Monstrous Affections

This collection of short stories won the Black Quill Award, Best Dark Genre Collection (2010).

A young bride and her future mother-in-law risk everything to escape it.
A repentant father summons help from a pot of tar to ensure it.
A starving woman learns from howling winds and a whispering host, just how fulfilling it can finally be.

Can it be love?

 

Endogamy Blues

The neo-fascist armies of the Liberator have swept across the Americas like a plague. Montreal is in flames, and the front is less than a kilometre away.

Seventeen year-old Private Joanie Morgernstern can expect no mercy from the victors. As a Canadian soldier, an Augmented Human and a Jew, she is a blood enemy to the Liberator three times over. Aircraftman Michael Cross, 16, a technician in the Air Force of the Iroquois Six Nations, is on the same hitlist. Their fanatically racist enemies will show them no quarter and no mercy.

Swept up in Canada’s last, desperate attempt to stave off defeat, Joanie and Mike expect nothing but death. Instead, they find each other.

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You Can’t Get There from Here

Reggie had always wanted to be an actress. And long ago she had decided that acting school would do more for her than college so her discovery of Adam Bentley’s Acting School came at just the perfect time. She had graduated from high school and for several reasons her home, as she had known it, had disappeared.
Reggie idolized Adam and found his theories of and training for “organic acting” fascinating. She felt she was gaining a new awareness of herself and her craft through her lessons. Finally, she moved into one of the spartan rooms reserved for resident students in the surprisingly lush brownstone that housed Adam, his school and the theater where the plays he wrote were presented. Only resident students could act in those plays and Reggie soon found herself with a part. She was thrilled. How marvelous not only to be learning but to be able to use her new abilities before and audience.
However, her role as Vicki was hard to play. It confused her and her perceptions of her relationships with others, including her family and the other students at the school. Only her relationship with Adam, her teacher, seemed stable. What was wrong with her?
It took her brother Jamie, to spot Reggie’s problem and to realize how truly serious it was.

Cover background image: masochismtango