Gods, Memes, and Monsters: A 21st Century Bestiary

The magic of bestiaries, or dictionaries of mythological creatures, has been captivating the human imagination since ancient times. Now, Stone Skin Press brings a fresh take on these compendiums of the fantastic with its latest anthology—Gods, Memes and Monsters. Featuring over sixty authors, this stunning international volume offers entries and short stories that range from the horrific to the humorous. The bestiary shed lights on familiar beasts that are coping in our modern era, including gorgons, minotaurs, and mantichores. It also introduces newly discovered creatures such as meme mosquitoes, trashsquatches, and urbantelopes that are thriving in the cyber age.

Shattered Shields

Swords and Shields. Faith and Magic. Grab yours and get ready, for the enemy is on the move. High fantasy and mighty conflicts go hand-in-hand. In great wars, armies rise to fight evil hordes and heroes struggle to push beyond their imperfections and save the day. These stories include more than just epic landscapes and characters… but also epic battles.

Imagine a doctor struggling to identify the spy who has infiltrated his company’s ranks and poisoned his colleagues or a boy suspected of murder by a king yet protected by a princess as he helps her father against his own people. Imagine a butcher discovering that he’s called to lead an uprising, or a First Born knowing that she must betray her own in order to save humanity.

The possibilities are endless, but at the heart they have this in common: soldiers—ordinary and otherwise-struggling against extraordinary odds to survive the day. They must withstand dark magic, dodge enemy blades, and defy the odds to survive Shattered Shields.

A Knight in the Silk Purse

In Taux, the city of cursed stone, a new dark power stalks the dreams of the population with bloody footprints. Even among the celebrations of the Festival of a Thousand Blossoms, the hardy folk of the Black Gate must find a way to defeat this lurking menace before it consumes them all. A Knight in the Silk Purse blends the shared tales of twelve of fantasy’s greatest modern storytellers into an epic weave of intrigue, murder, sorcery, death, and retribution like nothing else found on the shelves today.

The Lion & the Aardvark

Seventy writers from across the creative spectrum bring their modern sensibilities to the classic format of Aesop’s 2,500-year-old fables. Zombies, dog-men, and robot wasps mingle with cats, coyotes, and cockroaches. Parables ranging from the punchy to the evocative and the wry to the disturbing explore eternal human foibles, as displaced onto lemmings, trout, and race cars. But beware: in these terse explorations of desire, envy, and power, certitude isn’t always as clear as it looks.

Shotguns vs. Cthulhu

Pulse-pounding action meets cosmic horror in this exciting collection from the rising stars of the New Cthulhuiana, as humanity takes up arms against the monsters and gods of H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. The fighting takes place in the past, present, and future, from the birth of the shotgun to the end of the world, and contributors who boast high name recognition among today’s Cthulhu Mythos fans, including the co-creators of the Delta Green mythos setting and the cohosts of the H. P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast, relentlessly hurtle readers into the madness and danger.