Running Wild Novella Anthology: Volume 8 - by Stephen J Kimber & Andrew MacQuarrie (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

​The Tragic Plight of E.G.: A Clinical Case Report
"The Tragic Plight of E.G.: A Clinical Case Report" is a day-by-day account of an ill-fated patient who is hospitalized for a mysterious illness. He finds himself in the care of a team of top-notch doctors, nurses, social workers, and therapists. Even so, the patient's condition continues to deteriorate, forcing this modern medical establishment to grapple with what it really means to "do no harm."

Sgt Katrina Dunn, a.k.a. Angela Parker & the Games They Play
Angela Parker, who isn't your average 17-year-old, but who is?, has her run of Alien Quest hijacked by a man who looks, curiously, like her Uncle Reggie. The Uncle Reggie clone invites Ange to play an innovative and sensorily immersive kind of game, one that involves adopting an avatar role where you become someone frighteningly like yourself in a world that rapidly goes crazy. As Ashlie Sweet, Angela Parker finds herself fighting villains that look uncommonly like today's politicians in a small U.S. town. Everything apparently normal in this small town rapidly goes belly up: there are race riots, detention-centers, murder, and that's just in the first week.

What's more - with her game based boyfriend Norman Mené - she discovers they're in a game within a game and that they (their real theys back in Nottingham U.K. and Sydney, Australia and all the other places where the game players come from) are being data mined. The stakes aren't just in winning or losing a game. Maybe the fate of the free world hangs in the balance.

Talk about doing a girl's head in.

About the Author

Stephen J Kimber is an Australian author and teacher. He has co-authored a number of educational texts in English, History and Geography for John Wiley & Sons (Jacaranda), Nelson Thomson (CEngage), and others. He's the author of the YA novella, 'Sex and Drugs and Rock N Roll -- Or the cooling of Nathan Pearson', three plays, many short stories, and non-fiction pieces on motorcycling, fishing and the craft of writing. His work has appeared in magazines such as Imago, Idiom 123, Carve, Social Alternatives, Australian Angler, Two Wheels and others. He grew up in New Guinea, and has lived and worked in the UK and Indonesia. He currently lives with his wife, Linda, in rural Queensland, Australia, and shares the house with a husky named Syah and a cat named by his daughter after Childish Gambino. There are also lots of chooks (chickens); not in the house, though.

Andrew MacQuarrie is a reader, a writer, a veteran, and (allegedly) a doctor. Originally from Nova Scotia, he now calls Los Angeles home after a couple dozen formative years in Tennessee, the District of Columbia, and a brief sojourn in the US Air Force. When he isn't writing, Andrew can be found on hold with health insurance companies or filling out Prior Authorization paperwork. He has previously published short fiction in The Montreal Review, The Write Launch, Pennsylvania English, The Line Literary Review, and On the Premises, and has two different novel manuscripts in his back pocket ready to find a home if he ever makes time to sit down and edit them. Andrew can be followed on Twitter @haemo_goblin.