An umbrella is opened indoors. A black cat crosses your path. Three cigarettes are lit from one match. These are omens of bad luck that no one takes seriously. But at Van Buren University when these, and other superstitions, are broken… students die.Sophomore Jerry Williams' hard-hitting reporting has won awards for Van Buren's school newspaper. But when he connects a series of campus deaths to bad luck, his editor questions Jerry's judgment, kills the story, and s...

Visit a Valley you may not know.Shenandoah Fantastic: Mystic Whispers from the Valley's Vales invites you to experience the mysterious, the supernatural, and the humorous.Ride a ghost train to Mount Jackson.Visit the trolls that live beneath Luray Caverns.Experience a bird revolution in Singers Glen.And meet time travelers at the Shakespeare Center.Whether you're a long-time resident or a curious traveler, this ...

From the Mind of Derringer Award Winning Author James Blakey Comes Thirteen Tales of Crime and Mystery."Fast Times at Spiro Agnew High" - Junior Mike Wimmer owes money to the school loan shark. But Mike is broke, and the shark wants his money by six—or else. Mike's one hope: a reward for a missing iPhone. He has ten hours to find a 2x3 phone on a campus of 1,500 students, faculty, and staff."Porridge" - In a fairy-tale land a hard-boiled private detective i...

Visit a Cville that's not quite like the one you know.Charlottesville Fantastic: Arcane Echoes from Virginia's Heartland invites you to experience the mysterious, the supernatural, and the humorous.Meet unforgettable characters including a vampire at a UVA sorority, a four-hundred-year-old dragon hidden in Shenandoah National Park, and an enigmatic tuxedo cat on the Downtown Mall. Twenty tales in total, each exploring the m...

This issue, we have original mysteries by Albert Tucher (courtesy of Acquiring Editor Michael Bracken) and James Blakey, plus a modern tale by SJ Rozan (courtesy of Acquiring Editor Barb Goffman). For our mystery novel, we have a Golden Age tale set in the Canadian Northwest Territories, The Long Arm of the Mounted, by James French Dorrance. Rounding out the section is a solve-it-yourself puzzler by Hal Charles.We also have one of Norman Spinrad’s occasional “Norman Spinrad at Larg...

Over the past two decades, the oil sands region of northeastern Alberta has been the site of unprecedented levels of development. Alberta's Lower Athabasca Basin tells a fascinating story of how a catastrophic ice age flood left behind a unique landscape in the Lower Athabasca Basin, one that made deposits of bitumen available for surface mining. Less well known is the discovery that this flood also produced an environment that supported perhaps the most intensive use of boreal fo...