The Scavenger’s Daughter is a torture device invented during the reign of Henry VIII of England. It’s a particularly nasty machine which works opposite the famous rack: it crushes a person, causing internal bleeding, broken bones... Read More

"There Comes a Prophet", a young adult novel by David Litwack, focuses on three friends—Nathaniel, Orah, and Thomas—who have grown up together in the village of Little Pond, part of a carefully controlled network of settlements... Read More

In "The Hoard", horror novelist Alan Ryker advances the theory that piles of rotting man-made stuff can harbor worse things than cockroaches. Kansas farmer Peter Grish has a lot to worry about: his crops aren’t doing well due to a... Read More

Newcomer Alicia Wright Brewster debuts with a novella of urban fantasy centered on a fallen angel called Six. Sent to Hell for no reason she can discern (and no one’s bothered to tell her, either), Six enlists the aid of Alden, an... Read More

Ever since Plato wrote The Republic in ancient Greece, literature has carried the allegory tale from one era to the next. It’s a form most often used in religious fiction, because it allows the author to sermonize on religious values... Read More

Freelance writer and editor Laura Barcella has capitalized on the whole 2012 mythos with this compilation of fifty pop-culture items (books, films, music, TV series, art and comic books among them) which have the end of the world as... Read More

For an author who only published six novels (the posthumous Sanditon is a partial novel not published until recently), Jane Austen’s Regency-era fiction has immense staying power. Not only have her books spawned innumerable fan-fiction... Read More

In the early years of science fiction publishing, writers were often coaxed into publighing fix-up novels, composed of two or more short fiction works which were combined with connecting material to form a novel. For example, Gordon... Read More