SHORT STACK: Story Collection

by G.M. Frazier

Short Stack is a collection of G. M. Frazier's short fiction. All four stories were previously published separately, and are available here for the first time in a single volume.

This volume also contains a preview of the author's novel, A Death on the Wolf.

Brian's Wish
A poignant tale of love and devotion, Brian's Wish introduces us to Brian McAlester and Charles Vos, two people who would likely never meet barring extraordinary circumstances, but fate has a way of increasing the odds. Brian is an eleven-year-old in foster care who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Vos is a jaded billionaire businessman who established a charitable foundation that grants the wishes of dying children. Normally, his involvement in granting wishes is limited to writing a check to the foundation each year. All that changes when they receive Brian's wish.

Gerard: Le Garçon Vampire
At the age of ten, Gerard de Vigors died in the fall of 1855 at "Ransom," his family's plantation just south of New Orleans. Or did he? One-hundred and fifty years later, Jack Trask, facing a death sentence from cancer, is lured by the sales pitch of an online "vampire hunter" and has spent a small fortune traveling around the world in search of the one being he feels can save him. Now, in the ruins of Gerard's ancestral home, Jack comes face to face with the creature he has been seeking for nearly a year. And it's not what he was expecting.

Old Joe
On an unusually warm fall night on the eve of Thanksgiving, on the banks of the Nottaway River, Glen Erskine is taking his two sons and their friend for a camp out in the long-abandoned ancestral home of the Erskine clan. When he decides to tell the boys a ghost story that was told to him as a child, Glen suddenly finds the story may be all too real.

Trick or Treat
On the night of Halloween in 1973, a child's fantasy intersects reality as two brothers make the mistake of looking for a treat at a dark house where a lone jack-o-lantern stands watch on the porch. Reminiscent of an episode from Rod Serling's "The Twilight Zone," Trick or Treat shows the power a wish can have in the powerless world of one little boy.

172 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 28, 2012

About the author

I have been writing fiction for the last twenty years and I am not a genre writer. My stories run the gamut from the supernatural to the sublimely real. The novelist who most impressed upon me the necessity of well crafted dialogue is Hemingway. The novelist who most impressed upon me the power of well crafted narrative is Pat Conroy.

From 1998 to 2000 I was Managing Editor at Genesis Press, which is one of the largest independent book publishers in the South. Among the many books I have edited are the autobiography of Olympian Bob Beamon, Let us Prey, Hunter Lundy’s book Let Us Prey on the fall of televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, and Louisa Dixon’s legal suspense novels, Next to Last Chance and Outside Chance. It was my distinct pleasure to work with Dar Tomlinson as the editor for her debut mainstream novel Broken, which had won the coveted Hemingway First Novel Award in 1994. I also edited Mary Beth Craft's delightful ghost story, Goldengrove, which was her debut novel. I have also edited several children’s books including Boss of Me: The Keyshawn Johnson Story, Diana Nyad’s biography for children about NFL star Keyshawn Johnson, and Libby Hughes’s biography for children about Tiger Woods, Tiger Woods: A Biography for Kids.