Lombard Alchemist Tales

High in the desert, between the mountains out west, up where the ground throbs from the nuclear test detonations, the casinos still glitter, drawing people from the far reaches of the world. They come here to try their luck, to take a chance, to have the adventures they wouldn't write home about. In this other-world, the desert offers one last hope for the penniless, the luckless, the loveless, and the hopeless. A pawnshop dealing in wonders, where everything is for sale: a chance to get off the street, a few extra days with a dying lover, an afternoon in the sun, a home to call your own, the perfect wedding, or the chance to become a master magician, or a giraffe for your Sunday morning. But beware of the Master, and price he demands. In the tradition of The Twilight Zone and The Illustrated Man, master storyteller J. Daniel Sawyer guides through phantasms of hilarity, perversity, horror, and heartbreak in the darkest corners of the human soul.

Stephen got stoned so he could deal with the chemo, but it's his husband who really needs the drugs. After all, watching your partner of twenty years die of cancer can leave you courting bankruptcy, your life in ruins. It can drive you to steal, or cheat, or look for hope in a can of chicken-noodle soup you bought from the demonic pawnbroker at a creepy old hock shop at the edge of nowhere.