Ooter's Place: A Sampler

By Karl El-Koura

Home alone during a storm, two young brothers play a game to entertain themselves, a game that will quickly spiral out of control, a game that will have consequences as tragic as they are frightening.

In a dark alley, a man regains consciousness and discovers that he has superpowers. He can stop bullets with his chest, he can crush steel with his hands, he can even fly! He must be a superhero! The truth, alas, is something very different.

A young boy learns that his best friend is an alien. But does that mean they have to stop being friends?

This free ebook is a sampler of the author's collection "Ooter's Place and Other Stories of Fear, Faith, and Love." This book contains the full introduction and the three stories that start each of the three sections, along with their forewords. The full book contains 13 stories in total.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Karl El-Koura
• Release date: Jul 30, 2011
• ISBN: 9780987693860

Karl El-Koura

Karl El-Koura was born in Dubai, United Arab Emirates and currently lives with his beautiful editor-wife in Canada's capital city. More than sixty of his short stories and articles have been published in magazines since 1998, and in 2012 he independently published his debut novel Father John VS the Zombies. Karl holds a second-degree black belt in Okinawan Goju Ryu karate, is an avid commuter-cyclist, and works for the Canadian Federal Public Service. Visit http://www.ootersplace.com to discover more about Karl and keep up-to-date with his latest news.

Book preview

Ooter's Place:

A Sampler

Karl El-Koura

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011 Karl El-Koura

To my parents.

Introduction

This free ebook is a sampler of the author's collection Ooter's Place and Other Stories of Fear, Faith, and Love. This book contains the full introduction and the three stories that start each of the three sections, along with their forewords. The full book contains 13 stories in total.

The stories in this collection span my entire professional writing career so far, from the first story of mine to be paid for and published (They Came From Ooter’s Place in 1998) to one of the most recent (Blink in 2010). As the title of the book may have led you to believe, these works also span a wide range of genres: you’ll find stories of science fiction, fantasy, horror, detective fiction, military fiction, and even two pieces of superhero fiction. There are really short stories (the shortest is only 250 words) and longer stories (the longest is 7500 words). My hope is that the variety of this collection will be a virtue, containing something for everyone to enjoy.

Four stories appear under each of the three headings (Fear, Faith, and Love). These categories are rather arbitrary; most of the stories are really about love, or the lack of love. Love is at the center of the universe, and can hardly be avoided in life or fiction. As a bonus exclusive to this collection, the last story is about fear, faith, and love. All of the stories are accompanied by a foreword (an afterword in the case of the bonus story).

The Stories of Fear are not meant to fill your dreams with nightmare visions; that is not the kind of horror I like to read, and it isn’t the kind I write (although I recognize that there’s a place and an audience for it). The real horror in these stories, I think, comes from what they imply—about who we are as human beings, what we’re capable of, and how often we allow our weaknesses (such as laziness, pettiness, or just plain meanness) to usher varying degrees of horror into our lives and the lives of others.

Why write stories of fear at all? That was the question put to me by someone whose opinion I value a great deal. After reading one of my more gruesome stories (which isn’t collected in this book), she said, Why do you have to write such dark stories? And though I hadn’t given it any thought before then, I said, Because sometimes you need to go into the darkness to turn on a light. After thinking about it a great deal more, I find I can’t come up with a better answer than that.

The Stories of Faith are, for the most part, not directly about religion. They’re about the role faith can play in our lives and the power that comes out of our beliefs—with good consequences and consequences not-so-good, depending on the belief. Not all of these stories presuppose a supernatural realm or God’s existence, although many do; in fact, it is one of my favorite things about the horror genre that one can speak seriously about a spiritual reality at all, and consequently, some of these stories fall within that genre.

In certain circles, faith is considered something of a dirty word. Granted it may have been good or necessary for our ancestors, who empowered themselves with stories about how rain fell from the sky and what they could do when hit by a drought, but surely we who live in the post-Enlightenment world have outgrown the need for faith? The