The Jupiter Man (Unique Tales, Book 1) by Nick Dorsey

Release date: July 1, 2018

Subgenre: Superheroes, Crime fiction

About The Jupiter Man:

 

Let’s say you’ve just gotten out of prison, and your old boss wants to rehire you. Sounds great! But what if your old boss is the Frozen Avenger? His last job was the attempted kidnapping of an acclaimed astrophysicist in order reinstate Pluto as a full-fledged planet, and now he wants you to help him steal a set of precious meteorites to fund his obsession. Still sound great?

And what if an elite team of superheroes forces you to take the job and work for them as a double agent? Do these superheroes want to put away criminals, or are they just looking for a way to get these meteorites for their own mysterious purposes? Maybe these superheroes aren’t heroes after all.

What if all of the Frozen Avenger’s old goons are turning up murdered and it looks like you might be next? What if sinister corporations are taking an interest in your work history, and you’ve got a seductive cat woman, whiskers and everything, knocking on your door at all hours?

What are you going to do?

If you’re Zach Hernandez, professional henchman, you better forget about the dream of getting a normal job, having a normal life. You better learn not to follow orders. Then you do what it takes to stay alive.

 

Excerpt:

 

The Frozen Avenger was tall, though not as tall as Zach, and all decked out in black and silver gear. Like a kid had thrown on a medieval suit of armor and hot glued hoses and servos and gears onto the whole thing at random. His hands were empty, but there was a holster at his hip with some sort of gun there. It was big and silver, with a vacuum hose running from the grip to a big metal backpack strapped to the guy’s back. He had a ponytail and mustache. Sharp green eyes looked down at Saturn as he did his best to look imposing.

“I am the Frozen Avenger. Please. Forgive me for being late.” His voice ruined it, high and reedy with a hint of country twang the guy couldn’t quite hide. The Frozen Avenger’s armor whirred and chunked as he walked, sounding like an old CD player about to give out. “Thank you all for coming. We are about to be bold. We are about to be groundbreaking. What we are going to do will change the face of our Solar System.”

Of course. Unique criminals didn’t just want to knock over banks like normal gangs. Their jobs had ambition.

Gregor sighed, leaned over to Zach and said, “I bet five bucks we’re going to have to wear spandex for this job.”

 

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About Nick Dorsey: 

I was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. After a stint at Louisiana State University, I moved all over the country and I worked odd jobs. These included, but are not limited to: barista, copywriter, house painter, bicycle assemblyman at Toys R Us, carpenter’s assistant rebuilding houses damaged during Hurricane Katrina, writing instructor, indie film screenwriter, and salesman at an art gallery. You know those little beads that make up braille words set into plastic signs in office buildings? For a while, I was the guy who stuck those beads into the plastic. Yeah. They still don’t have robots for that. I grew up reading Kurt Vonnegut and Elmore Leonard, Robert Heinlein and Newton Thornburg. I live in New Orleans with too many dogs. Bleeding Levee Blues is my first novel.

 

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Glitch (Glitch, Book 1) by Victor Deckard

Release date: June 19, 2018

Subgenre: LitRPG, Post-apocalyptic 

About Glitch:

 

 Max, a rather plain guy, finds himself inside a post-apocalyptic survival roleplaying videogame. He has no idea how he has ended up in the virtual reality or how to quit it. He has no choice but to play the game.

Shortly afterward, he learns that the game is quite harsh and cruel. Max finds out that in order to survive he has to scavenge, gather various resources, craft warm clothes and armor, upgrade weapons and vehicles, and so on.

Moreover, the entire game world is a full-on PvP zone. So Max has to not only fight brutal mutants but also protect himself against gamers who have teamed up in order to ratchet up their chances of survival as well as against high-leveled players who take great pleasure in murdering newbies.

And all the while Max has been trying to find out what has befallen him, how he has gotten in the videogame, and whether or not there is any chance of exiting the game. Bit by bit he gleans more and more information about the game. He finds out that the game is full of bugs. Later on he also learns that he himself is some kind of a glitch. Unlike all the other players, he feels pain in the game and can interact with some game objects while all the other players cannot…

 

Excerpt:

 

I woke up with a start. Brilliant light assaulted my eyes at once. I involuntarily closed them again. After a few moments, I gingerly raised my eyelids. As light was gradually getting fainter, my surroundings were getting more visible.

          On looking around, I found myself in some vertical container. In front of me was a convex transparent full-length door that let me see only a little of the room through it. I got as close to the door as cramped confines of the container allowed me to do so, almost flattening my nose against the cold surface, and set about pounding on the door with my hand clenched into the fist.

          “Is anybody there?” I shouted in hoarse voice. “Let me out!”

          Nobody answered and no one came to my aid. It seemed that this room as well as any adjacent ones were altogether devoid of any occupants.

          I felt a wave of panic wash over my body.

          “How do I get outta here?” I mumbled to myself.

          The thought had barely crossed my mind when a hissing sound filled the air. Then the door drew forward a few inches away from me and flipped open like the door of a cabinet. 

          I stepped out of the container and the frigid floor instantly made me constantly shift my weight from one foot to the other. Only then, having cast my gaze downward, did I realize I had almost no clothes on. I wore only a pair of close-fitting underpants.

          I quickly looked around to find myself in an elongated and rather spacious room. It was brightly illuminated, yet I didn’t notice any sources of light. Containers ran the length of the two walls. They bore resemblance to cryogenic pods from sci-fi flicks. Unlike the pod I’d just climbed out, the others were closed tight, although all of them were empty.

          Numerous questions were preying on my mind. What was happening? How had I gotten in here? And what was this place, anyway?

          To make sure my memory served me correctly I commenced going over various facts about my life. So I went by Max. Twenty years old. Have been studying at Technological University of Michigan. Loved, or more specifically, totally adored sci-fi. Well, my memory seemed to be okay. I decided to turn my attention toward the most recent events in my life.

          I had suffered from excruciating headaches a few days prior. Decided to have my head X-rayed for any brain injures. And something happened when I arrived at the city clinic. I was lying on a bed, patiently waiting for the X-ray generator to kick in. Then brilliant light blazed and after that my world went dark. On regaining consciousness, I found myself in this weird place.

Did I suffer from memory loss? Had something happened after my visiting the clinic? I might have been abducted and moved over to this place. But why didn’t I have any memories of my leaving the clinic? Maybe I had been brained with some heavy bludgeon? I brought my right hand up to my head and felt it gingerly. Still, I didn’t find any bumps, lacerations, or welts. So I hadn’t been given a smack on my head. So why didn’t I remember anything about my having gotten in this place?

 

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About Victor Deckard: 

 

Victor Deckard has become an avid reader in his childhood and since then has a craving for writing fiction. He enjoys reading keeping-you-on-the-edge-of-your-chair thrillers filled with action and spiced up with sci-fi or fantasy themes. His all-time favorite authors are Raymond Chandler, Philip K. Dick, and H.P. Lovecraft.

Victor Deckard’s first fiction story is called Outbreak. It is an action-packed urban-fantasy novella with some horror themes.  Now he's working on his survival post-apocalyptic LitRPG series called Glitch.

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Pendulum Heroes (Pendulum Heroes. Book 1) by James Beamon

 Release date: June 10, 2018

Subgenre: YA Fantasy, LitRPG

About Pendulum Heroes:

 

Melvin Morrow has become a barbarian warrior maiden. Will he be able to escape this new, dangerous world and the chainmail bikini he foolishly chose as his armor or will he and his friends be stuck living their lives as their game avatars?

Melvin's a teenage boy not used to being ogled or the real world consequences of wearing a steel bikini. But the real world has shifted... him, his friends Jason and Rich, and his big brother Mike are stuck in character, in a place where danger doesn't lurk because it prefers to boldly stride out in the open.

Mages import game players like Melvin via the Rift Pendulum. The reason: the work's suicidal and pendulum heroes are insanely powerful. Usually. Melvin and his friends can be, too, if they're in the right emotional state to trigger into character. Melvin's a one-man, uh, one warrior maiden army when he's angry but anger's hard to find with all that mortal danger striding around everywhere.

The road back home's at the end of a suicidal quest. Melvin better find something to rage about... because being genre-savvy only gets you so far.

Pendulum Heroes, James Beamon's debut novel, is an adrenaline fueled adventure for anyone who's spent a little too much time on the character creation screen instead of playing the game, those of us who have thought just how godmode we'd be with mage power, but mostly it's for all of us who have wondered who the heck installs a portal to another world in a wardrobe. Fans of Ernest Cline and Scott Meyer better be prepared to fall in love with a new series..

Excerpt:

 

Melvin Morrow experienced panic for the first time because of a forest.

Alarm was Mr. Burney dropping pop quizzes on his desk as if algebra problems had cred in the streets while stress was finding Sophia Watkins standing behind him in the lunch line. Alarm, stress, they weren't even on the same plate as panic, which Melvin handled with virginal ineptitude. He felt near dizzy as his stomach rose and his heart dropped while his blood surged with roller coaster speed. His mouth, suddenly extra dry, tasted like salt.

The forest was his living room. That's to say, Melvin was just in his living room. Now there was no television, no coffee table, no game. There were no walls. It was all gone, replaced in a blink with trees that towered above him, a dense and impenetrable forest.

He had never seen trees loom but apparently that's what trees do when you allow them to congregate in groups of more than a dozen. Melvin wasn't that big into the outdoors, considering Dad would make him cut the grass every Saturday no matter how little it grew, but it wasn't like he was afraid of the outside. This, however, was two extra servings of outside. These pine and cedar trees stretched as far as the eye could see. Even with the sun shining brightly overhead, he couldn't see very far into the shadowy depths of the forest, but he was sure there were no stores on the other side, just trees and more trees. Melvin looked down at himself, a “check to see if you're a ghost, are you still alive?” kind of moment, which is when he discovered he was both quite substantial and had women's breasts.

He couldn't entertain the illusion that he was a dude that had somehow grown extremely obese. The breasts were in a chain mail bikini top and outside of a leather strap across his chest, chainmail bikini bottoms that matched the top and calf-high brown leather boots, he wasn't wearing anything else.

His skin was two shades darker than the russet potato color he had always known and there were very few places for fat to hide. Everything he saw looking down screamed woman. He, Melvin, was no longer a he.  The steel bikini glinted in the sunlight. His chest heaved in sync with his panicked breathing, which only served to mortify him more.

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About James Beamon:

James Beamon is a science fiction and fantasy author whose short stories have appeared in places such as Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine, Apex, Lightspeed and Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show. He spent twelve years in the Air Force, deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, and is in possession of the perfect buffalo wings recipe that he learned from carnies. He lives in Virginia with his wife, son and attack cat. Currently he's cutting back on the addictive habit of penning short stories to focus on writing books. Pendulum Heroes is his debut novel.

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