An Unsettled Score is a collection of short works by award-nominated author Christopher L. DelGuercio. This, his first collection, includes twenty twisted visions of speculative fiction spanning thrilling adventures on far flung, alien worlds and dystopian futurescapes, to mind-bending surrealities and nightmarish encounters with evil, to the bitingly satirical and overtly comical, these dark-hearted tales of monsters and mayhems are designed to entertain and delight, surprise and move. Ranging from poetic verse and flash fiction to novella-length narratives, in the rich tradition of such shining stars of the short form as Bradbury, Ellison, Gaiman, King, Martin, and Vonnegut, we can add an exciting new collection, An Unsettled Score.
If you’re in the mood for a hearty stew of stories to feed your cravings for the bizarre, the wondrous, and the macabre, take a stroll through the twisted visions of An Unsettled Score.
Praise includes:
"... a wild ride. These are dark and creepy tales, with a touch of surrealism, and more than a touch of twisted humor ... a master craftsman ... terse and distilled-not a word or sentence is wasted ... dialogue that rings true, regardless of character or setting ... fresh and surprising. What a rich and mysterious imagination this author has." --David G Moore, author, Kings Canyon, Stick People, and Harpies
"... a rich feast for the science fiction and horror fan. His stories, poems and longer fiction offer enough variety to satisfy everyone with a taste for the bizarre, the offbeat and the truly terrifying ... very reminiscent of the works of the famed science fiction/horror writer Ray Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles) and display the same sense of carefully twisted reality that the master writer is known for ... an intricate journey into an incredible world to reveal what it means to be human, as well as inhuman ... an engrossing dynamic that combines slowly unraveling details with throat-gripping action ... makes DelGuercio’s prose stand out from that of many other fantasy writers. For all those who favor horror and science fiction - and all areas in between or intermingled - the stories in this collection will open new pathways of frightening discovery.
--Megan Davidson, Author of Once a Rogue and The Thundering
"... a writer in the classical sense. His work is timeless. He doesn’t rely on any flavor-of-the-month tropes or ripped-from-the-headlines topics. Nearly any Christopher DelGuercio story that you read today will age well and be just as good five, ten years down the road ... the kind of stories that endure." --Linda Lowen, book reviewer for a leading industry magazine
Collection Includes:
Original Sin
Dark Men, Dark Machines
A Time Bully’s Report: August 13, 2046
Eden Succeeding, CNY Book-of-the-Year nominated novella
Man Farm
Shi’roc-Su
Béba Daio’s Inches
The Starway Pass
Marvels Of The Burger King Parking Lot
The Book of Judy
Every Good Stud Comes To His Senses
Metal With Me
The Arcadian Nights Of Rigel Kent
Farewell Luther
Two Cups
Copycat Jack
Unbreakable Yu
A Portrait of The Artist As a Stung Man
Heavy Is The Head
Tempus Servivit
Bonus: Intro by the author to each piece regarding seed conception, influences, and history.
Phase 5 Elements: Anthology 20, Transmutation 195, Other Worlds 57
Horror, science fiction, speculative fiction. Cosmology, galactic civilization, aliens, mutation, occult, reality manipulation, colonization, dystopia, humor, new weird.
Adult readers: violence; brief, mildly-graphic sexual situations; cursing; death; mutation; irreverence.
Christopher L. DelGuercio is a writer, teacher, editor, and lecturer from Syracuse, New York. He does this with the endless encouragement and understanding of his wife, Kathleen, as well as his son, Gabriel, and Shih Tzu, Jasper. He writes when it's quiet, in a farseeing place where he can stretch out and let his mojo rise. Mr. DelGuercio is a lifelong Central New Yorker and graduate of The State University of New York at Oswego. A creator and purveyor of speculative fiction for nearly a quarter-century, he began his writing career seated alone at a tiny desk in Liverpool, New York. Now he writes, seated alone, at a tiny desk in Clay, New York. In between there were stops at tiny desks in Watertown, New York; Cicero, New York; Baldwinsville, New York; and Fulton, New York. A lot of places, a lot of desks... and a lot of writing. In the realm of storytelling, he is a lover of all that is weird and wonderful, sublimely surreal, a fan of the fanciful and the phantasmagoric. If the tale is preternatural or mysterious or astonishing in nature, if it's well-written and blows your hair back, chances are good he can get into it.Mr. DelGuercio has authored many long and short stories alike, including the CNY Book-of-the-Year nominated novella, Eden Succeeding. His particular brand of "fantastic fiction" has appeared in print and on the internet for over fifteen years in many magazines, e-zines, serializations, anthologies, and podcasts. He's published many yarns since 2007, even more than contained in this collection, and produced many more recently, culminating in the publication of An Unsettled Score, which brings together twenty of his best past and present tales into one magnum opus. In addition to his years of writing, DelGuercio has served as editor for multiple novels from up-and-coming local authors, served as a fiction writing instructor at the YMCA's Downtown Writers Center since 2009 (where he also co-founded the Young Authors Academy), and has given numerous presentations on the writing process at CNY-area high schools. He is currently the faculty advisor for the Liverpool Literary Society. He can be contacted through his website, www.cdelguercio.com.
