Science Fiction and Fantasy Books You Can Read for $5 or Less

Con-artist Amanda Coleman lives in a London rife with undercover magic. Abras, as they are known, can harness these illegal powers, but for Coleman—whose father was a powerful and abusive practitioner—magic is anathema.

When her criminal crew hire an Abra to help with their heists, they accidentally raise a dangerously violent demon. Now they must race across darkest Siberia to a remote stone circle to kill the creature, in this engrossingly tense and gripping adventure.

But as the demon’s power grows during their grisly chase, Coleman must fight to survive, facing demons both in chains and within herself.

During the weird fiction boom that gave birth to H.P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon and Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian, Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore produced some of the most enduring pieces of speculative fiction in the genre’s history: the sagas of Jirel of Joiry, Northwest Smith of Earth, Galloway Gallegher, and more. Working closely, Kuttner and Moore became a husband and wife team whose work appeared in everything from television and print to the Cthulhu mythos.
 

Expanding on the concept behind Byron Preiss's Weird Heroes from the 1970s, George R. R. Martin's Wild Card series, and Michael Chabon's McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, The Darker Mask is a collection of original prose stories recalling the derring-do of the beings we call Superheroes and the worlds they fight to save.

But unique to The Darker Mask stories is that these plots and characters color a literary universe outside of what has been predominantly white, idiosyncratic, and male in previous homages to pulp. This is the stuff of urban legends, new mythos, and extraordinary folks who might live in a soon-to-be-gentrified ghetto, the dreary rust-belt of the city, or in another dimension.

Jack Danielson has spent the last year saving the oceans and the Amazon, attempting to fulfill a prophecy that was written before his birth. Now he's more than ready to get back to life as a typical teenager and spend some quality time with his girlfriend, P.J. Too bad the world has other plans.

Wrenched away once more from those he knows and loves, Jack is thrust through time to the fiery deserts of the future and the frozen tundra of the Arctic, battling cyborgs, zombie warlocks, and scorpions the size of tanks. At least he has Gisco—everyone's favorite surly telepathic canine—to keep him company, not to mention the Ninja Babe, Eko. And he will finally be reunited with the parents who abandoned him so long ago, in order that he might save their dying planet.

But it isn't only a race to save Earth. As the clock ticks down before the final confrontation with the dreaded Dark Lord, Jack must decide once and for all who he really is—prince of the future or humble human of the present—and choose between the two women who love him.

The city of Newford could be any city in North America, bursting with music, commerce, art, love, hate, and, of course magic. Magic in the sidewalk cracks, myth at the foundations of its great buildings, enchantment in the spaces between its people.

In novels like Moonheart, Forests of the Heart, The Onion Girl, and The Mystery of Grace, and in a series of story collections, urban fantasy master Charles de Lint has explored that magic and those spaces, bringing to life a tapestry of people from all walks of life, each looking for a spark of the miraculous to shape their lives and transform their fate.

Locked up safely behind the walls of their glamorous beach resort, the survivors have grown comfortable, almost forgetting that the undead are still on the prowl in the streets below. When tragedy strikes and the group loses one of their own under mysterious circumstances, friends turn on friends and they soon find themselves back on the apocalyptic streets of Haven, battling the dead. The biggest threat yet emerges and a traitor is revealed, proving once and for all that the flesh-hungry creatures infesting the city are not the group’s greatest foe.

Will the survivors be able to make it out alive one last time?

Now that JJ Wren, her brother Dylan, and friends King and Song-Ye have seen Earth’s dark future—facing an invasion by the hideous alien Kylarn—they know they have to prepare the human race. At the local Challenger Center, the mysterious Commander Zota sends JJ and her friends off on another mission, this time to the International Space Station Complex, where they meet old friends, survivors from the disaster at Moonbase Magellan, as well as a mysterious girl, Mira, who claims to be from the past. Another Star Challenger with her own mentor, just like Commander Zota. Together, they have to discover and stop the continuing plans of the alien invaders. And the Kylarn have set their sights on conquering, or destroying, the space station, so that Earth has no protection at all!

In Singer of Souls, young Douglas fled his American life of drugs and petty crime, arriving in Scotland to be taken in by his stern but fair-minded grandmother. Unfortunately, his career as a busker was interrupted by the fey folk who invisibly share Edinburgh's streets, who dragged him into their own internecine wars.

Now Douglas, usurper, sits on the throne of Faery--holding the Queen and the land hostage with his all-powerful magic and his unflinchingly loyal lieutenant, Martes.

Meanwhile, in Western Massachusetts, a strange infant is left on the doorstep of an ex-marine who may have the second sight.

And in Scotland, the granddaughter of a murdered woman sifts through clues trying to prove her brother isn't the killer…