I’m lucky enough to have my work included in The Rabbit Hole Volume 5: Just…Plain…Weird anthology along with quite a group of talented authors. I especially love the teaser
Welcome to the Rabbit Hole. On our fifth excursion into the warren of the odd, 37 authors lead us down their own little burrows of strangeness : an army of penguins, music that cures, aliens that communicate through old cartoons, images of the future that save, unwanted visions of the now, and, oh yes, it is raining lawyers. All have one thing in common, they are just…plain…weird.
Weird can be funny, weird can be sad, weird can be thoughtful, weird can be mad, but the one thing in common is that weird shares experiences you have, thankfully, never had.
Just be careful, all little bunnies are not nice, but they are memorable.
About the Author
Carl E. Reed is currently employed as a roofing operations specialist at a window, siding, and door company just outside Chicago. Former jobs include: U.S. marine, long-haul trucker, stage actor, cab driver, construction worker, and door-to-door encyclopedia salesman. His poetry has been published in The Iconoclast, Spectral Realms, Black Petals, & Deathlehem: Holiday Horrors; short stories in Black Gate, newWitch, Sci-Fi Lampoon, Penumbra and elsewhere. He is a member of Frank Coffman’s Weird Poets Society.
How the stories came about?
(1) Existential despair and a cynic’s jaundiced-eye view of recent socio-political/economic/environmental events, (2) irritation at the boorish behavior of brutes in public, (3) alarm at the simmering undercurrent of menace and violence that engulfs anyone and everyone who dares to go out in public nowadays, and (4) last but certainly not least the sheer joy of pitting an arthritic, amateur warlock octogenarian against a succession of belligerent punks. Also: comedy! The tale is farcical satire: vicious, surreal . . . and funny. (Leastwise, it’s intended to be funny!) This story is an example of me writing in the mode of (as writer/editor Atthys Gage has termed it) “playful savagery”.
Opening
It was a dark and storming pre-Covid night. A break in the day-long deluge revealed an orange half-moon burning in the sky like the baleful eye of a drowsy-lidded elder god of chaos. Stars pinpricked the heavens: indifferent points of light beaming down upon a world of beatings, murders, acidifying oceans, melting polar ice caps, relentlessly pistoning genitalia, and mercury-brained babies suckling their mothers’ toxic breast milk.
Enjoy!
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