The Short Stories of Steven Arnett

By Steven Arnett

Set in the 1970’s and 80’s, most of these stories, like “Waiting for Dan,” “A Chance Meeting” and “One Night Alone,” are about people trying to make their way through lives that are difficult and entirely different than the lives they had planned. They show a slice of people’s lives when something has happened that completely shakes up their lives in a way they never could have imagined, and often leaves them questioning everything they have ever believed. Mostly the characters are people at a pivotal, crucial turning point in their lives: People who are jolted into the realization that their lives have turned out so much different than they’d hoped and dreamed. As in life, and unlike many traditional short stories, many of these stories don’t have a pat ending that leaves a sense of finality.

This collection also includes stories in the suspense/thriller genre, like “Blizzard” and “Last Laugh” and “The Nightmare,” which at their core are about the hopes and fears and terror that lie in the deepest reaches of the human psyche. Finally, there’s “The Search,” a somewhat Kafkaesque adventure into a possible future world.

We hope you enjoy this introduction to Steven Arnett’s writing. It provides a good illustration of its flavor and diversity. Besides this collection, Mr. Arnett is the author of four novels: Winners and Losers, Death on Lake Michigan, The Labyrinth, and The Summer of Robert Byron. They are available on from Smashwords, Amazon, the iBook store, and from Google Play, Kobo, and other eBook vendors. We are offering this book for free in hope that you will like it enough to want to read those novels.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steven Arnett
• Release date: Mar 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370436149

Steven Arnett

Steven Arnett was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1951 and enjoys writing fiction and poetry. He attended Michigan State University and the University of Maine. He currently lives in Johns Creek, Georgia, with his wife, Delphine, and daughter, Vivienne.

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Short Stories of Steven Arnett

By

Steven Arnett

Copyright © 2018 Steven Arnett

License Notes

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite eBook retailer and purchase your own copy.

For my brothers and sister, Mike, Claudia, Jeff and Pete

Thanks for your love and support throughout my life

Table of Contents

Hyperlinks to Stories in This Book

Introduction

Blizzard

Waiting for Dan

The Search

Last Laugh

A Chance Meeting

Payoffs

One Night Alone

The Nightmare

Unexpected Developments

Wendy

Summer Stranger

Author Biography

Introduction

Set in the 1970’s and 80’s, the decades I know the best, most of these stories, like Waiting for Dan, A Chance Meeting and One Night Alone, are about people trying to make their way through lives that are difficult and entirely different than the lives they had planned. They show a slice of people’s lives when something has happened that completely shakes up their lives in a way they never could have imagined, and often leaves them questioning everything they have ever believed. Mostly the characters are rootless people at a pivotal, crucial turning point in their lives: People who are jolted into the realization that their lives have turned out so much different than they’d hoped and dreamed. As in life, and unlike many traditional short stories, many of these stories don’t have a pat ending that leaves a sense of finality.

This collection also includes stories that fall into the category of the thriller genre, like Blizzard and Last Laugh and The Nightmare, which at their core are about the hopes and fears and terror that lie in the deepest reaches of the human psyche. Finally, there’s The Search, a somewhat Kafkaesque adventure into a possible future world.

I am hoping that when you read these stories, you will like them enough to consider reading my novels. Below this introduction you can find out what they are about and read some of the reviews.

Steven Arnett

March 2018

Novels by Steven Arnett

Mr. Arnett’s latest novel is The Summer of Robert Byron. Here’s the scoop on it:

It’s fall 1966, and Robert Byron has returned to his home town of Blue Spring in Michigan after serving in Vietnam. Everyone there tries to welcome him home, but he’s unsocial and ends up alienating almost everyone. He pretty much keeps to himself through the winter, until the money he’d saved up in Vietnam runs outs, and he has to go back to work. He meets Jean Summers, a teacher at Blue Spring High School who’d just started her teaching career the previous fall herself, when Robert is hired by her landlord to do some work on the house she’s renting. They’re complete opposites in personality, but somehow, they’re attracted to each other anyway. The Summer of Robert Byron is their story: Of how Jean tries to redeem through love Robert’s alienation and the dark secret that he has brought home with him from the war. Can she succeed or is it too late to ever really bring him home again?

The Summer of Robert Byron and all the novels by Steven Arnett are available in paperback and in Kindle format from Amazon. You can also find them in the iTunes Store, Nook Store, the Google Play Store, Kobo, and other eBook platforms by searching on Steven Arnett.

Praise for Novels by Steven Arnett

A reviewer wrote this about Winners and Losers:

This book turned out to be one of the more enjoyable reads I’ve had in years. It’s the first fiction book I can remember that kept me up reading too late at night and made me sorry it was over at the end. Skillfully written, lots of laugh-out-loud moments, unpredictable plot twists, and well-drawn characters. I’ve started a lot of fiction books in recent years and ended up quitting them, because I just wasn’t enjoying them. This author hasn’t forgotten that above all, a book should be fun to read.

Set in a small southern Michigan city in the early 1990s, Winners and Losers stars Tom Slotrak, a young man who wins the jackpot in the Michigan Lottery and the crazy and (sometimes) adventures he has afterwards. He learns the hard way that money can’t buy happiness but that it sure can lead to some very funny and bizarre experiences!

Reviewer Jack Magnus wrote this about Death on Lake Michigan for the Reader’s Favorite Web site:

Steven Arnett’s noir murder mystery, Death on Lake Michigan, is an adroit pairing of investigative sleuthing and police procedural as O’Brien and his buddy on the local police force, Detective George Dirkman of the Lake County Sheriff’s Department, work in tandem in their attempt to solve the mystery. Arnett provides plenty of red herrings to give the reader his/her own opportunities to consider the clues and guess at the culprit. The Gull Haven location is inspired and lovely, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if other readers will be as tempted to visit that little beach town as much as I was. Arnett’s Mike O’Brien is everything you’d want in a noir detective or, in this case, investigative sleuth. He’s got an eye for women and is relatively fearless in his quest for the truth. Death on Lake Michigan is highly recommended.

In the 5 star rated mystery novel Death on Lake Michigan, Mike O’Brien, once the crusading editor of the Michigan State News, now the assistant editor of the Gull Haven Observer, becomes obsessed with solving the murder of Rich Mallon, one of the most notorious and well-known summer citizens of Gull Haven—and finds love in the process.

A reviewer wrote this about The Labyrinth:

Labyrinth is really a gripping suspense thriller! A great, refreshing story, different from other thrillers. Readers are more interested in finding out the actual identity of John Jones than the motif of his assassination. It's a book impossible to put down that captivates from the very first page, and the story is wonderfully written. It's a must-read: absolutely riveting!

At 3 o’clock in the morning cabin in Wells River, New Hampshire, a man who had called himself John Jones is run over by a car. He had been out walking in the rain miles away from where he lived, and there is no rational way to explain why. A strange drifter, he’d been living in a rundown cabin on Crawford’s Hill for a few months, but no one had really got to know him. The local sheriff, Jeremy Wright, searches the cabin but can find only one thing that might help him identify John Jones or that would tell him anything about his life: A pile of manuscript. Could be a novel or could it be an autobiography? There was no easy way to tell, but he knew he’d have to take on the job of reading through it to looks for clues.

The Labyrinth, a romantic adventure wrapped in a thriller, chronicles John Jones’s involvement in a murder when he was 15 years old that shaped his whole life afterward. It tells the story of how he ended up a thousand miles from where he had lived and grown up, in a place where he knew no one and no one knew him. His story ends up getting read by Jeremy, by his precocious 14 year old daughter, Mandy, his widowed mother, Dorothy, and George Teller, his English literature teacher brother-in-law. Each of them ends up with an entirely different picture of who John Jones was and even if that was really his name or if his story was true. They also end up with more questions than answers: Who really was John Jones? Does anyone really have a true identity, or does everyone really have a different identity to everyone who knows them or crosses their path in life?

Winners and Losers, Death on Lake Michigan, and The Labyrinth can be purchased on Amazon and on all the other major eBook platforms, including iBooks, Barnes & Noble, and Google Play, by searching on Steven Arnett.

Please like Steven Arnett’s Author Page at https://www.facebook.com/arnettse/info

You can search for postings about Steven Arnett on Facebook using #stevenarnett

Blizzard

The snow was falling in big, soft flakes, and Jim Nelson thought it was pretty as he was driving through it, especially because this was the Christmas season. It seemed just the right touch: The strings of colored lights on the houses and pine trees made him think happily of Christmases when he was a kid. It wasn’t long, though, before he began to be concerned about it. He was driving into the Smoky Mountains, and he began to question his decision to drive to Atlanta. The problem was, he hated to fly. Whenever he did, a leaden, terrified feeling imprisoned him for days before his flight, and often he’d have horrible nightmares about crashing.

Soon the snow was coming down hard enough so that he had to slow down. Daylight was waning, and because of the storm it was pretty dark, but when Jim turned his headlights on, the snow seemed even heavier. There was no doubt about it, he thought: He’d left too late. There was no question of stopping, though. He simply had to make the annual sales meeting in the morning. All the other district sales managers for the Progressive Appliance Company would be there, and it would really look bad if he were missing. Besides, his district had just had its best quarter ever, and he wanted to impress the significance of that upon top management as strongly as possible. He’d worked for days on the presentation he was scheduled to give and had gone over and over in his head how it would be when he gave it, and how Mr. Quigley, the vice president for marketing, would congratulate him afterward.

The storm just kept getting worse, though, and all Jim could hope for was that somehow it would ease up or at least that some snow plows and salt trucks would be sent out. He already felt like kicking himself for taking the scenic route after Knoxville, rather than staying on the interstate. But the weather reports earlier in the day had been good, with no mention of a winter storm developing, and at the beginning of the drive it had been sunny out. He turned on the radio, hoping to get some idea of how long the storm was expected to last, but of course, he thought, when you want a weather report, you can never get one. When you didn’t want one, though, it seemed like that’s all you’d hear. It annoyed him, too, that all he could get were a couple of country music stations, and he hated country music.

He was getting more and more nervous. It just takes so much out of a guy to drive in weather like this, he thought. He found himself smoking one cigarette after another, even though he’d been trying to limit himself to a half pack a day to get ready for his New Year’s resolution to quit. Christ, he thought, I’ve probably smoked half a pack in the last hour. At times the failing snow mesmerized him, and he’d have to shake his head to break its hypnotic effect.

He’d had to cut his speed down to just 20 miles