"The Witch Hunter's Account" in Nameless Magazine

Nameless Digest Issue #3 contains, among many other fine stories, my "Witch Hunter's Account."

Like "The Astrologer's Telling," published in Daily Science Fiction last month, "The Witch Hunter's Account" was inspired by one of Lovecraft's favorite authors, Arthur Machen, and is also a response to Lovecraftian cosmic horror, again with fewer tentacles and, I like to think, less xenophobia than Lovecraft. Hmm, actually, scratch that bit on the xenophobia (although I'm sure a conversation could get started on the refugee themes in "Astrologer's Telling." It may not have been a conscious screw-you to Lovecraft's intolerance, but I'd be tickled if people read it as such). No, Witch Hunters aren't exactly known for their open-armed acceptance of difference.

In "Harmony," a story published in Kaleidotrope Issue #8 some years back, I made my first attempt to hash out a dichotomy or Harmony/Discord--not good/evil or order/chaos, but rather permissive-of-life-as-we-know-it/utterly-inimical. It's not that Discord is objectively bad (there is no objectivity), it's just...very easily made uncomfortable for us squishy organic lifeforms. But even here it's not a clean cut. Because sometimes we want the rules of the universe to work differently, at least for a short while. A lot of the themes in "Harmony"--including the seductiveness of Discord and the "they who hunt monsters" elements hinted at beneath the surface--are further developed & examined in "The Witch Hunter's Account." Plus I got the chance to develop the culture of colonized, terraformed 31st century Mars, a place I certainly hope to return to with later stories.

An excerpt from "The Witch Hunter's Account":

Just before dawn—the dossier said she was an early riser—I drove up the cliff-hugging pink gravel road. The gates opened at my name although I knew I wasn't expected, and I parked in a courtyard shaded by some of the most luxurious growth I had seen on Mars. A housekeeper, dressed in smart black, was passing a sprinkler over a bed of poppies in the shade of a vast palm.     
"Go right in, Mr. Saye," she said. "The gate announced you. Ms Mao will see you in her study, right at the end of the hall."     
The inside of the house was as comfortable and modest as the exterior, though again overgrown by plants spilling from urns and troughs set before windows, on tables, and even directly on the plush burgundy carpet, staining it with water around their bases. The hall was permeated with an unnerving feeling of good health. I hurried to the door at the end of it, and it swung open at my touch. Also unnerving, the way every door and gate seemed to yield to me.    
 The study wall opposite the door was taken up by a vast window overlooking the sea. A pale Martian sunrise polished the waves, and it was a moment before I looked away from the sight to see the woman standing at a narrow bookcase.     
"Ms Mao?" I said.     
She turned to me, sliding a book back onto the shelf. Theophania Mao had a slender body and a round face, unlined save for softening wrinkles at the corners of her dark eyes. Her hair, onyx-black, hung to her chin in a style graceful in its plainness. Her long red dress was tailored in the fashion of a business suit.     
"Mr. Saye," she said, "would you like to sit down? And you would mind if I called you Jonathan?"     
Of course, she must have thought I was a client. A patient, I corrected myself—the file Edith Zann sent me said she didn't charge for her miracles.     
But she did call them "miracles." I took a seat with my back to the window.     
She pulled up a chair and sat across from me. "Can I get anything for you? Coffee? Wine? A glass of water?"    
 "No, thank you." I realized I still wore my hat and removed it, with a nod of apology, wondering what about this case was making me so nervous.    
 "Are you certain?"    
 She asked with such insistence that I said, "Water would be fine, thank you."     
She buzzed the order into her intercom with a small smile. The knotting in my gut unraveled, then rewound itself, as I considered her. She plainly enjoyed offering a helping hand, if only by offering refreshment to a stranger at her door. She had a generous spirit, the air of a person born for service. It disarmed me—while I knew some fell into Discord for noble reasons, it was academic knowledge; the only crusaders I had met were like Zann, on our side.    
 "I have something to ask you, Ms Mao," I said.     
She bent forward in her chair. "Yes?"     
"I want to know how you do your healing."     
Her eyes lowered, and she sat back like a reprimanded child. Her voice was firm but also apologetic as she said, "I can't teach you how to do it."     
I shook my head. "I don't need to know for myself, ma'am. I'm curious about your own method."    
 Her eyes narrowed. Anyone who might have taken her eagerness to help as a sign of weakness—or naïveté—would have been corrected by that look. "Why?"    
 "I have some interest in science," I said. "I'm slowly forming a theory of how things perceived as miraculous—like your healing or Miguel Chapman's levitation and walking on water—"  
 "Miguel Chapman's performances," she said, "are all charlatanism."       
"I'm not so sure, ma'am. Either way, I'd like to see examples of your work, and try to fit it into established science."

Review: Heaven's Needle by Liane Merciel

You know how I said The White-Luck Warrior became horror a few pages in?

The White-Luck Warrior would take one look at one page of Heaven's Needle and run away crying.

Which is why, despite it being marketed as high fantasy, Heaven's Needle is my review of choice for Hallow's Eve this year.

(That's a warning, by the way, that the following review will contain disturbing imagery and if you aren't up for that, especially if you're currently eating tasty food, feel free to visit a different webpage).



The prologue includes a nice grisly bit about people exploding, proving this is going to be far more twisted than previous The River King's Road if nothing else. Of course, we should expect more twistedness, given the Sun Knight Sir Kelland has been kidnapped and imprisoned by the sadomasochistic Thorns, whose magic depends on their worship of the goddess Kliasta through disfigurement and torture. His friend and would-be lover, Bitharn, is on her way to rescue him. But doing so involves deceiving and betraying their own order of paladins serving the sun goddess Celestia. She frees Malentir, a Thornlord imprisoned by the Celestians, in order to have a prisoner exchange.

Meanwhile, Kelland is discovering moral complexities of his own in conversation with the leader of the Thorns, called the Spider. Here the Thorns rise above standard villain fare by revealing discipline and philosophy. For one thing, these vicious clerics are truthbound, which the Spider explains is because "the truth hurts worse" than any lie. It's still interesting that the villains of the previous book are suddenly revealed as...not exactly trustworthy, but more complex than they were at first. The Spider is also deeply in love with her husband (and their relationship has definite consensual BDSM undertones, which is confusing to the chaste Sun Knight but not represented as a sign of their Evilness. Although, alas, I miss the days of R.A. Salvatore's sadistic sorceresses and their captive elves, it was refreshing to see BDSM as a humanizing element to an evil character, rather than Bad People Having Bad Sex). Speaking of confusing the chaste Sun Knight, the Spider further sends Kelland for a spin by teaching him of a Celestian heresy that allows sexual activity within a committed relationship. In short, only casual sex is bad for Celestians. Given Celestia is the moral arbiter of this story's universe, I feel like She's going both too far (celibacy, according to my Catholic upbringing, is the sacrifice of emotional as well as sensual intimacy) and not far enough (what's so wrong with casual sex?).

This is all extremely interesting to me, if the thick paragraph above hadn't tipped you off. Unfortunately, one of my pet peeves from The River Kings' Road carried over--the flashbacks. "Have you heard of this fortress?" Character A asks. Character B has heard of the fortress, and now we the readers will to, in the form of a 2-page flashback/lecture. Then Character B replies to A, "Yes, I've heard of it. <Pithy 1-sentence summary of the lecture that tells us all we really needed to know for the story to move forward.>"

Enjoying this series involves some level of acceptance of the fact that every chapter or so will contain a mini-short-story setting up background information that is perhaps 30-50% relevant. I get some fantasy fans really enjoy the worldbuilding. I usually do, too, but I like it to be subtler and more connected to the action of the story. Especially because there's enough to unpack in this story.

Our villain (or at least one of them), Corban, starts down the road to ruin by trying to democratize magic, which has previously been the realm solely of the gods. Unfortunately, he decides to democratize war magic, as that's where the greatest popular demand is. Even more unfortunately, this magic isn't actually free of the gods after all--it comes from Maol, god of Madness. This is why tracing your supply chain is important, everyone.

That said, the idea of god-free magic is very tantalizing to those of a more agnostic strain of thought, and I feel the theocracy of the Celestian Sun Knights goes unexamined. Especially as Bitharn goes to prove the Celestians are not flawless avatars of the good.

I said about the previous book that this world's Viking-analogues were very close to historic Vikings, but I was incorrect. They turn out to be more misogynistic (not hard, actually, as the Vikings allowed women to own property, divorce, and many other useful rights) and this paves the way for a new character, the gender-role-crossing Sword Maiden Asharre. Asharre is mourning the loss of her sister, a Celestian cleric, when she is given the job of playing bodyguard to two new clerics as they travel to their first assignment.

It doesn't go well.

Kliasta, the goddess of the Thornlords, has driven her followers to pluck out their eyes, disfigure themselves, and devise some really amazing torture devices. Thorns still flock to her in steady numbers. The followers of Baoz, god of war, are the topic of some really horrible visions inflicted on Asharre as she crossed a booby-trapped bridge. Boaz is still pretty popular among solider types, who come to him willingly. But Maol, bloody four-armed Maol, is so wrong that he doesn't have volunteer converts; instead His spirit just sort of comes where it will, inflicting body horror and insanity.

He's taken over the town where our baby clerics and babysitter Asharre are going preaching.

If the scene where a ferret claws out its own guts hasn't proved enough warning, I'll just lay down the line: do not eat, and be careful of drinking, anything at all after page 200. I giggled through MangaMinx's Amnesia playthroughs, and this book was too much for me (not literally too much, but...I'm pretty sure you understand what I mean. If this were a movie I'd be hiding behind the couch). Body horror transformations, torture porn, and scary creatures chasing the protagonists through the night abound. There's also helpings of sexual assault (consider yourselves trigger warned), no child immortality, and pleas from mercy coming from orifices that shouldn't even work as mouths.

To defeat this haunting/manifestation/curse, Kelland and Bitharn find themselves working alongside Kliastans, who are not only safer than the alternative but also more stylish. You know it's bad when I prefer the aesthetic of missing-eyeball body modifications, although for the record, Malentir's thorned bracelets? Stylish.

Aside from the Amnesia games, this book also reminded me of C.S. Friedman's Coldfire trilogy, if only for the surface similarity of sun clerics fighting the powers of darkness against a fantasy-horror background. Coldfire, though, had much more depth and the worldbuilding felt more rigorous--appropriately, as among its mash of genres there was a healthy dose of science fiction. Heaven's Needle seemed to miss the chance for deeper examinations of its premises in places like Celestian theocracy (also, Celestia appears to be the only benevolent deity in this universe). There was a nice bit of mindfuck, a twist I'm not even sure was played straight or not, when Asharre's horrific visions turn out to be helpful in defeating Maol, who uses terror to distract her from a path to salvation. Or maybe it was a double-blind taking advantage of reverse psychology. I'm not certain.

The Celestian plotline inflicts a specific cruelty masterfully in a way Coldfire also achieved and R. Scott Bakker's opus, though brilliant in other ways, hasn't managed: it holds out cosmic virtue alongside cosmic evil, revealing a right path that is neither good nor easy. Given Celestia exists, and Her precepts are good, and Her servants seek to ease suffering, and all this is self-evident, there's no excuse for Asharre, Bitharn, or Kelland to turn away from the frequently gruesome demands of their quest in Her service. In Bakker's universe you (especially as the reader, but as a character to) can toss up your hands at an especially grotesque im/moral scenario and live on in a selfish state of apathy. Perhaps some children have to be sacrificed so you can keep living, but oh well; the universe sucks and once you accept that, things make a sort of sense. Not so here. Serving Celestia may require you to let some children be sacrificed, and that makes it your duty to let them die, and this is a fact that coexists with the goodness of Celestia and, holy heck, my Catholic upbringing didn't prepare me for this (lies, it totally did and I'm drinking it up).

I was hoping for more tie in with The River Kings' Road, which I didn't feel had concluded the stories of all its characters, but Bitharn and Kelland are the only ones who carry over. I think the Thornlady in Road was acting as part of a long-term plot the Thorns had to capture a Sun Knight, all so they can secure Kelland and Bitharn's cooperation against Maol, but I'm not actually sure. Meanwhile,  Brys Tarnell isn't ever gonna get his redemptive arc, is he (which is fine, but then why all the backstory?). I'm not even certain if the series will continue or rest as a duology. If there is a third book coming, I hope it's a bit lighter in tone--maybe fluffy scenes of the Spider and her husband beating each other up and conquering the world. Yes, that would be a great deal cheerier.

Final judgement: I haven't read a really horrifying book in a long time, and it was oddly fun to give in to the occasional urge to whimper Liane Merciel, NO, have mercy!. It was also an interesting book to compare/contrast with The White-Luck Warrior, which I thought was scary at the time but is now regulated to merely grimdark swords and sorcery ("merely" meaning "on an unprecedentedly epic scale," but it didn't touch me in the deeply, emotionally violating sense Heaven's Needle did).

Read it if: you want to prove your toughness, enjoy some twisted dark gods, and, yes, see Kelland and Bitharn get their happy ending--whether or not you feel they deserve it after everything they allowed to happen in this book.

Do not read if: you dislike dead children, have extreme triggers for gore, and never want to picture intestines as a mode of locomotion. Oops, sorry, that mental image is here to stay. I don't see why I should suffer it alone.


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Review: The White-Luck Warrior by R. Scott Bakker

The White-Luck Warrior by R. Scott Bakker

Fifty pages in, I realized I had come to approach this as a horror story rather than epic fantasy, as if I was reading Stephen King or the Lovecraft Unbound anthology.  I read horror in a much more defensive mode, trying not to get invested in any character's survival, and nodding my head whenever a particularly disturbing (I would say, dryly, "quite effective") scene occurred, making terror an aesthetic observation in hopes of keeping it from striking too deep. Also turning the lights up and drawing my blankets closer.



In the opening chapters, Bakker succeeds in making forests scary. Maybe if I'd seen the Blair Witch project or played that Slenderman game longer, this would not be news to me, but I grew up among friendly, sunlit trees. The same monumental gloom that pervades the Nonman fortress our intrepid heroes (or greed-driven antiheroes, either way) barely escaped in the last book lives on in the black forest of the Mop. Which is, by the way, overrun with Sranc. A Sranc is to a Nonman what Tolkein's Orcs were to the Elves, blasphemous parodies, except unfortunately for Bakker's characters the Nonmen are already twisted, creepy, and dangerous. The Sranc are even worse--bestial, violent, equal-opportunity rapists, and worst of all omnipresent in stunning profusion.

As if that weren't bad enough, it appears that the vision of Mimara's Judging Eye is in fact reliable. This disappoints me a little for reasons described in my review of the previous book, but also adds layers upon layers of metaphysical horror, as pretty much every character we know appears damned. Bakker's running a risk here of the reader giving up in sheer despair-induced apathy, but for now everything seems confused enough that there's still hope for some sort of emotionally satisfying conclusion for somebody, I suppose. But really there are a handful of characters who, if the series ends with them being dragged to hell, will have me perfectly satisfied if the No-God succeeds in shutting off this world from what has to be the vilest Heaven ever. Perhaps that's going to be the twist ending. If so, you heard it here first.

Speaking of which, I also placed a bet early in the book that Sorwheel was the White-Luck Warrior. This would provide purpose to his ambling subplot, and after all he is clearly subject to some interest from the goddess Yatwer. But was I right? If I was, I couldn't tell you, because of spoilers. Given the White-Luck Warrior appears to exist and move in time quite differently from ordinary people, his identity may be unprovable until the last pages anyway.

The White-Luck Warrior, whoever he is, is sent by the Gods against Anasurimbor Kellhus. Kellhus himself is after the Consult, servants of the No-God--so he is in fact doing something that would be helpful to the Gods, but the Gods themselves can't see this because they're blind to the machinations of the No-God. Thus the Gods have turned against Kellhus because he sees more than they can. Is this a metaphor for Kellhus and the Dunyain vs humankind in general? Quite probably.

Kellhus aside for the moment, if there was one Anasurimbor the White-Luck warrior were to succeed in killing, Kelmomas is very, very high on the list. He's a grating combination of whining five year old (Bakker depicts the whining so well I wonder if he has some of that in his life?) and sociopath about to stab you in the eyeball. I still can't figure out what the kid wants, since his beloved "Mommeeee" Esmenet is a mere mortal besides him, but he's not seeking world domination yet so in the scale of things, he just seems petty and bratty. Yes, it says something about this series that the "petty brat" commits murder via stabbing-in-the-eyeballs. I enjoyed the scene where big brother Inrilatas completely unnerved him, not because I like the grotesquely unhinged Inrilatas so much as I hate Kelmomas. But during a particularly tense scene, Esmenent and her companions spent all their time worrying about innocent little Kelli (to be fair, Esmenet is in fact a mere mortal compared to him and has no idea how bad he is) and completely forgot his much more interesting elder sister, Thelliopia. Thelli reminds me a bit of Luna Lovegood in a darker universe, with a penchant for designing her own clothes (with Luna-esque love for creative and glittery things, and if I'm gravely misremembering Miss Lovegood, my apologies) and also seeing to the truth at the root of all things, because she's an Anasurimbor. She also may be located on the autistic spectrum, although with the Anasurimbor influence it's hard to tell, and the characters wouldn't have the language to identify that anyway. At the least she's much less grating and far more interesting than Kelmomas, plus happens to be one of the few female characters without a history of prostitution. Don't get me wrong, sex workers deserve stories, too. But when I start noticing and perhaps planning a drinking game around how every woman in a story is depicted, that may be a call for change.

Yes, we get some additional prostitute characters, in a way that actually makes sense given the narrative and allows some reflective pathos on Esmenet's part. In justice, we also have the Swayal Sisterhood, who are really really awesome--the sorcery in general in this story has some amazing visuals. Also, Bakker does a solid job illustrating the mostly-male Great Ordeal covering up the threatening realization that women can be powerful enough to work sorcery by hiding it under facade of horniness and dirty jokes. Because when a woman is powerful enough to threaten you, you pretend she's only a prostitute, and presumably this makes you feel better. The Great Ordeal finds itself so enmired in awfulness and Sranc that I can even pity them despite how much this worldbuilding enjoys its casual misogyny.

Our moral compass Achaimian may turn out not to be a moral compass at all--his willingly leading most of the Skin Eater mercenaries to their deaths in pursuit of his Dunyain conspiracy theory perhaps should have tipped me off--but he and Mimara especially start going off the rails while in a Nonman-induced drug haze. There's also the lovely snarl of whether Achaimian, in being against Kellhus, is unconsciously serving the interests of Kellhus' enemies the Consult and the No-God. Mimara even wonders if her Judging Eye is revealing his damnation because he's a sorcerer, or because he's helping bring about the Second Apocalypse. This is a motive/effect snarl I haven't seen in any other novel (leave your suggestions in the comments if you have) and it will keep me with this series even if the grimdark sometimes gets grating.

Although while we're talking about motives, and Mimara, and depictions of women, the scene where Mimara tries to refuse the drug out of her mother's instinct (because having a fetus growing in your automatically awakens maternal instinct, nevermind if your relationship with your own mother is strained because she sold you as a child into abuse so horrible and dehumanizing that you learned not to consider it abusive before you hit puberty)...I did a double-take strong enough to launch the book across the room. Really now?

It's perhaps a bit petty of me to harp on these casual slip-ups, but I guess reading almost 600 pages of such relenting grimdark (drawn on by delectable motive snarls and powerful imagery, my own drug of choice) will make you that much less charitable. It also became harder to deny that sometimes Bakker's gambles with prose get out of hand. I'm pretty certain in one instance things are described as at their "nadir" when they're actually at zenith (although his word choice in general is a masterpiece of the unexpected, so maybe I shouldn't assume). And then he writes of two characters releasing "black-haired grunting" and "high blonde cries," which if it was coming from a friend of mine would be a signal to gently stage an intervention. Perhaps with the help of the Eye of Argon.

The story ends with plenty of juicy cliffhangers, and I realize I have faith that this trilogy will be wrapped up in a more satisfying way than the first. If it takes a trilogy of trilogies to tell the tale of the Second Apocalypse, though, I'll be there the whole way, because reading these books is an experience like no other. Grunts with hair color aside, the epic scale and genuine creepiness become an addictive thrill. I'm always saddened to read the last few pages, while usually I love to gobble books as quickly as possible. Whether I'll be tagging the final book "apocalypses that weren't" hangs in the air. I could almost see Bakker writing an ending where the Consult wins--he's that brutal--and frankly I almost want to see it, because it would be just that awesome on an unparalleled scale. Also, the Gods are dicks and most of my favorite characters are damned anyway, so what do we have to lose?

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The Family: A Story for A Cause

"The Family" originally appeared on my old LiveJournal page as part of Crossed Genres' Post A Story for Haiti project. The idea of the project was that writers would post a free short story, and readers could show their appreciation by donating what in their minds the story was worth to a cause assisting Haitians after the devastating earthquake early in 2010. A bit like sponsors supporting someone racing for the cure. But instead of doing something easy like running a marathon, we go the distance to write & offer you free fiction.

I've always had a soft spot for this short, sweet (for certain values of 'sweet'), hard-to-classify story, and I was glad of the chance to share it for a good cause. As I move away from LiveJournal to continue with this blog, I thought it would be sad to let "The Family" languish there. So, after almost three years, I'm bringing it to light again--after a round of polishing and expansion--and, once again, it's for a cause.

News: Grim Corps' Debut Issue and Dell Magazines' Award Honorable Mention!

 Today I am reading my contributor's copy of Grim Corps' magazine's premier issue, which contains a reprint of my psychological horror story and Poe* homage, "Ms Brellin". Along with of course my own piece (I haven't yet had the time to read up to the page where it starts yet, so my commentary is on other writer's stories and thus perfectly unbiased), there's some quite effective dark fiction here, with chilling lines dropped at just the right places. And the ink illustrations are ominously gorgeous.

Also, my science fiction story "The Astrologer's Telling" received an Honorable Mention in the Dell Magazines Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing. I'm sorry I waited until my penultimate undergrad semester to discover this contest! My fellow finalists, as we've gotten to know each other through email, are some friendly and spectacularly talented people. I'm sorry I won't be able to meet them in person, as the International Conference on the Fantastic, where the awards ceremony is held, begins in Orlando on the very same day my class flies out to Ghana. Studying abroad is a great reason to miss anything, I suppose. Yet I am sorry to miss this one.

*I keep saying it's a Poe homage because I wrote it after nobody in my American Lit class agreed to go along with my alternative reading of "The Fall of the House of Usher." So then I decided, fair enough, I'll go and write a story that fits with my reading. Readers do seem to agree that "Ms Brellin," at least, is a contemplation of the horrors of loneliness...and the perhaps worse horrors that can come in attempting to escape it...but I've not yet heard any comparisons to Poe. But I thought I'd put it out there, in case anyone wanted to smile and nod and make my day.

Added: Publications List

If you look to the right of this post, you can now see a link to my Publications List, probably the single most useful page on this blog. It offers links to my stories, roughly organized by length and genre and also by series. There are currently 3 of the latter in progress:

A Dark and Wonderful History: Stories of Women and Monsters, is a sort of parallel history in a secondary world that has a share of similarities to our own. Also its share of differences. Gods, ghosts, the shapeshifting and blood-drinking Dihneen, sacred and magical trees, and doors that open to unimaginable places appear in these stories, all encountered--and sometimes, if only for a short time, controlled--by women.

The Curse-Strewn World is a planned series of at least five short stories and one novelette. Currently the first story--not the first chronologically, but written as a bit of an introduction--is available in Beneath Ceaseless Skies' 110th issue. "The Storms in Arisbat" was originally written as a sort of personal exorcism. I hoped if I could get down at least one story featuring these characters and their journey, which kept haunting me, I could move on with other projects (of which, like many writers, I always have too many). Well, I did complete the story, and some readers and reviewers enjoyed it--they enjoyed it so much that, like Lois Tilton in her Locus Online review, they wondered if there were more stories to come. The answer is: Yes. Yes, there are.

Heart's Kindred, featuring the swordsman Rathin and the wizard Anweth, I've written to be a purely enjoyable adventure series. As more stories are completed, they'll continue to build up the world where the wandering couple lives--a world which is linked, in fact, to several other stories I've written (read Of the Generation, based in the same setting, and you'll discover at least one custom, or perhaps a sort of spiritual or lifestyle practice, that also appears in Aqua Vitae). These links are far from unusual, and even my unsorted science fiction and fantasy stories may share references with each other. There's a scavenger hunt, or perhaps a bingo board or a drinking game, in there somewhere.

It's also for reason of shared setting that I've grouped the stories taking place in and around the Xeocin empire, though they are not by any means a series. The world-spanning empire's capital city of Xeocib is the locale of the novel I'm currently writing (reviews of The Halcyon in Flight especially have stated that there seems to be more background to the story than is shown, and probably further stories as well. They're right). While these short stories will not by any means be necessary to understanding the novel's plot or characterization, I think every single one of them has been referenced in the current draft of the manuscript.

As I created this Listing, I discovered a lot of 'dead links' and the reality of several stories which are no longer available online, in print, or in either medium. One of my next orders of business is looking for reprint markets so that some of these stories can enjoy the light of day again--and most importantly, so readers can find and enjoy them!