distance with a menacing man in the yard beyond it, throwing machetes at a human-shaped target. Disturbed by the sight, Eve moves quickly and quietly back to her group, taking care to avoid being seen. As she creeps along, she finds a broken digital camera, marked with the name Teresa Hamilton.

Born to a wealthy Virginian family, privileged Jordan's got her life all planned out. Get her PhD, find the perfect Virginian man to marry, pop out a few more Kacys, and make her state senator father proud. If only Jordan could let the past rest. When your mother disappears without a trace, it carves a gash that bleeds a long time. Jordan has never given up hope that her mother is alive. So when Jordan's old nanny shows up with a mysterious locket containing a portrait of Jordan's mother, Jordan believes her hope was not in vain.

Holly FitzGerald and her husband, Fitz - married less than two years - set out on a yearlong honeymoon adventure of a lifetime, backpacking around the world. Five months into the trip, their plane crash-lands in Peru at a penal colony walled in by jungle, and their blissfully romantic journey turns into a terrifying nonstop labyrinth of escape and survival.

"Greetings from the dead," declares Maxwell Broadbent on the videotape he left behind after his mysterious disappearance. A notorious treasure hunter and tomb robber, Broadbent accumulated over a half a billion dollars' worth of priceless art, gems, and artifacts before vanishing—along with his entire collection—from his mansion in New Mexico. At first, robbery is suspected, but the truth proves far stranger: As a final challenge to his three sons, Broadbent has buried himself and his treasure somewhere in the world, hidden away like an ancient Egyptian pharaoh.

Sixteen all-new stories by science fiction's top talents, collected by best-selling author George R. R. Martin and multiple-award-winning editor Gardner Dozois.

From Boston Globe-Horn Book Award winner Katherine Rundell comes an exciting new novel about a group of kids who must survive in the Amazon after their plane crashes. Fred, Con, Lila, and Max are on their way back to England from Manaus when the plane they're on crashes and the pilot dies upon landing. For days they survive alone, until Fred finds a map that leads them to a ruined city, and to a secret.

In a world where animals no longer exist, twelve-year-old Kester Jaynes sometimes feels like he hardly exists either. Locked away in a home for troubled children, he's told there's something wrong with him. So when he meets a flock of talking pigeons and a bossy cockroach, Kester thinks he's finally gone crazy. But the animals have something to say. And they need him. The pigeons fly Kester to a wild place where the last creatures in the land have survived.

Less than 48 hours after 12-year-old Chris sets off on a sailing trip down the Alaskan coast with his uncle, their boat sinks. The only survivors are Chris and a boy named Frank, who hates Chris immediately. Chris and Frank have no radio, no flares, no food. Suddenly they've got to forage, fish, and scavenge the shore for supplies. Chris likes the company of a curious, friendly raven more than he likes the prickly Frank. But the boys have to get along if they want to survive.

For two years, Cyrus and Antigone Smith have run a sagging roadside motel with their older brother, Daniel. Nothing ever seems to happen. Then a strange old man with bone tattoos arrives, demanding a specific room. Less than 24 hours later, the old man is dead. The motel has burned, and Daniel is missing. And Cyrus and Antigone are kneeling in a crowded hall, swearing an oath to an order of explorers who have long served as caretakers of the world's secrets, keepers of powerful relics from lost civilizations, and jailers to unkillable criminals.

A journey into the deepest, darkest jungles of the Venezuelan Amazon...and a primeval place and time that mankind was never meant to exist in. Ben Cartwright, former soldier, home to mourn the loss of his father, stumbles upon cryptic letters from the past between author Arthur Conan Doyle and his great-great-grandfather who vanished while exploring the Amazon jungle in 1908. Amazingly, these letters lead Ben to believe that his ancestor’s expedition was the basis for Doyle’s fantastical tale of a lost world inhabited by long-extinct creatures.

There came an elastic aftershock of creaks and groans and then, softly softly, a chinking shower of rubbled cement. Leaves calmed and trunks stood serene. Where, not a minute before, there had been a suburb, there was now only woodland standing amid ruins. There is no warning. No chance to prepare. They arrive in the night: thundering up through the ground, transforming streets and towns into shadowy forest. Buildings are destroyed.

With tales from Laird Barron, Stephen King, John Langan, Peter Straub, and many others, and featuring Datlow’s comprehensive overview of the year in horror, now, more than ever, The Best Horror of the Year provides the petrifying horror fiction readers have come to expect - and enjoy.

Allie Fox is going to re-create the world. Abominating the cops, crooks, junkies and scavengers of modern America, he abandons civilisation and takes the family to live in the Honduran jungle. There his tortured messianic genius keeps them alive, his hoarse tirades harrying them through a diseased and dirty Eden towards unimaginable darkness.

The Altamaha River, Georgia's "Little Amazon", is one of the last truly wild places in America. Crossed by roads only five times in its 137 miles, the blackwater river is home to 1,000-year-old virgin cypresses, direct descendants of 18th-century Highland warriors, and a staggering array of rare and endangered species. The Altamaha is even rumored to harbor its own river monster, as well as traces of the oldest European fort in North America.

A hulking freighter waits at a darkened pier. Aboard, filmmaker Carl Denham prepares for a strange voyage to a distant island, an island where he hopes to make the most exciting movie of all time. What waits at the end of the journey is Kong.

Eve Hardaway, newly single mother of one, is on a trip she’s long dreamed of - a rafting and hiking tour through the jungles and mountains of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico. Eve wanders off the trail, to a house in the distance with a menacing man in the yard beyond it, throwing machetes at a human-shaped target. Disturbed by the sight, Eve moves quickly and quietly back to her group, taking care to avoid being seen. As she creeps along, she finds a broken digital camera, marked with the name Teresa Hamilton.

When a fame-hungry scientist brings an impossible, living specimen of a creature long thought extinct back from the wild jungles of South America he unwittingly brings along a passenger. Something with the potential to destroy every living thing on our planet. The infestation begins, rapidly overtaking medical resources and resisting all treatment.

When Alexandra ("Bo") Fuller was home in Zambia a few years ago, visiting her parents for Christmas, she asked her father about a nearby banana farmer who was known for being a "tough bugger". Her father's response was a warning to steer clear of him; he told Bo: "Curiosity scribbled the cat." Nonetheless, Fuller began her strange friendship with the man she calls K, a white African and veteran of the Rhodesian war.

At 23, Jazen Parker has completed his Legion hitch a hero. But in four months, hell have a price on his head. Worse, hes lost his past, and he cant find his future. Worst of all, hes chosen to search for them on the deadliest planet known to mankind. When Jazen reluctantly hires on to a Trueborn Earthman tycoon's safari to bag a deadly trophy, the reluctant mercenary finds himself shipped out to Downgraded Earthlinke 476, the outpost at the end of the universe known to everyone except its tourism bureau as "Dead End".

Beneath the Ocean of Sky, heroes will rise. Samra Rose is in trouble. Living in a colony floating high above the clouds, she's been far away from anything resembling an adventure, but when aerial raiders carry off her home - with her inside - she gets more excitement than she ever wished for. Her best friend, Kipling, and a Grounder boy with a skyship will take to the air in pursuit, but all three will face dangers they've never imagined.

12-year-old Aidan Errolson, comes from a long line of adventurers. His grandparents were among the first settlers of Corenwald's Eastern Frontier. His father had been one of the kingdom's greatest warriors. Aidan, on the other hand, lives the quiet, comfortable life, of a nobleman's son. He never has any real adventures, and that, he believes, is the one great injustice of his otherwise happy life. All that will change the day he first hears the bark of the bog owl, and meets Dobro Turtlebane.

The Seven Wonders adventures continue in this bind-up of The Select and The Orphan. The Select tells the story of thirteen-year-old Burt Wenders, the first documented carrier of the G7W gene, and his fated voyage to the island that would eventually come to house the Karai Institute. In The Orphan, learn the story of Daria, orphaned at a young age and enslaved by the Babylonians, and her valiant battle to escape the only city she's ever called home. These titles are together for the first time ever.

Robert Jackson Bennett makes a stunning debut with this deliciously dark tale sure to hold readers in its menacing thrall. The grinding poverty brought on by the Great Depression is nowhere more apparent than in the untold thousands looking for work along America’s railroad system. But one man haunting the rail camps has been moved by an entirely different brand of desperation: revenge.

Ben McKelvie believes he's moving up in the world when he and his fiancée buy a house in the cushy Washington, DC, suburb of Barcroft. Instead he's moving down - way down - thanks to Madeleine Roux, the crazy neighbor whose vermin-infested property is a permanent eyesore and looming hazard to public health. First Ben's fiancée leaves him; then his dog dies, apparently killed by a predator drawn into Barcroft by Madeleine's noxious menagerie. But the worst is yet to come for Ben.