Showing results by narrator "Eric G Dove" in All Categories

The apocalypse happened, but no one knows how. All that’s left are a smattering of bizarro cities called remnants, each ruled by a grotesque potentate known as an Odd. If you wind up in hock to the Odds, they ship you to a chain-gang that stretches thousands of miles across desert, steppe, and tundra. A good-hearted drifter named Eldridge is a longtime member of the Chain.

The apocalypse happened, but no one knows how. What’s left is a barren world ruled by a high-powered caste of bookies, The Odds. Scurrying around underneath is our hero, Eldridge - a big-hearted, bumbling drifter with an estranged family he loves dearly. He’s deep in debt and deathly sick, so he places a bet predicting the day he’ll die. If he wins, he can go to his grave knowing that his family will be safe, but when he returns to his hometown to collect, he gets some bad news: He’s going to live. So it’s on to plan B.

Peter, a disgraced meteorologist and chronic wanderer, has traveled the country for years in his Winnebago, in search of the only thing that gives his life meaning. He's just arrived in the middle of nowhere-Hokie, Kansas-for the same purpose, but when he meets a waitress named Melanie, another sufferer, he's faced not only with his first real human contact in years, but perhaps someone who can save him.

Tredup, a shabby reporter working for the Pomeranian Chronicle, leads a precarious existence... until he takes some photographs that offer him a chance to make a fortune. While Tredup contemplates his next move, the town is buzzing. Farmers are plotting their revenge against greedy officials, a mysterious traveling salesman is stirring up trouble, and all the while, the Nazi party grows stronger as the Communists fight them in the street.

Tragic events unfold in a snowy, sleepy Colorado town. From the first scene, in which a man sits alone in the cold, watching a father and son in a diner, you know something is about to go horribly wrong.

The Vietnam draft is removing the staff of a rural Wisconsin bar one by one. Dishboys, bouncers, and a bartender named Roger are the latest to get induction notices, each showing a proud face while secretly terrified to face the medical examiners who will determine their fate. When help comes from an unexpected place, new problems arise. Shortlisted for Best American Short Stories 2015, Larson's intimate psychological portrait of fear takes the familiar and turns it into something utterly original.

In Eoriel, the High Kings are legend: rulers who once stood against the darkness and ruled the world for two thousand turns of peace and prosperity. In the long turns since their fall during the Sundering, Eoriel's civilization has faded. Dark men and darker beings have torn down and destroyed the old works. While some have held out against the grind of history, other places have been reduced to primitive tribes of savages, worshiping dark spirits and demons as their gods.

A luxurious vacation cruise to the exotic locales of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden turns into a nightmare for passengers and crew when their ship is suddenly attacked and captured by a band of bloodthirsty Somali pirates. An initial rescue mission ends in failure, and the decks are covered in blood. Unless they are paid a ransom of $200 million within seven days, the pirates threaten to execute all their hostages. But information gleaned from a captured Al Qaeda operative indicates that there is a far more dangerous conspiracy afoot.

All the girl known as Brenda Jones has ever wanted is a home and family, but she's on the run from her past. She works hard and stays to herself, save only for her budding friendship with the equally shy Henry Jansen. Henry wants more than a simple friendship, but he’s convinced she’s too young, too innocent, too sweet. Brenda has a crush on Henry, as well, but she’s underage and terrified of being put back in foster care, where she’s spent most of her life since her mother abandoned her at age eight.

At his friend's wedding, Paul Gilbert meets Holly Foster. After one foolish night with her, he finds out that Holly is a professional escort. He is repulsed. However, when pressure from his wealthy family to find an appropriate wife mounts, he enlists Holly's help. But has he taken on something he can't handle?

For years, Trent Turner has worked in the shadows using his vigilance and determination to covertly defend his country. His anonymous days dispatching of the world's dark realities are interrupted when the unthinkable happens and sends him on a path that could destroy him. He finds himself embroiled in a conspiracy where political and financial powers collide when members of a hacktivist group are strong-armed into helping a sworn enemy of the United States rise to power once again.

Venice, Italy - early 1800s: Viola has been given three months to live but she refuses to die a virgin. She travels to Venice where she wants to experience physical pleasure with a man without causing a scandal for her family. Afterward, she plans to take her own life to ensure she exits the world painlessly and with dignity. Unfortunately, the man she meets in a disreputable club couldn't be a worse choice for her plans. Dante, a hedonistic vampire, saves Viola from a violent rake.

Venice, early 1800s. Isabella Tenderini, a wealthy merchant's widow, rescues a stranger from drowning in one of Venice's canals. And how does the man repay her selfless act? By kissing her - her, a respectable woman. Not only is Raphael di Santori grateful for his life being saved, he would also like to thank his rescuer very intimately - more intimately than decorum allows. But then, Raphael has never been one to play by the rules - as a vampire he doesn't have to.

After being cleared of his wife’s murder, Todd Norman returns to her small Connecticut hometown in order to finish building their dream house by the lake. He is eager to restart his life and cast aside any remaining suspicions, but all of that is dashed when a young woman’s body washes up on the beach next door. The Lakehouse is a domestic psychological thriller about the wayward and marginalized, the lies we tell those closest to us, and the price of forbidden love in an insular community, where it seems everyone has a story to tell.

Blind music teacher Emily Warner regains her eyesight through a transplant. But her newfound vision catapults her into danger. As she begins to investigate the strange things she sees, she realizes the visions she has belong to her cornea donor - and that her donor’s death was no accident. When she decides to prove that her donor was murdered, she draws the attention of the killer onto herself. But no matter the danger she’s putting herself in, she has to expose him, before another young girl dies, and before Emily becomes his next victim.

For years, Caleb Marlowe has been following a hard trail. But fate finally seems to be smiling on him. The ranch he and his partner have been building is ready for a herd of longhorns, and a ghost from his troubled past is about to dance at the end of a hangman's rope. With winter descending on the Colorado boomtown of Elkhorn, Caleb's future looks bright. But in the wild West, a man's fortune can turn with the speed of a mountain storm. When his partner is jailed for murder, his herd taken by rustlers, and his ranch nearly destroyed, Marlowe knows someone is trying to run him off.

Colorado, July 1878. The nationally famous solar eclipse is almost upon the country, and a peak overlooking the fledgling town of Elkhorn is one of the centers of attention. In the midst of boisterous and chaotic frontier pre-celebrations, Caleb Marlowe - reluctantly deputized for the coming event - learns that local power broker Judge Horace Patterson is being targeted for assassination by agents of a financial magnate. Caleb's efforts to thwart the plan, however, are complicated when a ghost from his past shows up with the intention of blackmailing him.

In an ancient alternate history, four distinct regions of South America have merged to form one technologically advanced nation called The Land. Twenty-one-year-old Commander Jaway Barbour leads his young crew on military missions against the final remaining holdouts against the empire - the exploited tribes of the Wild Territory. When a bomb explodes, damaging their ship, it sends the crew on unexpected adventures.

Stanley Hopkins cannot resist the invitation from a honey-voiced US attorney asking him to track down the source of photographs of a young dance major abducted five years earlier from her apartment in Clarkeston, Georgia. A journalist has stumbled across newly posted pictures of Diana Cavendish on the Internet, apparently taken just days before she disappeared with her boyfriend.

Venice, Italy - early 1800s. When vampire rake Lorenzo Conti finds a beautiful woman sleeping in the bedchamber of his newly acquired home, he believes her to be a housewarming gift bestowed upon him by his thoughtful friends. There's only one thing to do with such a delicious present: ravish her! The mysterious Bianca rushes to Venice upon her father's death but arrives too late: the house that she believes to contain a priceless treasure has already been sold.