Alt Hist Issue 5: The Magazine of Historical Fiction and Alternate History

Alt Hist Issue 5 features another fine mix of stories covering a variety of historical periods from the 1800s to post-War USA.

This issue includes five new original works of fiction including stories about Al Capone and Italian Futurism, the aftermath of the American Civil War, the real Frankenstein, the Bridge that consumes the souls of men, and the latest instalment in a series of stories about a successful Nazi invasion of Britain.

Alt Hist is the magazine of Historical Fiction and Alternate History, published twice a year by Alt Hist Press.

Stories featured in Alt Hist Issue 5:

After Mary by Priya Sharma

AD 1929 by Douglas Texter

The Stiff Heart by Meredith Miller

The Bridge by Micah Hyatt

Battalion 202: Rotten Parchment Bonds by Jonathan Doering

Priya Sharma’s “After Mary” is set in the mid-1800s and is the story a scientist with dreams of greatness who lives alone in his country house with only his assistant, Isobel, and servant Myles. Then his friend comes to the house and leaves a copy of Frankenstein, which changes everything.

“AD 1929” by Douglas W. Texter is a story describing a meeting of artistic guile and criminal muscle. This is a tale of what might have happened if the Italian Futurist F.T. Marinetti had come to America and gone to work for Al Capone.

Meredith Miller is the author of “The Stiff Heart” which draws its title from a poem by Emily Dickinson. Meredith’s piece is a story about life under the surface, in New England in the 1870s where secrets and fears and desires sometimes refuse to behave properly. Not everyone joins in the self-satisfied complacency of this prosperous post-Civil War community.

Micah Hyatt is the author of “The Bridge”. Throughout history men have risked their lives to achieve great feats of engineering: The pyramids of Giza. The Empire State building. The Panama canal. But those who build The Bridge risk their very souls.

“Rotten Parchment Bonds”, the latest story in the Battalion 202 series by Jonathan Doering, features Harold Storey, a quiet man praying for a quiet life after the horror of the First World War trenches. But his prayers are cruelly crushed by the German Invasion of Britain in 1941. As a police officer he is forced to co-operate with Nazi officials and is thrown into moral turmoil by the accommodations that start to be made. But perhaps there is one good man amongst the enemy ranks?