The Reopened Cask and Other Stories

by Richard Zwicker

Vintage tales of gothic horror, Greek myths, and old school stories revisited, rethought, and rebottled with fresh, imaginative ingredients.

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Here’s a taste of what’s waiting for you in
The Reopened Cask and Other Stories
by Richard Zwicker

What if —
•You’re a detective, hired to investigate the bizarre death of a man who made three wishes on a cursed Monkey’s Paw?
•The French police turn to you when they’ve hit a wall in their search for a man who disappeared in pursuit of a cask of rare Amontillado wine?
•Victor Frankenstein’s great nephew accidentally animates a Thanksgiving turkey implanted with more than the typical bird brain and a disturbing amount of pluck?
•Zeus Himself came to you to finger the offending deity who has stolen his Fire? Does the assignment strike you as a bad match or a gift from the gods?
These are the midnight musings of Richard Zwicker, mild-mannered high school English teacher by day, and after-hours writer of tall tales that definitely fall on the far side of fantasy. In this new collection of witty short stories, Zwicker finds inspiration in Greek myths, gothic horror by Poe, Shelley and Wilde, and even contemporary children’s movies, to give strange, new life to a toy cowboy, ruminating robots, and an existentialist chicken who thinks a little too much about Why it wants to Cross the Road.
In this delightful follow-up to his 2016 debut with Walden Planet and Other Stories, this wry writer offers readers a bright, new set of imaginative
•a one-way space journey gone very, very wrong,
•a far-out pharmacy literally selling bottled-up emotions,
•a retirement home resident who finds dark mysteries in the music of The Monkees, and
•a lovelorn postman in Paul Revere’s New England, recalling his own midnight ride and ruminating the repercussions of one last delivery.
Zwicker finds fun as he plays with many great (but often humorless) stories that most of us read in school. After reading “The Reopened Cask and Other Stories,” you’ll want to re-read the classics with a new, not-so-serious perspective!

194 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 6, 2017

Reviews

[Simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this. Zwicker is a great storyteller and I imagine he enjoyed creating this collection of stories as much as I enjoyed reading them: which was very much indeed! They draw on wide reading from an unusual collection of genres; Greek Myths, Noir Detective of the Philip Marlowe school, Philip K Dick, Oscar Wilde, Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, and more. The aim of the stories is to play with the source material and see what happens when it is located into a different genre or time-space and filtered through a wonderfully witty imagination. They deserve a wider audience so buy a copy and get your friends to buy one. No, better than that, buy your friends a copy each and get them to do the same.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

A quick, easy read. Less snarl than the author's previous work, but a fun book with which to share a lazy afternoon.

[D.J. Cockburn]

My quest to read more of the type of short stories I write continues with Rich Zwicker's latest collection. The cask in question is the cask that was, at least at the beginning of Edgar Allen Poe's classic story, filled only with the finest amontillado wine and sets the theme that runs through most of the stories of this collection: an extension of a classic tale. Hence Other Wishes tells that tale of a detective investigating the case of The Monkey's Paw and The Robot of Dorian Graham picks up on the themes of Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, while the reluctant detective Phokus has a couple of outings investigating some of the stranger goings on of the Greek myths and Riddle Me attempts to give a more satisfactory answer than is customary to the age-old question of why the chicken crossed the road.

All of these stories have been published in magazines and anthologies in the past, so they've been edited or passed muster with an editor before they were self-published. Most of them use the high quality of the prose to carry Zwicker's trademark wry humour and while they were easy to understand knowing the stories they were based around, the note of familiarity added a certain something when I did.