New Releases by Ben h. Winters

WHERE ONCE A CRUEL UNIVERSE BECKONED . . . NOW A CRUEL KINGDOM SHALL REIGN! Oni Press is proud to unveil a spellbinding new chapter in the distinguished lineage of EC history! Enter: Cruel Kingdom—EC’s first-ever dark-fantasy anthology conjuring tales of MAGIC, MYTH, and MURDER from forbidden realms long before our own! Behold the bloody and barbarous age of wizards, knights, and dragons as reimagined in the immutable EC manner as master scribes Al Ewing (Immortal Hulk), Chris Condon (That Texas Blood), Greg Pak (Darth Vader), and Ben H. Winters (Cruel Universe) couple their forces with iron-wrought artists Charlie Adlard (The Walking Dead), Kano (Cruel Universe), Leomacs (Ghostlore), Andrea Mutti (Rebels) and more to forge a terrifying new vision of death, life, and adventure "once upon a time. From the twisted minds that spawned Epitaphs from the Abyss and Cruel Universe, steel thyself for 30+ pages of fatal fantasy and skullduggerous sorcery in one cursed tome of comic book enchantment!

Only human arrogance would lead us to believe that we are alone in this vast universe. The real question is, who will find us first? Allies to help us grow and flourish as members of larger cosmic society? Or others who would use up the earth for its resources, enslave the human race, and destroy everything we know and love? Do we live in a limitless realm of possibilities, or a deep dark Cruel Universe? Cozy thoughts, aren’t they? While you ponder those questions, you’ll find no comfort in the pages of our latest cruel offering . . . featuring the astronomical talents of EC veterans Matt Kindt (BRZRKR, Mind MGMT) and Ben H. Winters (CBS’ Tracker), while welcoming newcomers Cecil Castellucci (Shade the Changing Girl) and Matt Bors (Toxic Avenger) to the void. . . . Their harsh words are brought to terrible fruition by artists Alison Sampson (Hit-Girl), Kano (Gotham Central), and more!

You were an explorer who challenged the farthest reaches of existence. Until your technology failed and you found yourself trapped in the endless void of space, drifting amongst the nebulae, with only one question rattling through your tiny, dying, all-too-human brain: What if the horrors of this reality are too great to comprehend? What if they were NEVER supposed to be explored at all? GOOD THING YOU STILL HAVE THIS COMIC TO KEEP YOU COMPANY, SPACEMAN! Test the boundaries of our cold and unforgiving CRUEL UNIVERSE with four bizarre tales of time and space by eight modern masters of the science-fiction form: Christopher Cantwell (Thanos, Iron Man) and David Lapham (Stray Bullets); Chris Condon (That Texas Blood) and Javier Rodriguez (Amazing Spider-Man); Stephanie Phillips (Harley Quinn, Grim) and Riley Rossmo (The Sandman); and a very special surprise from Ben H. Winters (CBS’ Tracker) and Leomacs (Rogues). . . . EC Comics dares you to look into the void and ponder what fate awaits us all! (It’s OBLIVION!)

Compelled to OBLIVION, driven to ENTROPY, all life in our cosmos can only end in one place: COMPLETE ANNIHILATION! For the first time in 70 years, the limitless fury of EC Comics rages back to life to shred the very fabric of the universe itself—and wrench bizarre tales of time and space into our dimensional plane! Our guides across this double-sized, 40-page introduction to a cosmic maelstrom of strange extraterrestrial entities, malevolent scientists, and terrifying technological catastrophes? Learn to fear the void with the irradiated imaginations of Hugo Award nominee Corinna Bechko (Invisible Republic, The Space Between), rising star Chris Condon (That Texas Blood), Eisner Award nominee Matt Kindt (BRZRKR, Mind MGMT), and Edgar Award winner Ben H. Winters (The Last Policeman) as they collide with the wondrously destructive visions of artists Jonathan Case (Green River Killer), Kano (Immortal Iron Fist), Artyom Topilin (I Hate This Place), and Caitlin Yarsky (Black Hammer: Reborn)! The unpredictable return of EC Comics continues here with the quantum comics event of the millennium! Galaxies will collapse. Space-time will be distorted. And your very will to exist, too, shall be broken . . . Just remember: it''s all in the name of SCIENCE!

In this "wild and wonderful" (Lou Berney) corporate espionage thriller that takes the adage "time is money" and makes it frighteningly so, an everywoman FDA employee stumbles upon a dark, clandestine conspiracy to harvest and sell people''s time. What if time could be taken from us—the minutes, the hours, the years of our lives, extracted like organs taken for transplant? What would it mean for the world? And what would it do to the person from whom it’s taken? Grace Berney is a mid-level bureaucrat in the Food and Drug Administration, a woman who once brimmed with purpose but somehow turned into a middle-aged single mom with a dull government job and a melancholy sense that life has passed her by. Until the night a strange photo comes across her desk, of a young woman in a hospital bed who has been subjected to a mysterious procedure. Against orders and against common sense, Grace sets out to bring the girl to safety, and finds herself risking her job, her future, and her life on whether she can find the missing girl before an obsessive and violent mercenary who’s also looking. Big Time is a fast-paced thriller and a metaphysical mystery about the very nature of our lives.

From New York Times best-selling and Edgar Award-winning author Ben H. Winters, this supernatural page-turner about a real-estate nightmare will make you think twice about your dream home Susan and Alex Wendt have found their dream apartment in a gorgeous Brooklyn brownstone. Sure, the landlady is a little eccentric. And the elderly handyman drops some cryptic remarks about the basement. But the rent is so low, it’s too good to pass up. Big mistake. Susan awakens every morning with fresh bug bites, but neither Alex nor their daughter, Emma, has a single welt. An exterminator searches the property and turns up nothing. The landlady insists her building is clean. Susan fears she’s going mad—until she makes a chilling discovery in the bonus room. Filled with Hitchcockian suspense, The Bonus Room is a horrifying tale of a dream home that becomes a nightmare. Previously published in 2011 as Bedbugs.

C''est dans ta tête, chérie... À Brooklyn Heights, quartier prisé de New York, Susan et Alex Wendt ont enfin trouvé l''appartement de leurs rêves ! Certes, la propriétaire, qui vit au rez-de-chaussée, paraît un peu excentrique, mais quelle importance ? Susan, qui s''était arrêtée de peindre à la naissance de leur fille, Emma, va enfin pouvoir reprendre ses toiles. Pour le jeune couple, un nouveau départ s''annonce... Sauf que. Un redoutable fléau s''est invité dans le home sweet home des Wendt. Des punaises de lit. Envahissantes, assoiffées de sang, et apparemment indestructibles. Invisibles, également, sauf pour Susan. Inexorablement, la petite mécanique du bonheur domestique se détraque. Est-ce le fruit de son imagination ou une véritable invasion ? A moins que la jeune femme au bord de la crise de nerfs soit, tout simplement, en train de perdre la raison ? Apprêtez-vous à ne pas fermer l''oeil de la nuit ! Jouant avec nos obsessions et nos angoisses les plus intimes, Ben H. Winters nous prend au piège d''un récit d''une rare intensité, aussi dérangeant que captivant.

From the "inventive...entertaining and thought-provoking" (Charles Yu) New York Times-bestselling author of Underground Airlines and Golden State, this sweeping legal thriller follows a sixteen-year-old who suffers from a neurological condition that has frozen him in time—and the team of lawyers, doctors, and detectives who are desperate to wake him up. In 2008, a cheerful ambulance-chasing lawyer named Jay Shenk persuades the grieving Keener family to sue a private LA hospital. Their son Wesley has been transformed by a routine surgery into a kind of golem, absent all normal functioning or personality, walking in endless empty circles around his hospital room. In 2019, Shenk—still in practice but a shell of his former self—is hired to defend Wesley Keener’s father when he is charged with murder . . . the murder, as it turns out, of the expert witness from the 2008 hospital case. Shenk’s adopted son, a fragile teenager in 2008, is a wayward adult, though he may find his purpose when he investigates what really happened to the murdered witness. Two thrilling trials braid together, medical malpractice and murder, jostling us back and forth in time. The Quiet Boy is a book full of mysteries, not only about the death of a brilliant scientist, not only about the outcome of the medical malpractice suit, but about the relationship between children and their parents, between the past and the present, between truth and lies. At the center of it all is Wesley Keener, endlessly walking, staring empty-eyed, in whose quiet, hollow body may lie the fate of humankind.

From award-winning, New York Times bestselling novelist Ben H. Winters comes a mind-bending novel set in a world governed by absolute truth, where lies are as dangerous as murder. In a strange alternate society that values law and truth above all else, Laszlo Ratesic is a nineteen-year veteran of the Speculative Service. He lives in the Golden State, a nation standing where California once did, a place where like-minded Americans retreated after the erosion of truth and the spread of lies made public life and governance impossible. In the Golden State, knowingly contradicting the truth is the greatest crime -- and stopping those crimes is Laz''s job. In its service, he is one of the few individuals permitted to harbor untruths, to "speculate" on what might have happened. But the Golden State is less of a paradise than its name might suggest. To monitor, verify, and enforce the truth requires a veritable panopticon of surveillance and recording. And when those in control of the facts twist them for nefarious means, the Speculators are the only ones with the power to fight back.

Le compte à rebours est enclenché. Deuxième tome d''une trilogie passionnante, le roman de Ben H. Winters, lauréat du prix Elgar, nous transporte dans un monde à feu et à sang, au côté d''un personnage qui se révèle à lui-même, au moment où l''humanité sombre ! La fin du monde ? Elle arrive. Dans 77 jours maintenant, l''astéroïde 2011GV1 va s''écraser sur Terre, quelque part en Indonésie, et c''en sera fini de l''humanité. Plutôt que de se lever le matin pour aller travailler, les Américains – et on les comprend – préfèrent concrétiser d''urgence la liste des 100 choses qu''ils ont envie de faire avant de mourir avec, évidemment, tous les excès que cela implique. Pourtant, il reste un homme, un seul, bien décidé à faire son job jusqu''au bout : Hank Palace, ancien flic de la police de Concord. Déterminé à retrouver Brett Cavatone, le mari de sa nounou qui a mystérieusement disparu, Hank se lance dans une quête désespérée, et rien ne semble pouvoir l''arrêter. Mais son courage et sa droiture suffiront-ils ? Car rien n''est simple dans un pays livré à une anarchie sans nom, où l''électricité et les télécommunications ont rendu l''âme, où les pillages sont quotidiens et qui pourtant est synonyme de terre promise pour des milliers de personnes qui tentent de fuir la zone d''impact...

" This is the end. " Tragique, superbe et sans concession, la conclusion magistrale d''une série apocalyptique unique en son genre. Les derniers jours sont arrivés. Ancien agent des forces de police de Concord (New Hampshire), Hank Palace a trouvé refuge dans les bois de Nouvelle-Angleterre, où d''anciens collègues se sont rassemblés pour attendre la fin. Mais son esprit n''est pas encore en paix. Il lui reste une affaire à régler, la plus importante peut-être : celle de la disparition de sa sœur Nico, qui semble liée aux activités d''un énigmatique culte pseudo-survivaliste qui entend encore sauver le monde, envers et contre tout. L''humanité entre maintenant dans ses derniers soubresauts. En route pour l''Ohio, où l''attend manifestement une révélation tragique, l''inoxydable Hank, accompagné du chien Houdini et de son ami Cortez, découvre à bicyclette ce qui reste de l''Amérique : un monde en ruine et déserté par la technologie, un territoire hostile peuplé de gangs fanatiques, d''immigrants illégaux, de groupuscules religieux... et d''une communauté amish qui pourrait bien l''amener à reconsidérer toute sa perception des choses.

Há menos de duas semanas para o asteroide Maia atingir o planeta, as pessoas vivem atrás de barricadas, entocadas em porões e abrigos de emergência, o dinheiro se tornou inútil e água é a moeda mais valiosa. Enquanto todos esperam o fim, o detetive Hank Palace ainda tem um último caso para resolver. Sua irmã Nico está envolvida com um grupo radical que possui um plano para salvar a humanidade. Hank então embarca numa jornada por uma América destruída, na tentativa de encontrar a irmã e descobrir mais sobre o suposto plano. De Massachusetts para Ohio, o detetive passa por zoológicos abandonados, restaurantes desertos, encontra gente de todos os tipos em diferentes graus de desespero, até chegar a uma central de polícia vazia, onde as evidências de um crime brutal mexem com seus instintos investigativos. Com o tempo se esgotando, Hank segue as pistas, mas não tem certeza se está preparado para o que pode encontrar, no desfecho da premiada trilogia O último policial.

The bestselling book that asks the question: what would present-day America look like if the Civil War never happened? A New York Times bestseller; a Goodreads Choice finalist; named one of the Best Books of the Year by NPR, Slate, Publishers Weekly, Hudson Bookseller, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Kirkus Reviews, AudioFile Magazine, and Amazon A young black man calling himself Victor has struck a bargain with federal law enforcement, working as a bounty hunter for the US Marshall Service in exchange for his freedom. He''s got plenty of work. In this version of America, slavery continues in four states called "the Hard Four." On the trail of a runaway known as Jackdaw, Victor arrives in Indianapolis knowing that something isn''t right -- with the case file, with his work, and with the country itself. As he works to infiltrate the local cell of a abolitionist movement called the Underground Airlines, tracking Jackdaw through the back rooms of churches, empty parking garages, hotels, and medical offices, Victor believes he''s hot on the trail. But his strange, increasingly uncanny pursuit is complicated by a boss who won''t reveal the extraordinary stakes of Jackdaw''s case, as well as by a heartbreaking young woman and her child -- who may be Victor''s salvation. Victor believes himself to be a good man doing bad work, unwilling to give up the freedom he has worked so hard to earn. But in pursuing Jackdaw, Victor discovers secrets at the core of the country''s arrangement with the Hard Four, secrets the government will preserve at any cost. Underground Airlines is a ground-breaking novel, a wickedly imaginative thriller, and a story of an America that is more like our own than we''d like to believe.

La fin du monde arrive. Dans quelques semaines, l''astéroïde Maïa va s''écraser quelque part, et c''en sera fini de notre jolie planète bleue. La société ? Un champ de ruines. L''ordre et la loi ? De vagues souvenirs. Nombreux, déjà, sont ceux qui ont choisi d''en finir ou de s''évanouir dans la nature. Pas Hank Palace. Car, même s''il n''est plus officiellement flic, Hank demeure un homme de principes et de convictions. Et quand Martha Cavatone, la chère nounou de son enfance, vient lui demander de retrouver son mari mystérieusement disparu, il s''avère incapable de dire non. Mais sait-il vraiment dans quelle aventure il s''embarque ? A travers une Amérique désormais livrée à un chaos généralisé - entre dérives hédonistes et violence éruptive -, [épopée à deux roues de Palace, qui part sur les routes accompagné de son chien Houdini, ressemble furieusement à une quête de la dernière chance. Et les questions abondent, obsédantes. Due reste-t-il à espérer quand tout s''écroule autour de vous ? Due cherche Hank, au fond ? Et que trouvera-t-il au bout de son chemin ? Deuxième tome d''une trilogie unique en son genre qui, à mesure que le danger se rapproche, monte inexorablement en puissance, J -77 se révèle tout à la fois une enquête policière aux développements inattendus, la chronique détaillée d''un monde à l''agonie, et la description en profondeur d''un personnage à nul autre pareil, animé par un inflexible sens du devoir. Hank Palace est-il trop humain pour ce monde ?

A contagem regressiva continua. Restam agora apenas 77 dias antes da inevitável colisão do asteroide com a Terra, e o detetive Hank Palace está sem emprego. Com a força policial Concord operando sob comando do Departamento de Justiça dos EUA, os dias de combate ao crime de Palace parecem ter chegado ao fim. Até que uma importante figura de seu passado implora para que o ex-policial a ajude a encontrar seu marido. Brett Cavatone desapareceu sem deixar rastros. Uma tarefa não muito difícil em um mundo sem telefones, internet, carros particulares e, principalmente, sem distinção entre aqueles que saíram em busca de seus últimos desejos e os que desapareceram de fato. Nesta sociedade em frangalhos, Palace junta as poucas pistas que estão ao seu alcance, em uma busca que o leva de uma universidade ocupada por um acampamento anarquista até uma paisagem costeira ameaçada por uma milícia anti-imigração, empenhada em afastar refugiados vindos da "zona de impacto". Mas como encontrar uma pessoa desaparecida quando a maior parte das pessoas não está onde se espera? Nesta segunda parte da aclamada trilogia iniciada em O último policial, Ben H. Winters combina o melhor da ficção científica com o clássico romance policial para apresentar mais um mistério às margens do apocalipse - e dessa vez Hank Palace precisa ir muito além do procedimento operacional padrão.

Qual o sentido de se investigar um crime quando o planeta tem apenas seis meses de vida? O detetive Hank Palace enfrenta essa questão desde que o asteroide 2011GV1 foi avistado em rota de colisão com a Terra. Em face da tragédia iminente, a maioria das pessoas abandona seus trabalhos, casas e famílias e as instituições começam a ruir, mas Palace insiste em investigar um suposto suicídio. Ganhador dos prêmios Edgar, dedicado à literatura policial e de mistério, e Philip K. Dick, voltado para livros de ficção científica, O último policial é a combinação perfeita do clássico romance noir com o melhor da ficção científica atual. Primeiro de uma trilogia, o livro pinta um retrato fascinante dos Estados Unidos pré-apocalipse através de um enredo original e envolvente e de um protagonista carismático. "Estranha, bela e assumidamente apocalíptica. Uma das minhas séries de mistério favoritas." – John Green

A follow-up collection of spooky stories in verse is comprised of thirty tales about the scary-but-fun things that haunt kids'' nightmares.