The Weird and the Wild and the Doris Day

When we first sat around in the ZP virtual office telling dick jokes and spit-balling about what should follow our science fiction issue, HEY THAT ROBOT ATE MY BABY, I immediately put my hand up for a western.  I have a long term love affair with the genre. Growing up it was The Duke and Clint who jostled for space alongside The Clash and Springsteen on my bedroom wall.  I had other posters too, the kind showing girls with dubious morals and staples across their stomachs, although I kept them under the mattress, not on the wall. But I digress.

Writing for Zelmer Pulp really pushes my limits. Sci-Fi was a tough gig for me and ROBOTS took me about as far out of my comfort zone as I ever want to be. FIVE BROKEN WINCHESTERS on the other hand was a stone cold blast. Brian Panowich’s RED DECEMBER was already slated to open the collection. It’s a killer story from a writer at the top of his game and when I’d finished reading it I knew I had a really tough act to follow.

As much as I dig the horror mix of the weird western, I wanted to bring something more traditional to the 5BW party. Okay, now some of you are going to get all uppity here and say how the traditional western has been a dead genre since the 70’s and that there are no more stories to tell. With respect, that’s a load of crap. As David Cranmer said to me recently, when the name Bass Reeves rolls off the American tongue like Wyatt Earp then we might be halfway there. Go ahead and Google him. I’ll wait.


The old west was home to some really amazing characters. The true stories of these pioneering men and woman are often far more fascinating than the dime novel myths that have since grown up around them. Everybody has heard of Calamity Jane, right? No doubt that name calls to mind the tooth-achingly sweet rendering afforded her by Doris Day in the musical of the same name. What Hollywood failed to mention was that in real life, Martha Jane Canary (AKA Calamity Jane) was at times a prostitute, a manic depressive and an alcoholic. Instead of riding off into the sunset with Howard Keel, she ended her days washing the whore's undergarments in a South Dakota brothel. The wild west might not always have been as glamorous as the movies would have you believe, but there are plenty of stories still to be told.



MJC - Definitely not Doris Day 

Woman generally get a rough deal in western fiction and always seem to be portrayed as either bodice-ripping sirens with a heaving bosom or simpering idiots who can’t function without a man to cling to. The one notable exception and a truly great portrayal of a western female protagonist is the character of Mattie Ross in Charles Portis’ TRUE GRIT. If you have only ever seen one or other of the movies, then do yourself a huge favor and read the book. Somehow Portis manages to make his Mattie strong and determined while still allowing her to keep an endearing naivety that will have you rooting for her from the very first page. It’s a hell of a book and apart from all that the period dialogue is just wonderful.

I wanted to create the kind of female lead who had what they would have called sand back in the day. She wasn't going to be the kind to jump on top of the nearest cowboy at every opportunity and she certainly wouldn't be bursting into tears at the first sign of trouble. I also wanted a touch of the mysterious bad ass about her. A bit like the man-with-no-name thing that Sergio Leone had going on in the Dollar movies. Above all I wanted the story to have blood and dying and plenty of action. I can’t write the sort of beautiful prose that sings and fills up your heart like my ZP brother, Isaac Kirkman. I’m a pulp hack and for me it’s all about the action. Having said that a degree of authenticity is also important to me.

The end result was the debut of a tough little female bounty hunter who goes by the name of Justice McCann. I haven’t been kind to her; she’s had a hard life up to this point and it doesn’t get much easier for her in THE GUNS OF JUSTICE, but she’s a real fighter. And thanks to Chuck Regan’s red ink she’s a much better protagonist now than when she started out.

It was an honor to be part of FIVE BROKEN WINCHESTERS, not only did I get to have a story of mine in the same book as a Hawthorne tale (That's Heath Fricking Lowrance, people!)  I also got to play in my favorite genre with my best pals.

I really hope you dig the collection.  And if you want to know how Justice came by those God-awful scars of hers, you can find out in my novella GOSPEL OF THE BULLET, which will be released through Zelmer Pulp next year.

Did I really just write this whole post without mentioning Ryan Sayles once?

Goin' Smooth Up In Obsidian ... uhhh ... I Wrote That Wrong ...

I was never a western guy. Just not into ‘em. The closest thing I came to a western was reading Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series. I did watch Tombstone. But seriously, Kurt Russell, Bill Paxton and Val Kilmer (before he got shockingly fat) all in one movie? It could’ve been mimes-meet-gay-circus-porn and I would be glued to the TV.

So, on Halloween, 2012, at 11:15 AM, Ron Earl Philips of Shotgun Honey sent me a message on Facebook. He wrote, “You're going to be an editor for The Big Adios.” TBA was a western fiction website he was planning on launching in early 2013, and I happened to read a comment he made about and told him I thought it was a good idea. Then he did that. I said no. I’ve heard working with Ron is like fisting yourself; in the end there’s no payoff because you can’t sit down and all you have to show for it are dookie-covered hands. (That'll make sense later.) But then he sent me a picture of his titties and I immediately changed my mind.

True story.

The website fired up and I started reading westerns. Chris Leek submitted his story Seeds and in all honesty, I was blown away. We got others that made me want to write westerns (Gareth Spark’s Demon’s Road, Nik Korpon’s A Hundred For The Crows and Chris Deal’s Goat Sucker Blues come to mind) but there was something about Leek’s impact.

I sat down and wrote a western scene where an outlaw named Obsidian spoke to a deputy named Hornsby whom he’d just shot. I liked Obsidian. Sometimes an author will delight in writing a character, much the same way that an ignored child will grow up and delight in the fact they've become their parents' legal guardian. Let the payback begin! I was that way with him. He was evil, but I enjoyed his headspace. I wanted to write him as aloof but lethal. Like that snake dangling from a tree branch in the jungle, you can walk underneath it a thousand times and it acts like you were never born. But that one time it feels like it, it just snaps down and bites. It’s not even hungry or mad. It just wants to kill something. That was Obsidian.

I followed that scene with one about Hornsby’s partner, a man named Buford, who was the opposite side of the same coin as Obsidian. I wanted a sense of morality to guide Buford, while id (not a typo) drove Obsidian.

The name Obsidian was from Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road. It’s a post-apocalyptic tale of a father and son surviving a devastated world. McCarthy mentions the wife/mother character in passing. She gave birth and made the decision to kill herself rather than live through the apocalypse. The husband/father character gave her a piece of obsidian stone and sent her off to slit her wrists somewhere besides around their child. He said obsidian stone would do the trick. Yup. That’s all the reason I need to name a bad guy that.

Buford Pusser was the real-life character the movie Walking Tall was based on. I remember my dad talking about Pusser as one serious bad ass. I think the popular “Buford Pusser Stick” is a Hollywood fabrication, but even if it is, oh well. When a sheriff shows up with a table leg to beat the piss out of a bunch of bad guys, well, that’s all the reason I need to name a good guy that.

The problem was, I wrote those two scenes and that’s all I had. No direction at all. Nothing else came. So, like the wuss that I am, I sat it aside and said I’d come back to it.

Fast forward to the days preceding the release of Hey! That Robot Ate My Baby! Just days before it launched, we were beginning to plan for our next issue, which was going to be zombies volume II. Leek had the idea that we needed more space between the first and second zombie issue, and threw out the idea of a western. Brian immediately piped up and said yes. From there everybody got excited and so, it was time to write a western.

 I revisited Obsidian and, for some reason I can’t pinpoint, I got the idea to give him the head of Medusa. Yeah, that’d be cool. An Old West outlaw running around with the head of Medusa. Where I went wrong was I started adding to the myth, tweaking details until they were unrecognizable, trying to explain how the myth was recorded incorrectly in history, et cetera. I even had plans to make Obsidian into Perseus. In the end it was more confusing than illuminating to have the severed head still be Medusa.

I made it a curse that Obsidian wished to pass off, and after all those years of wandering aimlessly with a Gorgon noggin in his lunch pail, he happens across a deputy with whom he thinks he can do the old switcheroo. Things don’t work out the way he wants. Boom. End of story.

Enter Chuck Regan and his ultra-hot red pen laser scalpel. Needless to say (or write, or whatever), my tears flowed for weeks on end. As it was with my story from Robots, I went back to the drawing board. Chuck is a bully when it comes to writing, but I don't fault him. He has a tiny penis.

However, Chuck is also a Godsend and the final draft of my story was ten times better than what I could have had without him. It’s encouraging when a fellow writer adds a note in the manuscript that simply reads EPIC. Chuck knows how to make a Ryan blush. All right, I’m tired.

Good night.

Oh, and Obsidian and Buford will be back. One day. I got more of them in me. And not in the way that sounds.

The West Is Wilder In Space

The Space Western is a genre that takes little effort to write, but a lot of effort to write well. The 'Turkey City Science Fiction Writer's Workshop' calls this sub-species of science fiction "The most pernicious suite of 'used furniture'..." in that it borrows from two old established groups of tropes that are easily combined, but rarely combined well. Take a Western, turn horses into hovercraft and six-guns into blasters and you're done. The hard part is making the pieces work together without exposing the gory stitches in your Frankenstein creation.

Firefly changed the perception of the genre. Now, every hardcore naysayer of the Space Western has been forced into silence for fear of being cursed at in Chinese (something about the universe falling out of their ass?) or, worse, being walloped in the head by a bright orange pom-pom-bedecked cap, by any of the millions of fans of the show who may be within earshot.

Firefly, however, was not the beginning of my connection to the bastard genre. Back in the late 80's, there was a cartoon called Galaxy Rangers, which borrowed liberally from Clint Eastwood's The Man With No Name character in their creation of a shape-shifting gunfighter. Boba Fett, everyone's favorite anti-hero, was acknowledged by George Lucas as being inspired by the same Sergio Leone stoic warrior of the wasteland. I collected a comic book called Evangeline in the early 80s, written by Chuck Dixon, which was a big inspiration to me. The first story in that series was about an assassin-nun (yes, really) who traveled to Mars to kill some bad guy who had wronged the Catholic Church in some way. Although she wasn't a bounty hunter, per se, she carried the same strength and coldness of Clint's character—and was commissioned by God, however, not 'dollaro'.

In college, my freshman year, I finally experienced the source material behind all that was influencing me. A local UHF station (before cable, you young whippersnappers) aired all those classic Spaghetti Westerns during what happened to correspond with finals week. Art Majors like myself didn't have finals to study for, so I spent each night that week getting drunk on rum and cokes and immersing myself for the first time in that dusty world. The following semester, I took a creative writing class and wrote my first Space Western—Outlaw—about a gunslinger in a shooting competition on an alien world. Not very original, and my writing professor booed it as cliche and TV-ish. He wasn't wrong. It stayed with me, though. I had plans to adapt that story into a comic book series. It never happened.

My first written work to appear in print was in a title by Caliber Press, a one-shot comic book called Petit Mal. This comic was a collection of my stories loosely strung together into little slices of much larger tales. One of those sequences was about colonists on Mars. In this tale, Mars was a kind of lost colony—the planet frozen-over from rogue terraformation, and its population abandoned by the machinery of capitalism—the colonists were left to fend for themselves, and they degraded into in-fighting as resources dwindled. Petit Mal was published in 1992. I abandoned that world and pursued other projects.

Like many others, I missed out on Firefly's first flight. I caught it as a collection on DVD in 2005 and immediately fell in love again with the genre. Joss did it right, and he inspired me to dig up my Mars story again. As I started plotting and writing out scenes and history, I realized that committing all of this to a comic book format would take me years to tell. I had just come out of a bad relationship with a self-published comic book series I wrote and illustrated and decided to take the plunge and write my first novel. Five years later, I had a draft I wasn't embarrassed to share. I did a lot of research behind the science of the fiction, the mindset behind a spacefaring culture, and the PTSD of soldiers returning from a war, as my main character had done. Lots of research. Lots.

The Ballad Of Jeremy Diggett, my contribution to Five Broken Winchesters, takes place during the generation before my novel's timeline. All of the history, the technology, and the circumstances were already worked out for the novel, so it was easy to drop in again. Yes, there are blasters. Yes there are hovercraft. And yes, I crammed in as many old tropes associated with Westerns as I could fit.

The Ballad of Jeremy Diggitt is just a warm-up. I plan to tell a lot more stories set in this world. And if you enjoy it, my novel Little Agony (if and when it ever gets published) will give you even more blasters and hovercraft to enjoy.

A Fist Full of Lowrance

Zelmer Pulp is delighted to announce that Heath Lowrance will be joining the line up of our forthcoming western extravaganza, FIVE BROKEN WINCHESTERS.

Heath is not only bringing his mysterious hard-eyed righter of wrongs, Hawthorne to our version of the weird west, he will also be penning an introduction to the collection. When asked to comment on how honored he was to be a part of the greatest Zelmer Pulp publication since the last one, Heath replied. “This is private property; get the hell out of here before I call the police. And why aren't you wearing any pants?"

So there you have it folks, the one and only Heath Lowrance.

FIVE BROKEN WINCHESTERS will be available shortly in both print and e-book. 

No pants required

Go West Young Man

It’s summertime and the living is easy. That doesn’t mean the Zelmer Pulp crew are taking a vacation. The rumors about us spending all day sat in a children’s paddling pool on Isaac Kirkman’s front lawn, drinking PBR and wolf-whistling at passing redheads are completely untrue, we have in fact been feverishly working on our next release.
Zelmer Pulp is heading west in August with our new collection, FIVE BROKEN WINCHESTERS. This time we have invited a friend along and who better to ride shotgun for this posse than the Sheriff of The Big Adios and Shotgun Honey, Ron Earl Phillips.

FIVE BROKEN WINCHESTERS spans the whole arc of the western genre, from hard-boiled traditional stories of blood and revenge to science fiction and weird western horror. The full line up is as follows:

Obsidian by Ryan Sayles

Red December (A Harmon Brown Yarn) by Brian Panowich

The Atheist by Isaac Kirkman

The Ballad of Jeremy Diggitt by Chuck Regan

The Guns of Justice by Chris Leek

The Last Shot by special guest, Ron Earl Phillips

We will also be throwing down some glorious original cover art from our very own Chuck Regan and an introduction written by one of the leading weird western authors working today.

FIVE BROKEN WINCHESTERS will be available shortly in both e-book print editions. If you want a little taster of what’s on offer, then why not mosey on down to Amazon and pick up a copy of Brain Panowich’s first Harmon Brown Yarn, BABY JUICE, which is available RIGHT HERE.  

 

 

This ain’t your Daddy’s Western. This is Zelmer Pulp. 

Baby Juice - A Harmon Brown Yarn

 



Boom! Brian Panowich has just torn the weird west a new one with his Zelmer Pulp Short. BABY JUICE (A HARMON BROWN YARN)

It's been two years since Harmon Brown went into the blizzards of Montana to hunt and kill the beast that took his family. Two years Harmon has been carrying a curse the Zuni Indians called Atahsaia. So far, he's been able to control it, but the beast needs to feed and Harmon has chosen his prey.
It's time to fight monster with monster.
 

Dodge City, Kansas circa 1880 provides the backdrop for this tale of weird western adventure. Baby Juice is the first in a series of short stories that chronicle the legend of Harmon Brown.

You can get your very own copy of Baby Juice right now at Amazon US or Amazon UK for less than a bungfoodle.

Down the Rabbit Hole

This post serves two functions - ONE, to provide a format for a rant (aren't those what blogs are for?) and TWO, to announce an upcoming Zelmer Pulp project.

PART ONE:

You know what I love? Wikipedia.

I know there are a lot of detractors out there who claim that the information can be incorrect or biased—which is true—but I remember the days before Wikipedia, before the Internet. We had encyclopedias and the card catalog. The information was all safe to use in school reports, but it was all bunched into one place, and you'd have to spend hours researching. One book would lead you to another to another until you found your 'aha' for a story, and then hours and hours of research for supplementary information. (You haven't even started writing yet!)

For an upcoming Zelmer Pulp project, we're trying to orchestrate a little dance through history using a common timeline. In the past, I would have to read 40 books or arrange conversations with college professors of history before I could garner enough information about whether so-and-so was alive at a certain time, or if what's-his-face had invented that thingamabob yet. Now, I can find out in three to five clicks.

This is an amazing time we live in. Okay, shut up, I know I'm old, but seriously - - Wikipedia is the combined knowledge of millions of books distilled into one cross-referenced device. Back in middle school, we called it the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, and it was a thing of science fiction.

I woke up this morning at 4 AM thinking about this alternate-Earth history project, and you know what I didn't do? I didn't have to wait for the library to open. I opened my laptop without getting out of bed and started finding out some interesting details about Nikola Tesla, spiritualism, and 19th Century inventions. Did you know that someone invented a fuel cell back in the early 1800s? Did you know that Friedrich Nietzsche hated Richard Wagner and the German anti-Semitic movement? (It's all related, at least to my part of this epic undertaking). That's how I spent my morning before I had my coffee.

Okay, so, maybe this resource (as flawed as it may be) all balances out compared to other distractions. Nowadays, writers have to be writing blogs and posting to social networks and going to signings and handing out swag and promoting and pimping and writing reviews to build a presence. So we NEED that distilled resource in order to get all this stuff done. There is no way that all of this research could get done in the traditional 20th Century way with all this marketing of self going on. So, maybe it's the internet's fault that we have to do this digital pimping in the first place. I mean, without the internet, and without e-book publishers competing for attention, maybe we writers wouldn't have to spend so much time spraying in the corners, trying to get attention.

By 1910, We already had vacuum tubes and babbage's calculating machine, so was it simply lack of available resources stopping the development and proliferation of computers? Was it economics? Practical uses? Did World War I jar the momentum of technological development or inspire it into the wrong direction? What if Thomas Edison wasn't an asshole, and General Electric was more visionary, letting Tesla complete his bigger-picture inventions for free energy and war-stopping weapons? What if the world had thought it more important to invest in communication than in tanks and gas masks? What if Tesla had become some kind of super-psychic, and was able to network the minds of other early 20th Century inventors? How soon before we would've had the internet? How would life have been different in 1900?

Would we be sharing over that internet (and what would the Victorians call it?) photos of our cats and dogs and kids and what we made for dinner, or would we be philosophizing about the afterlife,  the latest novel discovery or invention, or would we be speaking to the dead using Tesla Electric Ethervox devices and transmitting messages and invention blueprints via Telegraphic Facsimile Machines?

What if World War I was averted? Big changes in history can occur from tiny nudges. What might have changed to shift history's gears? This was a theme in my story TIMEJACKED: THE RAND PARADOX in Zelmer Pulp's latest publication, HEY, THAT ROBOT ATE MY BABY, and it's being recycled I guess. But for this upcoming project, we're not giving history just a little nudge, we're giving it a titanic kick in its ass.

PART TWO:

Remember in the late 80s when comic books had an epic growth spurt? RETURN OF THE DARK KNIGHT and THE WATCHMEN were key examples of what I'm talking about. Those day-glow colors were pulled right out of their capes replaced with washes of grey. Zelmer Pulp is going even darker. Well, there might be some day-glow colors just to throw you off, but you know how we do things. Yes, Zelmer Pulp is tackling the superhero genre. Steampunk superheroes, Cold War super soldiers, and contemporary noir superheroes with darker-than-grey motivations.

You've read C'MON AND DO THE APOCALYPSE. You've read HEY, THAT ROBOT ATE MY BABY. You've seen what we can do. Coming up next, you'll see what we can do to the Western genre. Isaac Kirkman gave you a taste in his THIS PROTEAN LOVE, and if you haven't yet read any of Chris Leek's Wild West stuff, you're in for a surprise. Is it ironic that our guru of all things Western is from the U.K.?

Now, just try to imagine what we're going to do to the superhero genre. Title to be announced. In production...

ZELMER PULP signing at THE AUGUSTA BOOK EXCHANGE.

I was asked to come to the Comic-book shop I practically grew up in to sign some of my books, including C'mon V1, and Hey, Robot V1, in conjunction with Free Comic Book Day. It was a surreal experience seeing that place so alive, with me on the other side of the table. I shared my space with fellow author Linclon Crisler. Here are a few photos...

 

A huge thank you to the Augusta Book Exchange for letting me be a part of this killer event.

If anyone out there is interested in obtaining a signed copy of any of our books, just contact us here at the site.

 

We're also looking at having prints of Chuck's incredible covers and other shwag, like stickers and what-not, available too, so keep checking back.

Can anybody find my son Wyatt photo bombing us?

Hammer Down.

Brian

This Protean Love

Each of us was asked to provide the inspiration beyond their Science Fiction story in the collection Hey, That Robot Ate My Baby.  This is mine.

This Protean Love: 

Adelita Marie Salazar, the last living border agent of her precinct patrols the Tierras Oscuras, the Dark Lands, in search of her missing brother, encountering killers, and refugees, human, and machine in a futuristic world where the nature of reality is as uncertain as her future. 

This Protean Love began as a solemn prayer, a spiritual love letter to the Mexican women who have fought and died defending their people. I carry their images inked to my skin, and taped to my walls. They are my witness's and my guides.

Women like Maria Santos Gorrostieta, Erika Gandara, and Hermila Garcia

My connection to these women, and this struggle is intimate, and not abstract. It's a deeply personal one. They are kindred spirits.       (Erika Gandara below)

Nothing I could ever write will ever be as powerful as they were in that final moment when they refused to bow, refused to abandon their people. They are heroes in an age where we are desperate for them.

The name Adelita represents the archetype of the warrior woman (Soldaderas) of Mexico and connects to a proud tradition.

I wanted to explore concepts of love, and faith, of duty, and the nature of God and Gods place in our future, as well as acceptance of all life in the symbolic rich tradition of classic literature like Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain and Herman Melville's Moby Dick. This Protean Love is layered with dense numerological coding, and esoteric symbolism. Many books focus their theme on the spiritual but do not use occult or spiritual structures or ritual within the piece itself. They are stilllifes of the numinous, but are not designed with numinous techniques. This Protean Love's structure is metaphysical.

The last and crucial influence is Janelle Monae                                 

Janelle Monae is an artist and person I revere above all others. Her use of the android as the other in her musical opus The ArchAndroid was the humble template for which I have built This Protean Love upon.

In this work with the Wondaland Art Society she immaculately combined three important things: a deep, dense social-conscious message,  a spell-bounding sci-fi visionary story, with beautiful music and art. 

This Protean Love is a beam of light born out of a very deep, personal wound. It is the celebration of the female as a source of inspiration, and power. This Protean Love is my introduction beyond the realm of Noir vignettes, and my introduction into the Zelmer Pulp fold. 

     Thank you. 79797 Isaac Kirkman

The print version is out now for Hey, That Robot Ate My Baby!

TIMEJACKED: THE RAND PARADOX

So it was my idea to write about our inspirations. Blame me for what follows.

TIMEJACKED: THE RAND PARADOX started when someone on Facebook posted the question "If you could fight any historical figure, living or dead, who would it be?" Well, someone answered 'Ayn Rand', and I immediately pictured her in a kung fu pose. That's where it all began.

Halfway through writing, I realized I needed more info on the subject of my story. I read Nathaniel Branden's autobiography about his years with Rand and got quite a lot of insight into her and her philosophy. This was a 300+ page non-fiction book. I read it solely for this short story. I had no real job at the time, so there you go.

So, I wrote the first draft and kicked it around to some writers groups (LitReactor, for one—a fine place to get your skin toughened up for critiques, and PhilCon—a Philadelphia Science Fiction convention, featuring a writers workshop, where I got some more suggestions how to improve it). Once I got the story into a good place, I sent it off to a few sci-fi magazines, but nobody wanted it. I kept adding refinements here and there, but it sat, unloved, much like Ayn Rand in her later years, in my files.

Fast-forward one year, and Sayles and Panowich decide to keep going with their Zelmer Pulp thing (I had designed the first cover). They suggested a sci-fi issue for Volume 2. Ding! Since I was already slated to do the cover, do you think they'd say no, it's crap? Well, they did, but they needed some shlub to paint a cover who was willing to work for homoerotic sexting.

Ryan, why don't you text me any more?

Based on the technobabble science I created for this story, I have another Timejack story on the backburner where a guy goes back to World War 1, over tweaks his enhancements, and causes a cascade of nanodiseases to break out from the trenches. Coming soon. Or maybe not. I have to convince them I have another cover in me.

Hey, That Robot Ate My Baby! Volume 1

Click to buy

The madmen that brought you 2012's legendary zombie epic, C'MON AND DO THE APOCALYPSE VOL 1, are back in your face for the second wave, and this time they brought friends.

Joining Sayles and Panowich on their latest voyage into the world of Science Fiction are three of the hottest writers of genre fiction in the biz, Chris Leek, Isaac Kirkman, and ZELMER PULP cover artist Chuck Regan.

HEY,THAT ROBOT ATE MY BABY VOL. 1 features 5 distinct voices, and 5 mind-bending tales to astonish and offend.

Including:

Timejacked: The Rand Paradox... By Chuck Regan
In the 24th Century, the ultimate form of vanity is to create a personal alternate Earth timeline. Chlör Byzantine, a B-Grade web celebrity, travels to 1957 to stop Ayn Rand from ruining the future... but she is ready and waiting for him.

Wherever The Light Ends...By Ryan Sayles
In 1947, twins sisters disappear from the face of the Earth during the most horrific experience of their lives. Later they are found, and they have new parents, new scars and a desire for a new life. When they die in 2012, shut-ins and with no family and no friends, the results of that one disappearance mark the end for mankind.

Geek Squad 2.0...By Brian Panowich
In the 60’s and 70’s they did it with a bullet. In the 80’s and 90’s they did it with the media, but today if you want someone dead, it’s as easy as a Google search. The Geek Squad, bringing assassination to the modern age, but still can’t get dates for the prom.

The Whores of God...By Chris Leek
Earth in the 22nd Centaury is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there; the moral majority has taken a stand and if you want your kicks in 2132 you have to go off-world to get them. In the international waters of deep space everything is available, for a price. Jensen Corduroy is on a mission to get laid, but the Reverend Ellroy has a much higher purpose, he is on a mission from God.

This Protean Love...By Isaac Kirkman
Adelita Salazar, the last living border agent of her precinct patrols the Tierras Oscuras, the Dark Lands, in search of her missing brother, encountering killers, and refugees, human, and machine in a futuristic world where the nature of reality is as uncertain as her future.

This ain't your Daddy's Science Fiction. This is Zelmer Pulp.

Availabile now from Amazon.

C'mon And Do The Apocalypse Volume 1




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Ryan Sayles and Brian Panowich Introduce readers to the Zombie Apocalypse done their way. From tear-jerking to gut-wrenching to hardcore and brutal, all the things Sayles and Panowich have brought to the Indy Noir table are funneled into the world of the undead.

Volume One includes:

1. My Wife Dawn...And The Dead (Panowich)

A recount of the first few hours of the zombie outbreak during an small intimate Christmas party in the suburbs. What happens when a pop culture zombie nerd finds himself the smartest guy in the room, charged with protecting his family and friends on the eve of a real bonafide apocalypse? Probably not what you expect. My wife Dawn is a love story for the end of days.

2. 28 Days of Mutilated Zombie Whores Later (Sayles)

Two years after the the Zombie apocalypse, Nelson runs a new breed of harem on his farm. When his last surviving John arrives with a 'live girl' to trade for Nelson's service, they all experience a micro-apocalypse of their own.

Available now electronically and in print from Amazon.