Thirty-One Free Stories, and One of Them Is Mine
A myths, legends, and fairy tales giveaway, running through August 31.
Myths survive because nobody ever really manages to finish them. Someone always turns up like a thousand years later, decides the monster had a point, and writes the whole thing again.
That impulse is the entire reason this promo exists.
For the month of August, my short story The Stones in the Swamp is part of a BookFunnel giveaway with thirty other authors doing the same thing from thirty different angles. Norse gods behaving like roommates. Grimm fairy tales with a body count. Arthurian court intrigue. Beowulf, told by Grendel.
All free, all in one place. Which…is the problem.
Thirty-one free stories feels like a homework assignment! So I downloaded eight of them and read far enough in to have an opinion.
Three earned it. Keep scrolling to see my ramblings below.
Or, take the whole shelf for yourself →
First, mine (b/c we both knew this was coming)
The Stones in the Swamp — Medusa is tired. Tired of dating apps, tired of men who can’t stop talking about their penthouses, tired of being brought back to life by a goddess who never explains herself. The snakes haven’t gone anywhere and neither has her appetite.
Then her sisters vanish from their apartment in Washington D.C., and she has to go looking through a city absolutely stocked with people who deserve what’s coming to them.
Free, darkly funny, and set in the same world as my novel The Art of Killing Gods.
If you’ve been here for the modern myths, start with this one. Obviously I would say that.
Read it here · Send it to your e-reader
The three
1. Grendel & Beowulf — C. Gockel
A grandmother dies, comes back a vampire, and names herself after the most famous monster in English literature so she’ll never forget what she is now. The book opens with her running for her life through a Midwestern forest, generously talking herself out of resenting the man hunting her. “He’s only trying to kill me,” she says, as if weighing a coworker’s flaws.
Then you learn the boy chasing her was raised from birth to do exactly this, and his name is Beowulf.
What sold me is that the comedy and the grief share a paragraph without either one flinching. She’s running, she’s joking, and underneath it she’s watching the faces of her dead husband and children go soft and undefined in her memory, and wondering how long before there’s nothing left of them to lose. That’s a hard trick and Gockel does it in chapter one.
2. In the Day of the Flood — Stephen Thomas
A cave-priestess breaks sacred law to save an abandoned newborn. Meanwhile the Black Sea is preparing to break its stone wall and drown the world she did it in.
This is the literary one. Think Stone Age Anatolia with an invented language that never preens about itself and village elders negotiating over cattle and obsidian tools while the water rises behind them. An old woman explains that she’s too old to save everyone. And you know: fair. She intends to save what she can, of both people and memory, and the book simply lets that sit there.
It’s the most patient book in the promo and the least interested in impressing you. If your reading style is more restraint than fireworks, this is the one I’d hand you first.
3. Huntress — Stephanie Flint
Snow White relocated to a corporate dystopia, where the poisoned apple is an acid attack and the queen is a company president.
The premise is fun. The execution is better, and for a reason that’s easy to miss: the narrator has completely absorbed her employer’s morality. She explains, patiently and without malice, that people who refuse augmentation die younger and that this is their own fault. She calls the president dear. She is not a villain and she is not stupid. She’s been raised inside a system that gave her a body, a purpose, and a vocabulary, and she is using all three exactly as designed.
It’s giving fairy tale as org chart.
Two more, briefly:
Wolves: I Bring the Fire by C. Gockel is the funniest thing here. Loki waking in a cell with no hangover and no memory of the crime, cross-cut with a vet student washing roadkill off a small unfortunate dog named Fenrir.
The Shadow and the Scream by Rebecca L. Fearnley gives its heroine a rage she can’t govern in the literal shape of a snake she refuses to disown. It’s a three-chapter sample and it opens on domestic abuse, which it tells you up front.
The rest of the shelf
I sampled these lightly or not at all (read: I gotta get back to writing). But free is free, so follow your own nose:
Norse, and the old north
Berserk, Dragonfly, Gate of Air — Resa Nelson (a dragonslayer world built on Norse contact with Native America)
An I Bring the Fire Short Story, Gods & Mortals — C. Gockel
Fairy tales in costume
Wolves and Daggers — Melanie Karsak (Red Riding Hood as Queen Victoria’s werewolf hunter; brisk, banter-forward & steampunk)
An Angel of Blizzards — Rowan MacNeill (Beauty and the Beast crossed with Sleeping Beauty, circa 1800s in the Carpathian foothills)
The Girl Who Woke the Moon — Z. Bennett Lorimer
Fae and folklore
Folkloric Fae — Karenza Grant (Cornish fae, a patisserie counter, a life starting to crack)
Saved by Fae — Layla K Wood
The Clouds, from Afar: A Tale of Ciel — Z. Bennett Lorimer
Legend, court, and quest
Born of No Man — Tracy Cooper-Posey (Roman Britain, a woman guarding the secret of Merlin’s birth; historical romance, well made on those terms)
The Dragon Slayers — Andrzej Gieralt (a heist, except the vault is a dragon and the dragons run the government)
Tenebroso: The Midnight Rider — Tony Fuentes & C.S. Kading (a supernatural executioner marks corrupt men on moonless nights while the law hunts him.)
Gods and monsters in the modern city
Urban Mythic | Take My Monsters | Magic After Midnight — C. Gockel
Where Mercy Bleeds — Amity Myers
The Storm Within, Witchfire Covenant — Lisa Llamrei
Elsewhere entirely
Moon Over Marisol: The Eight of Ockham — Dennis Santaniello (cozy fantasy, tired witch, sarcastic cat)
Welcome to Honing Camp — Evaline Allred
The Vortex Sphere — Orlando D. Nova
Magic Tricks for Cheese Mix — Zachary Jeffries
The fine print, said plainly
This is a newsletter promo. Most of these books are free in exchange for an email address, which is how indie authors find readers when there’s no marketing department standing behind us.
My advice → take what you want and unsubscribe from what doesn’t fit.
No one is harmed in the process, least of all the gods.
Live through August 31, 2026.
And straight to mine ofc: The Stones in the Swamp
