In Tales with a Twist II, Michael Williams once again offers a variety of flash fiction (stories between 1,000 and 1,500 words), which includes fantasy, horror, humor, romance, and science fiction.

Competing versions of the truth collide when one group of conspiracy theorists' version of reality conflicts with another group's beliefs—with horrific results.

A city council comes up with an effective, if extreme, way of eliminating their town's “bad seeds.”

Thanks to a package-delivery service, a long-distance romance brings happiness to an unlikely couple.

A real estate agent faces an unusual problem when a squatter turns out to be a poltergeist resistant to eviction.

Love takes many forms, but few are as unique as Ella's.

These are only a few of the delightfully strange stories Tales with a Twist II presents as its author, once again, delves into the worlds of the fantastic, the uncanny, and the marvelous.

The collection also includes tales of weather control, homicidal software, oceanic crime-solving, a cameo by the Almighty, a collector who may just have found a cure for what ails her, an unfortunate film crew's encounter with unexpected extras, an extremely unfortunate man, and many other surprising, sometimes shocking, persons, places, and things.

As in his first volume of flash fiction, Williams's latest tales explore culture, psychology, social conventions, politics, and personal values, often illuminating the dark places of the human heart and mind, and regardless of whether a story empathizes, satirizes, sympathizes, or criticizes human desire, compulsion, ambition, and greed or emphasizes love, devotion, or sacrifice, Tales with a Twist II always entertains. The stories are refreshingly brief, but complete. They're fun, quick reads; they meet Edgar Allan's Poe's requirement for short stories: each can be read in a single sitting, usually in less than ten minutes—and their plots all offer a surprise inside.

Campbell and Rogers Press is proud to publish this superb collection of tales of the grotesque and arabesque.

Q: As the title of your book suggests, your tales are rather “twisted.” I'm going to ask the question most writers hate to hear: Where do you get your ideas?

A: I'm an eclectic reader. I enjoy learning about a variety of subjects. I guess you could say I'm a generalist. Sometimes, when the stars are in alignment, a remembered fact here will meet up with a recalled fact there, and, out of this connection of one thing and another, an idea will emerge. I might combine one of Thomas Edison’s inventions with the spiritualistic belief in the ability of the living to communicate with the dead, or I could update an ancient myth or a modern horror movie. As Arthur Golding wrote, in translating John Calvin, “All is grist for the mill.”

Q: I know you're something of a mariner. Does the sea ever feature in your stories?

A: Not as often as I might expect, but, yes, there is a sea tale or two. In one, the ocean solves a murder, which is rather a novel notion, I think.