BUY THIS RIGHT NOW!

 

Welcome to the premiere only issue of Stupefying Stories’ experimental testbed publication, SHOWCASE. Edited by award-winning author BRUCE BETHKE, here for your reading pleasure are four sparkling short stories that demonstrate just what our special brand of fantastic fiction is all about, packaged together at a special bargain price. Featuring:

• THE RIVER OF TIME JOINS THE SEA, by Probert Dean
• THE MANDALA DOORS OF HAFSHAMN SYNIAD, by Jeff Suwak
• THE CARPETBAGGERS BALL, by Karl Dandenell
• FINDING SPRING, by Sipora Coffelt

Buy it today, because as of February 28th, it goes out of print forever!

_____________

Sigh. SHOWCASE has always been a pet project of mine, albeit a somewhat neglected pet with matted fur and nails that desperately need to be trimmed. As Jimi Plays Dead demonstrates, I have always been a fan of the idea of putting short fiction out in “hit single” and “EP” packages, because that’s how I learned to love music: by trying lots of artists, in media priced to fit a teenager’s budget, and by listening to everything, until I found the styles and recording artists I wanted to focus in on.

Apparently no one else likes that idea, though.

SHOWCASE began life in 2013 as a weekly webzine, which published a lot of great content but in a format that looked terrible on cell phones and didn’t draw in many new readers. It also had the added disadvantage of being coupled with the Stupefying Stories online community bulletin board project, which quickly became a spambot nightmare and had to be shut down. To my surprise the SHOWCASE story index still exists, though, and if you have some time to spare you might want to take a look at the story index and see who we were publishing ten years ago, and maybe even read a few of their stories.

> LINK to the original SHOWCASE story index 

In 2014 we migrated SHOWCASE to our new “crevasse” site, so named because stories fell into it and were never seen again. Again, there is something resembling an index, and you might enjoy taking a look at it before it goes away.

> LINK to the crevasse version of SHOWCASE

Later in 2014 I finally broke down and spent the money to develop a full and proper WordPress site, and in that form SHOWCASE ran from October 2014 to June 2017, with a half-hearted attempt at reviving it in 2019. While we published a lot of good stories there, in a really good-looking format, once again, the comments section became a spambot and moderation nightmare and the very existence of the site seemed to generate a lot of confusion. Was Stupefying Stories a magazine, a webzine, or what? 

> LINK to the WordPress version of SHOWCASE

Eventually the only thing to do that seemed to make sense was to shut down the WordPress site and consolidate the archive content on this site, StupefyingStories.com, while spinning off SHOWCASE as an EP format magazine. That plan got as far as producing SHOWCASE #1 before 2019 fell on us like a ton of bricks.

And now it’s reached the end of contract life and is due to go out of print at the end of the month. So take a look at SHOWCASE #1, will you? It’s just 99¢ to buy, or free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers. And right about this time of year, I always enjoy re-reading “Finding Spring,” by Sipora Coffelt. Maybe you will too.

Thanks,
~brb