Nipping Them in the Bud is a gripping tale of extreme horror, showcasing Edward Lee’s mastery in blending visceral terror with thought-provoking themes. Prepare yourself for a journey into darkness, where every decision carries the weight of eternity, and every action challenges the soul’s very essence.

By no choice of his own, Harvey Sutton embarked on a life of crime. After spending years scrounging around in the gutter, he is seduced by a life-changing drug experience. A bad trip that pulls back the curtain of reality, leaving him with more questions than answers. The subsequent vision haunting his memory speaks to him, taking him on an odyssey of depravity, transgression, and violence.

The kids go into the bounce house, but when they come out…they’re not kids anymore. When a cam girl drives to the nearest grocery store, her GPS navigator takes her to another far more interesting location. Very pregnant Teresa has all her stuck-up friends coming for her baby shower, but there’s one guest who wasn’t invited, and his gift is most unusual: a jellyfish.

To Hell and Back serves as a mosaic of contemporary fears and timeless terrors, curated and edited by the Bram Stoker Award-winning Joe Mynhardt. This collection of horror stories brings together a diverse array of tales from both beloved and emerging voices in the horror genre, each story a unique exploration of the dark corners of the human psyche.

Beauty is...pain. But for Pamela Rose beauty is everything. She spends every day and almost every dollar fighting a losing battle against nature. When a young coworker comes to the office with a new set of breast implants, Pam's delicate psyche begins to crack. Doctor Joseph DiBiro used to make art from flesh and plastic, but after his release from prison the only thing he's handling is a broom. He knows he has more to give the world; he's not done creating beauty. He just needs the right patient.

Reece Karkoff's life derailed when her mother killed her father. Now, she lives on a defunct farm in Missouri with her Aunt and her cousin, who treat her as one of their own. Reece thinks her mother's violence is behind her ... But she's unaware of the cult that has moved into the woods beside the farm.

Kim White is a very popular cheerleader. She’s pretty, healthy, and comes from a well-off family. She has everything a girl of 16 is supposed to want. And she’s sick to death of it. In search of something to pull her out of her suicidal thoughts, she begrudgingly decides to lose her virginity, having heard it’s a life-changing event.

Tanner thought church camp would be boring. That this summer would be forgettable, uneventful, and lifeless. Then, he was surprised to make two friends, both of whom share his interests and anxieties. Together, maybe the three of them have a chance of surviving this long, hot summer. But all is not what it seems at Creston Camps.

In a dimly lit cell, a man has awakened to find himself surrounded by the most unimaginable and barbaric things that not even his worst nightmare could conjure up. His captor, Seth Coker, takes the man on a journey into his twisted world of vengeance. A world that runs parallel with the horrors that could only be found in the deepest and darkest parts of hell. A world that bestows a wrath of chaos upon the wicked of our society who have fallen through the cracks of the judicial system. Seth wasn't born a vigilante, nor did he seek out the role—it sought him out.

A strange plague called the "Gets" is decimating humanity on a global scale. It causes people to forget - small things at first, like where they left their keys... then the not-so-small things like how to drive, or the letters of the alphabet. Then their bodies forget how to function involuntarily - and there is no cure. But now, far below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, deep in the Marianas Trench, an heretofore unknown substance hailed as "ambrosia" has been discovered - a universal healer, from initial reports.

At Shadows Casino, this isn’t just a phrase, it’s a grim reality. Far from prying eyes is a world of decadent pleasure, and unimaginable pain, where only the desperate or the rich dare to tread. Cee is the leader of the sinister establishment, but that hasn’t always been her story. Long before she'd ever heard of a parlay or letting it ride, Cee was just a little girl with a daddy who liked to gamble. And when her daddy brought her into Shadows, he made a bet that changed both of their lives forever.

Lisa Quinn has a boyfriend: Sean Knight. She is just 16 years old, and he is her first. He's handsome, and, with his charm, he wins over her usually overprotective parents.

The mountains and forests of Washington State harbor a secret. It has remained hidden for millennia. An apex predator that has mastered the art of the hunt. Intelligent... savage... destructive... and now, gone rogue. It no longer sticks to the shadows. The hunt is on, and we are its prey. Nina Lee is a Forest Ranger assigned to numerous missing persons cases across Mount Rainier National Park and beyond. She knows some come up here to disappear. And she knows most will never be found. But something has changed.

While her parents attend a work party, eighteen-year-old Ella Romero is left in charge of her two siblings—thirteen-year-old Nicholas and eight-year-old Arianna—at their secluded lake house. In her usual fashion, Ella invites her friends to hang out while her parents are away, too. It was supposed to be an easy, quiet, normal night.

Hildreth House. On a moonlight night in early spring, 27 people entered the mansion's labyrinthine halls, to partake in an orgy of diabolical debauchery, the likes of which beggared description. And one by one, 26 of them were butchered in place. The 27th body was never recovered.

When Cassie's twin sister, Lissa, commits suicide, Cassie discovers she can travel to Hell to retrieve her sister's soul. Cassie thought she knew all about the Hell of legend, but finds Hell has evolved over the millennia into a bustling city full of the damned with looming skyscrapers, crowded streets, systemized evil, and atrocity as the status quo.

Plagued by nightmares of torture and intense violence, a writer suffering from trauma-induced memory loss seeks to solve the mystery of his missing past. The only clue is a single page of an unfinished manuscript found in an old manual typewriter, in a fleabag motel, in a small West Virginian town called Luntville. It is here that the writer will seek answers, believing that if he finishes the book he was writing, his memories will return.

Restaurant manager Vera Abbot has come to The Inn to embark on the job of her dreams. But from the day she arrives, her dream turns into a harrowing nightmare. She hears strange footsteps, sees faceless figures in the dead of night…and is tormented by erotic dreams in which a hideous stranger makes love to her. The past never dies. It only sleeps, waiting to unleash a new cycle of bloodshed and terror. For The Inn is a breeding ground for unspeakable atrocities.

Hildreth House. On a moonlight night in early spring, 27 people entered the mansion's labyrinthine halls, to partake in an orgy of diabolical debauchery, the likes of which beggared description. And one by one, 26 of them were butchered in place. The 27th body was never recovered.

Rape. Murder. Brain-eating. Never before has a work of fiction dared to delve so deeply into the realms of perversion, sexual dementia, and bad taste. Who is he? What is he? An inbred homicidal pervert? A supernatural psychopath? Who or whatever he is, he's on a roll now, raging out of the Virginia backwoods and leaving in his wake a trail of blood, guts, and disgust far beyond the limits of your reckoning.

Nipping Them in the Bud is a gripping tale of extreme horror, showcasing Edward Lee’s mastery in blending visceral terror with thought-provoking themes. Prepare yourself for a journey into darkness, where every decision carries the weight of eternity, and every action challenges the soul’s very essence.

Sexual obsessions running amok, a stagnant lake full of abominable horrors, and a secluded clinic with a secret wing that no one’s ever entered. These are just a few of the goings-on in this macabre tech-horror story in which veteran novelist Edward Lee takes the mad-scientist theme into shocking new territory. Security manager Clare Prentiss swears she’s being watched during her nightly rounds on a remote federal nature preserve.

Crick City is a small hick town. Violent, mean, and dirt-poor, it's a place nobody wants to call home. But for homicide cop Phil Straker, it is home. And now someone—or something—is turning his boyhood town into a bloody sideshow of mutilation and gruesome carnage. They're called Creekers. Centuries old, driven by rage and lust for revenge, they move through the deep, dark woods—deformed, shadowy outcasts with twisted faces and blood red eyes. Now, as the moon hangs low over their ancient house, they're gathering for a harvest of terror and death Crick City will never forget....

No train has run on this railroad since the end of the Civil War—a railroad built by the servitude to perfect evil—and its trusted tracks run right behind the house. Justin Collier expects his respite in Gast, Tennessee, to be relaxing if not a bit dull, but he will find out soon enough that those same train tracks once led to a place worse than Hell.

Bart is 30. He is bald. He is overweight. He wears glasses. He is a fry cook. He hates cats. And kids. Bart occasionally does very bad things. He is looking for his perfect match. He has done his research.