The Time Machine

The Time Machine

     The time machine has always existed.
     The time machine will always exist.
     Even in the dreams of men who lived before machines there was the wonder of what could have been.
     The hidden doorway to time travel existed behind every advance of our collective efforts at technology until the inevitable happened as the inevitable always will.

     The time machine has always existed.
     The time machine will always exist.
     Its discovery was accidental.
     They were trying to perfect the theory of teleportation.
     In underground research facilities that never see the light of day or get the attention they deserve but do not seek, experiments are conducted that would strain your faith in what you think you know about the world you live in.
     Have you ever heard of a government program called the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency?
     Probably not.
     Most people haven’t.
     It doesn’t matter.
     They do what they do regardless.
     The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA as the tin-foil hat wearing conspiracy theorists that know and love it call it in their “secret” chatrooms, is an actual government agency.
     It has a budget, and if you can manage to get through the two-hundred and eighty-two page itemized budget report you can see what their annual budget is.
     Because you can believe everything you find on the internet.
     If you know anything about the world, you know that sometimes false stories are published to make the true stories look false and only those that are truly “in the know” know the difference.
     Sometimes they manage to make it off of the compounds and onto some conspiracy podcast but it’s tough to believe what you hear unless you’ve had some time to ease your way into it.
     Maybe you watch a show on the History Channel about ancient aliens and you see a clip of Michael Tsarion or David Icke and decide to do a little more research the next time you’re bored and have internet access.
     Most of what they say is interesting in the way that a lot of conspiracy theories are interesting.
The world is run by shape-shifting blood-drinking alien lizards?
     Sure.  Why not?
     As long as they don’t try to take off with all of our water and they keep the trains running on time then it’s fine by me.
     But if you listen to enough stories, some of it starts to makes sense and you heed their constant urgings to “Do your own research!”.  And you do.  And you discover other sources like Texe Marrs and Jordan Maxwell and William Cooper that have done their homework and provide you with their sources if you have the time and effort to research them.  And less of what these people have to say seems like the ravings of a schizophrenic that went off of their meds and wandered away from their keeper.
     Certain phrases and project names recur.
     Project names like Rex 84 and Project Paperclip and Mk Ultra. 
     Maybe you hear about a shadowy organization that rules the world and you do research, or at least what passes for research in the age of the internet about The Freemasons and the Skull and Bones and The Illuminati and the New World Order, the Council On Foreign Relations and the Bilderberg Group which meets in secret and supposedly selects the next world leaders and plots the future history of the world before it happens.
     Maybe you even try to tell your friends about this amazing revelation that you’ve discovered about how the game is actually rigged and only fools play by the rules and there isn’t anything behind our currency and hasn’t been for years.  That the money that everyone spends most of their life pursuing is just worthless paper.  That maybe, just maybe, we never put a man on the moon.
     The further down the rabbit hole you go, the more superficial the smiles of your friends become.
     When someone that doesn’t know you well mentions something in casual conversation in mixed company, maybe a look was shot, quick and intended to be subtle.  A half a smirk or a roll of the eyes.
When anyone mentions politics, you say that the president was selected, not elected and that the popular vote and democracy itself is a sham and do they know anything about the electoral college?  The topic of conversation is awkwardly forcibly changed to sports, weather, or the latest events that happened to fictional characters on a popular television show.  Just like changing the channel.
That’s when you realize that the knowledge that you worked so hard to find is now yours to bear alone.
Even if we never put a man on the moon, you still have to wake up in the morning and empty your bladder and brush your teeth unless you want your teeth to rot away.
     Never mind the fluoride in the water supply.  The chemtrails criss-crossed across the twilight sky.
     Forget about MK ULTRA and Ewen Cameron.
     That’s not going to make sitting through your scheduled shift at your job any easier.
Having that information at the ready isn’t going to make small talk over appetizers on a blind date any easier.
     The last thing your friends want to be lectured on is why the days of the week are named after Norse Gods.  That Jesus was a solar deity and comes from a long line of magic sun gods that people worship, because it’s easier than having to accept that the universe is really so vast and meaningless that the existence of any single organism is so brief and inconsequential in comparison to all of time and space as we know it that it might as well have never happened and that one day maybe tomorrow and maybe a million years from now the sun will either implode or explode or burnt out and collapse in on itself and every record, tape, CD, MP3 and whatever the next incarnation of music technology is, it won’t matter if you bought another copy of Pink Floyd’s The Wall that you can upload directly into your brain’s audio center, because unless you’re listening to it in a colony in another solar system everything will just be circling around whatever the sun decides to turn into on either a cold dead iceball or a burned out ball of charcoal but that won’t matter because by then everyone they know and love will probably be long dead, gone and forgotten and nothing really matters no matter how hard you try.
     No.
     It’s not that kind of thing that everyone’s wired to handle.
     So you dial it back.
     You realize after you spend a summer not so secretly not being invited to anyone’s cook-outs that maybe a lot of the stuff that you’re carrying around in your head isn’t really ready for prime time.
Your put your pants on one leg at a time like everyone else and try to live for today.

     The time machine has always existed.
     The time machine will always exist.
     At first the goal was teleportation.
     To move things from one place to another.
     It sounds easy when you phrase it simply.
     First a thing is here.  And now it is elsewhere.
     A thousand years ago if you had said that humans would fly across the sky in metal machines that weighed as much as a thousand men they would put you wherever they put the people too mad to mingle with other people.
     Who was it that said “Today’s science fiction is tomorrow’s science fact.”?
     Even in our time, advances in technology have brought us wonders that only years ago we thought we wouldn’t see in our lifetimes and we take it all for granted.
In your pocket you have an affordable device that contains the computational power that would have required entire buildings of machines to produce and you use it to send each other pictures of your genitals.
     Sometimes the use of the machine is determined by the user.

     At first the goal was teleportation.
     To move things from one place to another.
     It sounds easy when you phrase it simply.
     First a thing is here.  And now it is elsewhere.
     If a thing can be moved from one place to another then how far can anything be moved to?
     The first the things were small.
     Ball bearings and marbles.
     Forks and spoons.
     When the things were made to disappear, they disappeared, but no one knew to where.
     Making things disappear was the easy part.
     Making them reappear where they were expected to was the difficult part.
     The scientists sworn to secrecy under penalty of death or worse were thrilled to be on the cutting edge of this new technology.
     One night after many drinks had been drunk while idly drawing on a dry-erase board with colored markers someone figured out that the problem wasn’t only space but time.
      “Around, around the sun we go, the moon goes 'round the earth, we do not die of death - we die of vertigo.”
     If you make a thing disappear with the intention of making it reappear in the same location the problem is not that the object will not reappear in the same place, but that the place is no longer where it was for the object to return to.
     The planet turns on its axis as it orbits around the sun and the entire solar system is spinning on a plane with the rest of the known universe.
     The problem was determined to be one of not only space, but of time.
     Experiments began with increments of time so brief that they would hardly seem like time at all to anyone or thing but the instruments keeping track and the items reappeared as predicted, but a little less predictable as the amount of time an item was allowed to be disappeared was lengthened.
     Things began to get weird and adjustments were made.
     Objects were successfully transported, first across a tabletop, then from one room to another and the experiments were repeated and repeated again just to be sure that what was thought to be happening was actually what was happening.
     One day a scientist decided to try to transport their watch from one room to the next.
     Just for a laugh.  Just to lighten the mood.
     The scientist even tried to think up a punchline for when the timepiece reappeared in the next room.
Something along the lines of “Time flies!”.
     When the watch reappeared the time had to be reset.
     That’s when things got interesting.
     No one had really stopped to wonder where things went when they went from here to there or where they were when they disappeared.
     Least of all did anyone wonder when they went.
     Supposedly that’s all we ever learned about the possibility of teleportation and that the project was abandoned as being too dangerous and unpredictable for any practical use.
     There are many scientists that know more than they would ever say about the project that few would even believe were they to risk their life to tell anyone the things they know.
     But there is something that I know.
     You can’t expect any good scientist to open up Pandora’s box only to peek under the lid and then shut it and forget what they saw inside.
     Although the funding for the project was discontinued and the scientists were reassigned to other projects, maybe some of the scientists were not reassigned.
     Maybe in exchange for their rights to be a private citizen some scientists traded their identities to be able to delve further into this new mystery until they had mastered it.
     Maybe some agents sworn to secrecy were assigned to infiltrate the message boards of sci-fi fandom and put forth the question of what consequences there would be for humankind if a time machine were to actually exist.
     Maybe the government through covert funding sources financed the existence of some of the science fiction magazines and awards were rewarded for the best conjectural fiction of what might happen if time travel were a reality.
     There’s a theory in conspiracy circles that the technology that the public at large is allowed to be aware of is ten years behind what science is actually capable of.
     What if I told you it was twenty years?
     What if I told you that I knew when and why the pyramids were built and why the library of Alexandria was burned and that some of the prophecies of Nostradamus were true.
     What if I told you that I knew who killed Kennedy and why, and I knew someone that heard Marilyn Monroe’s last words as they slipped from her beautiful lips?
     Would you believe me if I told you?
     Would anyone?
     It doesn’t matter anymore.
     It never did.
     It never will.
     I won’t tell you who I am.
     Who I am doesn’t matter anymore.
     What matters is what I know.
     I have seen the time machine.
     I have heard it humming and I have seen it make things disappear elsewhere, elsewhen.
     Sometimes these things reappear where and when you expect them to and sometimes they don’t.
     Sometimes smaller things and other times things not so small.
     Sometimes small objects.
     Sometimes other things.
     I can’t be sure that I can tell you for certain who or when but we have a way of knowing our own.
     You’d never make the trip unless you thought it through.
     To disappear from here and now and reappear elsewhere, elsewhen is more than most people could ever to hope to wrap their mind around.
     For some it is a dream, for others, a nightmare.

     The time machine has always existed.
     The time machine will always exist.
     I know where it is.
     I can take you there if you want to go.
     But you have to ask yourself… are you sure you want to go?

Sometimes Hard Luck is the only kind of luck you’ve got.

Final jury process and editorial review is finally completed for the Hard Luck anthology.
This one was difficult to finish for a variety of reasons personal, professional, financial, and existential.
Now that all of the acceptance and rejection e-mails have been sent and I'm waiting for the edits I suggested for the final stories to be accepted or rejected I finally feel comfortable writing the foreword for this anthology and starting to work on the call for the next anthology.
I don't want to jump the gun and reveal the Table of Contents because things have a way of going awry at the last minute and people can change and be stranger than you thought they were, even as far as authors go.
If someone decides to pull their story over the edits I suggested then I don't want there to be a scandal or any bad blood or other evidence at the crime scene.
So please forgive me as I wait for the final drafts to be safe and sound in a single folder ready and waiting to be laid out in twelve point Arial with 1.5 spacing in 6" X 9" Trade Paperback format before naming names and laying them out in a tasteful font on the final design of the back cover.
Those that have been selected have been made aware of their selection.
I know that sounds a bit imperious, but a camel is a horse designed by committee.

Sorry for the suspense, but here's my first draft of the Foreword for your consideration.
I don't have a horse in this race unless you know about the worst kept secret of the literary world since Richard Bachman so please forgive what may seem to some as self-indulgence.

FOREWORD
This one was difficult to put together for a variety of reasons.
This was supposed to be the second collection or anthology I put out on my publishing label.
Collection or anthology.  Pick your poison.  Whichever suits your fancy.
My preference changes day to day and depends on how fancy I’m feeling.
It ended up being the third and the second helped to cause the delay in putting together the third as things that occur in consecutive order which were intended to happen simultaneously often do.
But life also happened and continues to happen.
It was also difficult because of the quality of the stories that were submitted.
I had some hard decisions to make and had to disappoint some really nice people that submitted some really solid stories, but once a theme started to emerge as the jury process evolved I had to keep the central theme in mind.
Thankfully most of the authors did as well.
So why “Hard Luck”?
Because sometimes hard luck is the only kind of luck you’ve got.
Because you have to play your hand with the cards you’re dealt and the house always wins.
Because of any number of clichés.
I looked up the first “because” because I thought it was a quote I heard once and instead I found “The only thing that overcomes hard luck is hard work.”
Thanks, Harry Golden, whoever the fuck you were.
I hope you died screaming.
Because sometimes, no matter what you say or do, things aren’t going to work out the way you planned.
I always say “Prepare for the worst and hope for the best.” But what happens when things get even worse than your worst case scenario?
My van died last October and I’ve been taking the bus back and forth from work.
It’s April, and on every bus there’s someone sitting at the front of the bus that runs into someone they know and they always have to tell their friend everything about their bad luck life.
They either don’t know or don’t care that everyone else on the bus doesn’t want to know about their bullshit and don’t have earlids they can shut to block out their banal bullshit.
Sometimes the only way to get through those bus rides is to pretend that the two people at the front of the bus are avant-garde theater performers workshopping new material for some absurdist modern Brechtian theater of cruelty piece.
It makes it easier to endure if you wait for them to stand up and take a bow at the end of the bus ride and hold out a hat for donations from the other commuters involuntarily subjected to the drama of their lives.
It’s always legal problems and just got out of prison and in a halfway house and got kicked out of the halfway house for being high and they’re living on the streets but they know a guy that owes them some money so when they see that guy they’d better have their money because the mother of their kids won’t let them see their kids because they’re behind on their child support payments so the judge ordered that their wages be garnished and it’s tough to find work when you’ve got a record and do you have a cigarette to spare and a lighter to light it with and maybe a couple bucks because if they can just put together bus fare they can get to where there’s this other guy that also owes them money and all of this is probably true.  At least some of it is.
Whenever someone asks me for something and I don’t owe them anything I make them tell me a story.
Even if the story is a lie, it’s usually interesting.
You have to pay the monkey if you want to hear the music.
And when you’re down on your luck, sometimes the only thing that makes you feel a bit better is hearing about somebody who has it worse off than you do.
One time I was sitting outside a café and nursing a coffee, killing the twelve hour dead time between twelve hour work shifts because it was easier than taking two buses each way to spend six hours at my apartment just to get up and come back for the next twelve hours and a guy wandered over and asked me for some money.
I said I’d give him some money, but only if he told me what he needed it for.
He told me the usual story about a guy that owed him money and how he just got out of jail and that he was arrested for walking around with a machete.
“What did you need a machete for?” I asked.
“Because people were out to get me, naw mean?” he answered.
And I did.
I did know what he meant. 
And I gave him a dollar and thanked him for his time and asked him not to spend it to get drunk or high.  And I was too lazy to go into the café with the guy and buy him food so I’d know where my money went. 
My dollar was his and he could do whatever he wanted with it as far as I was concerned.
I’ve been homeless before.
Twice.
It’s not as bad as you might think, as long as you have a vehicle to sleep in and a gym membership.
You can shit, shower, and shave without anyone calling the cops and still show up to your job if you have one to go to.
There’s a freedom in knowing that wherever you go you are where you need to be.
To not have a series of interconnected boxes with all of your precious possessions waiting for you to come home and turn on the lights while you’re wasting your time someplace you’d rather not be, doing something you’d rather not be doing.
The only hard part was killing the time between work shifts.
The long cold nights.
Usually parking in a shopping plaza under one of the tall bright lights and reading a book until I fell asleep helped.
You’ve only got so much space for books so the ones you decide to keep matter more than if you have a room to keep them in.
There’s not a lot of sedans that come with bookcases as optional interiors.
I’d mostly read Charles Bukowski and Hubert Selby Jr.  Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk.  Henry Rollins and T. S. Eliot.   The Hagakure.
Books I could read a hundred times and still discover something new I hadn’t noticed the last time I read them.
I’m probably going to be homeless at the end of this month and probably will be when you read this and it amuses me to think of myself as running what might be the world’s first homeless publishing house from wherever I find myself.
This time I don’t have a vehicle, because my last one died, because of the hour commute I had to make back and forth each day and the road construction that tore apart the front end which made the cost of fixing the front end more expensive than what I paid for my van in the first place, but the mechanic I took it to said the wheels could fly off at any time so taking it onto the highway again would be suicide, so I junked it.  They said they’d give me three-hundred for it but when they showed up to take it they offered me two-fifty or to go fuck myself and I took the two-fifty because rent was due.  But then my license got suspended because of an unpaid parking ticket because my job hasn’t been able to give me forty hours regularly since I settled for it because the economy is bad here and has only gotten worse since I moved back, because I figured it was better to be where I was from, near people that said they missed me being around, than to stay in the town I moved to, so I could be with a girl that couldn’t handle her alcohol, but I didn’t know that about her until it was too late, so I had to let her go even though she was the last good thing to happen to me, and I never see the people that said they wished that I was here because they have their own lives to lead and their own problems to deal with.  So now I take the bus back and forth from work and sometimes I make the rent on time and sometimes I don’t and at the end of this month it won’t matter anymore.  I’ve got a broken tooth that I can’t afford to get pulled that always aches, some days worse than others, and a trick knuckle from a car crash due to a slick road on a dark night when I was over-confident and half asleep from working two jobs that almost put me behind bars.  Thankfully I only totaled my car and made a couple ruts in the lawn in front of the church and didn’t crash through the side of the church and the lawyer I paid seven hundred dollars to say “I think my client can speak for himself.” was enough to convince the prosecutor to drop the charges at what I think was my arraignment and that and a court fee dropped the charges down from felony “reckless driving” charge down to a “painted line violation” misdemeanor and I was allowed to keep my freedom and all it cost me was totaling a car I still owed three years of car payments on and seven hundred dollars for a lawyer that met with me twice and only ever uttered a single sentence in my defense, a two hundred dollar court fee for a fifteen minute arraignment, and waiting seven years for the misdemeanor to slide off of my driving record.
That was about ten or fifteen years ago and none of it matters.
I still have a trick knuckle that I never bothered to try to get reset that lets me know when there’s a heavy storm coming from the west before the clouds come over the horizon.
You have to play the cards you’re dealt, and the house always wins.
And if I can get a few people to buy this book then maybe I can save up my share of the royalties and get my license reinstated.  Save up and buy a vehicle to live in.  Pay the sales tax and registration and car insurance like a decent citizen.  Get a gym membership.  Save up for first last and security and get a decent place to put myself between work shifts.  Nothing too fancy, but someplace warm when it’s cold out and dry when it’s wet out.  Start to pay off my student loans again and fix my credit rating.  Meet a nice girl, or these days, considering my advancing age, a decent woman, that will make me forget about the last one I had to leave behind.  Maybe buy a house someday.  Two car garage and a dog in the yard.
And maybe the economy will implode and people will kill each other with smiling eyes and silent knives for trying to cut in line while waiting for a cup of thin soup and two slices of bread and all the salt and pepper you can stomach if you don’t mind having to tear open the single serving paper packets.
But, as I always say, “Plan for the worst.  Hope for the best.”
Maybe nobody will notice or care that I wrote this foreword or anything else I ever have or will write and it will all be a waste of time and I’ll get picked up on a vagrancy charge and finally get to see if jail is as bad as everyone seems to think it is.
It should make for some interesting subject matter for my next book.
I used to work with drug addicts and ex-convicts.
I’ve heard it all.
Go ahead.  Try me.
Murder.  Suicide.  Prostitution.  Armed robbery.
Burning bridges and rebuilding them just to burn them again.
My favorite anecdote as related to me by one of my clients was this.
“You know the difference between a drunk and a junkie?  An alcoholic will steal your wallet.  A junkie will steal your wallet and help you look for it.”
You have to find a reason to laugh when people you came to know and hoped the best for hang themselves from shower rods because they lost the battle with the bottle and couldn’t face themselves in the mirror the morning after.
They usually made more on public assistance than I was making as a counselor but still they killed themselves.
They said that jail’s not that bad as long as you mind your own business and keep to yourself.
Supposedly there’s three meals a day which is more than I can afford on the outside.
The food’s not great, but you always know your next meal will be there.
And there’s probably pen and paper and steady work to help bide the time.
I heard they pay minimum wage and that you can use your wages at the prison commissary to buy what you need to trade for what they don’t sell in the commissary and what you don’t spend they save up for you and hand you a check on your way out the gate.
You’re not allowed to have lighters, but they still find ways to light cigarettes in prison.
When I get out there’s public assistance that can line me up with a cheap place to live and a minimum wage job which really isn’t so far away from where I’m at now.
I’m not there yet, but I can see it if I look over my shoulder and squint.
The rent is always due, and the wolves are always at the door.
And even if they’re not scratching on the outside and nuzzling their muzzles into the corners, you can hear them howling in the distance.  I can hear them howling.  Can you?
If it’s true that “The only thing that overcomes hard luck is hard work.”, then I hope you appreciate the hard work that it took to put this together.
Not just my time and effort, which I gave with no regret, but the time and effort of all of the authors that wrote these stories.
Most of them did so alone, with little appreciation and encouragement from their family or friends if they have them, and the only thing that they want from you is to read their stories.
That is also all I ask of you if you’re reading this.
Even if you bought this as a favor for a friend, even if you were given a copy for free, please read them all.
The time and effort you’d spend doing so will surely be less than the time and effort it took the authors to write them.  Time they could have spent sleeping in or fucking off or playing video games or getting drunk or getting high or watching movies and living other people’s dreams.
Even if it doesn’t mean a lot to you and seems a simple thing, it would probably mean the world to the authors whose stories that follow.
And maybe if I sell enough copies of this book I can save up and catch the last bus out of town because there’s a guy on the other end that owes me some money and he’d better have it on him when I find him.
So, now that you’ve heard my Hard Luck story, let’s hear yours.

POSSESSIONS: A Collection of Short Stories About the Abject Horror of Ordinary Objects.

Burnt Offerings Books is proud to announce the release of its latest anthology.

POSSESSIONS: A Collection of Short Stories About the Abject Horror of Ordinary Objects is an anthology assembled and edited by Paul Loh.
Inspired by his social networking with other authors, Paul Loh decided to collaboratively come up with a theme with authors invited to participate in a secret invitation only group.
Of the thirty-three group members, fifteen contributed stories based on the theme of the abject horror of ordinary objects.
As the editor said, "It has been said that what is wrong with the world is that we use people and love things instead of the other way around.  What if things were using people? That question is answered within these pages.  Here, we have fifteen authors who have probed their deepest fears to transport you into a world where the enemy has no face.  It could be a phone, a book, a calendar or even a pair of shoes.  When ordinary objects become something to fear, where can you ever be safe?  We have met the enemy and it is our Possessions!"

From the Foreword:
"I am amazed by how quickly this all came together.  I've always known that I'm a writer and that I love to edit and proofread, but I never thought I'd be putting all those skills together in one project.
One night in December, Clay Cross and I were talking on Skype.  He mentioned a short story he'd like to write.  I told him that if he wrote a story,  I'd write one too and we could put them together in an anthology and get other writers to contribute to it.  Thus was born the idea.
When I got a group of writers together, we discussed a theme and came up with the title, which we all agreed upon.  We would write about ordinary objects somehow becoming something to fear.
From the beginning, this has been a collaborative effort. I could never have done this without the help of all the other writers.  This idea of ours becoming a reality is definitely a dream come true for me and all of us!
I am honored that I know so many talented writers.  Some I met at school, some I met while doing stand-up comedy at open-mic night and some I know through Facebook.  Now you can get to know them a little through the pages of this book!  At least their fears.
Sometimes that's the most real part of a person."

For several of the authors, this is their first publishing credit.
This is in adherence with the policy of Burnt Offerings Books to help authors that are trying to establish themselves to build their publishing resume to help them leverage their future work for pro-rate sales.

In this anthology are the following stories, organized by length from shortest to longest:
The Phone by Clay Cross
The Doorbell by John Reti
Bullet by Anthony Calhoun
Timer by Abbey Sweeny
Good Luck by Scott Lefebvre
Victory Assured by C. L. Quigley
Smart Phone by Paul Loh
Mine by Ian McClellan
A Call From Beyond by D. A. DeCuzzi
2B or Not 2B by Barb Lien-Cooper
Consumption by Ryan Lieske
Sussurri della Notte by Jason Holton
The Amulet by Amy Frischmann
Menology by Shanna M. Zuniga
Voices Under The Cabin Floor by Jason Harris

You can find the anthology for purchase through the following links:
CreateSpace Direct:
https://www.createspace.com/4738243
Amazon Print-On-Demand:
http://www.amazon.com/Possessions-Collection-Stories-Ordinary-Objects/dp/149749527X/
Amazon Kindle/E-book Version:
http://www.amazon.com/Possessions-Collection-Stories-Ordinary-Objects-ebook/dp/B00JFCD4PM/

Burnt Offerings Books is proud to announce its first themed collection of short stories Till Death Do Us Part.

Burnt Offerings Books is proud to announce its first themed collection of short stories Till Death Do Us Part.
Love and hate are often intertwined. In this collection we explore the consequences of the ties that bind when they come unraveled.
Life and death. Love and loss. Murder and suicide.
These themes and others are explored in this collection of stories.
This collection contains nine stories selected from the stories contributed for consideration.
Thrall by Christinna Viruet
Promises by Marta Salek
LI by Mark McAuliffe
Anniversary by Tim Jeffreys
Cold Shock by Kit Power
Angie's Change by Deb Eskie
Till Death Do Us Part by Sean Douglas
Companionable As Solitude by Lisamarie Lamb
Cadavres de Desir by T. Fox Dunham
You can purchase the collection from the following links:
CreateSpace Direct: https://www.createspace.com/4698016
Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1496129156
Kindle Edition: http://www.amazon.com/Till-Death-Do-Part-Collection-ebook/dp/B00IRI8YAA
FREE PDF copies available for review consideration.

Review of Dead Letter Depot by Kit Power.

Review of Dead Letter Depot by Kit Power.
 
In this grab bag of tales, shorts, intros, extracts and miscellaneous paths-less-travelled, that's the core message that keeps coming back, again and again. Scott can write.
It is, as the full title suggests, horror. Specifically (though not exclusively) apocalyptic horror. Scott has done some thinking about how the work might end, and how those they may remain will react to that ending, and across the pages of this anthology, he walks us through it - the desperation, the lethargy, the isolation, and yes, of course the fear - though it's telling that we're often as scared of Scott's protagonists as we are the world they have inherited.
It starts with 'Whimper' - a really fine stand alone tale, but also one that sets up so well the themes Scott will wrestle with throughout the book.
'Where werewolves come from' is my favourite in the collection, and worth the price of admission on it's own - a series of vignettes, connected by a common thread that you feel, even if you can't fully articulate it. This is a stunning meditation on people and the walls of flesh and mind that separate us all from each other.
The chapter extracts stand up well, but inevitably suffer from being dislocated from their wider narratives, especially, for me, the chapter from 'The End of the World Is Nigh.
'Braindead' manages to be a genuinely disturbing alternate take on the events of 'Whimper' - A Bachman vision, as opposed to King, if you can dig it - and the R/T/M intro made a useful pairing, in that it gave fair warning at to where that book is likely to go, should you be brave enough to attempt it.
And finally 'Till Death us Do Part' takes the premise of the movie 'Warm Bodies' and turns it into the gut-wrencher it always should have been.
This is not a perfect collection. The grab-bag nature of it precludes that. But the best stuff is very very good indeed, and across the piece you catch sight of real talent sweating blood to realise a vision. Scott has a clear and distinct narrative voice (albeit with capacity for variation, as the last couple of entries in this collection show), an unflinching vision, and is fully prepared to shed harsh light on the darkest recesses of the human condition.
I can't wait to see what he does next.

Dead Letter Depot: A Collection of Stories To Kill Yourself To
CreateSpace: https://www.createspace.com/4608401
Amazon Print-On-Demand Paperback Listing:
http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Letter-Depot-Collection-Yourself/dp/1494934973
Amazon Kindle/E-book Listing:
http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Letter-Depot-Scott-Lefebvre-ebook/dp/B00HRK3Q48/

Burnt Offerings Books: Offering Nightmares To Discriminating Readers: Open call for submissions.

OPEN CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS:
Burnt Offerings  Books is looking for:
Short Stories: 1,000 – 7,500 words.
Novelettes: 7,500 - 20,000 words
Novellas: 20,000 - 50,000 words
Novels: 50,000 words and up.
 
What kind of content are we looking for?
We are looking for traditional horror genres.
Vampires, Werewolves, Witches, Zombies, Ghosts, Demons, Serial Killers.
We are going to be very discriminative in our selection process.
We are looking for literature.   Not just stories.
If you’re going to explore a traditional genre, we expect you to do something new with it.
If you send us another textbook genre book, you will receive a polite letter of refusal and suggestions for other markets that may be better suited for your work.
What we’re looking for is writing that actually frightens.
We don’t want scary, young adult content.
We want terrifying writing that will make us leave the lights on after we’re done reading.
If you think you’ve got something that fits the preceding description, feel free to review our submission policy below.
We’re looking to publish a novel a month in 2014.
Shorts will be published in themed anthologies.
We will be publishing a themed anthology each month starting February 2014.
The theme for each month’s anthology will be announced at the beginning of each month and the anthology will be published at the end of the month.
If you can’t write a short story in a month, you may want to consider submitting to another publisher.
We’re not looking for the next Stephen King or Clive Barker or Anne Rice.
We’re looking for authors with a unique voice all their own.
No children’s books, no Young Adult, and if you’re going to submit something zombie-genre it had better be amazing.
Also NO EROTICA! Go peddle your vampire/werewolf porn somewhere else.
We are interested in publishing writing BY adults FOR adults, offering nightmares to discriminating readers.

What do we offer?
Burnt Offerings Books offers to publish and promote your work.
We will handle the cost of editing, formatting, designing a cover, and publishing your work.
In exchange, we will retain exclusive rights to print the work for six months.
After that, we will retain the right to keep the Burnt Offerings Books edition available, but you may also do with it as you please.
Publish it, don't publish it, sell it to some other publisher.  Whatever.
Just as long as we continue to retain the rights to keep our edition available.
You will also be required to use a different cover for republishing purposes to avoid confusion between the two editions.
In exchange for these concessions, you will receive 50% of all sales p.o.d. and e-book.
Profit-sharing will be distributed at the end of each month.
This is the best deal I have heard of from any independent publisher.
Good luck finding a better deal that doesn't include an advance.
All submissions will be accepted only on condition of agreement to the preceding conditions.
Doesn't sound like something you're interested in?  Don't submit.


If you are interested, submission inquiries may e-mail:
burntofferingsbooks@gmail.com
Or contact us through our Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Burnt-Offerings-Books/1408858196016246
To stay up to date on what we will be publishing join the Facebook group:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1449189218642723/