Fuel

By Adam-Troy Castro

He thinks suicide is the end of all his troubles.

He’s wrong.

He doesn’t know that he will immediately find himself imprisoned in a strange and alien place, where the souls of despairing creatures from the breadth of space and time are tapped for the energy that only they possess.

He also doesn’t know that he’s about to meet the oldest and most terrifying of all of Mankind’s enemies: an obsessed, all-powerful creature who has wiped out entire civilizations, in its single-minded quest to destroy everything human.

He doesn’t know that he is about to come face-to-face with everything we’ve ever been, and everything we ever stand a chance of becoming.

But there’s something the Beast doesn’t know about him.

He has a power he never knew he had.

This edition includes a special introduction by the author.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781625670823

Adam-Troy Castro

Adam-Troy Castro's fiction has won the Seiun and Philip K. Dick Awards, and received two nominations for the Hugo, three for the Stoker, and eight for the Nebula.

Book preview

Castro

AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION

You are about to read one of the oldest stories I remain proud of. There are older ones, that were good enough for some editor to say, Yes, for this I will cross your palm with legal tender, but some of those, however good they might have seemed at the time, will never be reprinted by me for as long as an ounce of life remains in my body.

It’s like that, at the beginning. You do a story that embarrasses the shit out of you, years later, then one that simply seems a little creaky, then one that you will always consider among your best, then a bunch more that you prefer to leave buried. Then all of a sudden you get better and can count on all your stories achieving a certain minimal level of competency, but you sacrifice the delicious unpredictability of those early efforts where you don’t know whether you’re about to release a golden egg or a turd.

Some of the good ones take a while to find a home, and so we have Fuel, which finally saw print in an anthology called Whitley Streiber’s Aliens, sponsored by what was then called the Horror Writers of America. (Now they’re the Horror Writers Association, which keeps the name but acknowledges just how many international members appreciate not having their national citizenship assumed that way.)

Here’s another thing: sometimes you expect stories to make a splash, and they sink like a stone; other times you expect them to sink like a stone, and they set the world on fire.

I expected this one to set the world on fire.

Didn’t. Was never remarked upon.

Ah well. That happens. Can’t argue about it. Not when I have stories that I thought would make their appearance on the printed page and then vanish…but which instead saw great acclaim, nationally or even internationally.

I still like this one, even the things about it that seem a