In the Shade

by Don Elwell

The descent begins one day when you find that you’re one of the invisibles. That you’re living at someone else’s address, using someone else’s phone, doing libraries and public kiosks for e-mail and the like. The car dies, and there’s no money to fix it. Eventually somebody tows it, and there’s no money to retrieve it. All your credit accounts have long since maxxed out and gone. You’re so stressed and so tired you find you don’t care, and that is the first step into shadow.

But when two self-described shadow people at the fringe of society notice a man one day on a busy college town street, a man that no one else seems to be able to see, they open a door into a parallel world, one living in the midst of our own, and the implications rattle the very foundations of what is "real."

Published here for the first time, "In the Shade" is Don Elwell's disturbing and weirdly hopeful novella of vampires, ghosts, and the world we refuse to see.

36 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 14, 2014

About the author

Dr. Don Elwell has been, in his time, actor, director, playwright, college professor, blacksmith, swordsman, innkeeper, restaurateur, bookseller, and, on top of all that, an avid sailor. He is the author of the oddly prophetic "Coyote Trilogy" of plays, the novels "An Alien's Guide to Sears and Roebuck," "The Ganymeade Protocol," and "Zarabeth's World," along with numerous works on history, theatre, and sociology. He currently resides aboard his sailboat "Constellation" in the Chesapeake.