Fiction Excerpt

Another story that appeared in The Fortean Bureau, this one in the December, 2003 edition. It features a mysterious game being played on a post-apocalyptic shoreline. I’d been a player in my youth, patching together my first drysuit out of old inner tubes, insulating it with hand-me-down sweaters and sealing the seams with wax from [...]

This story, offering a behind the scenes look at preparations for King Arthur’s eventual return, appeared in the December 2004 issue of the online magazine Ideomancer. The spiders come and go. They bring me the bricks with which I build the castle. From the silk litter they leave behind on the grass, I knit a [...]

“Detail” was reprinted in the third issue of Behind the Wainscot, a side project of the online magazine Farrago’s Wainscot. This story originally appeared in issue 11 (fall 2001) of the print magazine Conduit. The painting in question is The Temptation of St. Anthony (left panel), a nice large image of which can be found [...]

This story appeared in issue 5 of the print magazine Electric Velocipede. Back in 1995, it appeared in Shadowdance, a magazine that isn’t around any longer. It’s set in the same world– same city, even– as both “Sunfast” (see below) and the novel I’ve been working on for the past couple years. From the hour [...]

Set in a rather strange future, this story appears in the chapbook Rabid Transit: Menagerie from Rabid Transit Press. When she finally got though the door, Moonhead Lunes knew her heart was gone: she could see fragments of broken candy-box still melting into the shag. The jagged blue edges of gluco-glass were only slightly softened, [...]

When editor Dan Braum asked for a different kind of mummy story for his Spirits Unwrapped chapbook, I came up with this tale set at the court of Khubilai Khan. I mixed historical information about the Khan with images and ideas from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous poem, but the mummy is based on a real [...]

This story is set in the Blackstone River Valley early in an industrial revolution somewhat different from our own. It appeared in the October 2004 issue of the print magazine Realms of Fantasy. One September morning, Sophie and her father found a clockwork man in their courtyard, curled up in the far corner where the [...]

This novella is a new age gangster story. It appeared in two parts in the online magazine The Fortean Bureau, in the September and October 2004 issues. The beach along that stretch is shallow for a long ways out, and at low tide you can walk on the wet, packed sand like you’re walking on [...]

A short story about visiting interesting, faraway places appeared in the second issue of the print magazine Flytrap. It prompted one reviewer to go so far as referring to the author as being “like some new avatar of Lewis Carroll,” which is a lot to live up to. When I woke to find my clothes [...]

“Sunfast, Shadowplay and Saintswalk,” appeared in the September 8, 2003 edition of the online magazine Strange Horizons. It’s set in the same world– same city, even– as both “Moonless” (see above) and the novel I’ve been working on for the past couple years. On the second day before the sunfast, we gathered rose hips and [...]