Athenaeum
noun
an institution for the promotion of literary or scientific learning
a library or reading room
An (Absolute!) Eternity on Miller Island
Back cover copy
The Trilogy Universe is very similar to our own with one important difference: the existence of Super Humans.
Even in a world of superheroes and the mundane miraculous, there remain mysteries that defy the explanations of science, and there are always villains.
Sheriff Jake Dawes is about to find one.
Jake hasn't always been a small town sheriff on a quiet little island. His former employer, the nameless Agency, manipulates nearly every facet of Human society. Following the events of October 2014, the Agency assumes Jake dead.
With his family's lives at stake, Jake will clash with forces beyond his comprehension, making uneasy allies with monsters and federal law enforcement. With any luck he might even survive the longest night of his life, but not everyone can be saved…
About this book
This novel has taken me ten years to complete. I was, admittedly, quite insane for much of that time so the extended period can hopefully be understood. The majority of the writing has taken place just in the last few years of that decade.
Briefly: if you need help, get help. There really is a light at the end of the tunnel and it is not a train. 'Nuff said.
Starting out as a sequel to the novella Rain Shadow (now unpublished as a separate volume and included in this novel), the story took on a life of its own in my mind and ended up rather longer than I thought possible. It seems I had a novel in me after all.
If you have already read Rain Shadow you already know many of the characters and if not, I hope you enjoy meeting my friends who live in my head, both heroes and villains. They all really had a lot to say, it just took them a long time to say it.
You can read a sample right here.
Content warning: violence, strong language, child abuse, intense scenes
Mirror
Synopsis
This was intended to be a short story revealing some of Agent John Smith's past with the Agency and a bit of the history between he and his partner, Elaine. If you aren't sure who those people are, I suggest you take a look at An (Absolute!) Eternity on Miller Island, above, or on Amazon.
Agent Smith is ordered to a small town to investigate a series of mysterious disappearances of young children. He is quite certain that, if he has been sent there, the children will never be found because whatever was taking them certainly wouldn't be human.
About this story
Sometimes the writing bug bites pretty hard and occasionally life swats it. I was deeply into the idea of this story at the moment I first sat down to write it as might be evidenced by the ~1800 words I pounded out in the initial run. Unfortunately I never actually got back to it. I feel like there's something here, and I really do want to eventually finish this one, but at the moment this is all there is.
You can read a sample right here.
Content warning: family tragedy, grief, strong language
File Discovered on Laptop in Possession of Suspect
Back cover copy
A man picks up a woman at a bar and takes her home for a good time.
It will be a night he will remember for the rest of his life.
All 48 hours of it.
About this story
Not to spoil anything, cuz I'm not gonna, but this entire short story was born out of a single question: What if?
This is one of those stories in which you take a natural occurrence and then ask, "But what if it was really big?" like the ants in the 1954 nuclear fright flick 'Them!', or maybe you watch a documentary regarding the mating habits of mantises or some spider species or—going way out there—the sexual symbiosis of some anglerfish, and then applying those strategies to humans or maybe very human-like aliens that could prey upon humanity.
That's what happened here. I was doing some light reading regarding a subject in which I had an interest and had a cussword-worthy moment.
I think I wrote the entire story in a single sitting. While I did not worry at this much shorter tale nearly as obsessively as "Rain Shadow", it still managed to pack a certain punch.
You can take in a brief sampling on this site by clicking here. If you are willing to forego a third of a cup of coffee, you can get this story on Kindle for $0.99 by clicking here (link opens at Amazon.com).
If you like the story (or don't even read it), you should check out the amazing audio drama version my friend created. It is hosted at Soundcloud, is completely wonderful, and is NSFW so you may want to listen at home, in the dark, alone.
Content warning: suicide, sexual scenes, body horror
Robigus
Synopsis
This is the first several paragraphs of a story that takes place several years into the future of the story line of Earth. Just a fragment, an idea, this is as far as I got with the story. Technically, this could be seen as a sequel to "File Discovered..." above, so I recommend you do not read this unless you have at least checked out the complete audio drama version above, which is free, or perhaps even spend a buck on the "Dollar Dreadful" available at Amazon.
That said, all of this started really far away from anything like an idea for a book.
About this story
If you have ever played Diablo 2, you're going to know what I'm talking about. If not, sorry?
Anyhoo, my favorite class was always the Necromancer. Dresses in black, skeletons... what's not to love, right? Now, maybe because I come from a background of storytelling and role playing, I was not content with merely putting together some numbers and caring only about my DPS. I also absolutely refused to use the same cookie-cutter builds that everyone else played. Just like my Magic decks, my D2 characters may have been non-optimal but they were actually fun to play. Just all the skeletons. Yes, Hell difficulty solo in an 8-player game was slow. Very, very slow. But I did it with nothing but skeletons, a couple legendaries, a couple runewords, and mostly just some good rares... in Hardcore.
Eat it, the meta.
At any rate, I decided to make a "poison necro" and his name was Robigus. If you haven't read "File Discovered..." you should probably stop here. If you have, or don't care, continue below.
Spoiler section
Due to one of the item prefixes in the game that increased the poison skill tree for Necromancers being called "Fungal", it seemed a natural fit to base a poison character around mushrooms. I used skills like Confuse for the idea that his victims were hallucinating vividly due to spores, probably, as it was an instant cast for area of effect but was not a terribly visible effect. This allowed me to run through groups of enemies and take very few hits as they all attacked one another.
A poison Necro's damage is completely ridiculous. A single dagger strike kills almost anything in the game but a boss monster. Unfortunately, randoms from the Battle.net lacked imagination, communication skills and evidently intelligence and could simply not comprehend that the green monster (that's how "elemental effects" were marked, by coloring the enemies) was already dead. Attack something else.
Unfortunately the way poison was programmed meant that a later instance of poisoning would overwrite the damage of any previous attack. So the +10 poison damage over 5 seconds on random would overwrite the thousands of poison damage over more seconds.
I ended up having to play alone.
That makes leveling up more difficult as more players = more XP. It's also a bit boring.
However, I loved the idea of the character. You see, "Robigus" is the name of the only fungus god I could find; the Roman God of Rust. Not rust like oxidized iron; rust like the corn disease. Romans would sacrifice to Robigus to prevent their crops from spoiling on the plant.
I never let go of these central ideas about the character: A lonely fungus god; incredibly toxic; capable of inducing vivid hallucinations; capable of breaking immunity to poisons; immortal, always rising again after apparent death; his only companion, when he had one, a female warrior (Act 1 merc).
You can read the fragment here.
Content warning: violence, strong language
Plague Doctor
Synopsis
This tale is an introduction to Dr. Blood—a Plague Doctor from Earth in 2008, more than six centuries following the event that separates the Earth of his timeline from that of our own.
About this story
My friend, an historian and big ol' nerd, ran a couple of time travel games for myself and others in his circle. In one of these campaigns I portrayed a hulking black knight from 14th Century Eastern Europe. Possibly a cannibal, certainly prone to berserk rage, and highly superstitious regarding, well... everything, he was a lot of fun.
The character in this brief prose, Dr. Blood, hailed from a later campaign in which my friend encouraged us to flex our creativity and, instead of choosing an era and coming up with a character, to indulge in a bit of speculative fiction and change or create an event in history that would result in the formation of an alternate timeline. These timelines are inherently fragile as the rectification of the inciting incident causes them to collapse.
Our characters were to be individuals with the "spark" of time travel snatched from these parallel realities just before the moment of their dissolution. Not only did we play characters out of time, but who also learned that their entire lives—their whole worlds—had been the result of what amounted mistake and that everything they had ever known or loved was annihilated upon the correction of that error.
Preast
Synopsis
This is the tale of Father Jacob Kelly's fall from Grace into the waiting arms of something far older and more malign than his conception of reality could allow. His entire world is upended in a single night when he finds himself newly ordained in the service to Mhr'Azekel, a god to gods from an age beyond the history and kenning of mortals.
About this book
Catholic Priests get a pretty bad rap in popular culture and so make easy fodder for the grinder. At the time I started this, I was probably feeling pretty blasphemous and likely quite a bit atheistic so it explains a bit about the tone, I think. Sorry if all of this heresy offends, but it's just a story.
In this book I intended to introduce the world of the Necronites, the demimortal modern day servants of a god that existed long before humanity and even all the other gods. Mhr'Azakel is the Titanic God of Severance, the death god of what are essentially the Great Old Ones of Lovecraftian lore. In the Timeline for Gaia hosted at my other site, SuperNaturalRPG.com, you can follow the very, very long history of Mhr'Azakel and get a brief explanation of exactly where it came from.
The Necronites likewise have a very long history, originating from before the birth of the modern age. Similar to the clans of Scotland, the Saurians divided themselves into great families interrelated by blood, marriage or oath called Hordes. The first mortal worshipers of Mhr'Azakel were members of Horde Gi who would go on to dominate their Horde which would become the first beings to be transmogrified into unliving servants of the Unlord.
During the early days of humanity's rise, Horde Gi would return to reignite the worship of Mhr'Azakel, giving rise to new Hordes. Some of these great families of fiends are introduced in the fragment featured here.
If that all sounds cool, you can read the relatively lengthy manuscript fragment by clicking here.