Tales from the Half-Continent

The two novellas set in the Monster Blood Tattoo universe, where monster-hunters -- teratologists -- use alchemy and steam-punky technology against nickers, bogles, and other nasty creatures. In the first story, an unlucky corser (someone who robs graves to order for various scientific and other, more nefarious uses) ends up helping a private investigator rescue a lost girl who's been abducted by fictlers -- "false-god worshippers and inveterate anti-socialists, fictlers were the worst fashion of backward hill-dwelling nincompoops, filled with delusions of a world ruled by their mythical deep-dwelling masters, the slumbering idiot false-gods."

Written with a penny-dreadful-esque flair, "Beyond the squat blue fellow, a third figure was crouched behind a boulder that jutted near the bridge. Clad in a heavy black weskit over a clean white shirt, he aimed with a prodigiously long rifle up the left flank of the gully. The weapon spoke, offending the new-won hush with its violence, the bark of its deadly voice repeating dully back to them through the convolutions of the gullies."

The second story follows the evolution of a servant girl, Virtue Bland, from country bumpkin to ambitious would-be monster-hunting scourge. The setting—a walled town—is as much a character as the plucky young Virtue and the bogle who killed her father.


These are small works, but vividly written and fun to read.