Fledgling, Octavia Butler’s last novel, is the story of an apparently young, amnesiac girl whose alarmingly un-human needs and abilities lead her to a startling conclusion: she is in fact a genetically modified, 53-year-old vampire. Forced to discover what she can about her stolen former life, she must at the same time learn who wanted—and still wants—to destroy her and those she cares for, and how she can save herself. Fledgling...

Eden, Kentucky, is just another dying, bad-luck town, known only for the legend of E. Starling, the reclusive nineteenth-century author and illustrator who wrote "The Underland"--and disappeared. Before she vanished, Starling House appeared. But everyone agrees that it's best to let the uncanny house and its last lonely heir, Arthur Starling go to rot... Opal is a lot of things--orphan, high school dropout, full-time cynic and part-time cashier--but...

"Something's happening to the girls on Denton Street. It's the summer of 1980 in Cleveland and Phoebe Shaw and her best friend Jacqueline have just graduated high school, only to confront an ugly, uncertain future. The girls they've grown up with are changing. One by one, the girls' bodies wither away, their bones exposed like corroded metal beneath their flesh. As rumors spread about the grotesque transformations, soon everyone from nosy tourists...

To some she's intelligent and beautiful. To others she's proud and dangerous. At the historically black college of Dillard University in the lush mystical city of New Orleans, the beautiful and serious Leslie Beaudet is struggling with a dark secret of power in a world that is pulling her in many different directions. In the eyes of her Haitian immigrant father, Leslie is a queen who deserves more than the broken dreams and carnage of poverty. To...

Marion Del Rosario disappeared at age twelve, and no answers ever came. Ten years later, Charlie Louise is still haunted by the empty space in her life that Marion once filled. They were best friends, each other's first loves. She still searches for Marion in the eyes of strangers, trying in vain to escape the gravity of her past. The only things that give her hope anymore are her father, whose sobriety has brought a semblance of stability and comfort;...

"Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort--a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other "Bunny," and are often found entangled in a group hug so tight they become one. But everything...

Allie Hilts was still in high school when a fire at a top-secret research facility released an air-borne pathogen that quickly spread to every male on the planet, killing most. Allie witnessed every man she ever knew be consumed by fearsome symptoms: scorching fevers and internal bleeding, madness and uncontrollable violence. The world crumbled around her. No man was spared, and the few survivors were irrevocably changed. They became disturbingly...

Meridia is a lonely child; a mysterious incident when she was an infant has torn apart her parents, leaving them sharing nothing but a cold, mist-filled home. Not until Meridia meets the charmer Daniel, at age 16, does she finally feel loved. They marry and move in with his family and at first Meridia loves her life in Daniel's home. But she quickly learns of matriarch Eva's deceitful, manipulative ways and her power, both natural and supernatural,...

"If beautiful, orphaned Emily St. Aubert is to resist the predatory demands of her new guardian, the inscrutable Signor Montoni, she must quell the superstitious imaginings that pervade her mind. Within the sombre walls of Montoni's medieval castle the boundaries of real and imagined terrors are blurred as Emily is drawn into a Gothic web of mystery and intrigue which threaten her not only with the loss of inheritance but also identity."--Jacket.

"Cynthia and Imeld have always lived in the Apartments. A world where every calorie is rationed and the girls who live there are forced to weigh their own hunger against the lives of the others living in the building. It's a world where the threat of the Wet Room and Ms. Lion always lingers, and punishments are doled out heavily both by the Women who oversee them and the other girls. When Cynthia is wrongly accused of eating an "A" ration which leads...