The Yellow Road Not Taken is NOT your momma's Wonderful Wizard of Oz. If you're looking for the heartwarming, sugary simplicity of the original L.Frank Baum story, run. Run now. Run far away. If you're ready for a happily acerbic, satirical sendup in which the Cowardly Lion suffers from crippling anxiety, the Tin Woodsman is a psychopath, and the Scarecrow is gloriously, undeniably brainless, then you're in the right place. If you want a story about how three hopeless mis...

Food.Shelter.Digitized life after death.Companionship.Identity.Love without monsters getting in the mix.We all have needs. We all know that, too, we just don't know what it means to say so. Generally speaking. Day in, day out, we mine a lot of gold about what it means to be who we've decided we think we are. And that's what this collection is about. What do we need? How do we find it? What would we do to keep it? It's strange, it's w...

In a country in which teachers are demonized as incompetent, where everyone wants quality schools but no one wants to pay for them, what becomes of those who stand for principle, who know what to do to teach young minds, but are prevented from doing so by their own supposed leaders? Guardians at the Gate is a satirical examination of the plight of public education. It is a no-holds-barred gut shot to the myths and underhanded purposes that threaten this uniquely American instituti...

It's the Mid-World Arts Spooky Season Spectacular! Thirty-four tales of the uncanny, the weird, the disturbing, and the silly. Ghost stories, monster mashes, vamp vignettes, spirit scares, and a whole bunch more. It's All Hallows Eve. The trick-or-treating is done. You've collected mountains of candy. Now it's time for the monster show marathon on TV! (Swing with it, youngsters. This is something we used to do.)This is that marathon. The independent artists of Mid-World Arts present...

Deor is nobody special. She's sixteen, French, homeless, trans gender, and living hand-to-mouth on the cold streets of Paris. Oh, and she's a teleporter. Yes, that's right. She can move instantly from one place to another. No door is closed to her, no place restricted. And she can break the confines of the universe itself. At a price. Because of her power, she's hunted. Governments want her for sneaking and peeking. The police want her for crimes she's committed. Human traffickers want her...

Indianapolis, present day. Not the most burgeoning of American cities, not the place you think of when you call to mind crime, despair, and the hopelessness of urban existence. So why does Indianapolis, Naptown to some, have a superhero patrolling its streets, and why did that hero settle in Naptown after two years fighting the good fight in Chicago, just a few hours north? For the mysterious, rarely glimpsed Voice of the City made his debut in that metropolis by the lake, beating down cri...

This book offers the first multidisciplinary perspective on the formation and practices of fandoms before the term 'fan' was borrowed from the world of sport to describe enthusiastic filmgoers in the 1910s. The focus is on nineteenth-century theatre, opera and literature, where fannish audiences were indispensable participants in the emerging cult of celebrity surrounding actors, opera singers and writers, although their presence was almost obscene and consequently rarely acknowledged in s...

NIGHTWATCH, Book 6Clayton Hostetter, US Marshal, makes his living rousting out range agitators, fence cutters, them that mutilate the cattle and make the circles in the crops, and general uncivilized folk. Just now, he's ordered by President Theodore Roosevelt himself to bring in Ehnrich Boehm, aka The Dark Man, the most ornery outlaw you ever did know. Wanted for murder, mayhem, terrorism, and conspiracy to destroy the eighteen contiguous universes (also blasphemy and vandalism), ...

NIGHTWATCH, Book 7FIONA STREET is back as the US government's most dangerous black ops agent! She's saved a nation from political gangsters. She's helped save a foreign universe from destruction. Now the government's most super of super-spies builds a special ops team to grapple with menaces no one can imagine. But those enemies aren't sleeping. A terrible entity from beyond our universe sows doubt through Fiona's spy network, leading it to distrust and hunt her. Fiona's own people...

Christmas is good cheer, snowmen, nog, and family get-togethers. Often, those reunions are strained. How much more tense might the holiday dinner become if you add space travel, time dilation, and alien influences into the mix? Charlese Tilbrenner and Bernie Oldman, heroes of Stephan Michael Loy's upcoming novel Galactic Geographic, are about to find out how twisted reunions can get as Charlese takes her man to meet the family, and Dad. A heartwarming comedy on the true meaning of Christma...

Walter Cheatham is a detective of sorts, a finder of lost things. Today, Christmas, he's busy finding a kidnapped ten-year-old girl. Time is a factor, for this child is invited to her captors' Christmas dinner – as the entrée. In a strange and marvelous dystopian world where death and horror are the everyday backsplash of a dull, gray existence, Walter must learn what truly matters when not even life has value. Walter Cheatham's Cannibal Christmas is an engaging holiday story for science f...

Death is abroad in ancient Egypt. The god Set has murdered his brother Osiris, incurring the wrath and vengeance of Isis, the dead god's wife. With Set's vile act, the pantheon of Egyptian myth is split into opposing forces, those who maintain the status quo and those who seek to upend the traditional roles of immortals. As part of this new revolution, mortal men have been sent on quests to find the corporeal flesh of Orisis, which Set scattered to the corners of the Earth. They seek out t...