Check out: IRREGULAR CREATURES, my first short story collection. Featuring an unholy host of bizarre beasties and mythological mutants. Flying cats! Bigfoot! Mermaids! Infernal Bangkok strippers! A mystic hobo hermaphrodite! These nine stories drunkenly swerve between fantasy, horror, and science-fiction — with a dash of humor and absurdity thrown in for good measure.
“You’ll be amazed, amused, entertained, and even potentially horrified, but you won’t be disappointed.” — Elizabeth White (Musings of an All-Purpose Monkey)
“I recommend Irregular Creatures if you’re a lover of tales–ghost stories, campfire tales, things whispered under the covers by flashlight at a grown-up slumber party, if you will–or have a fondness for Neil Gaiman’s short stories. You’ll be grossed out; you’ll be horrified; you’ll roll your eyes at the bad jokes; you’ll find hope.” — Dee Knippling, author of Choose Your Doom: Zombie Apocalypse.
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The collection features the following nine tales:
DOG-MAN AND CAT-BIRD (A FLYING CAT STORY)
Joe’s got job woes and family problems, and it’s made all the more complicated by a cat who dies on his porch one night – or, so Joe believes. The cat is not only dead, but it appears to be some kind of improbable mutant: a cat with wings. The cat initially appears to complicate Joe’s life as he hides it from his family, but he soon learns that more may be at stake than he realized. Little does he know, a battle for good and evil, between Heaven and Hell, is about to be fought in his garage.
A RADIOACTIVE MONKEY
That bartender you really like, well, she just whipped up a potent cocktail called a “Radioactive Monkey.” Would you drink it? (Hint: you shouldn’t.)
PRODUCT PLACEMENT
Imagine one morning you wake up and you discover that the world is now home to products you don’t recognize but everyone else does. Flix candy bars? Jack Kenny whiskey? Burrito Hut? Donnie’s never heard of these brands, but those around him say such products are beloved and have been here for years. Donnie’s quest to discover the truth – and prove he’s not nuts – reveals a marketing and advertising scheme not of this dimension.
THIS GUY
“Every day, I catch him before he makes it to the China Skillet… I drag him into the alleyway, and I beat him with a tire iron. Sometimes, I stab him with a kitchen knife. I do this every day. I think it’s starting to affect me.” Every day is the same for the protagonist: get up, drive to work, and on the way there, beat some zombie to death. Next day? Zombie’s back. It would take a toll on one’s sanity, wouldn’t it?
MISTER MHU’S PUSSY SHOW
Nolan seeks untold pleasures, but never finds them: not until now, when he becomes swiftly obsessed with Tasanee, a Bangkok dancer at a hole-in-the-wall club. He is driven to pursue her at any cost, but what he finds at the end of his obsession is not pleasure, but pain.
LETHE AND MNEMOSYNE
Old age wreaks havoc on the body and mind, and in this flash fiction that has been never more apparent than when a senile old man’s children exhort him to remember the means by which he controlled the giant chicken wreaking havoc back home.
THE AUCTION
Benjamin’s father shows his son the secret behind his job: he is a buyer and seller of very forbidden things, magical things, objects of a fantastical purview. He takes his son to “The Auction,” a place where anything can be bought and sold: mythological creatures, insane machines, haunted and horrific artifacts. Benjamin is lead astray by a religious man with pious words but sinister intent. When Benjamin encounters a sickly mermaid on the auction block, can the boy step in and avert disaster?
BEWARE OF OWNER
A short story of how father teaches son: Dad teaches the boy that you don’t need to beware of a dog, but you damn well better beware of owner.
DO-OVERS AND TAKE-BACKS
Taye and Beau are two characters from two different worlds: the first a boy in the city projects, the second a rich man with a hollow life and an estranged family. But a bizarre figure steps in as catalyst – an inhuman “Rag-Man” appears and draws connections between the two characters that could not have existed before.
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