Widow’s Dozen

Things are falling apart in upstate New York’s Beardon County. Mysterious disappearances. Uncanny antigravity pockets. Repeat visitors from “beyond.” New York City’s not much better. Endless summer. An alarming uptick in the mortalities and syndromes. Open season for rabid foragers.

Widow’s Dozen, Marek Waldorf’s mind bending, genre blending short story collection, offers eleven coruscating stories from a past that never was to a future too late to forestall. Subtle lives – nostalgia lit, lovingly textured – bridge the currents in catastrophe from impossible to remote to inevitable.

A captivating vision of America’s dismembered states – how we got here, where we’re going – that is less science-fiction than future shock treatment.

• "Marek Waldorf’s deeply original stories inhabit the reader like demons who won’t be exorcized. He implants alternative realities inside ordinary ones and takes them for granted–as do his characters. If the purpose of art is to make the world strange again, this is brilliant art. And the writing is beautiful, the shapes of the sentences, the quick back and forth movements of attention, the pitch-perfect diction, the inventiveness. Readers will be challenged–and rewarded." —John Vernon


• "In Widow's Dozen, Waldorf achieves something of a fiction trifecta: unexpected stories told in inventive language about unique and interesting characters. The stories take liberally from genres like suspense and sci-fi, but to categorize them seems beside the point: it's just good fiction. Leave your preconceptions behind and pick up the book." — Shya Scanlon


• "This is a loosely thematically unified collection that ranges from mundane to science fiction to fantasy to magic realism. The style varies slightly at times but generally involves very long paragraphs which don't seem so long because of the cleanness of the prose … a handsomely done little book … I hope to see more of this author, and this imprint, in the future." —Don D’Ammassa (at Critical Mass)


• "Widow's Dozen .... ornery to the last, keeping the characters center-stage in even its most extravagant flights of fancy; and ultimately remaining as incomplete as it always promised. Overall, Widow's Dozen is a difficult book to pin down. Its prose is often dense, its eye forever looking to one side of its subject; with the result that it can be ... elusive. Yet there's something in that very elusiveness, the sense of a world transformed and transforming, that wouldn't quite be the same if we could see it clearly. We need the gaps, after all." — David Hebblethwaite (at Strange Horizon)