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Announcement: Merely This and Nothing More

Merely This and Nothing MoreQSFer Voss Foster is part of a cool new project:

A clockwork raven.
Two sets of irresistible teeth.
A house brought to life by nanobots.
A heart that won’t stop beating.

All this and much more in the Writerpunk Press version of the beloved suspense stories by Edgar Allan Poe. We’ve pulled out all the stops this time around to bring you the very best punked versions of classic Poe tales, complete with shiny gears and tiny bots!

In addition to the more familiar Cyberpunk and Steampunk, we’ve added Bio, Deco, and Dieselpunk genres to the mix. The resulting volume is a dynamic take on horror of which the Master of Macabre himself would be proud. Profits are to be donated to PAWS Lynnwood, an animal shelter and wildlife rescue located in the Pacific Northwest.


Excerpt

“Red Sky at Morning” ~ Jeffrey Cook

A steampunk story inspired by “The Masque of the Red Death”

Four months passed without a sign of trouble. The noblemen and women, hidden behind their masks, gloves, and fancy clothes, danced, and as the ship moved, and the sun with it, the lights danced with them—red in the earliest or latest parts of the day, depending on the ship’s facing, and then each of the other shades of the stained glass, sometimes only blue, or only green, or one of the others when the sun hit just so, and sometimes the lights danced and mixed amidst the revelers, moving as if in time to the music.

The call went up one morning, “Red sky by morning.” The crew begged the Prince to go below decks, to send the dancers and musicians and all of the crowd to quarters, that they might take down the glass, extend the sails, and try to run as far and as fast as the engines might take them.

The Prince would hear none of it, chastising the frightened sailors, insisting that he trusted in their skill, and the sheer size of his airship, and the good fortune they’d enjoyed so far. Instead, as he’d done before when the news seemed worst, the Prince tried to dispel it with the greatest of his parties yet. The entertainers were all called at once, that no part of the deck would be without spectacle, and he called all of his friends to come and enjoy the day. He had the cooks and servers prepare a feast, holding nothing back. Wine flowed freely, and the Prince looked upon all he had wrought, and was pleased.

A shift in the wind moved the ship about, and the blues and whites of the reflections abruptly shifted. The sun struck the uneven red pane, disappearing where the streaks of coal dust marked it, and uneven shadows played amidst the dozen shades of red that danced over the revelers as midday neared.

A singular figure that none could recall joined the dance. The figure was slender, wearing trousers, polished shoes, and a shirt of black. The jacket and top hat, however, were of the richest red crushed velvet, soft to the touch. The mask was the simplest of all the revelers, plain white porcelain, but wherever the figure moved, the light through the red window always caught it, dancing red lights shifting across the reflective surface.


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Author Bio

Authors in this anthology include Jenny Blenk, Rachel A. brune, AR DeClerck, Jeffrey Cook, Anthony Stark, Andrea Hintz, David Stegora, Rie Sheridan Rose, Holly Gonzalez, Jayelle King, Carol Gyzander, Nils Nisse Visser, Jeanne Whote, Voss Foster, Lee French, B. Lynch, Lindsey Schopfer, Michelle Cornwell-Jordan, Virginia Carraway Stark, Amber Michelle Cook, and Sechin Tower.

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