Buxton and Other Stories

I’ve released kindle and paperback versions of a new short story collection. The introduction from the collection:

One of the definitions Merriam-Webster gives for fantastic is ‘conceived or seemingly conceived by unrestrained fancy.’ Another is ‘so extreme as to challenge belief.’ Since all the stories in this collection fit either of those definitions, or at least graze them, I considered calling this collection The Fantastics. But there's a double problem with that: First, there’s the 1960 play The Fantasticks, which could cause some confusion, and, Merriam-Webster also gives a third possible definition of ‘excellent, superlative’, and that might convey more than a whiff of conceit.

Since my first short story collection was titled 21 Tales, and there are twenty stories in this collection, I briefly considered the title Almost 21 More Tales. But the stories in this collection are very different from my earlier noir stories in that first collection.

While these stories run the gamut from science fiction to horror to mystery, relationships are at the core of most of them—whether it’s the relationship between a husband and wife, a couple which have just started dating, two partners, a baseball player on his last legs and his parents, or a reporter and the truth.

Most of the time when I write short fiction, I’m writing a crime or mystery story for a specific magazine or an anthology where I’ve been invited to submit. Sometimes I’m driven to write a story that’s something different, and more than half of the stories in this 20-story collection are those. These tend (in my opinion) to be my most interesting short fiction, but unlike my crime and mystery fiction, I have no idea where to sell them. I was able to find homes for some of the odd and unusual stories in this collection, others I didn’t even try. One of those that I didn’t try to sell was Pink Wiggly Things. It has a little monster called a Ghengi in it, but it’s not a horror story, and instead is something whimsical, and so I stuck it in a drawer, although I did read it once at a bookstore. This was somewhere between 12-15 years ago. Paul Tremblay, Christopher Golden, and his writing partner, Amber Benson (who played Tara on Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and I were at a bookstore in Salem MA on Halloween, and when I got to the final line of Pink Wiggly Things, Amber burst out laughing, which was exactly the desired response (I can’t express how satisfying it is for a writer when that happens!). I hope everyone who reads this collection bursts out laughing at the final line in Pink Wiggly Things!