Future historians may choose to call our recent history the "Age of Electricity." This force powered not only our electric lights, but it brought us the movies, radio, TV, and the internet. We find coursing through all these the Story, the Tale, and the Fable. Aesop reached thousands with his fables, but Warner Brothers, Disney, and MGM reached millions with their fables involving the pig, the ducks, the rabbit, and the mice. The Age of Electricity's fabulists had such names as Thurber, Walt, Chuck, and others. Howard Denson, scion of the Southeast, removes his hat and offers to posterity his...

MOWBRAY AND THE BARON (93,500 words; 3rd POV) is a comic fantasy novel set in 1937. Its protagonist, Martin Mowbray, accepts a position as butler/estate manager for a Northern Italian aristocrat, Baron Culdraca, who has relocated to Fledermaus House in an obscure town in New York State. Mowbray knows that the Baron sleeps during the day and gets up after sunset, and his employer is aware that Mowbray can see, and converse with, ghosts. Mowbray acts as a catalyst to see that several murders are solved, even though the ghosts of victims aren't aware that they have been killed. He and the Baron...

THE CASE OF THE ANNIVERSARY LIBATION is a murder mystery with its "detective" being the "clever Hebrew" Judah P. Benjamin of Louisiana. His amanuensis, Horatio T. Burdette, tells of a Huck Finn odyssey from boyhood, to student, to early fatherhood, all while he is a slave. The 88,500-word novel traces Horatio's boyhood at the Burdette plantations near the Gulf of Mexico. A drunken Rainey Burdette has already caused the death of a horse in an accident that broke the collarbone of the twelve-year-old Horatio. Days later, Rainey is drunk at Miss Ginny's Emporium when he uses Horatio as...

CLARE AND THE COUNTRY PEOPLE AND OTHER STORIES features Tales of Lower Appalachia and traces the history of the fictional Waldentown from its post-Civil War days through the new century. The town has its first legal hanging, house fires that cause one couple to retreat to a remote community to rebuild. Burley's residents had never even seen a chocolate cake. Clare Reardon is the "town girl" who has to learn to cope: with a husband she nurses during the 1917 flu epidemic, with a brother who returns from the Great War missing both legs to trench disease. (395 pages; 125,000 words) The...