"I was sitting on the ground, straight up against something rigid, my head was hanging, my chin on my chest. I smelled smoke and heard the snap and hiss of a fire."

A woman wakes up, struggling to remember... was she once free? How do you face a future in captivity? A novel set in the past but timely for the present.

"Often in the pink light of dawn I would take long walks up Woodland Valley Road or strike off up the mountainsides into untracked forest...." A man hiding from a killer unexpectedly encounters his past—and his future as well. Are there socialist ghosts in these woods? Is synchronicity real?

"It took much convincing to get Zeitzer to don his hiking boots, dig out his metal detector, and accept the premise that there was a treasure trove stowed somewhere in the woods based on the word of a spook."

Two guys with unlikely names, Coot and Z, hike up a mountain. They encounter travails both physical and mental. Why ask why?

"John Eldritch woke up in the middle of the night to find himself pinned down in his bed, a knee on his chest and his arms grasped firmly below the elbows. 'Just tell us where it is and you won't get hurt.'"

A secret plan... an invisible city... a cryptic journal. Is it possible in today's world to be a great explorer of unknown frontiers?

"'Do you ever think about old Jonny Swiggert?' Bobby asked me. We were standing under the awning of Sam's All-Night Coffee and Donuts, sipping hot coffee from polystyrene cups. Light rain was falling and the autumn air had a winter chill...."

London cabbies must know the city, but maybe the old ones know something more. When a dark mystery pulls you like a magnet, do you follow?

"The 1 mg. tablet of clonazepam needs thirty minutes to kick in so I take that first. Then I put on a polyester shirt and my tan leisure suit, and load up the VCR."

A new twist on time travel, but also an investigation of self. Can perseverance overcome fate? What would you do to save a life?

"Energy was all ours and we burned it. We'd run down the beach, us girls, until the jagged water-edge turned us back. We'd hop stairs to the roof and scream until a flashlight halted us."

Two vignettes from a woman's life. Welding torch, highway, tattoos, dusty junk... Can we make judgments? What have we learned?

"It hadn't rained yet, so Ket looked out at the grey morning and limped out to join the rest. He had to lean on the old stub of a spear he'd carried since the hunt that had made his reputation."

Life is more than the struggle to survive. What might have been the origins of art in our prehistoric ancestors?

"The truth is, things were not working out well. Cate and I had been fighting a lot lately, and at the root of it was the cliche I hated to admit: money." A man looks back to the dawn of his marriage. Was their union doomed by esoteric mysteries? Perhaps he needs to see through her eyes.

"She was a maiden of rarest beauty, and not more lovely than full of glee. And evil was the hour when she saw, and loved, and wedded the painter."

A strange little vignette by the lauded (or is that laudanum?) master of romantic gloom. And an attempt to interview the author. What were we thinking?