What Can I Read?

Novel or short stories -- take your pick.

Oscar Ridell is a hero to most towns he visits as he travels west, paying for room and board by restoring equipment fried by the Pulse. Few guess he's part of a national recovery effort; fewer still that their hero is a reformed alcoholic, haunted by the voices of his estranged wife and child. When a bandit attack leaves him gut-shot and bleeding to death, Oscar awakens in an isolated town with no belongings and little to offer rescuers, other than his repair skills - something the town’s leaders forbid him to use lest he revive potentially harmful technology within their fragile community.

Winter is approaching, bandits control the roads, and the only means of contacting someone back east for help rests in the hands of a national guard unit whom Oscar discovers are the source of the bandit attacks.

What Oscar wouldn’t give for a working telephone… or a stiff drink.

Short Stories (previously published)

A Soldier's Life (scifi) - Spark #9 (Sep 2010)
Absolute Power (teen paranormal) - Solar-X (2005)
Cheater (urban fantasy) - Static Movement (Jul 2009)
Dockside (futuristic) - Spark #7 (Apr 2010)
Gates (urban fantasy) - Lost Worlds (Feb 2004)
In the Shadow of the Oak (horror) - Absent Willow Review (Oct 2009)
The La Fey Sisters, or Eyewitness to a Sorcerous Showdown (fantasy) - Spark #6 (Oct 2009)
Opening Night (post-apocalyptic) - Spark #6 (Oct 2009)
Sunset (fantasy) - Spark #9 (Sep 2010)
Time's Cruel Sands (mystery) - Spark # 7 (Apr 2010)
Twilight Interlude (historical fantasy) - eFantasy Vol.1, No.1 (Aug 2012)