Thrilling Fantasy, Horror, & Science-Fiction Shorts!

January 13, 2021 in Story, Feature

A D Jameson

Alien Spores

Can you help me? I’ve been trying to rid this city of alien spores. I thought I’d eliminated them all, but now I see they’re back again. I must have missed a few, and they replicate so quickly! It seems no matter how many I destroy, I always find a few more the following days; they’re extraordinarily resilient. I’ve been asking others to give me a hand, stressing the threat posed by alien spores, but no one I talk to seems to think that the spores pose as big a threat as I do. But they are a real threat! If the spores get inside your nose, they go up in your brain, and then they completely warp your priorities, make you forget who you are as well as your everyday life, make you see things that aren’t really there.

Rock Albany!

January 12, 2021 in Story, Feature

A D Jameson

Rock Albany laughed. He stood naked at the edge of a cliff. His windswept hair was neither blond nor red, but black, as black as a melon. His face was like a law of nature, like the call of the herd. He had the mouth of an executed saint.

Rock laughed and shook his head, then dove into the lake far below. He swam easily to the far shore, where he dressed, then strolled down a path. He walked swiftly, with a loose, lazy expertness of motion. He walked down the long road on the sun, the sun’s only road. The sun was his home. He had lived there for seventeen years. Most men would die if they tried to live on the sun. They would burn up at once. Rock laughed at this thought. He found the sun charming. The sun, he thought, has been waiting here just for me. Waiting to be ripped apart by my dynamite and drill. Waiting for the new shape my hands will give it. He would paint it pigeon blue. He would install a Pekinese buttress. He would hand-raise pudgy canaries. Rock liked canaries. Their eyes never missed a thing. They made a man feel as though he did not exist. They stared with a sudden resentment. They knew that they were naked in their cage. They suffered in this world. Rock knew that the canaries would suffer to live inside cages on the sun. He didn’t know how long they would hold out, staring at him with their damned eyes, before they burned up. He would go through a lot of canaries. He’d have to skimp and slave to afford so many. He would need them at once. He resolved to call his best friend and supplier, the Duke. But then he forgot. He didn’t give a damn.

Amazing Adult Fantasy

January 12, 2021 in Press, Feature

Paul Kincaid

Originally published on The SF Site

To begin with, these short fictions are funny.

They are also experimental, wayward and surreal, any of which might make them seem far more serious and “worthy” than they actually are.

They are not stories in the conventional sense. Some of them may offer a narrative, but if you try to follow them too closely you will find characters change, chronologies wander all over the place, and an obsessive interest in something mundane and irrelevant will suddenly intrude into the text. They take risks with what we expect of our fiction, which is a good thing, but not all the risks pay off, of course. This means it is all too easy to linger over phrase-making or ponder construction, or otherwise consider the success or failure of the individual pieces in some drily academic way. But that would be to miss the simple joie de vivre, the devil-may-care insouciance of the pieces.

Amazing Adult Fantasy by A D Jameson

January 12, 2021 in Press, Feature

Jonah Vorspan-Stein

Originally Published in the Noo Journal, Issue 13

AD JAMESON’S Amazing Adult Fantasy opens with a brief indictment: “Fiction may be the worst thing about the 21st century.” The stories that follow—fabled, sardonic, sharp—venture to strip fiction of its conventions, substituting in their place a new narrative logic: one that brandishes an acute playfulness and grandiose sentiment, one of mustachios and infatuation, the most mature kind of absurdity. These are stories about obsessions and deficiencies, about people who glare every bit of themselves, who feel the world on its largest scales. In these stories, astronaut Buzz Aldwin falls into the bad graces of NASA, a girl shares her various and mutually exclusive truths about Oscar the Grouch, and Bronx monkeys devote themselves to preserving earth’s aurora borealis. While these are certainly stories of insistent and shifting forms, they are also stories that always endeavor to a literary beauty.

Two Things Struck Me: A Review of Jameson's Amazing Adult Fantasy

January 12, 2021 in Press, Feature

Jeff Bursey

Originally published at The Quarterly Conversation

We’re in an unimaginative period when many readers prefer memoirs to fiction. Perhaps there’s something in Canadians and Americans that demands fiction to mirror life, to provide a perspective on how to live, like one would download an app designed to locate chain restaurants in foreign cities. Imaginative writing, so newspaper reviews would lead one to believe, has its best home in science fiction and fantasy titles. The serious novels—written by Philip Roth and James Ellroy, for example—don’t stray far from realism, unless you’re Spanish, South American or Salman Rushdie. When was the last time you picked up the local paper and saw a long review of a book that didn’t pretend to tell you exactly how this or that occupation was carried out in the 1540s, or describe minutely the way clothes were worn in 19th-century Wales? When was the last time an author’s style, above all other elements of a book, received praise in that same paper for its vocabulary, fresh metaphors, complex sentences, and the use of adverbs and adjectives, without once mentioning plot?

Amazing Adult Fantasy by A D Jameson

January 12, 2021 in Press, Feature

Jess Stoner

Originally reviewed in Necessary Fiction 11.14.2011

The artist statement of sorts, “Fiction”, that begins the first half of the stories in A.D. Jameson’s Amazing Adult Fantasy, teaches us how to read the entire collection: we’re told that we’re reading a book that’s been lost in a fire, that the book we’re reading doesn’t exist. A better metaphor for childhood, the gratuitous fiction of how we remember it, might not exist either.

A Review of Jameson's Amazing Adult Fantasy

January 12, 2021 in Press, Feature

Peter Fontaine

Originally published in The Collagist

Amazing Adult Fantasy, A D Jameson’s debut collection of fiction, asks us to think carefully, as adults, about our childhoods. Not only our childhoods, however, but the nature of fiction and fictions, the imagination, and our relationship with them as we ‘grow up’ and supposedly “put away childish things.” The epigram that starts the collection, Paul speaking to the Corinthians, is one of the many clues Jameson gives us for thinking about the book, for understanding the sometimes contradictory ideas that govern its form and his approach to familiar and even iconic characters from our youth.

Excerpt of Giant Slugs

January 12, 2021 in Excerpt, Story, Series

A D Jameson

(A D Jameson has a new book out by Lawrence & Gibson, a remarkable little outfit in New Zealand renowned for their beautiful hand-sown craftsmanship. Jameson’s new book, entitled Giant Slugs, is a strange and alluring creation; it’s narrator exiled, ousted, put out by those oozing outsized interlopers, denied his true inheritance, his due kingly crown. So begins this epicene narrator’s epichorial wanderings (part epicrisis, part epicedium) in this largely silly, slightly filthy, pun-laden Epicurean retelling of the ages-old Epic of Gilgamesh.)

On the fifth day, our class was taken on a field trip to Ninja City’s secret portions, the developing suburban bailiwicks, expanding eastward at the rate of three blocks per year. The slogan of these newer parts was, “Virus-Free Since ’93!” Their motto was, “We Will Find the Serum.”

The ninjas who lived there, global warming enthusiasts, threw webbed geodesic domes over desolate tracts—the war-scarred landscape it had been left to them to develop. When the finished dome was turned on, it generated an interior rain that lasted for forty days and thirty-nine nights. When the domes were taken down, the desolation had been transformed into normal, productive topsoil, rich loam like you’d find in a national forest. Other ninjas, the ones whose talents disposed them to comprise the follow-up crew, paved over the mess and poured concrete sidewalks marked with their handprints and the date. Then they built roadside stands from which they sold pints of Noby Sheets’s coleslaw. (She used her spare time once a week to make big vats of the stuff, the most delicious slaw I’d ever tasted.)

Still-recognizable Figures: A Review of Jameson's Amazing Adult Fantasy

January 12, 2021 in Press, Feature

Matt Dube

Originally published at H_NGM_N

A.D. Jameson is a pretty much a monster when it comes to corrupting familiar characters, folding, spindling and mutilating existing forms, and generally bankrupting your appreciation of traditional narrative. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Amazing Adult Fantasy

January 12, 2021 in Product

A D Jameson

A D Jameson, lost and innocent, narcissistic and corrupted, has been dreaming his way through the past thirty years, the dying breaths of the fictional 20th century. In his dreams he made many friends: the alien puppet ALF, cantankerous, threadbare, and living in a casket; Luke Skywalker, middle-aged, mustachioed, and hateful; and Bonnie Raitt, the ceramicist, shining spotlights onto sand and cancer.

He invites you now to join both him and them; his lips shape your name. For his dreams have also been about you; he’s been searching for you for a long time. Lie down beside him; allow him to drape his glittery silver fur coat across your shoulders. He’ll fold his hands and bow and whisper. He’ll hand you a gumball that’s grown stale inside a locket. He’ll hand you a gem that fell down from the moon. Together, you’ll sail across the ocean on his wok rat, nibbling his tree pig. Together, you’ll enter these fantastical tombs.

Samples of Jameson’s writing can be found on our website. To read his story, Rock Albany! go here, and to read his story, 7 Movie Reviews, go here.

Paperback Book
8" x 5.25"
168 Pages
$12.95
Now Available

Buy now

Mutable Author Tells All!

January 12, 2021 in Article, Interview, Feature, Press

(A D Jameson, author of Amazing Adult Fantasy, out this coming fall through Mutable, talks with us about his influences, his loves, his hates, and his secret horror. His most recent story, Korawik Wattanakul, can be found at Harp & Altar. To read his extended bio, please go here.)

What does it mean to be a writer? Who are writers? What do they do?

For me, writing’s a form of thinking. It allows me to express ideas that I couldn’t express otherwise, because my memory isn’t good enough. And because writing possesses a logic all its own. It’s a meditative activity and a form of discipline that allows me to clarify some thoughts, and muddle others.

There exist more writers than people suspect, including all those whom “real writers” usually won’t acknowledge. There’s a disturbing tendency among high lit folk to not take seriously other writing, even if they enjoy it: genre fiction, commercial television, comics, children’s books, writing by actual children, zines, journalism. Also excluded: slam poets, performance poets, conceptual artists, and many others. This is elitist, short-sighted and unfair, not to mention a huge mistake. The people who wrote G.I. Joe and Star Trek are very much so writers. They wrote all over me! They wrote me!

Seven Movie Reviews

January 12, 2021 in Story, Feature

A D Jameson

1.
At the stroke of three-thirty the missile lurches from the ceiling and forcefully imbeds itself inside the giant globe. Only the missile is the prong of a fork, and the globe is a sugar gum-drop. Welcome to the miniature world of THE MICROS, a likeable little people whose adventures are recounted in this amazing series of family films. No more than one centimeter in height, the Micros experience one exciting adventure after another, as they make their way in a world so much larger than they are. Now, experience that adventure and dream about being as miniscule as a Micro. In the first tape, we are introduced to the world of the Micros, in which many of the everyday objects we take for granted are shown to be treacherous hazards for our miniscule heroes, because they are so small. A drop of water is a giant pond, a speck of tin foil a dangerous open blade. We meet various prominent Micro citizens who serve as the major characters in the series. In the second tape, Scrunchy is discovered to be missing, and the other Micros fear the worst. Meanwhile strange new objects keep appearing in Lothar’s hut. In the third tape the Micros confront their murderous arch-foe Pepperton, who has sworn to rid the earth of what he considers “disgusting, disease-causing Micros.” In the fourth tape, the Micros must work in concert to save an orphaned boy from the bitter reality of life on the street. Through their efforts, a new home is found for the boy, but not before many exciting adventures are had. These and other wonderful videotapes form the collection of MICRO films now available for home viewing by you and your family. Welcome to the miniature world of THE MICROS, where the people are small in stature, but big in caring, and in courage.

Paul Kincaid

Jonah Vorspan-Stein

Jeff Bursey

Jess Stoner

Peter Fontaine

Matt Dube

Paperback Book8" x 5.25"168 Pages$12.95Now Available

A D Jameson

Paperback Book
8" x 5.25"
168 Pages
$12.95
Now Available