A bizarre collection of award winning short stories ranging from action adventure to horror.
Someone out in the street was yelling and everyone looked up. I saw a young lady running across the street towards the sidewalk in front of the coffee shop. She was tight but frail with albino skin and pale eyes, wide and wild. Her hair followed her like a torch's fire as she ran barefoot in a torn red skirt and a ripped white bra that barely held onto her with strings like clinging fingers. As much as I knew that she was terrified, running from danger or the truth, I still wanted her to be naked and vulnerable. Which I knew that she was on the inside. But I wanted that bra to fly away and show the world that was watching those two eyes that cannot see but can stand up and watch. She had fled the open door of a parked taxi and a man in a blue suit got out of the other side and began walking rapidly in the other direction. The lady was trying to hold onto the leg of a mounted police officer as she screamed at him to do something. Like something hadn't already been done. I wondered if she was married. I wondered if she had children. I wondered where her purse was. I wondered if she knew that all this was really the most that she had probably lived in her life. Her fifteen minutes. The skinny cop started blowing a big silver whistle that hung about his neck and his brown horse jumped nervously. He started speaking into a police radio and I heard sirens nearby. Here came his buddies to the rescue. The street was getting wild. The man in the blue suit began to run and I saw traffic stopping as police cars came around the corner of Tenth Avenue accelerating onto Bay Street with red and blue lights flashing that would have looked more impressive had all this taken place at night. The breakfast scene became more chaotic when the mounted cop's horse suddenly reared and tossed the policeman down hard onto the sidewalk. I saw his radio flung out into the street, crushed by a brown truck and his gun went off. The horse galloped down Bay Street and the skinny cop groaned on the sidewalk, a spot of blood forming around his leg. The lady was still screaming at him and pointing at the escaping man in the blue suit. Her bra was now only clinging to one breast and I could see her one exposed brown eye watching the scene.
Excerpt
I had to pick from twenty years of stories and we have included forty stories in SECRET GROTTO. They range in genre from adventure to romance, to science fiction to horror, to comedy to mystery. Some of the stories have appeared in other forms and some are published in different places. Eleven of these stories first appeared in my book, Bite of the Mailman, in 1996. Alligator Salesman won Best Fiction at the B.A.W.L. Writer's Conference. All of my stories are fiction and never meant to suggest anything other than that. I have visited some of the locales in my stories and others I just made up the details. I have been to Woodville, Texas but I have never seen the monster.
Professional Reviews
One of those Unique books
Every once in awhile a writer's imagination strikes you as so unique you find it necessary to grab the person nearest to you and start reading aloud sentences, paragraphs, even whole stories. Doug Hiser's Secret Grotto is one of those books. Sitting in my favorite coffeehouse I started reading it and before I had finished the first paragraph I had backtracked to read it out loud to my wife. Before I had finished the first page, the people at six other tables were leaning over and listening. There's a mode of writing that combines the mildly absurd with a fearless faith in the power of the story, with results that are always startling. Some of the stories are very short, and are the equivalent of a friend coming up from behind you and tapping you on the right shoulder, then appearing at your left. Some longer and involving strange creatures never seen by humans, some are built around the everyday details of normal life but both blend together convincingly. Whether you read for pure story or the joy of discovering unique sentences like, "When i drive around at night, by myself, I think a lot about dead polar bears, " you are likely to be helpless before the discovery of this great storytelling voice. Secret Grotto is fine and fun, and for a guy whose 15 minutes of fame consisted of American Gladiators TV Show, "I'd like to nominate him for a few extra minutes of your own time and attention. Jeff Schwaner, Broken Umbrella Press
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Book 2 of The Commander and the Chief series finds the Chief "on the warpath" and "counting coup" with her enemies on both sides of the ocean. Meanwhile, she fights an indictment and risks losing her latest love, the Commander, as well as unleashing
