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

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, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. By clicking through and buying (anything book-related, 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. Remember though all of these submissions are from people willing to be associated with this blog. So if you’re trying to buy from people who don’t hate you, this is a good place to start.– SAH

FROM MARY HARE: Hearth and Helm: Voices from the Epics

For over two years, the Meaningful Differences substack responded to the inspiration of Homer’s *Iliad* and *Odyssey* and Virgil’s *Aeneid* with stories, poems and essays. This collection comes from that work. From the hearth’s precious warmth to the helm’s unyielding call, heroes and ordinary men and women endure the timeless struggles of duty, loss, leadership, and survival.

**The Aeneid section: ** Aeneas turns back to the flames of burning Troy, searching desperately for Creusa after losing her on the way to the rendezvous. Dido succumbs to cursed love and bitter abandonment, missing Aeneas’s unspoken answer. A skilled slave mother struggles to stay with her nursing twins after frightened women burn some of their ships. And a father shares hard-won wisdom with his son, before leaving him to return to the field: “Learn virtue and true toil from me-fortune from others.”

**The Iliad section: ** When Agamemnon appropriates Briseis, the wrath of Achilles spreads devastation through ordinary lives. A soldier and his once-captive wife confront their own painful echoes of the spoils of war. Hector removes his helmet to bid farewell to Andromache and their infant son as a father, then dons it again for battle. Ordinary sons of herdsmen and shepherds fall in the brutal grind of combat. In the end, Achilles reminds us: Die Must We All.

**The Odyssey section: ** Odysseus’s crew perishes on the wine-dark sea, caught between starvation and divine wrath. The suitors discover too late the cost of arrogance, while the land mourns one of them who tried to do right. Telemachus arms beside his father with sword and spear as they reclaim their house. Penelope tests the beggar’s identity with wary hope: Is It Really Him? A man is nothing without the gods-or the family waiting at the end of the long road.

Blending mythic grandeur with unflinching portrayals of combat, leadership, sacrifice, resilience, and homecoming, these stories-drawn from Substack favorites-illumine the hearts of warriors, their families, and the unsung souls caught in epic events. For military readers, historians, and anyone who loves the *Iliad*, *Odyssey*, and *Aeneid*, *Hearth and Helm* responds with fiction, poetry and essays that honor both the glory of the fight and its profound human toll.

FROM DALE COZORT: Growlers: A Snapshot Novella

In the strange universe of the Snapshots, the CIA runs black ops through the unlikeliest of fronts: a struggling dimension-hopping zoo. When the circus arrives in a crumbling British colony town on an ancient, isolated version of South America, they set up shop in an abandoned elementary school for what should be a simple mission. But nothing stays simple when Nazi-tinged spies from a rival Germany start circling—and the enigmatic Growlers begin to stir. Part spy thriller, part dimension-hopping adventure, Growlers is a fast-paced snapshot novella where the fate of worlds may ride on a few misfit animals… and the reluctant keepers who guard them.

FROM CHRIS THORNDYCROFT: The Fae Wars: Red Dragon Rising: Albion Book 1

As dragons stalk the mountains of Wales and rebel cells with machine guns and explosives wage a desperate war against elven mages and their spell fire, an ancient prophecy is awakening. The final battle for Britain is about to begin.

On a remote island off the coast of Britain, a hidden magical order guards a secret that could change everything. A hero long dead is about to return, awakened to face his ancient, most deadly foe. Once and Future King, promised in Britain’s time of greatest need.

Two years before, portals opened around the Earth, spilling forth an armada of elves, orcs, and ancient creatures from myth. Within weeks, humanity had fallen. Nations collapsed. The survivors were forced into slavery beneath the rule of the Fae or carried on the war from the shadows.

Carys Reed, a schoolteacher-turned-resistance fighter, never believed the stories of King Arthur. She has spent years battling the Fae occupation, not chasing legends. But when she is tasked with helping Britain’s greatest hero recover his legendary sword, she discovers that the old myths were true … and that she’s about to be part of a new one.

The fate of humanity hangs on Arthur’s success, yet the Fae know the danger he represents. The Imperium’s dreaded Security Bureau has dispatched its most ruthless agents, and they will stop at nothing to ensure Arthur and Excalibur are never reunited.

Red Dragon Rising is the explosive first novel in a thrilling new series set in the bestselling Fae Wars universe—where myth and modern warfare collide, and the return of a legend may be humanity’s last hope.

EDITED BY LUCY HARRELSON: Roots & Rivers: A Collection of Myth and Folklore

Beneath ancient trees, beside blackened hearths, and deep within forgotten waters, the old stories still whisper.

In Roots & Rivers: A Collection of Myth and Folklore, legends rise anew through a breathtaking tapestry of voices and traditions from around the world. From haunting retellings of Greek mythology to eerie encounters with cryptids hidden in shadowed forests, to the dangerous bargains of jinn, these tales blur the line between the sacred, the monstrous, and the deeply human.

Across continents and centuries, gods walk among mortals, spirits linger at the edge of firelight, and ancient creatures refuse to be forgotten. Some stories are dark. Some are wondrous. All are rooted in the timeless power of myth and the enduring currents of folklore that connect us across cultures.

Step into the water. Follow the roots. Listen closely.

The stories are waiting.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: The Law of Magical Contagion

The capper to Siobhan Miller’s terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day was a dog, tied to the stop sign. She hates dogs. She’s terrified of dogs, and that was a big dog. Looking sad and lonely, tied to a stop sign. That was not okay. She was the only one around, so she took him home. Only to find that he wasn’t a dog, but one of the Good People, under a curse. And there were more of them.

And they were all after her. And all she had was the dog (who wasn’t a dog) to help keep her from being taken away from all she’s ever known. Because that dog? He and his twin sister are family that she didn’t know she had, and their appearance has upended everything she’s ever known about herself. Including that she was human to begin with. She has a lot of questions.

Starting with curses, and how and why they sometimes spread.

FROM CAROLINE FURLONG: Theophany

Ten years ago the Savients took over Niban, forcing the independent inhabitants into poverty and despair. Bass White saw the careless cruelty of the Savients kill his mother and his father. When a resistance cell is discovered in his city bloc, the Savients seek to make everyone pay.

With his wife Amie, Bass races into the caverns to escape the Savients’ brutal enforcers: the Atrasai. The couple barely make it to the limits of known territory outside their underground city, however, before the Atrasai catch up with them. It would take a miracle to save them…

…or a combat medic robot.

Join Bass and Amie in this sci-fi story of healing, hope, and wonder. After a decade of fear and pain, even a little light can bring out the best in man and machine. But will the best be enough to heal?

FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: The Reason (Timelines Universe Book 1)

January 1993. Somalia. Operation Restore Hope. A Marine platoon pulling a security patrol runs into an insurgent ambush in Mogadishu, and when the platoon commander winds up unconscious from a blow to the head taken when an IED rolls his command Humvee, and the First Sergeant is killed as soon as he exits his vehicle, command falls to a badly wounded gunnery sergeant — initially trapped in the same vehicle with his platoon commander and their driver, but conscious and alert and ready to bring some personal hell down on the RIFs…if he can just get out of this damn vehicle, grab a rifle, and drag himself and his busted-up, non-working leg over to a firing point without bleeding out.

June 1993. Washington, DC. A First Lieutenant with a freshly-healed scar on his head encounters a beautiful redheaded floor nurse at Bethesda Naval Hospital. He’s there to see his Gunny, who’s been stuck in the hospital with a broken femur since he was transported home in February. He’s the platoon commander who was knocked hors de combat by the IED, and he’s been sent to find out why his Gunny is obstinately refusing to accept an important decoration for his participation in the incident.

Turns out that’s going to be quite a job, because Gunny’s got his reason. Will the Lieutenant, and his ally the nurse, be able to convince his Gunny there’s a better reason to accept the decoration?

Might be they’ll need a little help from a friend…

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Other Side of Midnight

Life has been a nightmare for Mitya ever since he was arrested on trumped-up charges and exiled to Siberia. But this labor camp in the far north of Magadan Oblast hides a secret far more terrible than the merely human evils of the Great Terror. For the universe we know is not the only one, and there are places where it interpenetrates with universes where the laws of nature as we know them do not operate, where humanity has no place. Worlds inhabited by beings ancient and terrible, to whom humanity are slaves, playthings, food.

FROM PATRICK K. MARTIN: The Armies of Midnight: Censored

Lord Shyam has come to Ravan with his army at his heels. It is to be his final step in his war against The Enchantress, the woman who destroyed the world and him. Ravan’s queen Eilína Irinadottir, is now trapped in the cage of the dread lord’s revenge. Can she keep herself and her people alive or will they be just more casualties on Lord Shyam’s road of war?

FROM JOHN BAILEY: The Eyes in the Mist (Science Fiction Singles)

In the Swiss Alps, a patch of fog is moving against the wind.

When climbers Thomas Keller and Rudolf Faber descend from the Schneehorn glacier, they witness something that defies the laws of meteorology — a dense, deliberate mass of mist that climbs uphill, carries lights in its interior, and leaves one man changed in ways no doctor can explain. The survivor cannot remember what he saw. The other man does not return.

Journalist Helen Grant arrives in the mountain village of Brunnfeld to cover what local authorities are calling an accident. What she finds is a pattern: missing persons, unexplained behaviour, a blind man who describes things he has no way of knowing, and a radio observatory at nine thousand feet that has been recording signals from the glacier for six weeks — signals that appear to carry structure, repetition, and intent.

As the investigation deepens, a team assembles around the mystery: a British intelligence operative, a Swiss neurologist, an atmospheric physicist, and Helen herself, whose drive to find the truth will eventually lead her into the mist. What waits inside is not what any of them imagined. It is older than the Alps. It has been watching humanity for three centuries. And it has been trying, in the only way it knows, to give something back.

The Eyes in the Mist is a slow-burn Alpine mystery at the intersection of cosmic horror and first contact — a story about the things that look at us from the dark, and what it means when their gaze turns out to be, against all expectation, a kind one.

For readers of John Wyndham, Arthur Machen, and Alistair MacLean.

FROM SARAH A. HOYT: No Man’s Land: Volume 1 (Chronicles of Lost Elly)

Sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.On
a lost colony world, mad geneticists thought they could eliminate
inequality by making everyone hermaphrodite. They were wrong.
Catastrophically wrong.Now technology indistinguishable from magic
courses through the veins of the inhabitants, making their barbaric
civilization survivable—and Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Kayel
Hayden, Viscount Webson, Envoy of the Star Empire—Skip to his friends—
has just crash-landed through a time-space rift into the middle of it
all.Dodging assassins and plummeting from high windows was just the
beginning. With a desperate king and an archmagician as his only allies,
Scipio must outrun death itself while battling beasts, traitors, and
infiltrators bent on finishing what the founders started: total
destruction.Two worlds. One chance. No time to lose.Volume 1The
Ambassador Corps has rules: you cannot know everything, don’t get
horizontal with the natives, don’t make promises you can’t keep.They’re
a lot harder to follow when assassins are hunting you, your barbarian
allies could kill you for the wrong word, and death lurks around every
corner.The unwritten rule? Never identify with the natives.Skip’s already broken that one.Now
he’s racing against time to save his new friends from slavery—or
worse—while dodging energy blasts and political intrigue. One
crash-landed diplomat. A world of deadly secrets. And absolutely no
backup. Some rules are meant to be broken. Others will get you killed.

WHAT HUNS DO, OTHER THAN BOOKS:

Yes, I know it’s weird, but other people do things other than write. I don’t GET it either.

Wire Wood And Leather

https://wirewoodandleather.com/

Morrigan’s Mercantile

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 to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: STRONG

According to Hoyt 2026 Fundraiser, Day 12

(I will keep this up through day 17, because people have asked due to pay schedules.)

If you wish to donate: There is a Give Send Go fundraiser for this specific fundraiser set up. Here is a Paypal Me Link if you prefer that. (Yes, I know. Paypal, but for now, they’re behaving.) If you have a monthly donation setup to the permanent Give Send Go, that is still working and thank you! There are also two substacks you can subscribe to. One is on the side bar of the blog, the other is supposed to be a newsletter, as well as giving you chapters of the current work in progress if you become a paid subscriber. It takes cards. For snail mail: Sarah Hoyt 304 S Jones Blvd #6771 Las Vegas, NV 89107

And if you want to read the whole appeal, it’s here: Toss A Coin To Your Blogger, Oh Readers of Plenty.