'Daddy, mom's boyfriend Mark is after me, and I'm hiding in the bathroom." This is Harry's frantic call from his twelve year old daughter, Madison. "Don't worry sweetheart, daddy's coming to get you." Harry races out his suburban home front door and gets hit by a quiet electric truck. For quite some time, Harry doesn't know that he is dead. In his car, he is driving to get his daughter. His car dies on a weed-filled road in the middle of where-am-I. He walks to a lake and finds Pete's Boat...

I feel compelled to admit that this is a strange little book of fictional short stories, whimsical and surreal. I loved writing the book, and had many giggles each time that I reread for editing purposes. The first story is In the Garden of Mistress Bloom, a bit of garden, galactic empire, and folktale complete with human and non-human characters. In The 19th Frustration, we find our hero and heroine caught up in a time and dimensional struggle with advanced alien culture. In Vanlines - Th...

A mystery wrapped around two love stories with the same woman, Maggie O'Die.Like so many mysteries, Cle Curbo’s new novel, For the Love of Maggie O’Die, opens with a body, but lest you get too comfortable, nothing is at all what it seems. From the first page, Curbo crafts a mystery, sci-fi adventure that takes the readers on a rollercoaster ride, putting them in the driver’s seat, while trying to figure out what exactly is happening. The book grabs you and makes you want to keep re...

Simon Silibus is unflinchingly devoted to his friends, Maggie O'Die, Jake Chin, and especially to Ryger Deacon's comatose body. He will give Ryger a new life, but only if he can get him to Heavenly Hospice without being caught by the Trackers. When Simon leaves suddenly for the Arizona desert at night, Maggie and Ryger are left with a nagging mystery to solve as they flee to evade capture by the Trackers.

What could the aliens want with his father? Bharkli flees to his mother's planet to prepare him to fight the aliens. Meeting the orphan Sylvane as a fellow Watcher, they seek to protect Earth from invasion and takeover by the aliens. As Sylvane speeds to planet Ghames to reveal the alien's plans and gain help for the Earth, she is met with a mysterious man who knows her from a life she does not recall. Will she be able to save Earth and become the mature goddess that the mystery man claims...

A frantic call from his daughter puts Harry in harm's way. BAM! He's dead but doesn't know it. He comes to a lake, where a she-captain blows in on a storm, and they sail the choppy seas of the afterlife, harrowed by a mix of monsters, both human and not.

Whimsical and surreal, this collection of short stories won 1st Place in Sci-Fi in 2021 from Writer's Digest for self-published ebooks. All that really matters is that the listener delight in hearing these tales of adventure in the spacetime strangeness the characters encounter.

Five award winning sci-fi short stories. In the Garden of Mistress Bloom won First Place in Science Fiction in 2021, in Writer's Digest's self-published ebook category.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, The Shipping News is a vigorous, darkly comic, at times magical portrait of the contemporary North American family, and "a rare creation, a lyric page-turner" (Chicago Tribune).At thirty-six, Quoyle, a third-rate newspaperman is wrenched violently out of his world when his two-timing wife meets her just desserts. He retreats with his two daughters to his ancestral home on the starkly beautiful Newfoun...

"It's cold. And dark. I can't breathe."Successful, ambitious state prosecutor Grace Courtemanche is at the top of her game. Then she gets a chilling call from a young woman claiming to be buried alive. Desperate to find the victim before it's too late, Grace will do whatever it takes . . . even if it means excavating the darkest secrets of her own past and turning to the one man she thought she would never see again.FBI agent Theodore "Hatch" Hatcher is a man without roots-...

From USA Today bestselling author Kelly Rey comes a holiday novella that is ho-ho-hilarious…When Jamie Winters' elderly neighbor Jack disappears a week before Christmas, Jamie pairs up with her landlord's fearless teenaged niece to find him. Only the more they look into his disappearance, the more they begin to believe Jack is not the man they thought he was...and he bears a suspiciously striking resemblance to jolly old Santa Claus! One carjacking, some spooky reindeer, a little p...

Hilarious and heartwarming stories of outdoor mishaps and misadventures fromThe New York Times five-time bestselling, beloved humorist, Patrick F. McManus, "a writer who makes people laugh out loud, hard." (The New York Times)McManus's first story collection, gathering twenty-seven witty, cautionary tales about camping, fishing, backpackers, and b...