Tales with a Twist is an eclectic collection of flash fiction, offering over thirty tales of fantasy, horror, humor, science fiction, and suspense.

Stories include a comedian's encounters with “small assassins,” a divorced husband's regrets about feeding his ex's cat, drone technology's new windows of opportunity for theft and ransom, a woman who takes it upon herself to kindly put “losers” out of their “misery,” an invention that gives men too much of a good thing, and a mobster's son who learns too late what honor means among thieves.

This collection also treats readers to an invention that buys another year of life for its inventor; a lovelorn Yeti; a compassionate con man; a desire for peace and quiet that turns into the road to hell; a modern-day Norman Bates with a thing for classy blondes; a talking statue; a couple of stories about Santa; and much more.

Q: What interests you in the super-short genre of flash fiction?

A: Alfred Hitchcock once said that a movie shouldn’t be longer than the capacity of the human bladder. I find I agree. Edgar Allan Poe considered the effect of short fiction to be more intense than that of longer works, such as novels or—my apologies to Hitch—full-length motion pictures. I also tend to concur with Poe: shorter fiction can pack more of an emotional wallop than longer forms. In our modern, fast-paced world, I think shorter fiction is also more convenient for many. A lot of people want complete stories without having to spend hours or days to read them.

Q: It seems that you prefer fantastic to realistic stories. Why is that?

A: Actually, I enjoy reading and writing all forms of fiction, but I think that tales of the fantastic, marvelous, and uncanny--handy distinctions that Tzvetan Todorov makes—add an element of magic to mundane experience, the icing, so to speak, on the cake. I also believe that, as Flannery O’Connor once said, a writer sometimes needs to use hyperbolic techniques to communicate with readers, and the shock of the surreal, the astonishment of the weird, the wonder of the otherworldly, the supernatural, the occult, and the mystical provide these rhetorical approaches.