This is not a book.

It's a whirlwind tour of fantastic lands, a mail-order-catalogue for drama and adventure. It's a sample pack of 17 self-published and indie-published novels. As readers, we at Skullgate Media wanted an easy way to sample a large number of the sorts of self-published books we wanted to read—fantasy, sci-fi, horror, off-beat speculative fiction—so we could decide whether to buy the entire book. But when we couldn't find a collection like that, we did what any self-respecting enterprising publisher would do: we decided to make one.

Apart from The Darkness Returns, none of the stories inside this book have been published by Skullgate Media. All the rest are self-published, labors of love by an individual writer who has worked to bring their characters and world alive without any help from from Skullgate. This collection is not even an explicit endorsement (though I have worked with all the writers), rather a platform for these writers to share their work and you, as a reader, to get a taste of their work... and hopefully decide to buy some of their books. This is just a small selection of the many wonderful writers we've been fortunate enough to work with; if this experiment is a success, you can look forward to another sampling of self-published books in the future.