Works by
David Morrell
(Writer)
[1943 - ]

Fiction

• The Shimmer (July 7, 2009)
  When a high-speed chase goes terribly wrong, Santa Fe police officer Dan Page watches in horror as a car and gas tanker explode into flames. Torn with guilt that he may be responsible, Page returns home to discover that his wife, Tori, has disappeared.
  
  Frantic, Page follows her trail to Rostov, a remote town in Texas famous for a massive astronomical observatory, a long-abandoned military base, and unexplained nighttime phenomena that draw onlookers from every corner of the globe. Many of these gawkers—Tori among them—are compelled to visit this tiny community to witness the mysterious Rostov Lights.
  
  Without warning, a gunman begins firing on the lights, screaming “Go back to hell where you came from,” then turns his rifle on the bystanders. A bloodbath ensues, and events quickly spiral out of control, setting the stage for even greater violence and death.
  
  Page must solve the mystery of the Rostov Lights to save his wife. In the process, he learns that the decaying military base may not be abandoned at all, and that the government may have known about the lights for decades. Could these phenomena be more dangerous than anyone could have possibly imagined?

• The Spy Who Came For Christmas (2008)
  It’s Christmas Eve in Santa Fe, but among the revelers on Canyon Road, a decidedly unholy scene is taking place. A desperate man, dressed all in black, feverishly seeks refuge for himself and the squirming bundle he holds tightly against his breast. Agent Paul Kagan’s bundle is a baby who has the power to change the course of global events. His pursuers are his former colleagues—members of the Russian mafia who will stop at nothing to accomplish their mission. Now Kagan is a spy on the run—he must ensure this baby’s survival, even if it will cost him his own life.
  
  Just a short distance away, Kagan will find an unexpected pair of allies—a mother and her young son, who huddle together after a horrible episode of domestic violence leaves them home alone, with no means of transportation.
  
  And so, with the exquisitely honed skills of his profession and the help and good faith of a weary woman and a disillusioned boy, Kagan must take on forces that will stop at nothing. In the course of a wild and violent night, the unlikely trio learn lessons of generosity, courage, and selflessness, discovering within themselves the luminous strength of the true Christmas spirit.

• Scavenger (2007)
  Scavenger, Morrell's latest novel, takes us in a harrowing new direction: a desperate high-tech scavenger hunt for a 100-year-old time capsule. Frank Balenger, the resolute but damaged hero of Creepers, now finds himself trapped in a nightmarish game of fear and death. To save himself and the woman he loves, he must
  
  Scavenger is a brilliant, frightening hunter-hunted tale that layers modern technology over the dusty artifacts of earlier times. The result is a surreal palimpsest, one that contains the secret of survival for Balenger and a handful of unwilling players who race against the game's clock to solve the puzzle of the time capsule, only to discover that time is the true scavenger. Morrell's trademark action sequences are embedded with fascinating historical clues that make Scavenger a thrill-a-minute page-turner as well as a mesmerizing literary experience.

• Creepers (2005) -- Winner Bram Stoker award.
  On a cold October night, five people gather in a run-down motel on the Jersey shore and prepare to break into the Paragon Hotel. The once-magnificent structure is now boarded up and marked for demolition.
  They are "creepers": urban explorers with a passion for investigating abandoned buildings and their dying secrets. Reporter Frank Balenger joins them to profile this highly illegal activity for the New York Times. But he isn’t looking for just another story, and soon after they enter the rat-infested tunnel leading to the hotel, he gets more than he bargained for. Danger, fear, and death await the creepers in a place ravaged by time and redolent of evil.

• Nightscape (2004)
  In "Front Man," an aging screenwriter cast adrift in a youth-oriented Hollywood culture finds a frightening way to make it back into the business. In "Nothing Will Hurt You," a father is obsessed by his daughter’s murder, and will stop at nothing to avenge her. In "Resurrection," a son is determined to preserve and care for a father frozen in cryogenic sleep. David Morrell is a consummate storyteller, investing his tales with passion, sympathy and irresistible narrative drive.

• The Protector (2003)
  No one knows his real name. No one knows where he lives. Trained by Delta Force, calm in moments of absolute terror, Cavanaugh stops threats before they strike-silently, swiftly, and lethally. His latest assignment: protect a brilliant scientist with a secret so extraordinary he needs to disappear and adopt a new identity. For Cavanaugh, helping Daniel Prescott is just another job. Until it explodes, Prescott vanishes, and the protector finds himself in a fast, furious battle for his life.

• Long Lost (2002)
  Brad Denning is a successful architect living a perfect life in Denver with his loving wife and son. Or so it would be, if not for the haunting memory of his brother Petey who disappeared while under Brad's supervision when they were kids. Now, a man claiming to be his sibling has mysteriously appeared and Brad is eager to take him in, despite the man's haggard appearance and reluctance to reveal anything about his past. "Petey" is a welcome addition to the family, until a camping trip goes terribly wrong and Brad returns home to find that his devoted wife and son have been abducted. Certain that Petey-or whoever he may be- is responsible for the horrible crime, Brad sets out to recover his family. Travelling alone through America's heartland, it's a race against time as Brad struggles to get to his family before the terrible secret of what really happened long ago destroys everything he cares about.

• Burnt Sienna (2000)
  Once Chase Malone waged war. Now he creates beauty, living as a reclusive painter in Mexico. Until a rich man hires Chase to do his wife's portrait. And Chase finds out what beauty is really all about. . . . Derek Bellasar is an international arms merchant who lives in a fortresslike mansion on the Riviera. Sienna is his wife and the woman whose incredible beauty Chase Malone must somehow capture on canvas. There's only one problem: Every time Bellasar has one of his wives painted, she dies. Suddenly, Chase is fighting a one-man battle against Bellasar and a private army of highly trained killers. At stake is Sienna's life--and more. Because the CIA has been using Chase to keep a blockbuster biological arms deal from going down. And with a man's evil threatening to devastate the world, Chase Malone must save a woman, save his life, and practice the art of war.

• Black Evening: Tales of Dark Suspense (1999)
  David Morrell, whose many bestsellers include Double Image, Extreme Denial, and The Brotherhood of the Rose, has consistently redefined the modern thriller. Now he turns to a darker side of suspense in a powerful collection of tales, many of them award winners, that delve into the weird, uncanny terrors that lurk just beneath the comforting surfaces of daily life.
  
  Fear of loss, fear of pain, fear of madness, fear of being trapped, fear of the inescapable, unspeakable horrors that fester deep within the soul....No matter who or where you are, fear is always with you, always ready to attack from behind the masks of thought and dream. Let David Morrell tell you a story...
  
  From the American heartland to the edge of Hell, David Morrell presents a career-spanning examination into his own life...and the fears we all share.

• Double Image (1998)
  He has walked through the valley of death and man's depravity. Now war photographer Mitch Coltrane is trying to escape his memories. As he loses himself in a world of art and obsession in L.A., a haunting photograph of a woman pulls him into the mystery of a beautiful starlet during Hollywood's golden age. But past and present are about to collide. A living woman, eerily like the woman in his photograph, comes into his life. So does a killer--straight from the hell that Coltrane survived. Deception, double identities, and murderous revenge will shatter his new life and force Coltrane to perform the ultimate act of courage--not with a camera, but with a gun.

• Extreme Denial (1996)
  At forty, Steve Decker is one of America's most accomplished anti-terrorist operatives. Then a bungled covert operation kills twenty-three people in Rome and leaves Decker shouldering the blame. Embittered by the fiasco, he retires to the mountains of New Mexico and there meets an extraordinary woman named Beth Dwyer. She changes his life. Suddenly Decker has the very things he had lived so long without: a beautiful, brilliant woman he longs to marry and a future that could include children. But when a terrifying assault rips his world apart, Beth disappears - leaving an agonizing mystery in her wake. Who is this woman he loved so completely, almost to the point of obsession? Is she still alive? Was she captured by Decker's enemies or her own? Did she love him or use him - possibly as bait in some sinister plan? Reaching back into his shadowy past, Decker discovers that two malicious - and diametrically opposed - forces have been stalking him. To stay alive, Decker must use all his carefully honed skills, stay one step ahead of his murderous enemies, and pray that luck is on his side as he moves from hunter to hunted, from the deserts of Santa Fe to the streets of New York City. For Decker the stakes couldn't be higher: Beth's life, Beth's love, and, most of all, the truth.

• Desperate Measures (1994)
  This story begins as Matt Pittman, a once famous journalist whose life has fallen apart because of overwhelming personal tragedy, prepares his own suicide. Suddenly, what was to have been the final act of Matt's ruined life is interrupted by a phone call. Matt's editor has an assignment for him: write an obituary of a man who is not dead yet.
  
  Plucked from the edge of oblivion, plunged into the unexpected, Matt finds himself accused of killing the very man whose premature death notice he was to write.
  
  As he races to untangle the most dangerous story of his career, Matt seeks redemption in a deepening love for Jill Warren, who becomes his accomplice in survival. He finds himself thrust into the heart of a conspiracy of aging power brokers whose lethal influence in America and throughout the world remains terrifyingly unsurpassed. And he stumbles across a devastating secret forged in the birth of the Cold War - and decades before that, in the intimate and treacherous rites of passage among the nation's youthful, golden elite.

• Assumed Identity (1993)
  Filled with nonstop suspense and stunning psychological insight, this is the story of Brendon Buchanan, undercover intelligence operative and master of over two hundred false identities: a man forced to assume the most elusive and treacherous identity of all--his own. Tracking the most devastating conspiracy he has ever encountered, trapped by his love of two enigmatic, beautiful women, he will race through a sinister labyrinth of intrigue to a shattering rendezvous with fate . . . in a novel that not only offers a brilliant, action-packed plot and fascinating characters, but asks daring, provocative questions about our own identities as well.

• The Covenant Of The Flame (1991)
  For two thousand years a hidden conflict has been waged. Now it is bursting into the open - in a pitched battle over the very future of the planet...
  
  In the Amazon and in Africa, from oil spills to animal slaughters, the earth is being defiled, and two covert armies are locked in mortal conflict - with a woman reporter caught in the middle.
  
  Drawn into the mysterious disappearance of a gray-eyed stranger and his horrific murder by fire, Tess Drake and a veteran New York City police officer follow the trail of blood from Manhattan to Washington to the ancient caverns of Europe. Hunted by both sides, fighting for her life, Tess races toward the dark heart of a secret that will rock the world...

• The Fifth Profession (1990)
  Savage, a former Navy SEAL and American state-of-the-art security specialist. Akira, Japan's most brilliant executive protector and a master of the samurai arts.
  Their mission: the retrieval of Rachel Stone, a beautiful American woman whose ruthless billionaire husband is out to destroy her. But quickly Savage and Akira realize they are trapped in a mission more far-reaching than the protection of one person.
  For they are bound together in a common nightmare, a set of horrifying memories, a terrifying past that never happened, but is somehow inexplicably real. Only together can they confront the mystery. Yet when they do, an even more chilling scenario awaits them one with the power to shatter not only their world but ours as well.

• Rambo III (1988) by David Morrell, Sheldon Lettich, and Sylvester Stallone

• The League of Night and Fog (1987)
  From the Vatican to the Swiss Alps, from Australia to the heartland of America, two masterful operatives are being drawn together to solve a violent riddle: Why have ten old men been abducted from around the world? But when the agents, weary of their own covert wars, begin to investigate, they are pulled into a terrifying cycle of revenge that began in the heart of World War II--and is now forcing sons to pay for their father's darkest sins....

• Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) by David Morrell, James Cameron, Kevin Jarre, and Sylvester Stallone

• The Fraternity of Stone (1985)
  Drew Maclane was a star agent--until the day the killing had to stop. He withdrew and for six years lived the life of a hermit in a monastery. But someone has tracked him down, leaving a trail of corpses. Someone who knows all about him, who knows how to draw him back into that electrifying world where no one is as he seems, and where life's most horrifying and harrowing game is played....

• The Brotherhood of the Rose (1984)
  They were orphans, Chris and Saul--raised in a Philadelphia school for boys, bonded by friendship, and devoted to a mysterious man called Eliot. He visited them and brought them candy. He treated them like sons. He trained them to be assassins. Now he is trying desperately to have them killed.
  
  Spanning the globe, here is an astonishing novel of fierce loyalty and violent betrayal, of murders planned and coolly executed, of revenge bitterly, urgently desired.

• Blood Oath (1982)
  He wanted to make peace with the past....Peter Houston just wanted to find the grave of the war-hero father he never knew--a yearning that would draw him thousands of miles from home to the military cemetary in France.Instead, he stumbled into a shadowy underworld....He enver dreamed his private pilgrimage would unearth a decades-long secret that would plunge him into a deadly labyrinth of intrigue and murder.Now, he's fighting for survival....As ruthless assassins hunt him through the cities of Europe, he'll struggle to stay alive. But when they murder the woman he loves, he'll turn from hunted to hunter.And swearing a blood oath of vengeance....Tracking down his ruthless tormentors, he'll discover a truth he could not imagine...and could possibly destroy him.

• The Totem (1979)
  The Totem plunges you into an all-to-real visceral terror made all the more terrifying because it is timely. When police chief Nathan Slaughter settles in the tiny mountain community of Potter's Field, Wyoming, his most fervent prayer is that he has left behind him forever the nightmare he barely survived as a policeman during a blizzardy night in Detroit. But nothing has prepared him for the greater sanity-threatening nightmare he is about to confront. Beginning with the discovery of mutilated cattle on outlying ranches, Slaughter is drawn deeper and deeper into a vortex of terror as the inexplicable attacks and mutilations quickly multiply, trapping the entire town in a frenzy of violence. As Slaughter and the medical examiner race against time to expose the horrifying secret behind the increasingly savage and uncontrollable attacks, they also struggle to overcome their deepest fears.

• Last Reveille (1977)
  Last Raveille, an evocative thriller that combines the epic sweep of history with issues of violence and character as relevant today as they were nearly one hundred years ago, and paints a picture of an America that could in many ways resemble out tomorrow.

• Testament (1975)
  Reporter Reuben Bourne has broken a promise - to cast a paramilitary white supremacy group in a favorable light. Now, one basically peaceful man, one with a paradoxical attraction for violence, must confront a force of unrelenting hate. Somehow, he must survive - as he leads his family on a desperate flight into a wilderness as unforgiving as the fanatical humans who pursue him.

• First Blood (1972)
  From New York Times bestselling author David Morrell comes the novel upon which the box office super hit Rambo was based. First came the man: a young wanderer in a fatigue coat and long hair. Then came the legend, as John Rambo sprang up from the pages of First Blood to take his place in the American cultural landscape. This remarkable novel pits a young Vietnam veteran against a small town cop who doesn't know whom he's dealing with -- or how far Rambo will take him into a life-and-death struggle through the woods, hills, and caves of rural Kentucky.
  See also The Rambo Trilogy - The Ultimate Collection (DVD  VHS)

Comics

Captain America Series (with Mitch Breitweiser, Illustrator)
Marvel brings you a groundbreaking new vision of Captain America as you've never seen him, in this six-issue Marvel Knights mini-series in the vein of Spider-Man: Reign and Silver Surfer: Requiem. Steeped in the life-or-death tension of insurrectionist combat, is the young Marine Corporal James Newsom really fighting side by side with Captain America, or is it all in his mind? And is Cap actually... dying?

1. Captain America: The Chosen with Mitch Breitweiser, Illustrator

2. Captain America - The Chosen  with Mitch Breitweiser, Illustrator

3. Out of Body, Out of Mind with Mitch Breitweiser, Illustrator

4. Fear in a Handful of Dust with Mitch Breitweiser, Illustrator

5. Variant Cover by Travis Charest  with Mitch Breitweiser, Illustrator

6. Captain America: The Chosen with Mitch Breitweiser, Illustrator

Non Fiction

• Lessons from a Lifetime of Writing: A Novelist Looks at His Craft (2002)
  Best-selling novelist David Morrell provides insights and advice learned during thirty years of writing and selling novels-insider secrets that are sure to help writers achieve the next level of literary success, whether they're just beginning or already published!
  
  With captivating anecdotes and thoughtful discussion, Morrell explores the basics of the writing craft, from structure and character to dialogue and style, allowing readers to look into the mind of an internationally known best-selling novelist. He also examines how to get published, the business of writing and the steps for getting fiction translated into film.

• American Fiction, American Myth: Essays by Philip Young (2000)
  Few experts in American literature have written as insightfully and brilliantly as did Philip Young, renowned Hemingway critic and scholar at large. His unique work bursts with a joy in the humanities, with a sensibility, a humor, and a style that communicate to academics and general readers alike. Although Young died in 1991, he survives in his remarkable prose.
  
  American Fiction, American Myth features nineteen groundbreaking essays in which Young masterfully reveals the "so what?" that he insisted all literary studies ought to have. In the first section, he demonstrates his fascination with such American myths as Pocahontas and Rip Van Winkle, reaching powerful conclusions about America and its people. In the second section, he becomes "Our Hemingway Man," explaining his germinal and still provocative theory that Hemingway's severe wounding in World War I so traumatized the novelist that his fiction was to a great degree unwitting self-psychoanalysis. Young's book on Hemingway was the first of its kind, but Young was more than a one-author critic, as his essays demonstrate in the third section, exploring such diverse topics as Hawthorne's secret love, the Lost Generation that was never lost, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s debt to T. S. Eliot, and the relationship between American fiction and American life.
  
  What Hemingway once said about himself can be equally applied to Young: "I am a very serious but not a solemn writer." The reader comes away from these essays dazzled by the power of Young's observations and the grace with which he expresses them.

• Fireflies - A Father's Classic Tale Of Love And Loss (1988)

• John Barth: An Introduction (1976)

See also:

• Nursery Crimes (1993), Martin H. Greenberg, Robert Weinberg, and Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, eds.
  Includes stories by Ambrose Bierce, David Morrel, Joe R. Lansdale, Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, and Seabury Quinn with illustrations by John Tierney.