A Fine and Dangerous Season

“This SEASON evokes every kind of Bradbury Weather –
a worthy celebration of storytellers and the storms they summon.”
– James A. Owen, author of
The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica

“October is a fine and dangerous season in America. It is dry and cool and the land is wild with red and gold and crimson, and all the lassitudes of August have seeped out of your blood, and you are full of ambition. It is a wonderful time to begin anything at all. You go to college, and every course in the catalogue looks wonderful. The names of the subjects all seem to lay open the way to a new world. Your arms are full of new, clean notebooks, waiting to be filled. You pass the doors of the library, and the smell of thousands of well-kept books makes your head swim with a clean and subtle pleasure.”

― Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

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Ancient evil stalks the Earth, hiding in illusions while sowing terror and death. Only a handful of people have slices of the truth: two science fiction writers, their editor, and a comatose mathematician. Can a missing writer draw them together in time to stop the nightmares from unleashing their terrible power upon a new millennium?

This is a story about stories, and about what is unnoticed in the world around us.  The tale is told through the eyes of four characters who don’t realize that their lives are drawing together in the streets and neighborhoods of their home town. Interspersed with the stories of their lives are the tales that they publish in Un/Revealed, a struggling science fiction magazine. But where does fiction end and dangerous reality begin?

In the tradition of Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, this is a book of stories that twine together into a larger, darker narrative. Oh, and there’s a Donut Galaxy, Harry Houdini, James Doohan, and a vicious slush pile; and it all makes sense in the end.

It started with a challenge…

The good folks at Fyrecon declared October 2023 to be Fyretober: a month of creative prompts, encouraging writers, poets, and artists to share their explorations.

I like a good challenge. So I started writing a story a day, just like they suggested. Of course, they meant flash fiction, 1,000 words or less; but I tend to go overboard… I began writing the stories, sending them to my email subscribers, and posting them here.

Then I went a little… crazy…

I started with the prompts. I really did! But things happened:

• Story 2 involved an editor for the fictional Un/Revealed magazine.
• Story 3 involved a logician whose only escape from a coma was to see things in a new way.
• Story 5 involved a writer who has sold a story to Un/Revealed magazine. She perceived things that others couldn’t. She also frequented a particular local donut shop.
• Story 6 featured the return of the logician, now cursed to see visitors in mirrors. He and his wife visited their favorite local donut shop, now familiar…

And I became convinced that I wasn’t writing stories, I was writing a novel made up of stories. Thus was born…

A Fine and Dangerous Season

This was an experiment: Could I write a novel, one chapter per day, discovering the novel as I write? Ray Bradbury was famous for writing a story a day, often from random prompts he found in the world. If he could do it, I could do it.

Bradbury was also famous for setting some of these stories in the mythical town of Green Town, Illinois; and he gathered and merged some of them for his signature novel, Dandelion Wine. Others followed.

The experiment: If Bradbury could do it, could I do it? In a month? Without planning, guided only by the stories themselves and what I learn in them?

I can’t claim to be as successful as Bradbury, but there’s a story here, set in the mythical city of Grand Rapids, Michigan. (Trust me, the version in these pages is mythical.) Some of the chapters are the stories of editors, authors, and readers of the mythical Un/Revealed magazine. Some are stories that appeared in the magazine. They explore what is seen and unseen, all in the Dangerous Season of October.

Over time, I veered from the prompts as the story shape was revealed. In the end, the story took control, and I grabbed the reins and steered it to an exciting conclusion.

Coming June 2025

Now for the first time, the stories are revised to clean up changes across the course of the month. They have a new, ominous cover that hints at the menace within.

The ebook of this amazing story will be available in June 2025. But that’s a story in itself, coming soon…