My short story The Green Wood is featured in the new anthology Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy Volume 4.
Set in a fantasy version of ancient Rome, The Green Wood is an old-school swords-and-sorcery tale filled with action, intrigue, and black magic. It’s a real honor to have my name alongside tremendous talents like Adrian Cole, whose short story collection Tough Guys was one of my all-time favorite reads.
Here’s an excerpt of The Green Wood:
Grimacing at the ache in his shoulder, a pain so fierce that he feared a plague quill had pierced his lorica armor, Lior swung his spatha in a downward cut. The long, broad-bladed sword splintered the shaft of the pike that thrust at his side, and the dirt-grimed pikeman took the edge across his jaw, severing it. Shrieking, adding to the battle din, the man staggered back, clutching the crimson ruin of his face. Lior spurred his horse to trample him into the mire of blood and dirt.
Sweat streamed into Lior’s eyes, narrowed to slits against the glare of the sun. Byzantium’s 9th Cohort had struggled and strained and fought for every yard of earth since dawn, and now, at long last, he spied the crest of the hill past ranks of armored Gauls. If Byzantium reached the high ground, the battle would be all but won.
Renewed by the possibility of victory, Lior flicked the reins to charge forward. His exhausted horse reared, and its iron-shod hooves shattered the skulls of the enemy on its way down.
“Sticking our necks out a bit, aren’t we, sir?” shouted a voice behind him.
Lior grinned. “Perhaps a hair.”
Optio Albian rode up to his left. Not as tall as Lior, but twice as broad, with skin the color of brick and a jaw that jutted aggressively past his helm’s cheek-guards. “We’re too far ahead!”
“They’ll catch up!” Panting, Lior leaned cross-body to drive his sword’s point into the upper chest of a pikeman fumbling after a missed thrust.
“D’you see anyone else?” Albian hacked arms and heads with the workmanlike chops of a butcher. His entire right side was bathed in dust-caked blood from shoulder to sandal, and the horse beneath him rolled its battle-mad eyes, barely controlled by the pressure of his knees.
“When we reach the hilltop they’ll flock to us.”
“Not if we—“ Albian paused. “DOWN!”
Without hesitation, Lior threw himself forward, along the neck of his horse.
For the rest of the story, click here to get a copy of Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy Volume 4.
With Woke Progressivism corroding every American cultural institution, there’s only one place to find the best of the new literary counterculture, and that’s here: the Appalling Stories series.
With that in mind, I didn’t get Annie Neugebauer’s So Sings the Siren. I gather it meant something deep, as it started with a Kafka quote, but I lacked the wit to grasp it. The reader can comfortably accuse me of sexism and hence disregard all future opinions by my addition of The Better Part of Drowning by Octavia Cade to the less-comprehensible pile. The Watcher by Douglas Ford wasn’t as much a story as a strangled, tedious narrative focusing on racism and a sick, PTSD-suffering veteran (military vets aren’t part of a protected class like other minorities, so they make good antagonists).
