Joy to the Worlds: Mysterious Speculative Fiction for the Holidays is officially out!

(And because Amazon does weird things, it has been unofficially out there for a few weeks and it has already made the top 100 in Amazon’s Sci-Fi Anthologies, Mystery Anthologies, Fantasy Anthologies, Sci-Fi Short Stories, and SF SS New Releases categories.  Yeah, it’s an Amazon bestseller!

So, Happy Book Birthday to Raven Oak, Janine A. Southard. G. Clemens and Yours Truly!  This short story collection has something for everyone–just ask our reviewers.

Scroll down for an exclusive sneak-peek of one of the two stories I wrote for this collection, “Odysseus Flax and the Krampus,” starring none other than the brother of Fairy Tale Fatal’s Ophelia Flax.

P.S.–If you happen to live in the Seattle or Portland areas, please drop by one of my book tour appearances.  They promise to be a lot of fun, and you can get your holiday shopping done, too.

Odysseus Flax and the Krampus

            Everyone has their own notion of Hell on Earth, and for Odysseus Flax, Hell was traveling sickness.

The steam train snaked deeper and deeper into the Alps—what country was this? Odysseus didn’t care—hugging mountainsides, plummeting in and out of tunnels, churning over precarious trestle bridges. In flashes he glimpsed ravines and outcroppings lit and shadowed in mysterious ways, and then they were gone.

He leaned his forehead on the velveteen seat in front of him, eyes squeezed shut, his spatial imagination in cartwheeling free-fall inside his skull. Lord, he did not wish to vomit. He had already assessed his belongings as potential sick receptacles and had concluded that since his valise contained all of his earthly possessions and he required his coat in December, his bowler hat must suffice. And he had only the one hat.

The track descended—or did it rise?—and then locked into a series of loops and—truly?—spirals. Odysseus began to perspire in odd places—the back of his hands, his chin. His jaws panged with saliva. Vomiting was inevitable; he fumbled for his hat.

Then, a chink of light in the black ceiling of Hell: the train screeched to a stop.

Odysseus lifted his head. Outside the window, a snowy slope rose up, pillared with black wet trees. Wilderness out there, and a chamber in a baroness’s castle waiting for him, miles and miles down the track.

A few people were filing out of the train carriage, all bundled up. Through the opposite window Odysseus saw a neat little station with a sign that read KIEFERTAL. So, maybe not total wilderness, but close.

Nausea rocked him again, and suddenly a featherbed in a baroness’s castle didn’t sound half so tantalizing as a breath of fresh air. Odysseus clamped on his hat, grabbed his valise, and leapt off the train just as it was gearing up once more into infernal motion.

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Well, Odysseus had, by the look of things, stopped at Kiefertal on the wrong day.

Sure, in the falling dusk, with those heavy-eaved wooden buildings and the stars twinkling above the snowy line of peaks, it could’ve been on a Merry Christmas card. But as Odysseus walked from the train station and onto the main street, he sensed that things weren’t winding down for a snug winter evening. Women bustled behind lit-up windows. Children and dogs still romped in the icy streets. He passed three drunk men. What looked like two hairy costumes dangled on a clothesline. Was there to be a pantomime?

Why, precisely, had he gotten off the train?

At the station Odysseus had learned that the next train out wasn’t for twenty-four more hours. Tarnation! Three more hours on the train wouldn’t have killed him, and now he’d be a day late to steal that painting from the baroness.

No use crying over spilled milk. Anyway, Odysseus knew that suffering cannot be quite remembered, for if it could, well, all of life would be Hell, wouldn’t it?

He found a tall wooden building with a sign that read Hotel Baumberg. He paid for a chamber, dumped his hat, coat, and valise in it, went back downstairs to the dining room, and seated himself. He was still a little queasy, but his chamber was lonely.

“Good evening, sir,” the waitress said to Odysseus. Her fair plump blondeness glowed, holy, from inside her somewhere.

“Uh,” Odysseus said, forgetting to blink. His pupils throbbed, attempting in vain to absorb her gorgeousness.

“You do not speak our local language?”

Odysseus woke up. “Yes, I do,” he said, to prove it.

“All right then, what would you like? The sausage is nice, served with leeks and potatoes, and I could bring you first a plate of pickles and onions.”

Odysseus’s jaws twanged and he gulped back the thought: vomit. “Only a glass of water, please, and perhaps some wine, Miss—?”

“Anna.” She retreated in a swish of blue skirts and white apron strings.

The dining room, pine-beamed, cozy with that blazing fire in the stone hearth, was near empty. A pale, thin-lipped gentleman all in black sat alone at the corner table, reading a book. He wore blue-tinted glasses with steel bows. Such tinted glasses were designed to be sunshades, with lenses that could flip to the side for use on moving trains, like blinders. Why the gentleman wore them inside, Odysseus chalked up to eccentricity or an eye ailment.

Huh. Maybe Odysseus could have used some of those glasses on the train. Maybe they would’ve saved his equilibrium.

A family of three occupied the center table: mother, father, and a boy of perhaps twelve. Dishes and domes and bottles clogged their tabletop, as though they were sampling every dish on the bill of fare thrice over. They spoke in low, prickly tones. A burly young man slumped, bleary-eyed, over a glass of clear spirits at another table. The rest of the tables sat empty.

Anna returned and set glasses of water and white wine before Odysseus. “Are you British?” she asked.

“American.”

“I should have known, you being such a tall and handsome young man. What are you doing here? Americans never come here.”

“Traveling through.”

“Not here for Krampusnacht, then?”

“What is that?”

“The night when the Krampus comes to scare all the naughty children into behaving themselves. You have never seen him, with his forked tongue and hooves and horns and all that hair?”

“Not in the flesh, no.”

“I meant in storybooks and such,” Anna said. “He will walk right out of Hell tonight with a basket strapped to his back and a birch switch for swatting the naughty ones.”

“What is the basket for?”

“For carrying the really bad ones off to Hell.”

Saint Nick truly was a goody-two-shoes, wasn’t he? “I saw some hairy costumes, hung out for an airing, on my walk through town,” Odysseus said. “I suppose they were Krampus costumes?”

Anna nodded. “Tonight, people will dress in disguises—Krampuses, witches, and wild-men. People drink a great deal and run through the streets. Remember” —she laughed— “if you have a run-in with one of the drunken Krampuses you must offer him schnapps and he will let you be.”

“Schnapps.”

“The children fancy Krampusnacht is exciting, but they all get a good scare, too.”

“I have noticed in my travels that every place has its own child-rearing methods.”

“What is that?” Anna asked, pointing to Odysseus’s hip, where his jacket had fallen open.

“Nothing.” His hand flew to the leather pouch, the size of a plum, attached to his belt. He arranged his jacket to cover it.

“Looked like something to me. Allow me to see it—the beadwork is ever so fine. Is that from America?” Anna reached out.

Odysseus drew back. “No one might touch it but me.” Panic washed over him, the boneless panic of a rodent in the jaws of a cat. Why hadn’t he seen that sneaky spark in Anna’s eyes before? Wait. No—it was gone. His muscles regained their vigor. “It is only a small token that is significant to me, yet with no value beyond that.” He would never untie the pouch from his belt, and when he died, it would be buried with him.

“It is something made by natives of America, perhaps?”

Odysseus drained his water glass. “From the far western territories. I worked out there as a gold miner and a tracker.”

“Gold?” Anna’s eyes flared.

“Never found much, sorry to say.”

“What is a tracker?”

“I’m good at finding things, out in the woods, say, or in a city, too. There are little signs, see, that most folks don’t notice.”

“Such as footprints in the snow?”

“Sure. I can track anything in the snow. I could track a ghost in the snow.”

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