“Under the Blood-Red Maple” first appeared in Pulphouse Fiction Magazine, a publication dedicated to bringing readers the cutting edge in modern short fiction. My story shared space in that issue with some of today’s best contemporary authors—Kevin J. Anderson, Mike Resnick, David H. Hendrickson, Annie Reed, Robert Jeschonek, and Kristine Kathryn Rusch, to name a few. What an honor that was.
In this story of broken dreams and tortured conscience, you may feel echoes of Poe’s masterpiece, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” or Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Nothing so magnificent as the enduring stories those masters created for readers worldwide, but tiny echoes, nevertheless.
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They call it a green room, but the décor leaned toward beige and rusty orange, accented with splashe
