Short Stories

It's difficult to explain the complexity of these stories without spoiling, but I thoroughly recommend Future Tides..

It's a great read....Any one of the stories such as 'Black Rain', 'They Trade in Eyes' or 'Occupied' are worth the criminally low admission price.

...seriously, just buy this book. You're missing out if you don't. It's 2716 pages of awesome.

Christopher Ruz's signature style returns in top form with pared-down prose and imagery that hits straight at the gut...

slick, accomplished, and not a word over budget....

An exceptional first work... concise and impeccably crafted.

And in They Trade in Eyes, Alicia has a problem. If she wants a job that isn't waiting tables, if she wants to be a somebody instead of a nobody, she needs new eyes. Cobalt plated units with laser-blue irises that can interpret petabytes of data at a glance and record every moment of your life. But when eye-swapping - and, in turn, memory-swapping - becomes the new street fad, a black market in second-hand eyes flowers overnight... And when there's nobody willing to trade in their eyes? Business is business. Someone has to make a killing.

And in Black Rain, a storm is sweeping in, dark enough to swallow the world. Now Liri and her terrified husband are trapped inside their apartment, watching the lights on the hill vanish behind the rain. There's no power, no phone signal, Liri is sick and the taps are running black... Is there any way to escape this apocalypse? Or will the end of the world be heralded not by trumpets, but by the drumming of rain?

And in Hercule and the Doctor, Harold has spent twenty years obsessing over the night when his little sister vanished into the decrepit mansion known as the Bonehouse. Now, Harold is a middle-aged Agatha Christie aficionado, still wondering what might have been if he'd only been a little braver that day, a little bit more like his childhood hero - the fourth Doctor. But when Harold meets an out-of-town cosplayer in full Tom Baker kit, he decides to do as the Doctor would have done and return to the Bonehouse in search of answers. Can one amateur thespian and one drunken science fiction fan really solve this mystery, and put little Elizabeth to rest?

And in Long Way Home, Andrew accepts a posting to the distant mining colony of Markourya, where the air is acid and the skin of the planet ruptures daily, swallowing men and their APCs whole. Markourya is uninhabited but for the hundreds of engineers who spend their days laying down concrete and dodging the local fauna, trying to live out the length of their contracts. But there's something even more dangerous out in the Markourya gas-storms... something terrible and beautiful, drawing men like Andrew to their deaths...