Search Worlds Without End

WFA nominated short story. It originally appeared in the collection Tales from the Nightside: Dark Fantasy (1981). The story can also be found in the anthology The Horror Hall of Fame (1992), edited by Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg. It is included in the collection Scream Quietly: The Best of Charles L. Grant (2012).

In this book, keyed to the seasons, Grant gives us...face to skull confrontation with Death, variously personified as a man/serpent, eliminating its romantic rivals, a little girl who gives her mother's admirers violence and lightning, a faceless motorcycle gang, and a shadow in a black raincoat... .some of Grant's best work yet.

WFA nominated novella. It originally appeared in the collection Nightmare Seasons (1982).

Pat Shavers was an artist and a teacher. She'd had a rough life: a divorce, and the loss of her child. But now things seemed to be in order. Except for the strange force riding in the daily movements of her life. A threat rising in the envy of her colleagues, the jealousies of her new lover, the hidden enmity of those who seemed to be her friends. It was a dangerous fury gathering itself against her. The wind rose and swirled, threatening to destroy her.

Josh Miller has a talent for finding things. So far, the things people have asked him to find - antique tables, old movie posters - have been innocuous enough. And Andrea Montague, the daughter of a local writer, may be his most interesting find so far.

But no one's asked Josh to find the missing fifth victim of an unexplained auto accident - the one who vanished from the scene of the crash without leaving a trail of blood, though he must have been badly hurt. No one's asked Josh to look for the other missing people - residents of Oxrun Station who mysteriously and inexplicably vanished on their birthdays.

Someone very definitely doesn't want him to find the clearing full of century-old gravestones, the clearing that feels so evil.

This time whatever Josh is hunting is hunting him, too... and it's hungry..

Somehow Natalie had managed to pull herself together and carry on, but certain people wouldn't leave her alone... Her brother-in-law, the chief of police, insisted on sending patrol cars to "protect" her, and her sister-in-law urged her repeatedly to see a psychiatrist. The only person whose interfering she didn't mind was newspaper reporter Marc Clayton's. But the guardian eyes about her seemed to hinder her social life as well.

And some strange things began to happen. A murder which the newspaper refused to report, missing books from the library which appeared to form a pattern...and the discovery of a certain object which unlikely people have in common with her dead husband. Are these fragments of some larger scheme? As she wonders, an awful black presence begins to haunt her shadows, to threaten her very life, and then she knows that the attack is in earnest and she must somehow solve this unbelievable mystery or sacrifice herself to a monstrous killer beyond the powers of this world.

Natalie Windsor was not your ordinary small-town librarian. Nor did she expect, on her arrival in the quiet New England town of Oxrun Station, to be swept off her feet by a six-and-a-half-foot policeman and into marriage, only to be widowed a little less than a year later, after her husband was grotesquely murdered.

Returning to her home in Oxrun Station to find her family considerably changed and the town noticeably quieter, Cynthia Yarrow begins to be followed by the Greybeast and discovers an awful secret.

There was one thing worse than loving the children,and that was trusting them.

They came to the toy shop in the tiny New England village in the steady stream-children somehow older than their years, money clutched in their little hands, buying a bizarre and unsettling selection of games, then vanishing to play with them in a world that no adult could enter.

Still, there seemed nothing to worry about. After all, children would be children.

Then the townspeople began to discover what else children could be-as the grown-ups themselves became the children's playthings...