Saturday, July 1, 2023

Short Story Time: Scapegoat

Welcome to a new feature on the blog: Short Story Time. As some of you may know, my alter ego, Alan Draven, has been writing fiction for over seventeen years. I’ve written mainly in the horror and thriller genres, and am now focusing on Sword & Sorcery with my ongoing Amok tales. Back in 2018, leading up to the publication of my then-upcoming thriller Oblique, penned under the pseudonym Neal Vandar (an anagram of Alan Draven), I had decided to republish all my short stories for free as well as a couple of my novellas. The links to those tales have long disappeared so I figured it was time to bring them back and introduce them to new readers. Starting today, I’ll upload one of my short stories or novellas on the first Saturday of every month as a free PDF. It will lead to the publication of the collected Amok tales as a print/Kindle book around November or December 2024.

To get the ball rolling, since we’re in the middle of baseball season, why not start with the only short story I wrote as Neal Vandar back in 2018 titled “Scapegoat.” It’s a baseball tale but I promise you, even if you don’t care for baseball, you’re bound to get a kick out of it. It’s a fantasy tale that deals with the Curse of the Cubs, the love of baseball, some time travel, and a whole lot of nostalgia. It’s 26 pages long so you can read it in one sitting. You can download it right here. If you enjoy this tale, drop me a line here or on Twitter to let me know; I always love to hear from my readers. You can come back here on August 5th for another free story, and in the meantime, you can swing by anytime to read about metal/doom music, audiobooks of all kinds, and some Sword & Sorcery talk. Happy reading! 

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