Showing results by author "William Carter" in All Categories

Equal parts riveting and stirring, Carter takes a staple of campfires and rainy nights - the ghost story - into surprising new territory in this collection. No gore or gratuitous splatter here - these tales are meant to raise the hairs on the back of the neck and leave the reader feeling quietly discomfited hours after reading. These five tales have all the makings of good ghost stories with a touch of strange thrown in for good measure.

When an old flame of Dexter Duff's shows up out of the blue, claiming her rich husband is missing, Duff has mixed feelings about getting involved. She's willing to pay top dollar, though, and like usual, Duff is broke. The case turns even stranger when it turns out her husband, who was once an android, became a human for her sake through a costly and risky procedure - and then went back to being an android when she seemed happier with him the way he was before. Then he vanished without a trace.

It was a simple plan. She would help him pass algebra. He would help her win the student election. What could go wrong? Take one geeky 16-year-old girl deathly afraid of speaking to any crowd larger than one, but who desperately needs something on her application other than perfect grades to get her into Stanford. Add in a star basketball player who's Mr. Popular to everyone else, but who's hiding more than a few startling secrets. Throw in a crisis of identity, a scheming girlfriend, and troubled family lives.

Seventeen-year-old Trevor can't catch a break. Just when he finds out that Janna, the girl of his dreams, is finally available, his mom tells him he's being shipped off to a boarding school because of his awful grades. A desperate call to his dad, who owns a rubber chicken factory in Las Vegas, gets him nowhere. His father is more interested in enlisting Trevor's aid writing what he sees as the perfect gag gift - a how-to manual about rubber chickens. That's Trevor's life for you. Everyone around him is totally and utterly insane.

They meet on a rainy night, penniless and alone, both of them without a friend in the world. He's a disgraced, down-on-his luck giant, short for his kind, banished forever from his tribe. He just wants to be left alone and pity the poor person who annoys him.

Although this fact is well known among historians, what is not known is what else happened that day - when a deranged, dimension-hopping descendant of a Confederate general attempted to assassinate Lincoln long before he became the 16th President of the United States.

On a rainy night at a tiny Oregon college, a shadowy figure at the back of the hall interrupts Bullwick Farley's mythology lecture: "Little Red Riding Hood has done something terrible," he says, "and I desperately need your help before it's too late." Just another story in a class all about stories? A myth, a fable, a tale told and retold? The students might think so. But 10 years after leaving a life where even the strangest stories turn out to be true, Farley faces a choice.

Former FBI agent turned full-time drifter, Karen Pantelli pursues a promising lead on her long missing mother to Orcas Island, Washington. Toiling as a hotel maid, she reaches a dead end until an encounter with an eccentric math professor raises a gruesome possibility. Her mother may have been murdered by a serial killer, the work of a cunning monster who has claimed hundreds of lives and evaded detection for decades by camouflaging his kills as accidents, suicides, or random acts of violence.

For generations, people have gathered around campfires to tell tales of adventure, mystery, and wonder. These stories have been passed down through the ages, each one carrying with it the wisdom and wonder of those who have come before.