Games Creatures Play

Résumé

Welcome to the wide world of paranormal pastimes, where striking out might strike you dead. Editors Charlaine Harris and Toni L. P. Kelner are your announcers for this all-new story collection of the most peculiar plays ever made...

Sports fans live and die by their teams’ successes and failures—though not literally. But these fourteen authors have written spirited—in more ways than one—new tales of killer competitions that would make even the most die-hard players ask to be benched.

In Charlaine Harris’s “The Blue Hereafter,” Manfred Bernardo learns about softball from a certain blond barmaid in Louisiana.

Life-and-death stakes make the competition get serious in William Kent Krueger’s “Hide and Seek.”

Mercedes Lackey’s “False Knight on the Road” features a high-stakes drag race on a foggy mountain road between a clever young bootlegger and a mysterious stranger.

In Laura Lippman’s “Ice,” a young girl learns the true story behind a bit of neighborhood folklore.

Seanan McGuire presents “Jammed,” in which a chimera loose during the Roller Derby makes it anyone’s guess as to who will still be skating by the time the buzzer sounds.

In Brandon Sanderson’s “Dreamer,” a game of cops and robbers is a new challenge when the players are able to switch bodies at will.

And Scott Sigler follows ghost stomper Hunter Hunterson as he investigates a haunted, never-ending baseball game in “The Case of the Haunted Safeway.”

These and eight more supernatural sporting stories are guaranteed to have you rooting for the home team... or else...

Introduction by Charlaine Harris and Toni L.P. Kelner

In the Blue Hereafter, Charlaine Harris

Hide and Seek, William Kent Krueger

Stepping into the Dead Zone, Jan Burke

Dead on the Bones, Joe R. Lansdale

The Devil went down to Boston, Caitlin Kittredge

On the Playing Fields of Blood, Brendan Dubois

The God's Games, Dana Cameron the Case of the Haunted Safeway, Scott Sigler

Prise de Fer, Ellen Kushner

Dreamer, Brandon Sanderson

False Knight on the Road, Mercedes Lackey

Jammed, Seanan McGuire

Hide and Shriek, Adam-Troy Castro

Ice, Laura Lippman

Bell, Book and Candlepin, Toni L.P. Kelner