THEY'RE BACK.

Barry and Lich are two high school outcasts living as much of a life as they can in the small town of Grafting, Michigan, smoking, drinking, playing in a band, and slinging dice at their weekly Dungeons and Dragons session. Life ain’t great, but it ain’t too bad either. That is, until the Grafting quake hits and a strange man heading a secretive organization shows up with a mobile lab full of brilliant minds, highly trained mercenaries, and a monster that’s crawled straight from the realm of nightmares. As it turns out, reality is starting to tear and things from another dimension are starting to pop up—things with really bad intentions. So when a few popular jocks from the high school fall victim to a series of brutal murders and all the evidence points to Barry and Lich, their already crazy world is flipped upside down once more. Now on the run from local law enforcement, a government shadow operation, and the monstrous manifestation of their own dark desires, the two teens, with the help of some very unlikely allies, must find a way to prove their innocence before it's too late—both for themselves and possibly for all of reality as well. It's a journey that will take them to literal Hell and back. 

THE BLEED is a direct, alternate-dimension continuation of the short story, "Barry & Lich," first published in the Bram Stoker Award-nominated anthology DARK MATTER PRESENTS: HUMAN MONSTERS. Cover art by the legendary Butcher Billy.