Thirty-One Free Stories, and One of Them Is Mine
A mythic fiction 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.
So it shouldn’t be a surprise to you that this promo exists.
For all of August, my short story The Stones in the Swamp is part of a BookFunnel giveaway with thirty other authors doing the same thing. Except we’re all approaching it from thirty different angles. We got Norse gods behaving like roommates, Grimm fairy tales that are nothing like Disney, some Arthurian court intrigue, and even Beowulf, told by Grendel.
All free! 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, so keep scrolling to see my ramblings below.
Or, take a peek at the whole shelf for yourself →
First, mine (b/c we both knew this was coming)
The Stones in the Swamp — Medusa is tired (like the rest of us). Tired of dating apps and tired of men obsessed with power. Mostly, she’s tired of being brought back to life by a goddess who never explains herself. The snakes haven’t gone anywhere. Neither has her appetite.
Then her sisters vanish from their apartment in Washington, D.C., and she has to go searching through a city 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 stuck around here for the modern myths, start with this one.
Read it here · Send it to your e-reader
The three
1. Grendel & Beowulf — C. Gockel
A grandmother dies and comes back a vampire. She names herself Grendel on purpose, after the borderland-haunter who drank the blood of warriors, 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 reasons.
She’s being modest. That hunter does not survive the chapter.
So the order that sent him sends someone better, a man handed to the temple at seven and raised into a weapon. His name? Beowulf.
What sold me is that the comedy and the grief occupy the same space 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, wondering how long before there’s nothing left of them to lose. That’s a hard trick and Gockel does it well throughout the book.
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 what: fair. She intends to save what she can, people and memories, and the book simply lets that sit there.
It’s the most patient book in the promo and the least interested in trying to impress you. I mean that in the sense of if you prefer restraint over fireworks, this is a great one to munch on.
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 (a huntress working for the president) 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 even calls the president dear.
It’s all giving fairy tale as an org chart.
Two more (we love some honorable mentions):
Wolves: I Bring the Fire by C. Gockel is the funniest thing here. Loki wakes in a cell with a knot on his skull and no memory of what he’s accused of. Of course, Thor won't say and won’t stop feeling guilty about it either. Then you cross-cut that with a vet student washing roadkill off a small, unfortunate dog named Fenrir, and the two collide in a way that’s very funny and, eventually, not.
The Shadow and the Scream by Rebecca L. Fearnley gives its heroine a rage she can’t govern in the 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 Norse-inspired fantasy saga where warriors, dragons, and clashing ancient cultures fight for survival in a magic-ravaged world.)
Fairy tales in costume
Wolves and Daggers — Melanie Karsak (Red Riding Hood as Queen Victoria’s werewolf hunter; brisk read with lots of banter & 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
Saved by Fae — Layla K Wood
The Clouds, from Afar: A Tale of Ciel — Z. Bennett Lorimer
Legend, court, & quest
Born of No Man — Tracy Cooper-Posey (a woman guarding the secret of Merlin’s birth)
The Dragon Slayers — Andrzej Gieralt (A heist story. 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
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 tha gods.
Live through August 31, 2026.
And straight to mine ofc: The Stones in the Swamp
