Brian Hodge has 6 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 6 narrators, with an average listener rating of 3.5★ across 10 ratings. The most-rated is Year's Best Hardcore Horror, Volume 3.
Year's Best Hardcore Horror, Volume 3
Summary
It was a killer year for horror fiction of the harder kind. Authors, editors, and publishers presented readers with some startling works of horrific imagination, stories graphic in the extreme yet with subtleties suggesting larger meanings, tales that explore humanity by plumbing depths of soulless inhumanity and, in some cases, outright depravity. The stories here represent the best of them, disturbing tales that dig deep and take you into the dark heart of horror itself, unrelenting and unapologetic. “So Sings the Siren”, by Annie Neugebauer, takes us onto a dark fantasy stage for a one-night-only performance of mythological torture. Ryan Harding’s “Junk” gets right to the hardcore stuff with the ultimate dick-pic horror tale. Robert Levy’s “The Cenacle” is a literary cemetery feast you may have a hard time stomaching (Tums won’t save you). Luciano Marano made his first pro sell when he sold “Burnt” to DOA III, and the tale has its own fiery fetishistic twist. Tim Waggoner’s “Til Death” is Lovecraftian post-apocalypse horror at its absolute best. “Letter from Hell” comes with that special delivery you only get from Matt Shaw. Dani Brown gets down and very dirty in her “Theatrum Mortuum”, which may be the most extreme thing you hear all year. In “Bernadette”, Ramiro Perez de Pereda gets medieval in his tale of a djinn summoned by a desperate priest. Brian Hodge takes you on a trip to Mexico you will never forget in “West of Matamoros, North of Hell”. Bracken MacLeod’s “Reprising Her Role” takes us behind the scenes of a porno snuff film for a gut-wrenching reprisal and unexpected bonus footage. A real-life death threat inspired Doug Ford’s “The Watcher”, and we think it shows. “Scratching from the Outer Darkness” showcases Tim Curran’s descriptive prowess and gives you a tale of hardcore Cthulhu mythos. Brace yourself when Adam Howe’s “Foreign Bodies” takes you deep into the bowels of a nasty abyss. Sean Patrick Hazlett introduces us to “Adramelech”, an ancient demon with a taste for broiled children. Scott Smith (A Simple Plan and The Ruins) wraps up this year’s fat package of the hard stuff in a big bloody bow with “The Dogs”. The canines in this tale are not "man’s best friend" variety, nor are they woman’s besties, as you will see. And many more! Thanks for coming along into this year’s heart of hardcore darkness. We hope to see you on the other side.
©2018 Comet Press (P)2018 Comet Press
Year's Best Hardcore Horror, Volume 4
Summary
Red Room Press is extremely proud to present its fourth annual anthology featuring this year's hardcore corps of authors with the best extreme horror fiction of 2018 that breaks boundaries and trashes taboos. First up is Vigil by Chad Lutzke. Chad takes us into a neighborhood where a steady stream of decayed corpses are exhumed from a neighbor’s cellar. Extreme olfactory horror at its best. Deborah Sheldon went under the knife for the inspiration of Hair and Teeth, and the result is a tale of gynecological body horror likely to terrify women and make most men squeamish. With Rut Season Brain Hodge makes a return to Year’s-best stories in a tale as chilling as it is heart-wrenching, inspired by a thousand-mile drive littered with roadkill and some personal tragedies. Control by Jeff Parsons introduces us to a meth addict stalking potential victims in Central Park to get money for the next score. Annie Neugebauer is back with Cilantro, a Neugebauerian yarn of culinary chaos sure to turn stomachs and cause nightmares. Tim Waggoner likewise returns this year with Voices Like Barbwire, an exploratory dig into old wounds and painful memories. Rebecca Rowland’s Bent wins the Most Cringe-worthy Story honor with her twisted tale of extreme body horror. Her well-drawn characters seem to come off the page but God forbid they do. Their idea of a pretzel party is truly twisted. Scath Beorh takes Lovecraftian cosmic horror to its next level with Lord of the Mesa. Sean Patrick Hazlett’s story The Godhead Grimoire possesses dangerous religious overtones and a forbidden bloodthirsty book. Carnal Bodies by R.E. Hellinger is a shocking story of baroque horror and demonic necrophilia from Two Dead Queers Present: Guillozine. You’ll have to read this one to believe it. In Crossroads of Opportunity Ed Kurtz and doungjai gam take you on a-deal-with-the-devil-at-the-crossroads trip with a son driving his dead mother to an uncertain destination. Trouble is, his mother is a bit of a backseat driver and she just won’t shut up. Seras Nikita’s Dad’s Famous Preserves won’t do much for your appetite but it will show you a recipe for disaster when a jungle missionary’s foot infection blossoms into a stomach-churning nightmare. The Bearded Woman, brought all the way from Rome, Italy, by the inimitable Alessandro Manzetti. His dystopian future tale takes us for a ride in the Bearded Woman’s circus trailer as she and her dwarf husband bring their marriage to a bloody end. Sara Tantlinger’s The Devil’s Dreamland takes us inside the Murder Castle of the infamous H.H. Holmes with her brilliant narrative poem of macabre beauty. Frank Oreto’s All God’s Creatures Got Reasons reveals that there are real monsters walking among us, monsters with a savage appetite for young flesh, but they are so skilled at covering their tracks, we never even know they’re there. The Ugly by J.R. Park introduces us to a couple of sweet little kids who may have a good reason for torturing and eating cats. It’s a way to keep the ugly at bay. Or is it? Doug Ford’s I Have a Confession takes a coldblooded plunge into sex with a ghost. But what if it’s not a ghost? In When the Owls Call Lyman Graves takes us “stealth camping” in a Texas park after hours, where a strange and dangerous gathering is taking place. David Lynch might say, “The owls are not what they seem”. But are they? Jeremy Thompson is back this year with his nefarious pal the Hallowfiend in Bloodletting and Intrigue on All Hallows’ Eve’. With a stylistic nod to Ray Bradbury, Jeremy delivers on our promise that something twisted this way comes. Capping it all off, Alicia Hilton serves up Monkey See, Monkey Do as a tasty little nightcap (for those with hardcore tastes). Salud! Sleep well. If you can. - Randy Chandler and Cheryl Mullenax
©2019 Red Room Press (P)2019 Red Room Press
Dark Screams, Volume Three
Summary
"The Collected Short Stories of Freddie Prothero" by Peter Straub: A mere child yet a precocious writer, young Freddie records a series of terrifying encounters with an inhuman being that haunts his life and seems to predict his death. "Group of Thirty" by Jack Ketchum: When an award-winning horror writer on the downward slope of a long career receives an invitation to address the Essex County Science Fiction Group, he figures that he's got nothing to lose. He couldn't be more wrong. "Nancy" by Darynda Jones: Though she's adopted by the cool kids, the new girl at Renfield High School is most drawn to Nancy Wilhoit, who claims to be haunted. But it soon becomes apparent that poltergeists - and people - are seldom what they seem. "I Love You, Charlie Pearson" by Jacquelyn Frank: Charlie Pearson has a crush on Stacey Wheeler. She has no idea. Charlie will make Stacey see that he loves her and that she loves him - even if he has to kill her to make her say it. "The Lone and Level Sands Stretch Far Away" by Brian Hodge: When Marni moves in next door, the stale marriage of Tara and Aidan gets a jolt of adrenaline. Whether it's tonic or toxic is another matter.
©2015 Brian James Freeman and Richard Chizmar (P)2015 Tantor
The Darker Saints
Summary
Behind the walls of respectability is a world exploding with crime, sin, and the darkest magic of all. The rain beats down on the hot New Orleans streets. A derelict staggers, no longer a man, but a zombie, a vessel emptied by voodoo sorcery and poured full of another's will. This is the land of lace curtains and Mardi Gras. This is the world of the bayou, and sizzling crawfish, and a man in white who can kill at any distance. A storm of corporate greed and cruel vengeance is sweeping through New Orleans, descending on a young advertising executive (Nightlife‘s Justin Gray), who fears he may be selling his soul along with brand names, a weary ex-CIA agent, and a Caribbean chauffeur on the run from enemies he can't understand. Two powerful businessmen, one legitimate, the other a criminal, have built a common empire. Now it is coming apart in a tidal wave of bloodshed and shattered lives, flooding the Delta with voodoo - the dark magic of darker saints. PRAISE FOR THE DARKER SAINTS: “Southern Louisiana is always a terrifically atmospheric setting for hot, humid, moldering, multicultural horror. Hodge uses his setting well...moves along with the speed of an airboat skimming a steaming bayou. The action's hot, the magic is dark, and you start getting a little sorry for Justin, considering all the shit he gets into in the space of just two novels... This is a quite literate edge of night in which the morning apparently never comes.” (Ed Bryant, in Locus) “You've got the spicy ingredients for a dish so intense and uncompromising, it'll leave your eyes stinging... If you're tired of predictable horror yarns, then step into Hodge's dark and obsessive world, where lovers circle each other like enemies, brothers see murder as a tool of capitalism, and ancient voodoo gods descend to earth to possess willing subjects. Hodge's work often emphasizes that the real world can be scarier than the supernatural. The Darker Saints stands as a mature and fully realized vision of what it's like to be young and confused, and you can't get much scarier than that.” (Insider)
©1993 Brian Hodge (P)2020 David N. Wilson
Skidding into Oblivion
Summary
We each inhabit many worlds, often at the same time. From worlds on the inside to the world on a cosmic scale. Worlds imposed on us, and worlds of our own making. In time, though, all worlds will end. Bear witness: After the death of their grandmother, two cousins return to their family’s rural homestead to find a community rotting from the soul outward and a secret nobody dreamed their matriarch had been keeping. The survivors of the 1929 raid on H.P. Lovecraft’s town of Innsmouth hold the key to an anomalous new event in the ocean. If only someone could communicate with them... The ultimate snow day turns into the ultimate nightmare when it just doesn’t stop. An extreme metal musician compels his harshest critic to live up to the hyperbole of his trolling. With the last of a generation of grotesquely selfish city fathers on his deathbed, the residents of the town they doomed exercise their right to self-determination one last time. As history repeats itself and the world shivers through a volcanic winter, a group gathers around the shore of a mountain lake to, once again, invoke the magic that created the world’s most famous monster. With Skidding Into Oblivion, his fifth collection, award-winning author Brian Hodge brings together his most concentrated assortment yet. It includes all of the best picks and awards finalists. All stories have one thing in common: It’s the end of the world as we know it, and we don’t feel fine at all.
©2019 Brian Hodge (P)2019 Journalstone
The Immaculate Void
Summary
You wouldn’t think events happening years apart, at points in the solar system hundreds of millions of miles distant, would have anything to do with each other. When she was six, Daphne was taken into a neighbor’s tool shed and came within seconds of never coming out alive. Most of the scars healed. Except for the one that went all the way through. You wouldn’t think that the serial murders of children and the one who got away would have any connection with the strange fate of one of Jupiter’s moons. Two decades later, when Daphne goes missing again, it’s nothing new. As her exes might agree, running is what she does best, so her brother Tanner sets out one more time to find her. Whether in the mountains or in his own family, search and rescue is what he does best. But it does. It’s all connected. Everything’s connected. Down two different paths, along two different timelines, Daphne and Tanner both find themselves trapped in a savage hunt for the rarest people on Earth, by those who would slaughter them on behalf of ravenous entities that lurk outside of time. So, when things start to unravel, it all starts to unravel. But in ominous signs that have traveled light years to be seen by human eyes, and that plummet from the sky, the ultimate truth is revealed: There are some things in the cosmos that terrify even the gods.
©2018 Brian Hodge (P)2020 Journalstone