Dramatized Fantasy

John Thomas Rourke, M.D., ex-CIA Covert Operations Officer, weapons expert, and survival authority is on the move again — searching for a cache of 80 megaton warhead missiles secreted on the New West Coast. It all begins with a fire fight between Brigands and a unit of US II armed forces, a battle that ends with Rourke, and a seriously wounded Natalia, taking refuge on a submarine.

The Marshall islands, once the testing grounds for 20th-century weapons of mass destruction, remain perversely beautiful. But the infested waters become the battleground for looting pirates and sec men in still-functional navy PT boats, all driven by greed and madness to plunder the predark caches of science and technology hidden in the islands. Ryan Cawdor and his band emerge in this perilous waterworld, caught in a grim fight to unlock the secrets of the past.

Violent gangs, a corrupt mayor, and a heavily armed police force are the hallmarks of former Detroit, a mutie-infested, rubble-strewn metropolis. When Ryan and the companions show up, the Desolation Angels are waging a war to rule the streets. After saving the companions from being chilled by gangsters, the mayor hires Ryan and his friends to stop the Angels cold. But each hard blow toward victory proves there's no good side to be fighting for. As Motor City erupts into bloody conflagration, the companions are caught in the crossfire.

Emerging from a gateway in New England, Ryan Cawdor and his band of wayfaring survivalists ally themselves with a group of women warriors who join their quest to locate the Illuminated Ones, a mysterious pre-dark secret who may possess secret knowledge of Deathlands. Yet their pursuit becomes treacherous, for their quarry has unleashed a deadly plague in the twisted plot to cleanse the Earth.

World War III was just practice for what's coming. And even those who survived the original firestorm — like John Thomas Rourke — won't have a chance when the next round of carnage begins. But Rourke, ex-CIA Covert Operations Officer, weapons specialist, and survival expert didn't struggle to stay alive in this brutal world only to die in a final holocaust of fire and blood.

The Seven Satrapies have collapsed into four - and those are falling before the White King's armies. Gavin Guile, ex-emperor, ex-Prism, ex-galley slave, formerly the one man who might have averted war, is now lost, broken, and trapped in a prison crafted by his own hands to hold a great magical genius. But Gavin has no magic at all. Worse, in this prison Gavin may not be alone.

Across the flat plains of the Dakotas, an iron horse shrieks and rumbles across refurbished tracks. Inside the boxcars, Ryan Cawdor and his companions face trouble unlike any other. Jak is missing, Krysty is dying, and the train is loaded with sec men, whitecoats, and a horrifying experiment — a baron with psionic abilities using stolen children to fuel his mad dream for mind control of every living soul in Deathlands.

Transformed by the nuclear conflict of 2001, the Earth had turned into a wasteland ruled by anarchy and barbarism. Heirs to this blighted world, Ryan Cawdor and his warrior wayfarers fight for survival...and a way to restore humanity's lost promise. The preholocaust redoubts housing the dangerous and unpredictable mat-trans units are the legacy of the whitecoat scientists and their precocious knowledge. For the very few in the know, the network of redoubts serves as an escape route and transport through the bleak landscape.

In the nuclear-storm devastated Deathlands, a warrior survivalist of the 22nd century leads the relentless fight to reclaim a lost world. Barely escaping from a marauding gang, Ryan Cawdor and his band of post-holocaust survivors emerge from a gateway into an idyllic community ruled by Druidic law. But this new Eden may be a mirage, concealing a deadly threat. For the seed of dissent had been sown in the past and is again ready to destroy.

In Othir, he was at the top of the food chain — an assassin beyond compare, a dark shadow in the night. But Caim left that life behind when he helped an empress claim her throne. And now his past has come calling again. Searching for the truth behind the murder and disappearance of his parents, Caim discovers a land in thrall to the Shadow. Haunted by temptations from the Other Side, he becomes mired in a war he does not want to fight.

Demons are putting rips in the veil in order to cross over and steal my friends and allies away. But, going after them isn’t even close to simple. The deepest level of the veil is not a place you can just open a doorway to, after all, and, of course, that’s where they’ve been taken. As fate would have it, it looks like I might get some help from a trained demon slayer and his fire-breathing ride. The only problem? Said demon slayer claims to have family ties to me. And I’ve never trusted my family. Nor am I about to start now.

Emerging into one of the pre-dark installations known as Redoubts, the group is taken prisoner in a fully functioning army base operating in a parody of life before the blowout. Its occupants are inbred soldiers, a legacy to the lost secrets of the Totality Concept. Led by the mad general of an obscene military project, the base has found its last hope in the ragtag bunch, a fate that may be even more horrifying than the hell they have survived.

After the nuclear winter, the taint of humanity worsened in the raw blood-quest for survival. Hunger for jack and power now fuels traders and barons, who relinquish authority only through death, crushing everything in their path. Still, a handful seek a better way of life, where iron fists and ordnance are replaced by harmony, justice, and fair trade. Separated by fate and a freak storm in the shifting landscape of the Great Plains, the companions find themselves on a path of strange prophecy.

The classic vampire story by Bram Stoker revolves around a struggle between good and evil, tradition and modernity, and lust versus chastity. The author didn’t invent vampires, but his novel has so captured the public’s imagination that he is rightly considered their popularizer. Listen and you will meet not only the Count himself, but heroes Jonathan Harker and Abraham Van Helsing, plus an array of madmen, psychiatrists, and fair maidens who cross paths with the fanged menace.

The war of Honce drags on, and the roads and seas are littered with bodies. To everyone's stunned disbelief, Yeslnik the Fool has tipped the war's scales in his favor. The reign of the newly self-appointed King Yeslnik is already distinguished as the most bloody and merciless in Honce history. Trapped, Dame Gwydre and Father Artolivan concoct a desperate plot to join forces with Laird Ethelbert, the lesser of two vicious evils. But Ethelbert's paid assassins slew Jameston Sequin and nearly did the same to Bransen.

Playing Gods: Altruism is Book Three of the series. When his virtuous opponent turns even more callous than he is, Vylis, the ostensible bad guy and playfully psychopathic audience favorite, begins to smell a rat in the walls and starts punching holes in his carefully constructed reality to see what’s really on the other side. The creator of that reality will not be pleased.

Crawling out of the ruins of a nuke-shattered America, a new reality shapes an unpredictable terrain of human resilience and unabated savagery. Born and bred in Deathlands, Ryan Cawdor has seen the pulsing of its dark heart. And he understands more than most that tomorrow is certain to arrive. But to see it means surviving today — any way he can.

The Gemini Cell has taken everything from former Navy SEAL James Schweitzer: his family, his career, his life. Schweitzer knows the only way he can stop running, the only way to keep his son safe, is to destroy the Cell once and for all. But out of control and fighting a secret war against the government it once served, the Cell will not be destroyed easily. Its Director has been sent to the far reaches of the subarctic to search for a secret that could allow the Cell to seize control of the country.

In the nuke-altered region of the Great Lakes, Ryan and his group face the spectrum — from the idyllic to the horrific — of a world reborn. Close to enclaves of peace and sanctuary, Deathlands' most distorted spawn of humanity, cannibals, spread terror. Against the battered shoreline of Lake Michigan, an encounter with an old friend leads to a battle to save Milwaukee from a force of deadly mutant interlopers — and to liberate one of their own.

It's hard to find a lesser man than Apropos: a con man, a knave, a scalawag...and those are his finer points. This time, Apropos winds up a stranger in a strange land called "Chinpan," populated by those who speak a different language and live by a code of honor, neither of which Apropos can comprehend. And yet it is here that he begins to examine his life and question whether he can aspire to become more than the hard-bitten cynic he's always been.