Fiction
Fiction
Body Found in Monument Creek
The body lay in the creek amid the swirling and sloshing of broken sticks and plastic bottles that had accumulated between two large rocks. There was no blood, no sign of foul play – just the body of an older white or Hispanic male in a brown jacket, underdressed for the mid-March weather. He lay
Cole
It’s an old railroad style house fronting a thin street, not far from the train tracks and stockyards. Cole comes out the front door for a moment to check on his motorcycle. He won’t be staying long, but it’s dusk and he knows the neighborhood. The icy wind stings his face like bees. He’s visiting
Ray
“Step on a crack, break your mother’s back,” Ray dutifully reminded himself as he watched his left shoe, and then his right shoe, pass each other on the sidewalk below, looking from his vantage point like compact autos negotiating a tiny two-lane road. If one could even call it that, given a buckling surface strewn
The Haunted Bookshop I: Innocents at the Bookshop
In John Dunning’s Booked to Die, men abuse and murder women and each other, brothers and sisters cordially loathe each other; Cliff Janeway, book-loving cop protagonist, beats his antagonist nearly to death – justifiably, of course, for the antagonist is a bully who likes to beat up women. Just another few days in America, full
The Haunted Bookshop II: “Christianity Fails Again”
Christopher Morley’s The Haunted Bookshop begins with the mysterious disappearance from the Bookshop’s shelves of Thomas Carlyle’s biography of Oliver Cromwell, that bringer of the reign of Christian righteousness and short hair to a people who, after a taste of perfection and a lot of death, decided they preferred neither. The book disappears, reappears, disappears,
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Novels and Collected Works
Body Found in Monument Creek
The body lay in the creek amid the swirling and sloshing of broken sticks and plastic bottles that had accumulated between two large rocks. There was no blood, no sign of foul play – just the body of an older white or Hispanic male in a brown jacket, underdressed for the mid-March weather. He lay
Cole
It’s an old railroad style house fronting a thin street, not far from the train tracks and stockyards. Cole comes out the front door for a moment to check on his motorcycle. He won’t be staying long, but it’s dusk and he knows the neighborhood. The icy wind stings his face like bees. He’s visiting
Ray
“Step on a crack, break your mother’s back,” Ray dutifully reminded himself as he watched his left shoe, and then his right shoe, pass each other on the sidewalk below, looking from his vantage point like compact autos negotiating a tiny two-lane road. If one could even call it that, given a buckling surface strewn
The Haunted Bookshop I: Innocents at the Bookshop
In John Dunning’s Booked to Die, men abuse and murder women and each other, brothers and sisters cordially loathe each other; Cliff Janeway, book-loving cop protagonist, beats his antagonist nearly to death – justifiably, of course, for the antagonist is a bully who likes to beat up women. Just another few days in America, full
The Haunted Bookshop II: “Christianity Fails Again”
Christopher Morley’s The Haunted Bookshop begins with the mysterious disappearance from the Bookshop’s shelves of Thomas Carlyle’s biography of Oliver Cromwell, that bringer of the reign of Christian righteousness and short hair to a people who, after a taste of perfection and a lot of death, decided they preferred neither. The book disappears, reappears, disappears,