Today's KDP Select exclusive-or-else backlist sf/fantasy feature author is someone whom I'd have said I'd never heard of, but he turns out to be someone I kind of "know" from works he was involved with.
What Will Come After by Scott Edelman (
ISFDB), is a collection of his market-trend-anticipating remixed mashup pre-
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies shorts by PS Publishing, which includes a bunch of Stoker-nominated ones.
It turns out that Edelman, according to his
Wikipedia entry, has edited a bunch of science fiction magazines, including the glossy Science Fiction Age (I have a couple of back issues of this, which the used bookshop sometimes carries), and also the old Sci-Fi Channel (from before they rebranded themselves as the laughably illiterate "SyFy Channel" which incidentally also makes it sound like they're harbouring a sexually-transmitted disease involving spirochetes about which there's a pun to be made involving insertion and penicillin) website magazine, which I've read some of the stories from in the Internet Archive.
Anyway, free for who knows how long, probably without DRM (IIRC, the other PS Publishing books didn't have it) @ Amazon
main UK DE ES FR IT
Description
During the three decades Scott Edelman has dedicated himself to the short story, his fiction has been called "darkly hopeful," "deep, disturbing, and emotionally draining," and "unnerving work that peers into the darkest corner of the human soul and makes one fear what lurks at the bottom of that abyss -- but also makes it impossible to look away."
In these nine tales, you'll also discover that long before the current craze of mashing up mindless shamblers with the literary classics, Edelman was remixing zombies with "Romeo and Juliet," "Our Town," and other famous fictional worlds.
In the Stoker Award finalist "A Plague on Both Your Houses," you'll visit a post-apocalyptic Manhattan that reads like a fever dream created by George Romero collaborating with William Shakespeare, in which the living son of the mayor of New York City falls in love with the daughter of the zombie king. In "Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man," another Stoker nominee, you'll lock yourself in a library as a writer struggles to keep his sanity by making sense of the zombie uprising the only way he knows how. And in "What Will Come After," original to this volume, you'll learn what happens to Scott Edelman himself when he faces his own inevitable end.
Gathering his complete zombie fiction to date, Almost the Last Stories proves that the undead can be more than just rampaging braineaters -- though you'll find plenty of gory gorging in these pages as well -- but also a lens through which we can see that the living and the living dead are not so very different after all.
The slushpile keeps fluctuating and seems far from settling. This is what I bothered to look at and I mostly skipped over the repeats.
ISFDBed former Dorchester-published horror writer W.D. Gagliani offers a suspense novel with a bonus crime short:
Savage Nights
Sometime a year or two ago, we received one of Timothy Hallinan's novels as an official freebie (I think it was HarperCollins). He offers the 6th in a series and apparently previously published from the Booklist and Publisher's Weekly reviews, but the paperback isn't linked and I'm not going to bother digging for whomever first printed:
The Bone Polisher (Simeon Grist Mystery)
Small-pressed crime writer Anthony Neil Smith returns with a thriller about a murder investigation getting entangled with Somali warfare:
All The Young Warriors
Much paperbacked Robert W. Walker returns with another batch of assorted thrillers & horror, some new:
Linkage for the lot, which will also pull up some of that Prime "free" stuff which Amazon refuses to filter out, so caveat 1-clicker
Harlequin-published Karen Rose Smith returns with another contemporary romance:
Forever After
ISFDBed Robert Stanek offers the self-explanatory:
Complete Kingdoms and the Elves of the Reaches (The Complete Series Omnibus)
Keta Diablo who's had a book out with specialty erotic romance small press Noble Romance offers a paranormal historical erotic romance which she warns contains fairly explicit content:
Cradle Of Dreams
Minor ISFDBed Lee Allen Howard returns with a "bone-chilling gay horror" short:
Stray
I.J. Parker returns with the 7th in her Severn House-published historical Japanese sleuth mystery series, out in 2010:
The Masuda Affair (A Sugawara Akitada Novel)
James Reasoner (
ISFDB) offers a pulp aviation-inspired short which was originally published in a Joe R. Lansdale-edited Subterranean Press anthology:
DEVIL WINGS OVER FRANCE (A Dead-Stick Malloy Story)
ISFDBed Robert E. Keller offers a repeat of:
Fantasy Stories -- Volume I
Mark Yarwood who wrote for TV shows including UK comedy Smack the Pony returns with the "dark noir tale":
Welcome To Killville, USA
ISFDBed Aaron Polson offers some sort of high school-set supernatural suspense thriller:
Mutiny
Kaye George has two paperback listings from Wildside and Mainly Murder Press. She offers a collection of mystery/crime shorts including a story she says was nominated for an Agatha Award in 2010:
A PATCHWORK OF STORIES
Five Star-published Michael Haskins returns with another short in his series:
The Drumstick Murder: A Mick Murphy Key West Short Story (Mick Murphy Key West Mystery)
Ellora's Cave-published Valerie Douglas returns with a high fantasy romance novella:
Not Magic Enough (The Coming Storm)
So it turns out that one of "Leda Swann"'s writing co-publishees from the Wharekohu Bay imprint for New Zealand authors is one "Paris Alexander". I hope they've also got a "Cassandra Apollonia" or a "
Cressida de Troyes" writing for them as well. Anyway, here's their short erotic tale:
Maid for Seduction (Stolen Moments)
Kate Silver, another Wharekohu Bay alumna, repeats her 2002 Kensington historical romance if you missed it a couple of months ago:
On My Lady's Honor (All for one, and one for all)
Previously-included Lisabet Sarai, who's had a number of stories included in anthologies by LGBT specialty press Cleis, has a mini-collection of BDSM erotic romance shorts (f/m, from the looks of it), offered via Books We Love/BWLPP:
Just A Spanking: Tales of Dominance and Submission
Another BWLPP title is a repeat of Jude Pittman's Vancouver BC-set murder mystery with First Nations people in it. Apparently this expired early the last time it was included, so here it is again in case you missed it:
Bad Medicine
I'm not sure what's going on with this. Margaret Fenton's suspense thriller was published by Oceanview in 2010, but either she's offering it herself now, or Oceanview's messed up the listings by creating two versions of the same book at different list prices, which is not a situation which has happened for their previous freebied books, IIRC, (or the author was premature with her rights-reversion celebratory uploading, or there's a non-exclusive distribution contract in place or whatever). Anyway, enjoy it while it's still free, whether it's official or not:
Little Lamb Lost
I'm not sure what's going on with this, either, but it looks considerably (and cracktastically) easier to figure out:
A tale of tyrannosauruses... and sixty five million years later
Outside of Edwin Abbott's classic Flatland and the number of published fanfic derivatives established writers have created over the decades, there don't seem to be very many novels based on actual mathematics (Life of Pi does not count), so I hereby include this one, which is apparently aimed at kids by author Colin Davies, who's probably not the same guy who has an
ISFDB entry for illustration credits in the 80s:
Mathamagical: An Alice in Wonderland Styled Tale set in the World of Mathematics
Happy reading, especially if you learn some useful things about math (or manage to teach any to whatever kids you might know) from that last book.