Messing With Mr. In Between

My story collection, Messing With Mr. In-Between, has just been published on Amazon in print and on Kindle.

There are four previously published short stories, four new short stories, as well as a brand new novelette “Family Business.” All of the stories tend to deal with characters moving between different worlds or realities. Almost all of them have them having to contend with the danger of moving between worlds, the possibility of coming face to face with Mr. In-Between.

All of these stories are genre mashups with significant noir or sometimes hardboiled influences. Most are urban fantasy stories. Many of them are set in the same magic-is-real version of Los Angeles as my fourth novel, Union Station.

“Family Business” is the story of two sets of brothers. The younger brother’s son has disappeared, likely taken by supernatural characters as the family’s past is steeped in magic. Not only does it have the alternate world train station from Union Station, it also has some of the same characters, the Sheriff and Ellis in particular. It also has some strange rites being performed in derelict buildings off the main road in the desert, something I’ve been obsessed with a long time as was apparent in my third novel, Four Corners.

Speaking of stories started by wondering about what’s going on in abandoned buildings on the side of the highway, “Sleeper” is a story I wrote for Eric Miller’s anthology 18 Wheels of Horror. It’s about a down-and-out trucker seeing something he shouldn’t witness as shipping is being done between worlds as well as across the interstates. This story was heavily influenced by Tom Waits and David Lynch.

“The Irrational” is a sort of origin story for Paula, the Numbers Cruncher mage from Union Station. In my head I love science fiction. In my heart I love fantasy. So thinking about what sort of magic mathematics would create if magic were real was a lot of fun. At the same time I didn’t really address race in Union Station. The characters are diverse but I felt like it wasn’t specifically part of that story. In this short story we see Paula, an African American woman, having to struggle with coming up in an industry that still struggles with inclusion today, let alone in the early 1980s when this story is set.

“A Business Necromancer” is based on an idea I had about how if magic were real how would it relate to our world, how would a professional necromancer conduct their business.

“The Black Pharaoh of Hollywood” is a story I wrote for the American Nightmare anthology. It’s an idea I had when I read about the buried “Egyptian” artifacts from DeMille’s Ten Comandments film that are out in the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes.

“The Station” is another story set in the alternate Union Station with the Sheriff. This originally was just an attempt to flesh out that setting in my head, but I kept the story and polished it up because I liked it.

“The Danger In Between” is the earliest of all of these. This story first appeared in KZine #3 way back in 2012, but it had many of my ideas about a hardboiled story in a version of Los Angeles where magic is real already formed.

“The Quake” is the story of where I put the departure point between our reality and the reality in most of these stories: the Long Beach Earthquake of 1933.

I wrote “Between” for the Doorbells at Dusk Halloween anthology. This story started because I was obsessed with Calculus and the mathematical expression of change through a derivative and then back again through the antiderivative. Then I put it into the Los Angeles where magic is real and had the main character meet some spirits of L.A.

I love writing these noirish characters and contemplating what the world would be like if magic were real. I hope you’ll check out and enjoy Messing With Mr. In-Between as much as I enjoyed writing it.