Search Worlds Without End

The yard of this house is a graveyard of moments and everything left behind is a clue. And I am here to dig.

There's a ghost haunting 208 Water Street. She doesn't know who she was, or why she's still here. She does know that she is drawn to Maggie, the new girl in town, and her friends - beautiful, carefree Pauline and Liam, the boy who loves her.

But the ghost isn't all that's lurking in Gill Creek... Someone is killing young girls all across the county. Can the ghost keep these three friends safe? Or does she have another purpose?

A hauntingly beautiful mystery for fans of The Lovely Bones.

It's October in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where Richie Feehan was born and raised and has lived his whole life. He's a part-time lobsterman and full-time painter who sells his art at galleries in Rockport and Newburyport. Between the two jobs he makes enough money to get by, living in an in-law apartment in the family home owned by his brother Jim. Jim runs Feehan & Sons Funeral Home, a business started by their grandfather in 1921.

All in all, despite the tension with his brother, and despite the grumbling of his friends, whose business has suffered because of a lengthy red tide and a spectacularly bad overall fishing season, Richie enjoys his life very much. He's content, and believes that's pretty much all a man can ask from his life.

That is, until a horrible mystery begins to unfold in Gloucester.

Out lobstering, Richie sees something nightmarish in the surf one day, catches a bare glimpse of it beneath the surface. He doesn't dare speak of it for fear of what others might say-he doesn't want to become the town crazy. But he's having a hard time sleeping at night, and several days later, while out hauling in his traps for the winter, Richie finds one of them stuck on something. When he finally hauls it up, there's a corpse attached, a corpse that has been eaten at by sea creatures, including something large... the corpse of Greta Wagner, a woman who had been waked at Feehan & Sons two weeks earlier and buried a couple of days later.

Someone stole her corpse from the ground.

And her grave won't be the only one disturbed.

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Sex in the System: Stories of Erotic Futures, Technological Stimulation, and the Sensual Life of Machines (2006), edited by Cecilia Tan, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, Issue 104, January 2019.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

The Despair has plagued the earth for five years. Most of the world's population has inexplicably died by its own hand, and the few survivors struggle to remain alive. A mysterious, shadowy group called the Collectors has emerged, inevitably appearing to remove the bodies of the dead. But in the crumbling state of Florida, a man named Norman takes an unprecedented stand against the Collectors, propelling him on a journey across North America. It's rumored a scientist in Seattle is working on a cure for the Despair, but in a world ruled by death, it won't be easy to get there.

This short story originally appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 9, March-April 2016.

Read the full story for free at Uncanny Magazine.

Great Aunt Oleander is dead. To each of her nearest and dearest she has left a seed pod. The seed pods might be deadly, but then again they might also contain the secret of enlightenment. Not that anyone has much time for enlightenment. Fleur, left behind at the crumbling Namaste House, must step into Oleander's role as guru to lost and lonely celebrities. Bryony wants to lose the weight she put on after her botanist parents disappeared, but can't stop drinking. And Charlie struggles to make sense of his life after losing the one woman he could truly love.

A complex and fiercely contemporary tale of inheritance, enlightenment, life, death, desire and family trees, The Seed Collectors is the most important novel yet from one of the world's most daring and brilliant writers. As Henry James said of George Eliot's Middlemarch, The Seed Collectors is a 'treasurehouse of detail' revealing all that it means to be connected, to be part of a society, to be part of the universe and to be human.

Travel through time with the touch of a hand.

Roan West was born with an extraordinary gift: he can relive memories across centuries and glean history first-hand. A highly skilled psychometrist, Roan is able to perceive the past of any object he touches. He has spent his life as a voyeur, using his talents to find and sell valuable antiques, but his quiet life in New Orleans is about to change. Stuart, a fellow pyschometrist and Roan's close friend, has just unearthed several "ooparts": out-of-place artifacts that challenge recorded history, including a ring belonging to the 17th-century mathematician and philosopher Rene Descartes that was found buried in prehistoric bedrock.

The implications are staggering, but soon after the discovery, Stuart disappears, making him one of several psychometrists who have died mysteriously in recent months or vanished without a trace. When Roan comes across a YouTube video of a young woman who has discovered a priceless pocket watch by "sensing" it, he knows he has to warn her - but will Melicent Tilpin listen? And can Roan find Stuart before it's too late?

The dedicated agents of the Federation Department of Temporal Investigations have their work cut out for them protecting the course of history from the dangers of time travel. But the galaxy is littered with artifacts that, in the wrong hands, could threaten reality. One of the DTI's most crucial jobs is to track down these objects and lock them safely away in the Federation's most secret and secure facility. When Agents Lucsly and Dulmur bring home an alien obelisk of incredible power, they are challenged by a 31st-century temporal agent who insists they surrender the mysterious artifact to her. But before they know it, the three agents are pulled into a corrupted future torn apart by a violent temporal war. While their DTI colleagues attempt to track them down, Lucsly and Dulmur must restore temporal peace by setting off on an epic journey through the ages, with the future of the galaxy hanging in the balance...

Meet Sam Thornton, Collector of Souls.

Sam's job is to collect the souls of the damned, and ensure their souls are dispatched to the appropriate destination.

But when he's dispatched to collect the soul of a young woman he believes to be innocent of the horrific crime that's doomed her to Hell, he says something no Collector has ever said before.

"No."

Meet Sam Thornton, Collector of Souls.

Because of his efforts to avert the Apocalypse, Sam Thornton has been given a second chance - provided he can stick to the straight-and-narrow.

Which sounds all well and good, but when the soul Sam's sent to collect goes missing, Sam finds himself off the straight-and-narrow pretty quick.

Sam Thornton has had many run-ins with his celestial masters, but he's always been sure of his own actions. However, when he's tasked with dispatching the mythical Brethren - a group of former Collectors who have cast off their ties to Hell - is he still working on the side of right?