Alan Rodgers Books In Order

Blood of the Children

In the small town of Green Hill, all the children belong to an evil, magical, and entirely secret cult. For generations, every child in Green Hill has belonged to this cult until he reaches puberty. Then all evil, and all memory of evil acts committed, disappears. Only the children know of the ceremonies that take place on moonlit nights and in the caves that lie underneath the town’s foundations…
.

Ben Tompkins had never a nicer bunch of people than the ones he met in Green Hill. That’s why he decided to move himself and his son, Jimmy, there when his wife had a horrifying mental breakdown. Ben doesn’t know about the children of Green Hill. But Jimmy is about to discover their terrifying secret…
and pay the price for that knowledge.

Fire

THE END OF THE WORLD HAS COME. BUT THE HORROR HAS ONLY BEGUN. THE PRESIDENT A madman with his finger on the button he’s determined to bring the rapture and Armageddon to an evil world…
. THE SCIENTIST He accidentally discovered the cure for death but for the newly risen it s not a blessing, only eternal damnation…
. THE PREACHER He s taken over the media to spread his apocalyptic message to an army of rabid listeners hell bent on a second inquisition…
. THE BEAST Hideously deformed, it stalks the ravaged land bringing promise and panic with its eerie, clairvoyant powers…
. Now a small band of men and women both dead and alive are being summoned to heartland America and the ultimate showdown between good and evil…
to a clash of forces undreamt in their darkest nightmares…
to an orgy of violence where not even death can end the torments of the flesh…
. PREPARE FOR THE WORST GET READY TO BE CONSUMED BY FIRE

Night

Night I started working on this book with the thought that God isn’t dead, and it isn’t that he doesn’t love us, either. It’s just that he wants to give us room enough to be ourselves, even if that means we screw up. If he didn’t we’d be nothing but children, and it’d stunt us. I ended up telling a story that isn’t that, exactly but that’s where and what it comes from. That’s what’s this book the story of a man with a forbidding legacy and a destiny he can’t imagine growing great enough to face means to be. Alan Rodgers

The Bear Who Found Christmas

Joey loved his teddy bear so hard and long and pure, so deeply and so truly and so powerfully that the bear began to grow a heart. A spirit heart, made of ghost instead of flesh and blood. It happens to toys sometimes. No one ever notices. When the Bear came alive in the haunted shopping mall, he was all that stood between life and death and Christmas. ‘Alan Rodgers, has taken the fairy tale of the Brothers Grimm and the Rev. Dodson, polished its edges here and there, added a pinch of this and a tablespoon of that, and had produced the almost perfect successor to these 19th Century fables just as the 20th Century was drawing to a close.’ Mike Resnick

Pandora

There’s a story that goes ’round about strange events outside Roswell, New Mexico, and how they led to a hangar in Ohio and the three dead aliens that lie stored inside it. Most everyone has heard the tale at one time or another. And because it goes ’round the way it does metamorphosing ever so slightly with every retelling some people say the tale is nothing but a scrap of modern folklore; a legend alive in every bar and coffee house across the land. Pandora knows better. Pandora knows all about the strange events outside Roswell and she knows even more about the stranger ones that followed. She knows that there weren’t three dead aliens in the wreckage of the doomed ship. Not three, but four. Three dead adults and a single living, breathing infant. That infant was Pandora. Years now the government has raised her in captivity, unknowable and secret inside a classified Air Force Facility in Ohio. This morning Pandora escaped in the dark dark hours before dawn. And through the miracle of modern satellite television, all the world has seen her. And the government wants her back.

Bone Music

A little over sixty years ago, Robert Johnson died of poison in a little town up off the bluff in Arkansas. In an hour, a little girl named Lisa will die of cancer. Such different deaths but linked, horribly and inevitably, by the crime Robert Johnson committed in the hour that he died. That Crime was Judgment Day: Robert Johnson sang Judgment Day, the song to end the world, as he lay dying in that shack up off the Mississippi River bluff and nothing anywhere in the world has been right since. ‘Startling originality, a strong and rhythmic narrative voice, compelling characters, and delightfully quirky metaphysics make this a noteworthy hardcover debut for Rodgers, author of New Life for the Dead…
. Well realized settings range from contemporary New York City to Missouri and Mississippi in 1938; heaven and hell both come down to earth in modern New Orleans. Through colloquial prose that’s strong and perfectly pitched, Rodgers combines elements of horror sometimes graphic, fantasy, and magical realism into a unique novel that’s not only an occult standout but a captivating memoir of an important slice of American culture.’ Publishers Weekly ‘The highest praise one writer can give another is to say ‘I wish I’d written that book.’ I would cheerfully trade my younger brother Rick, my collection of original Beatles cards, and any hope that my beloved Cleveland Indians will ever win a World Series to have written Alan Rodgers’ Bone Music.’ George Alec Effinger, author of When Gravity Fails ‘Alan Rodgers…
uses simple and beautiful words to tell this complex and horrific story. Really weird! Don’t die until you’ve read Bone Music.’ Brian Lumley, author of Necroscope ‘Alan Rodgers’ Bone Music is a work of mythological proportions. He captures the beauty and the horror of the old bluesmen, the terror and majesty of Heaven and Hell, and mixes it all into a potent tale of earthly woe. For atmosphere, real soul, and a touch of mystical madness, read the dream that is Bone Music.’ Billie Sue Mosiman, author of Widow

Menace

Outside Cincinnati, Ohio, there is a wasteland that used to be Wright Patterson Air Force base. Three years ago the aliens invaded there, turning Wright Pat into a nuclear wasteland, the detritus of a terrible battle. It was no ordinary battle, but a battle with something utterly unworldly, something unhuman and inhuman, a force no man could ever hope to master…
. A force over which the world triumphed only because of miracles and ingenuity, driving the aliens back into space and obliterating them on the ground. But everything that goes around, comes around, and now the aliens have returned their agents walk among us, indistinguishable from you or I; and those who listen closely to the news will hear reports of their return to distant and Impregnable places places like Battle Mountain, in Wyoming. The Aliens have landed. And nothing in the world will ever be the same. Alan Rodgers writes with style, wit, and an innate knowledge of what terrifies. Don t miss him! F. Paul Wilson Alan’s books are one of the horror field s most dependable pleasures. He s a writer with great talent, a willingness to tackle difficult and sometimes vast subjects, and an imagination that s as dark and fertile as cemetery earth. T.E.D. Klein Alan Rodgers is an original voice in horror who consistently rewards his readers. His name on a book guarantees a sleepless night. Raymond E. Feist The thing about Rodgers is, he takes the horror and it s horrible, all right and turns it into the light just a little differently than you d ever expect and from this angle you realize it s more tragic than horrid, more beautiful than hideous. Orson Scott Card / F&SF You can depend on Alan Rodgers; he always delivers the goods. Mike Resnick Alan Rodgers is a unique and powerful voice in the field of horror and imaginative fiction. He writes with an uncanny eye for dark images and frightening details that make his stories stick in your mind and leave you feeling pleasantly horrified. He knows the darkness that can be at the core of the human heart and soul, and he takes his readers there and won t let them go until they scream. Frightening stuff! Rick Hautala Author of Cold Whisper, Dark Silence, and Ghost Light…
his novels are as riveting as the interrogation records of the Spanish Inquisition: they fascinate, they horrify, and they illuminate the most shadowy realms of the human soul. S.P. Somtow

The River of Our Destiny

This is the tale of the man sailed The River of Our Destiny. It starts in the barrios of an alien city with a name no man can pronounce, where they sell a drug called Life, that will kill you if you take it. It leads through the events that underpin our lives like the struts of some great superstructure: in the end it will take Walt Fulton to the verge of the veil of time itself. No one knows what lies beyond that. None who have gone there ever have returned.

Alien Love

She was more like a woman than a woman is like a man. She was alien, but not very alien. Even in that first moment when Walt saw her as she looked up as she walked past the construction site, he knew she was alien but thought of her the way he thought about human women. That was a mistake. A really, really bad mistake.

New Life for the Dead

‘The thing about Rodgers is, he takes the horror and it’s horrible, all right and turns it into the light just a little differently than you’d ever expect and from this angle you realize it’s more tragic than horrid, more beautiful than hideous.’ Orson Scott Card / F&SF. New Life for the Dead is one of the best horror collections of the 1990s, and it features many of Rodgers’ best short works, including his Bram Stoker Awardwinning novelet, ‘The Boy Who Came Back from the Dead.’

Ghosts Who Cannot Sleep

”Mama Ghost’ really must be one of the best, and certainly one of the most disturving, horror stories written during the last decade and a half.’ Peter Straub. This collection is a must read for anyone interested in the best of modern horror.