Any day now, Bizarro Jersey Magazine will send a reviewer incognito to the ghost tour Jim Griggs runs in a scenic little Delaware River Valley town. The Halloween season is coming, and Jim has bills to pay. When his girlfriend gives him a haunted cabinet for his birthday, a spectral union agitator who died in the 1930s wreaks havoc in Jim's town — terrorizing tourists, stirring monsters best left to lie, and unionizing all the ghosts.

You know the feeling: You learn about some appalling event in history that makes you just want to punch the perpetrator's ghost. Well, there's a professional who can help with that -- at least, until new clients and targets pose dangers the ghost puncher never anticipated.

Catch a glimpse of a New Jersey even weirder than the one you think you know in this 2015 Mythopoeic Award Winner, newly revised by the author. A covenful of very modern Wiccans wrestle challenges both supernatural and mundane—and, occasionally, each other. The personal injury attorney who chose kitchen-witchery over his family’s five-generation lineage of old school ceremonial magic would like to miss his dead parents, only now that they’re dead they won’t leave him alone. The professiona...

When Stisele of Imlen's royal cousin appoints her governor of a conquered province with brutal orders to enforce, in the hope that the locals will kill her, Stisele defects. Casting her lot with the people she was sent to rule, who are far more complicated and need her far less than she imagined, forces her to get over her vision of herself as a savior and to face what it really costs to turn on the nation and kin she used to serve.

When a flood traps a young officer of shameful birth with an enemy sergeant not long off the farm, they must decide how far to trust one another if either is to survive until they can be rescued--but whose army will find them first?Despite, or perhaps because of, her meddlesome dead parents, Stisele of Imlen has made it to the age of nineteen and the rank of lieutenant in her foster father's army. Rushing through a north country forest to bring him a secret diplomatic message, she gets cau...

Any day now, Bizarro Jersey Magazine will send a reviewer incognito to the ghost tour Jim Griggs runs in a scenic little Delaware River Valley town. The Halloween season is coming, and Jim has bills to pay. When his girlfriend gives him a haunted cabinet for his birthday, a spectral union agitator who died in the 1930s wreaks havoc in Jim's town - terrorizing tourists, stirring monsters best left to lie, and unionizing all the ghosts.In this contemporary fantasy short story of post...

A modern-day author conjures Sir Percival of the Round Table to a New York cancer hospital to bring the Grail - the real one - to a friend in need of healing. Sir Lancelot, never willing to be upstaged, intrudes on Percival's quest. The two knights know all the versions of their stories that have ever been told, but the story they're in now has surprises in store for them and their bossy author.In this contemporary fantasy short story by the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award winning author ...

When a flood traps a young officer of shameful birth with an enemy sergeant not long off the farm, they must decide how far to trust one another if either is to survive until they can be rescued-but whose army will find them first?Despite, or perhaps because of, her meddlesome dead parents, Stisele of Imlen has made it to the age of nineteen and the rank of lieutenant in her foster father's army. Rushing through a north country forest to bring him a secret diplomatic message, she g...

Stisele of Imlen knows she's in trouble, but not how much. The young adopted daughter of Beltresa's sovereign longs to be a weapon in her mother's service — even against her birth family, should Utroneth ask it. If only Stisele could master the temper that drives her to pepper the royal heir with petty kin-curses.But Stisele's dreams are bigger than the balance of intrigues that keeps her alive and captive in this perilous royal court. She can be more than a speaker of kin-curses. ...

Stisele of Imlen knows she's in trouble, but not how much. The young adopted daughter of Beltresa's sovereign longs to be a weapon in her mother's service — even against her birth family, should Utroneth ask it. If only Stisele could master the temper that drives her to pepper the royal heir with petty kin-curses.But Stisele's dreams are bigger than the balance of intrigues that keeps her alive and captive in this perilous royal court. She can be more than a speaker of kin-curses. ...

You know the feeling: You learn about some appalling event in history that makes you just want to punch the perpetrator's ghost. Well, there's a professional who can help with that - at least, until new clients and targets pose dangers the ghost puncher never anticipated.

The final issue of the year comes when the nights in the Northern Hemisphere are at their longest and coldest. It’s at this time that fiction is needed the most. Against the backdrop of darkness, we gather close and whisper tales to entertain and inspire—and to remind ourselves that dawn will return.Welcome to issue #135. In these pages are the continuation of Flashlight, Knife and Flowered Crown. Hands of a Toolmaker presents another tale of rage, but this time it is contained and...