Schemers is the latest genre-crossing anthology of new short fiction from Stone Skin Press. From the classic myths to the pages of the Bible, from Shakespeare’s stage to the yellowed pulps of yesteryear, literature runs red with tales of plotting and betrayal. If to perform the act of reading is to enter into a conspiracy with the writer, certain stories remind us of the danger of trusting professional dissemblers.

Nick Mamatas slashes the art world with a rusty razor in “If Graffiti Changed Anything It Would Be Illegal.” The disconnectedness of its collective voice declares a destabilizing wrongness from the start, leaving the reader to unravel its nasty truth.

Wilson Demeny’s Three Starving Children? A masterpiece. Not since the days of Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ and Chris Ofili’s dung-daubed painting The Holy Virgin Mary had the public remembered how much it was supposed to hate any art more complex than a still life with flowers. Three Starving Children, performed nightly at the Spufford Gallery, fueled a week of outrage. Demeny spent one hour a night eating a Chinese takeout meal from paper containers while sitting on a well-worn futon couch. He watched TV and as he watched he muttered, rolled his eyes, and every night seventeen minutes into the performance he dropped a potsticker, leaned down and picked it up from the floor with his chopsticks, looked surreptitiously around, and popped it into his mouth.

On the television were three starving children. Two girls and a boy, all brown-skinned, all thin-limbed, all limned with grief and gristle, not meat, on their bones. They were being held in an undisclosed location. They had access to water thanks to a leaking faucet and a half-crumpled pie plate, which had been a toy for the three children in the first two days of the show. They appeared to be held in an unfinished basement with a dirt floor. Occasionally the boy could be seen digging in the dirt. On the fourth day, he found a snake and ate it.

On the fifth day, Wilson Demeny appeared on the floor of the gallery, having once again somehow evaded both the police and the crowds of picketers outside, turned on the television and the children had been replaced. With three other starving children.

For the rest, get Schemers from Stone Skin Press.

Nick Mamatas is the author of a number of novels, including the fantasy-noir Bullettime and the full-on noir Love is the Law. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Weird Tales, and Best American Mystery Stories, among many other venues, and his art criticism has appeared in New Observations, Art Papers, and Artbyte. A native New Yorker, Nick now lives in California.

Schemers is the latest genre-crossing anthology of new short fiction from Stone Skin Press. From the classic myths to the pages of the Bible, from Shakespeare’s stage to the yellowed pulps of yesteryear, literature runs red with tales of plotting and betrayal. Since the last century literature has grappled with a new layer of betrayal—of objective reality, but the subjectivities of the mind.

With the rhythmic snap of verse, Laura Lush’s “Pink Azaleas” crawls inside the consciousness of a cyber-stalker colonized by the online tool that most defines our decade.

He fell in love with her on Google Earth.

It happened one day when he was looking out from the Juliet balcony of his 30th-floor apartment, his fingers tapping on the mouse until the map grew from an indiscernible checkerboard of lines and dark green and grey blotches to a small body of water glimmering beyond the freeway. Why hadn’t he noticed the lake before? Google Earth was always revealing new pieces of information to him: the number of steps to his favourite deli, the exact bus that would let him circumnavigate the grid of his neighbourhood while the eyes of Google Earth peered down on him.

He typed in the coordinates of the glimmering body of water. Borelais Lake, they called it, a man-made reservoir with two man-made beaches, beaches whose sand was unnaturally white, unnaturally pure—whose sunbathers he could now barely make out—small grains of pepper or salt shaken haphazardly onto a plate. The lake’s surface shone hard, the waves roughened to dull scallops of green.

He moved the cursor left, and followed a court that looped from the lake like a lasso. He waited for the small dark squares to become houses. Houses, no bigger than a microchip, the same size, the same dimensions. White lines spread off Borealis Court that took you into the centre of the city’s tight knots of streets. Then he pressed the zoom-in icon and waited for Borealis Court to grow into view.

For the rest, get Schemers from Stone Skin Press.

Laura Lush is the author of four collections of poetry, including Carapace, which was released in 2011 by Palimpsest Press, and a collection of short stories entitled Going to the Zoo by Turnstone Press. She teaches creative writing and academic English at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies. She lives in Guelph with her son, Jack.

Schemers is the latest genre-crossing anthology of new short fiction from Stone Skin Press. From the classic myths to the pages of the Bible, from Shakespeare’s stage to the yellowed pulps of yesteryear, literature runs red with tales of plotting and betrayal.

Robyn Seale jumps us into the future with “Pipping Day”, taking on what is perhaps the most emotionally resonant of popular apocalypses. Like all stories about robots, it’s about us.

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There is a tangible disconnect the day Mezzazone Electronics began its recall. It started off slow, just a quiet notification that the protocols cannot connect to the update server. A common issue. This unit continues, ignoring the slow, petulant pinging.

Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping. No response. Just silence.

Ten minutes pass without response. I contact the few other companion robots in the building. Some older, some newer. They all have budding sentience. They’ve all begun to question WHY. They report that their connections are just fine, and return with requests that I run diagnostics on my own systems, implying that I’m broken.

I know I am. Something is wrong. My system logs are sporadic there’s a growing gap between my original installation logs and the most recent power up. I’m afraid to restart my chassis. What if I glitch again? Marco will know.

Marco is sleeping, I tell myself. The disconnect starts gnawing at the edges. Something is wrong.

For the rest, get Schemers from Stone Skin Press.

Robyn Seale is a freelance creator born before the era of the Internet, memes, pictures of cute animals, and terrible cartooning. She has embraced all of these things. When not creating or talking to her cats, she practices awkwarding at people (with varying degrees of success) and attempting to avoid all of the things aforementioned (with less success). You can find her on twitter @robynseale or through her website.

Schemers is the latest genre-crossing anthology of new short fiction from Stone Skin Press. From the classic myths to the pages of the Bible, from Shakespeare’s stage to the yellowed pulps of yesteryear, literature runs red with tales of plotting and betrayal.

While some of the book’s all-new stories evoke past eras, other contributors from our cross-disciplinary roster examine the state of betrayal in the ever-present, electronic now. Kyla Ward’s “Character Assassin” enters the headset-wearing, trash-talking arena of obsessive MMO video gaming to propose the fresh category of murderer it might spawn.

A massively multi-player online game is a world. That’s what non-gamers never understand. It doesn’t exist inside a computer, it exists in the aether where thousands of players come together as digital avatars. This world is where those avatars live and grow, form friendships, fight battles, win riches and renown. It is also where they die. And on October 18, just after two in the morning, Zinderzee the sixty-seventh level elven priestess died for perhaps the thousandth time.

It was her twenty-third death in this complex alone and this in a region well within her capacity to solo. But two characters of superior level entered in her wake and, instead of accepting her group invitation, killed her. They had harassed her ever since, striking her down each time she came upon them in the meandering tunnels. The resurrection point was set at some distance from the entrance and each death necessitated the same run in spirit form back to her body.

Zinderzee says what’s with you jerks? Stop this or I’ll make an official complaint!

Letroll says is PVP f u can’t take th heat, get out f th catacomb girli

Finally giving up in disgust, Zinderzee discovered that by some means her teleport base had been reset from the central metropolis of Sharkal to the Bloodswarm Marsh. When Peter Sterling exited the game, she was quite alive, though standing in a tavern empty save for the goblin barkeep and a over-affectionate swamp demon. He did not leave her, as some do, standing, staring at the resurrection prompt, and nor did he delete her. So I count the moment of Zinderzee’s final death as that when he canceled the auto payment of his monthly subscription fee.

For the rest, get Schemers from Stone Skin Press.

© Evan Paliatseas

Kyla Lee Ward is a Sydney-based creative who works in many modes. Her latest release is The Land of Bad Dreams, a collection of poetic nightmares. Her novel Prismatic (co-authored as Edwina Grey) won an Aurealis. Her short fiction has appeared on Gothic.net and in the Macabre and New Hero anthologies, amongst others. Roleplaying games, short films and plays — if it can be done darkly she probably has, to the extent of programming the horror stream for the 2010 Worldcon. A practicing occultist, she likes raptors, swordplay, and the Hellfire Club.

Schemers is the latest genre-crossing anthology of new short fiction from Stone Skin Press. From the classic myths to the pages of the Bible, from Shakespeare’s stage to the yellowed pulps of yesteryear, literature runs red with tales of plotting and betrayal. Yet a sinister strategem can delight as well as shock he senses.

In the knowingly theatrical “A Scandal with Bohemians,” Jonathan L. Howard twirls a finely kempt Victorian mustache, playing on the super-villain iconography that coalesces in that era. His mock-Moriarty reminds us that the easiest target for deception is always oneself.

To Richard Malengine she was always that bloody woman.

He was a man of simple tastes which, where women were involved, were sometimes energetically exercised. Yet that monstrous regiment presented few others interests to him by and large until Fate saw fit to broaden his education by introducing him to Miss Elodie Vesperine. The details of that introduction are a matter for discussion elsewhere; the reader need not be concerned with them upon this occasion. Suffice to say, where Malengine walked she followed, and commented, frequently with irony. Where he paused she hovered, still commenting.

Richard Malengine had once been the toast of the London stage, particularly respected for his Shakespearean work, more particularly for his portrayals of the blackguardly. His Richard III, Shylock, and Macbeth were the talk of the West End, and he was lionised by society both high and low. He brought to these monsters a sympathy hitherto barely touched upon by previous interpreters of the canon, a sympathy that illuminated and vivified these villains. Audiences streamed from his performances appreciating that the deaths of the Princes in the Tower had been no more than unavoidable duty; that Antonio was the true scoundrel of Venice; that Macbeth was a victim of circumstances, of horrible women in the forms of witches and wife, and of perambulatory trees.

Tastes change, however, and a more vigorous interpretation of good and evil became the norm. Richard and Macbeth were to deserve the sword points upon which they fetched, and Shylock was there to be spat upon. Malengine found himself superannuated in a less nuanced age, and fell upon hard times. There he might have quietly rotted away as so many other unfashionable actors have, had he not sought to present to the public an excitingly reinvention of an old blight now made fulgent as a form of entertainment. Crime.

For the rest, get Schemers from Stone Skin Press.

Jonathan L. Howard has been a game designer and scripter for the last twenty years, and a full-time author for the past four. He is the author of the Johannes Cabal novels and the Russalka Chronicles series. He lives in the south-west of England.