Stories from a Different World
stepping out and taking a leap ...
I love short stories. I often start my day with one, as an add-on to my first cup of coffee. It can be a recent publication by a favorite writer or a random pick from an online magazine. Collections and anthologies that sit on my reading pile are evening choices. They go best with a comfortable armchair and the light of a side table lamp. And when I get into those, I seldom stop after one story.
Substack also drops nuggets in my in-box. Pieces from
, , , or that I read as soon as they come in. They’re short storytelling at its best.I was in my twenties when I sold my first short story. A crime and horror tale, with a Roald Dahl-Hitchcock Presents kind of ending. The murderer pulls it off, but there’s an ironic twist. Retribution with a wink. I still write stories like that where scoundrels get away, but rarely get everything they want. Perfect and blissful endings are not that interesting. Orson Welles once said something about happy endings depending on where you end the story.
Beyond riffing on a theme that I occasionally revisit, that first story also displayed my ‘genre’ tendencies. Light horror, cracked psychology, and an unsettling atmosphere. More The Haunting (1963) than The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In the years that followed, I dabbled in science-fiction—loaded with political misdeeds—wrote a crime novella (unpublished) featuring an insurance investigator who goes slightly mad searching for missing diamonds (I have to revisit that plot, it’s cool), and dedicated over half a million words to Declan Shaw, my Houston PI.
Until five years ago, crime short fiction was glaringly absent from my resume. I didn’t think I could write crime in a compressed format. It took me a long time to give it a try. When Bristol Noir published Cutting Edge in 2021, it was the encouragement I needed. On that day, my writing took a turn as sharp as the knife in the story.
I love to lose myself in a book project but short fiction is what kept me writing and coming back to the keyboard with my enthusiasm intact all these years. It’s where I try new things with style, voice, and structure, and where characters get a chance to strut their stuff. It’s also where I play with the kinds of stories that I devoured as a kid. The stories that made me a voracious reader. Adventure, fantasy, historical fiction, space opera, espionage … Anything goes.
Which is why I decided to put a new collection together. Unlike Family and Other Ailments, released two years ago, the selection will not include crime stories. The closest is a forensic investigation on a faraway planet that involves an android. Crime or negligence? Roboticide? Definitely a cover-up.
The twenty-four stories in the book play with genre and blur boundaries. A few of them lean toward dystopian science fiction. They’re set in scarred worlds where ingenuity means survival, life might be bleak but it’s not hopeless. I don’t do hopeless. The story that anchors the collection and gives it its title is A Book to Live By. It features a resourceful teenage boy and a strange girl on the run. She’s not what she appears to be. The Book of the title is a masterpiece that the boy memorized. He quotes from it, does not understand what it all means, recites or chants the words. They’re both poetry and prayer. Comfort and advice in times of danger. This is the kind of speculative fiction I like.
Taking a leap from pure rationality is liberating. Which is why I also play with horror tropes. The collection has a couple hauntings, a vampire love story, a Renfield tale (including a Dracula cameo), sharks, tomb raiders, ancient gods, and mysterious rituals. Just like the colorful covers of the paperbacks I grew up with. I’m no longer a kid, but my imagination is still feeding on the treasures these books left behind.
In Chimera, maybe the most purely gothic of the stories in the collection, the accumulation of recovered treasures is in full view. The plot revolves around a garden design obsession. The protagonist is a young man hell-bent (pun intended) on restoring the sculpture garden his grandfather mapped out but couldn’t complete. It’s an open-air cabinet of monstrosities and a mythological crucible. Once the main character starts putting the statues on their pedestals and the garden takes shape, the pieces of the story also fall into place. I’m very fond of that one, it’s deliciously weird.
The book is scheduled for release on the last week of January, from Wordwooze Publishing. I’ll talk about it more as the date approaches, but to give you an appetizer, and make the waiting more bearable, here’s the cover. Dark woods, a full moon, and roaming wildlife … you know the feeling.
Recent Publication
My story Poolside was published in the LAXtras anthology (charity project for the L.A. fires). It features Jack Carver, a PI tasked with finding a swimming pool. Yes, it’s ironic and quirky. Right now I’m trying to find more cases for Jack …
“Before starting on this elusive quest for the perfect swimming pool, I only had a vague notion of how many houses clung to the hills like suicides having second thoughts.”
Looking forward to this.
Congrats and thank you 😊