Book Promo And Vignettes By Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike

Book Promo

If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH

FROM JEFF DUNTEMAN AND JAMES R. STRICKLAND: Drumlin Circus / On Gossamer Wings

A starship malfunctions and strands its 800 passengers on a planet eerily like the Pleistocene Earth, complete with prehistoric mammals including woolly mammoths, dire wolves, and smilodons. And something else: tens of thousands of abandoned alien machines consisting of a bowl and two pillars that respond with drum-like sounds when touched. Tap 256 times on the pillars in any combination, and…something…coalesces in the bowl. It might be a spoon or an axe or a twisted lump of silvery metal. These artifacts (dubbed “drumlins”) help the unwilling colonists survive, but there’s something a little weird about what comes out of the “thingmaker” machines. High-pitched sounds sometimes make drumlins twitch and combine into more complex things. Stranger still, what drumlins do seems to depend on the thoughts of nearby humans. Wish hard while you whistle just so…and something amazing may happen. 260 years on, the castaways have created a civilization resembling late 19th Century America, based in part on coal, steam, iron, and hard work–and in part on the mysterious drumlin artifacts. Both short novels in this volume are set against this background. Drumlin Circus: Every spring, Bramble Ceglarek takes Pretty Alice’s Wonderland Circus down the dirt roads of the west country, dazzling townfolk with clowns, acrobats, calliope music, and trained animals — especially trained animals. His wife Julia trains them with a drumlin whistle, and they obey with peculiar precision. The cultlike Bitspace Institute, hoping to train animal assassins, sends agent Simon Kassel to steal the whistle. Unknown to him, Kassel has been set up to fail by his Institute rivals who want to be rid of him, and after Julia and her apprentice Rosa are abducted by Institute thugs who attempt to kill him, Kassel switches loyalties and joins the circus as a very scary clown. He returns to Institute HQ to rescue Julia and Rosa, only to discover that the training whistle is much more than merely a whistle: a mysterious “function controller” that compels animals, human beings, and even the alien drumlin artifacts themselves to obey its bearer. On Gossamer Wings: From out in the dry rye fields of the west, rumors have come to the Bitspace Institute that someone has drummed up something valuable from the alien thingmakers: a large sphere of pure iron. Institute agent Hiram König rides out to investigate, and discovers the strange, mute young woman who has done the drumming. He also learns that the Big Ball of Iron is just the beginning of the previously unknown drumlins that she has discovered in the vast “bitspace” of the alien thingmakers. Despite the slow progress of technology in the Valinor colony, where steam locomotives and the first primitive hydrogen airships are state of the art, Natalie Bishop is using her talents with the thingmakers to seek out the drumlin parts she needs to build a heavier-than-air flying machine. For her, the flier is her masterpiece, the work that will prove her worth to the people she cares about. The race is on for König to extract Natalie from the pressure-cooker of a small town that is her home, before it blows up around her and before she takes the dazzlingly risky final step and tries to fly.

FROM SHANE GRIES: The Big Dead One (The Line)

The best place to be in an Apocalypse is inside a thirty ton Bradley Fighting Vehicle grinding rotting bodies to paste under your tracks or using an Abrams 120mm canister round to turn a horde of undead into a pink mist. Here’s the thing though … tracks and guns and the people who operate them wear out, even as the living corpses keep coming at you.

After a brutal summer of combat in the plains and cities of the Midwest, the First Infantry Division is conducting a fighting retreat back to the Pacific Northwest. Both the winds of Fall and the howls of the undead are echoing in their wake when they’re re-tasked to take Denver Airport. Along the way they have to safeguard thousands of civilians who are following in their armored wake, and one mistake can turn them all into a ravening horde.

For Staff Sergeant Mark Foley and his tired mechanized infantry squad, it means diving once more into the hell of combat against both raiders who will shoot you dead for a gallon of gas and infected that will send you to a special kind of living death.

The third volume of Shane Gries’ best selling, “The Line” series.

FROM MARY CATTELI: A Diabolical Bargain

Growing up between the Wizards’ Wood and its marvels, and the finest university of wizardry in the world, Nick Briarwood always thought that he wanted to learn wizardry. When his father attempts to offer him to a demon in a deal, the deal rebounded on him, and Nick survives — but all the evidence points to his having made the deal. Now he really wants to learn wizardry. Even though the university, the best place to master it, is also the place where he is most likely to be discovered.

FROM PAM UPHOFF: Out of Contact

Radmir Gagarin is not an Exec, he just does the job of one. Working for the richest man in the Alliance, Lord Diomid Devi, is not easy, even though he’s retired. And it gets a lot harder when the Plague strikes the World Lord Diomid purchased as his personal retirement home. And then the invasion . . .

As the Three Part Alliance crumbles, it’s every world for itself, and even a man so rich he can buy an entire parallel Earth to retire on, can find himself in a lot of trouble!

BY MANLY WADE WELLMAN, REVIVED B D. JASON FLEMING: Sojarr of Titan (Annotated): The Classic Pulp Planetary Romance

When the spaceship crashed on Saturn’s largest moon, the pilot adventurer died. But his infant son did not. Raising himself in the wilds of an alien world, Sojarr survives, and thrives, discovering a strange tribe of gypsy humans, and battling roving bands of monstrous natives…

Until the day another ship falls from the sky and threatens to throw two worlds into chaos!

• This iktaPOP Media edition contains a new introduction giving the novel genre and historical context.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: Highway to Tartarus

Insanity seems to run rampant in the immortal population, and Hades seems to be the one the Fates tap to contain them all; however, this time, Hades, and Kyra, the former goddess of War from Atlantis, have to find and catch the one who’s gone dangerously insane: Deshayna, Kyra’s identical twin, and the former goddess of Death.

Along for the ride are a pregnant Persephone, Hel from the Norse pantheon (and Hades’ and Persephone’s lover), Tyr and Thor, and Kyra’s adopted daughter Rowan.

The seven of them follow rumors, leads, and death-god connections around the world in an RV that’s bigger on the inside than on the outside, while trying to maintain a bare semblance of normalcy despite the chaos of never knowing when or where their Fates-assigned mission will end…or if it will end them.

FROM KAREN MYERS: Bound into the Blood – A Virginian in Elfland

Book 4 of The Hounds of Annwn.

DISTURBING THE FAMILY SECRETS COULD BRING RUIN TO EVERYTHING HE’S WORKED SO HARD TO BUILD.

George Talbot Traherne, the human huntsman for the Wild Hunt, is preparing for the birth of his child by exploring the family papers about his parents and their deaths. When his improved relationship with his patron, the antlered god Cernunnos, is jeopardized by an unexpected opposition, he finds he must choose between loyalty to family and loyalty to a god.

He discovers he doesn’t know either of them as well as he thought he did. His search for answers takes him to the human world with unsuitable companions.

How will he keep a rock-wight safe from detection, or even teach her the rules of the road? And what will he awaken in the process, bringing disaster back to his family on his own doorstep? What if his loyalty is misplaced? What will be the price of his mistakes?

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Sound of One Child Crying

Who is the child Reza can hear crying every time she goes to the new addition to the Royal Library? Her boss insists there is no child, that it is nothing more than her uncanny sensitivity to the unseen world making a nuisance of itself.

Worse, searching for answers gets her angry rebukes about respect for the dead. The further Reza goes, the more certain she becomes that someone is hiding an ugly secret.

It’s a secret that traces back two generations, to a dark period in this land’s history. A time most people would prefer to forget, not caring that denial doesn’t make a problem go away.

The truth may set you free, but not without a price. And Reza fears that death itself might turn out to be an easier price than the one demanded of her.

THIS WEEK WE HAVE A SPECIAL TREAT: FROM OCCASIONAL ATH COMMENTER AND ACE OF SPADE HABITUE SCOTT, HIS FIRST PUBLISHED STORY IS FREE HERE: The Waystation Incident

And if it gets enough votes, it will be printed in an anthology. So go and read, and if you enjoy it, support it.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: PREMIUM