Short Reads

Imagine if you will, a world where our history pages have been smudged, ever so slightly. A world where places and people sort of, well...differ from our current reality. Our history books suggest the Titanic sank during her maiden voyage and that Nikola Tesla has no place on the mantle of great inventors, but this tale, from the memoirs of Sir Swarley Paxmore, tells a different, skewed story...

Edo period Japan is full of beauty-lethal beauty. Under the rule of the Tokugawa Shogunate and the three-hundred Daimyō, social order is strict, the country is isolationist, but culture and the arts flourish. Amongst it all a young man, born the seventh son of an impoverished farming family, leaves everything he's ever known in search of adventure, wealth, and a good wife. Stay on the path...Failing to heed his mother's dire warning Takashi soon discovers that the ancient yōkai of legend are much more than myth, and that not everything is always as it seems.

It's an anxiety dream come true. Curtis Baum, frontman for the up-and-coming rock band Frozen Wanda, is forced to be a rodeo clown for one night, sparring with a snarky shape-shifting bull. This boanthrope, known as Luke Tureaud in human form, is ready to buck his own job and deliver some bovine intervention. Curtis urgently needs to reunite with his band on the eve of their breakthrough tour, but now he's a clown about to go down. The unlikely duo hatches a daring escape plan. Freedom and the rock-and-roll road await Curtis and Luke if they manage to pull it off. What could possibly go wrong?

I do not know what They are. I don't know where They came from.All I know for certain is They appeared in the house about six weeks after Amy and I moved in.They may have always been in the house, but I don't believe that's true. I believe they found something compelling about the old building that drew them to it. My wife and I were merely the unfortunate souls who resided there when They arrived.Lock your doors, close the drapes, turn on all the lights...Supernatural horror from G. Allen Wilbanks at its best.

Gerald prides himself on his librarian skills-he's a teacher, a researcher, a human database, and the one he coined himself, a recommender, with just a few details, he knows the perfect book for every customer. Will his skills help him when a hungry newcomer, desperate to devour the books, arrives in his library. Supernatural horror from Emery and Hort.

In the late 25th century, a systems analyst is called in to diagnose a strange instability in the computers of a base established on the most volcanically active planet ever encountered. What he finds shakes his understanding of reality, because this planet is not as dead as it seems, and it wants humans gone-for their own sake.

Alexander Devin's life is about to change. Pulled from the edge of death, he wakes to find his mind has been preserved in a new body, a mechanical body that will never know pain, illness, or old age. But it is much more than that. Zander's mind has been downloaded into the Spector, an experimental, self-aware, long-distance star ship. For now, he is little more than an observer on board, a ghost in the machine. One day, if he can prove himself, he may be allowed full control over the ship. If not, he will be turned off and condemned to the Nothing. Zander will do anything to avoid the Nothing. A science fiction thriller from G. Allen Wilbanks.

Spring is in the air. The town of Bract Hollow, Vermont, is a nice, normal place full of nice, normal people, or at least it used to be. Now, everyone smiles a little too widely, even when they ought to be sad, and few seem to notice the difference. Even fewer have noticed the recent spate of mysterious deaths, or the strange, flaky material scattered around each fallen body. No one, however, suspects the truth… Something strange is growing in the town of Bract Hollow, and something much worse is about to be in bloom.

One barb-tongued, big-haired, county coroner, one schoolteacher husband, one Pink Wave. Joan and Richard appear to have the perfect life, one the uncontested county coroner, the other a successful teacher in a high school. But the deadly and mysterious Pink Wave appears and changes their lives forever. As the pink foam tongue alters the path of thousands of lives, can Richard tame Joan's sharp and flippant tongue? And in the end, who wins? Weird fiction from J. Motoki.