Fevered Visions: Ten Tales from the Febrile Hinterlands of Reason

Professionally published writer Alistair Ainscott presents ten tales from the febrile hinterlands of reason. The stories probe shades of light and dark, from hilarity to shadows of doom. The light-hearted farce of a man trapped on a 3,000 mile trip with his twin toddlers. A mysterious forest fortified by concertina wire of black-barbed briars. One man's quest to atone for nuclear holocaust. The stories have a variety of themes and inspirations, almost always modest extrapolations from the safe islands of everyday experience that somehow mushroom into farcical (or horrific) tales of characters in dire situations. Call it an expedition to a visionary present if you like, or an exile to the febrile hinterlands of reason if you must, but terrifying or farcical, there's something strange and wondrous to engage the reader with each tale. This book includes the author's foreword plus the following ten stories by Alistair Ainscott: "The Thriller Writer's Workshop" "Tailor Maidens" "Captain Disaster and the Twin Terrors of Unholy Matrimony" "Occupy Stinking America" "The Briarwood" "The Familial Tremor" "Plastic Island" "Season of Black" "The Ferro-Erotic Roaches of Kiki" "Trinity of the Sands" The book also includes an excerpt from Ainscott's short novel, The Flies Dropped Dead. Alistair Ainscott is a research scientist by day and a writer of strange speculative tales by night. He writes tales of science gone haywire, men gone mad, oddballs gone even odder, twin toddlers run amok, cats doing the things that cats are given to do, and other nefarious goings-on of the mysterious and the unknown. His fiction has appeared in the professional-paying Penumbra magazine of speculative fiction from Musa Publishing, and he has also studied short fiction with Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith.