Showing results by narrator "Ezzo Ezzo" in All Categories

In The Dinosaur Tourist, Caitlín R. Kiernan’s 15th collection of short fiction, 19 tales of the unexpected and the uncanny explore that treacherous gulf between what we suppose the world to be and what might actually be waiting out beyond the edges of our day-to-day experience. A mirror may be a window into another time. A cat may be our salvation. Your lover may be a fabulous being. And a hitchhiker may turn out to be anyone at all.

In The Ape's Wife and Other Stories - Kiernan's 12th collection of short fiction since 2001 - she displays the impressive range that characterizes her work. With her usual disregard for genre boundaries, she masterfully navigates the territories that have traditionally been labeled dark fantasy, sword and sorcery, science fiction, steampunk, and neo-noir.

Chicken Little is NOT afraid of anything. Well, okay, maybe a mysterious BONK to the head can produce panic. But only momentarily. It's not as though she meant to send the barnyard into a tailspin, thinking that the sky was falling. How ridiculous! But can she calm her feathered friends with facts and reason?

Sex. Horror. Discomfort. In five stories and one poem, you'll find questions and answers, and you might learn something about yourself along the way. Something uncomfortable. Something dark. Come on in and join us. Lean back, open up, and let us take a look at that tickle. We're sure it's nothing serious. Just...something in your mouth.

Sky Fielder is a typical college student, except that she is a product of the foster-care system, lives in a halfway house, and meets with her caseworker on a weekly basis. While failing to balance her grades and erratic social life, she receives a call from a hospital, asking her to make medical decisions for her brother Ben—who died more than a decade before. The call must be a scam, and besides, Sky has a new life now. None of her classmates know about her desperate and feral childhood in West Texas.

In April 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope team unveiled the first ever image of a super massive black hole. This inspiring scientific breakthrough took years of hard work, innovative thinking, and a level of global cooperation never seen before. A multinational team of scientists, lead by Dr. Shep Doeleman and Dr. Heino Falkem, used eight of the largest telescopes from around the world to collect more than four million billion bytes of data, which was flown to teams of computer scientists and mathematicians.

This is it. Graduation. Vic is going to throw the most epic party this town's ever seen. She's going to give her friends and everyone's favorite restaurant, Happies, a proper send-off, and you better believe she's going to hook up with Jake. All she needs to do is to keep it all a secret so that Miss Thrope, the town's nightmare councilwoman and high-school economics teacher, doesn't ruin it.

Thirteen-year-old Vic is of the Youngest Generation, fixed in prepubescence after a catastrophic environmental degradation. She’s also her father’s favorite student. But when he takes his own life, the perennially ingenuous Vic wants to understand why. As she sets out on her quest, Vic begins to learn that family isn’t something you’re born with - it’s something you build.

Free-spirited Grace Sheldon is used to living on a tight budget as a freelance photographer. But nothing short of a miracle could produce the $30,000 she owes on the house she’s inherited. Without steady employment, the bank refuses to give her a loan. Working a temp job won’t give her nearly enough, but she’ll take any little bit she can get until she figures out a solution. Her first day, though, she realizes this is no ordinary office - and her handsome new boss is no ordinary man.

In a stratified society where contact with the sun is a luxury reserved for the elite, those kept prisoner in the darkness will do anything to find the light. Arden - beautiful, street-smart, and cynical - is one of the citizens of the lowest Level, known as Undercity, of an off-world colony. A blackout band traps Arden in her district, but as sister to the leader of the most powerful gang in Undercity, she has access to Above.

Music means more than anything to high school student Cate Reese; it's also what unites her with Cal Woods. Devoted classical guitar players, Cate and Cal are childhood friends newly smitten by love - until a devastating car accident rips Cal out of Cate's life forever. Blaming herself for the horrific tragedy and struggling to surface from her despair, Cate spirals downhill in a desperate attempt to ease her pain.

Ever since her father died, Bernie’s life has been stagnant. When concerned friends and family suggest she join a hike through Alaska to gain new perspective, Bernie reluctantly agrees to go, even though she’s never been the adventurous type, unlike her namesake, Great-Aunt Bernice. Matthew is a struggling screenwriter who needs a week off the grid to gain some inspiration for a new project and to process the reappearance of his absent father. When the two meet at the trailhead, it’s annoyance at first sight.

FBI agent Layla El-Deed becomes entangled in the opulent art world she's infiltrated in Cairo, Egypt, as part of her undercover investigation into the acquisition and sale of priceless art and relics to fund terrorist groups. When a terrorist plot threatens both Egyptian and American lives, Layla is forced to decide where her loyalties truly lie.

Following her forced departure from Fourline, Natalie Barns has been aching to rejoin the struggle to overthrow its evil dictator. With Soris and those she left behind constantly on her mind, Nat bides her time, determined to find a cure for the duozi - those infected by the terrifying Nala. An unexpected discovery propels her back to those she has sworn to protect, but her reappearance in Fourline is anything but straightforward, particularly when familiar faces appear when least expected.

Emily Williams, 20-something free spirit, is spending a year in England with - horror of horrors - her parents. She's not going to let that get her down, though, any more than she is brought low by her seemingly hopeless search for love, the ghost that inhabits her underwear drawer, the horrible high school flashbacks that come via a student she tutors, the hot guy she fancies who may or may not be what he appears, or the dishy almost-veterinarian who could be the perfect Mr. Emily.

It's been quite a year for novelist Liz Holt. She's overcome a lot and is finally feeling at peace with her new life at her family's hotel, the Indialantic by the Sea, on the beautiful barrier island of Melbourne Beach, Florida. She's exactly where she needs to be to ring in the New Year at the Florida Writes Literary Masquerade Ball.

When Gwen Marcey's dog comes home with a human skull and then leads her to a cabin in the woods near her Montana home, she realizes there's a serial killer in her community. And when she finds a tortured young girl clinging to life on the cabin floor, she knows this killer is a lunatic. Yet what unsettles Gwen most is that the victim looks uncannily like her daughter. The search for the torturer leads back in time to a neo-Nazi bombing in Washington state - a bombing with only one connection to Montana: Gwen.

Veterinarian Wade Roberts is done with love. But try convincing the elderly folk of Cape Harmony who are determined to play matchmaker. Now the young single women in town are bombarding him with baked goods and love notes, and being “taken” is the only way to stop the meddling grannies - which is why he needs a fake fiancée. Fast. Arden Pearson loves planning weddings. Other people's weddings, that is. After her own engagement ended in disaster, she prefers to live vicariously through her work.

Trading the urban sprawl of Manhattan for the tranquility and exotic beauty of a Florida barrier island was the best decision author Liz Holt ever made. What could be more ideal for relaxing, regrouping, and getting a writer's creative juices flowing than observing life at the unconventional hotel that has been in Liz's family for generations? But it's death that grips the island when a body sweeps in on the tide....

Over seven feet tall and with a newfound ability to sense future events, Corinthia Bledsoe is far more than just another Midwestern high-school junior; she's a force of nature. When she predicts with terrifying accuracy the outcome of a tornado that will hit her high school, leaving a cow standing midcourt in the Lugo Memorial field house, Corinthia finds herself at the epicenter of another kind of storm entirely. And as things get stranger and stranger, lives start to intersect in ways even Corinthia can't foresee.