Marco Etheridge is a writer of fiction, an occasional playwright, and a part-time poet. He lives and writes in Vienna, Austria. His stories have been published in more than eighty reviews, journals, and magazines in Canada, Australia, the UK, and the USA. Power Tools gathers twenty-one of his best short stories into one collection. An elderly woman sets out alone on a journey into a new life. Two soldiers in a bunker share candy and memories. A widower takes on the Supreme Court with a rob...

The Wrong Name gathers twenty-one of author Marco Etheridge's best dark short stories into a single volume. These are speculative tales from the darker edge. Within these pages live characters bearing the wrong name, unrepentant, untethered, and unforgiven. Good choices are made and bad; others that are downright evil. Here are doppelgangers and crones, artificial and human intelligence gone wrong. Murder and revenge, tragedies embraced, and fates narrowly avoided. Reluctant heroes tire of...

The U6 is one line of the Vienna underground transit system. The silver and red trains carry stories, many stories. A woman mourns her musical lover, and a man discovers his courage. A Syrian family flees to a fragile new beginning, and a young man helps circus performers during a pandemic. Lovers rediscover each other after decades apart, and a man finds a father he never knew. A contract is broken, and neighbors defend their own. Eighteen tales of love lost and found, of the darkness wit...

Marco Etheridge is a writer of fiction, an occasional playwright, and a part-time poet. He lives and writes in Vienna, Austria. His stories have been published by reviews, journals, and magazines in Canada, Australia, the UK, and the USA. Broken Luggage gathers twenty-four of his best flash stories into one collection.A man's life condensed to the broken luggage that will contain it. A young woman alone in the Sonoran Desert. Memories of dangerous eggs, thunderstorms, and a gunshot...

Marco Etheridge is a writer of fiction, an occasional playwright, and a part-time poet. He lives and writes in Vienna, Austria. His stories have been published by reviews, journals, and magazines in Canada, Australia, the UK, and the USA. Here, for the first time, fifteen of his best short stories are gathered together in one collection.An aging veteran who despises his neighbor ends up in hospital under her care. An isolated married couple search for help to deliver their first ch...

Clouds Before Rain is the exciting prequel to The Best Dark Rain. This gripping novella sets the stage for an epic post-apocalyptic adventure. The world is dying a swift death, and the city of Seattle is dying along with it. Panicked citizens flee the wave of death, only to die on the clogged highways. Those unable to flee remain trapped in the city. A handful of survivors remain amongst the deadly ruins. The feeble threads of society unravel as armed bands begin roaming the empty streets....

Vienna, Austria, a city of palaces, music, and cafés. But behind the cold, grey stone lies a dark secret. Against this backdrop of culture and shadows, the fates of three unforgettable people will be drawn into a common peril.Perry Farmon is an American photographerr on sabbatical in Vienna, searching for his lost creative spark. A strange friendship and a mysterious love alter Perry's quiet world, drawing him into a shared secret. The powers threatened by that secret force Perry i...

Quinn discovers a violent history: his own. A deadly mystery in the present collides with his past. Sobriety, love, and life are at stake.The past has power. A promising writer, Quinn Boyd dreams of completing his novel, breaking free from the shackles of his past. While researching a magazine article on genealogy, Quinn is confronted with a history of family violence, his own history. The deeds of his newly-discovered ancestors become a backdrop to his violent upbringing.F...

Seattle is dead. Almost dead. Liz and Pat are the last couple standing. Survival is only half the battle. Living is hard, trusting is harder.There is precious little room for love in a dead city, a dead world. For not quite everyone died. Better if they had. Armed bands stalk the streets. In the shadows worse enemies prowl, horrible enemies. At the center of this bleak urban waste lies a makeshift fort. It is the refuge of Liz Walker and Pat O'Shea. They are the last living couple ...

Take a journey into darkness. Visit places where one might expect to find the dark—in a house where love was shared and lost, a milky-white pool in an Australian cave, the trenches of World War I, the deep woods. You would not be surprised to find the dark in a cheap apartment on the wrong side of town, down mean streets, under a gallows-tree, along dank passageways, trapped underground, in the near future, or among the mysteries of old New Orleans. Dunes, lakes, isolated cabins, old books...

A young man is taken hostage in the Nevada desert after his fiance's father discovers they are engaged.

Winner of the 2004 Archibald Lampman Award (National Capital Region -- Ottawa) and shortlisted for the 2004 Trillium Book Award for Poetry and the 2004 ReLit Awards In The Vicinity David O'Meara gives us a new kind of cityscape, one that brings its unseen, and usually unsung, materials to the foreground. Brick, concrete (that "not-so-silver screen / our walk-on parts are posed upon"), glass, steel, wire: they step boldly from anonymity into fresh focus, backdrops goaded into stardom. Full ...