Strange & Unnatural Tales Series

Joshua and Victoria Matisse are a young couple who, after five years of connubial bliss, remain childless, though not for lack of trying. Their doctor believes their failure is due to stress, so on his advice they decide to take an extended vacation cruise through the island chains of the South Pacific. As an added bonus, they rent a deserted atoll for a month, so they can spend time alone, wearing nothing but suntan lotion and doing nothing except have sex and dive the lagoon's reef. However, soon after their arrival, Josh and Vicki begin to have vivid erotic dreams involving the octopi that inhabit the lagoon. In time they learn they have been selected to conceive and bear the avatar of the atoll's cephalopod god, slumbering imprisoned in a tomb at the bottom of an abyssal pit. Their dreams climax in a ceremony in which Vicki is impregnated with an egg that Josh fertilizes. Afterwards, they cannot shake the feeling it had all been real, even as they hope it wasn't. But there is one way they can discover the truth: find the tomb and see if it was occupied. This story contains foul language, sexual situations, and scenes of intense violence. Reader discretion is advised.

When Jack the Ripper fled 1000 years into the future to avoid capture, he believed he had found Paradise. Mankind had progressed to become a society free of violence, crime, hatred, and fear. The people lived only for pleasure, and they were governed by only two laws: Do As You Will and Do to Others What You Would Want Them to Do to You. In that way they lived in peace and harmony, their every desire instantly gratified and all their needs fulfilled. Because the people seemed so innocent, Jack believed he slaughter them with impunity and feed off their psychic vitality until he gorged himself. Who was there to stop him? But he underestimated the advanced technology that allowed the people to live as they did, and he did not fully consider the consequences of obeying the two laws.

Jeremiah Arkenton is a dedicated and consummate theoretical scientist, while his wife Kathleen is a technological genius in her own right. Together they have made many breakthroughs for the US government and military while pursuing their own pet projects. They more than anyone, even among their fellow scientists, understand the risk inherent in scientific research, especially when investigations push beyond the boundary of what is known into the unknown, to deliberately probe the limits of what is possible versus what is impossible. Jeremiah and Kathleen are asked by their good friend Laban Shrewsbury to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a scientist working at the Natural History Museum in Denver, Colorado, at the request of a former student who heads the research department. It turns out to be a classic "locked room" mystery, with the only clue being an enigmatic device that resembles a telescope. The researcher's notes describe it as a "tachyon television", which uses particles that travel faster than light to "see" objects farther away than is possible for any device that relies on normal electromagnetic waves, such as light or radio waves. To solve the mystery, the couple decide they must activate the device to see what happens. At the same time, they must try to avoid the same fate of the hapless museum scientist.

Donall Ruad Mac Roibeaird and Somhairle Duhb O Nollaig love each other more than their lives and honor. They eat together, fight together, and sleep together, and are closer then husband and wife. They have even sworn an oath, that should either of them fall in battle, the other would willingly surrender his life, so that even in death they might never be separated. Yet when Somhairle was killed in a war with tribes from the south, Donall was too grief-stricken to fulfill his oath, and so he continued to live. That one act of betrayal destroyed him, and he withdrew from life even as he clung to it. Now Ireland is being ravaged by a horde of the walking dead, driven to scour the land of all human life, but only Donall knows that the revenant that leads it is his long-dead beloved. The Morrigan, the goddess of war and death, has charged him with destroying Somhairle, but his love for his companion of old is stronger than ever, and he cannot make himself do it.

Theodore Thompson is a salesman visiting Cairnsford in Colorado to generate more business for the web design firm he works for. When a morning meeting ends early, he has the entire afternoon to kill, and decides to find a good lay, so as to relax and enjoy himself. In a bar he finds a practicing witch who is into fertility rites. She also lives close by, and invites him back to participate in one. She assures him she doesn't worship Satan and has no intention of sacrificing him to The Evil One. Ted believes he's hit the jackpot. Unfortunately, he didn't bother to inquire about who she does worship.

January Ian Mariposa, Jaim to his friends, and his feline familiar Bastet, have acquired a device that allows them to travel back in time. One scholarly subject that has always fascinated him is the influence that the Cthulhu Mythos had on Victorian society of Great Britain in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. As such, he spends a great deal of time in London of the 1880s. However, he needs a way to support his pretense of being a dilettante aristocrat, and what better way than to pose as a consulting detective in the manner of Sherlock Holmes? He expected most of his cases to be fairly mundane, if occasionally macabre or grotesque, but some turn out to be more eldritch than he anticipated. Such as, the time Scotland Yard called on him to examine a body....

Shasta Taffaday is a young woman who was forced to become a prostitute, a streetwalker, to survive. Her pimp sends her to the home of Clarissa MacCandels, a rich Denver socialite, who wishes to hire her services as a sexual surrogate, to teach her son how to have sex. She offers her a great deal of money as an inducement, enough for her to leave the streets and set up as an independent escort. Shasta is sorely tempted by the offer, but something about it doesn't feel right, and she can't be sure what Ms. MacCandels really wants. Still, she accepts her offer and agrees to seduce her son, but then Ms. MacCandels tells her the whole truth....

Checkers Pizza is very popular among the students of Keekishwa University in Delasalle, Illinois, because it offers guaranteed 30 minute or the order is free. Business is usually brisk each night, even during the summer, but one night it died early and might have stayed that way, if a bizarre gentleman hadn't ordered 24 pies and paid with a solid gold coin. Just one catch: he wants them delivered to the gate of a haunted cemetery.... In the Bonus Story, a woman passing through a cemetery late at night is assault by a couple of ghouls, who fight over her, allowing her to escape. But then they start to court her....