Being a zombie is no picnic, especially when your body is rotting right before your eyes. (Gross!) As if Ed Bagley didn't already have it bad enough, he's now being chased by a horde of demons sent by Kambo Cheapteeth, an undead circus clown who’s always angry. With the help of his werewolf buddy, Max Moon, Ed ventures into the ultimate vortex of evil: a demon circus, to battle with Kambo once and for all! Along the way, he encounters an evil curse, a maze of mirrors, a giant spewing sewer creature, and a floating girl with a sewn-up eye who’s determined to destroy him. Can Ed hold it together (and keep from decomposing) long enough to stop the big top?

Undead Ed finds himself being hunted by a demented clown.

When Ed Bagley wakes up in a yucky sewer --and discovers he's a zombie-- things can't get any weirder! That is, until his evil arm scurries off his shoulder and into the town of Mortlake to cause all sorts of trouble. Un-armed and dangerous, Ed teams up with his werewolf buddy Max Moon to track down his rogue limb and save Mortlake from the evil at the center of it all. This formerly unlucky kid is out to prove he really is all guts! But when he's faced with gross ghouls, wormy wraiths, freaky fat babies, and some seriously sinister clowns, will Ed and his undead friends have enough skin on their bones to save the day? Or will this arm-y prove too tough to hand-le? Hilariously illustrated zombie antics make this the perfect next book for fans of Zombiekins!

Reaching Reluctant Young Readers features 150 middle-grade books. Each profiled title has the potential to hook the reluctant reader and lure them to read the entire book. To specifically encourage elementary and middle-school-age reluctant children to read, there is first a pitch to get the reader’s attention. That is followed by a short reading passage to “set the hook” and encourage the young person to read the rest of the book on their own. Further, the book contains several hundred additional recommended titles. The books selected for this collection were chosen following the criteria of reluctant reader books created by the Quick Picks committee sponsored by the Young Adult Library Services Association. While these guidelines were designed for young adult books, they also work well for middle-grade books. The criteria include: clear writing (no convoluted long sentences with sophisticated vocabulary), high interest “hook” in the first few pages, well-defined characters, interesting plot, and familiar themes.

Boyface Antelope has been waiting his whole life to turn ten and be allowed to enter his parents' stripemongering shop so he can take stripes off animals and put them on something different. Like tartan onto badgers, or removing the stripes of zebras to make ponies. On the morning of his tenth birthday he finds his parents ill, and they ask him not just to go in the shop but to look after it on his own! Will he be able to keep the stripemongery running smoothly?

Being undead is no walk in the park, especially when you've got four extra fingers with a mind of their own! In this third creepy installment, Ed must contend with a nemesis even scarier than an evil clown: the devil himself! Yes, the devil is the one pulling the strings on Ed's weird additional fingers, and Ed must pay him a visit if he ever hopes to be free. But the deeds of Ed's fingers have turned everyone in Mortlake against him. Can he win back his friends and make everything right again? Packed with hilarious black-and-white illustrations and spooky details, Ed's third adventure is his wildest ride yet!

Forget everything you've ever seen or heard about werewolves, zombies and vampires because Ed Bagley's going to tell you the single most important fact you'll ever learn: being undead sucks ... especially if you're a kid.

Includes and excerpt from The last wild.

Ten-year-old Jane Doe, the only student average enough to be excluded from the town of Remarkable's School for the Remarkably Gifted, is joined by the trouble-making Grimlet twins, who lead her on a series of adventures.

Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.