This dynamic collection of 27 stories offers a wealth of fantastical and horrifying settings. Life after death, digital personalities, alien invasion, and Lovecraftian horror. It includes “Life on the Preservation,” the basis for Skillingstead’s Philip K. Dick nominated novel of the same name. In the title story, a parapolice detective in hot pursuit of a serial killer receives help from a responsive memory module of the killer’s mother, but soon discovers that he might be falling in love with the module. Edgy and surreal, each tale reflects on familiar, emotional issues and complex relationships from new and imaginative angles.

Originally published in 2014. Now with revised content and cover image.

FP201208 August 2012 Fairwood Press Books

The Terrorists of Irustan

by Louise Marley

The Singers of Nevya

by Louise Marley

Unpossible and Other Stories

by Daryl Gregory

Harbinger - Fairwood Press

by Jack Skillingstead

Six years after a drunk driver kills his mother and brother on Halloween night, Ellis Herrick awakens to find himself changed by a mysterious power. For the next two centuries, Ellis pursues answers to the riddle of his immortality, a journey that takes him from the irredeemable pastto the far reaches of outer space—and ultimately to the innermost caverns of his wounded psyche. Harbinger is a novel of adventure, evolution, imperishable love, and the shifting nature of personal reality.

What does it mean to be human in a universe of shifting, sometimes terrifying realities? Eighteen stories from Jack Skillingstead’s second decade of publishing feature intense and surprising explorations of who we are, who we wish to be, and who we can’t be.

In “The Whole Mess” a genius math professor solves a multiverse equation only to find himself pursued by ancient Masters across the many iterations of his could-have-been lives. “Straconia” gives us a Kafkaesque world where all the lost things go, including people who must first find themselves before they can find a way back home. “Tribute” looks at a post-NASA space race that goes nowhere—until an unlikely pair of marooned astronauts find each other and the future.

​Also included in this collection is “The Writing Life,” a self-reflection on memory, ambition, and imagination in the formation of one writer’s journey.