(Re)Viewed by James K. Moran: Benched

Friday, December 5, 2025

Benched

Sidelined, utterly benched, by a headcold all week, and feeling defeated, overwhelmed, reclusive. Wondering what the point if so many things is, and if my projects will see fruition. Withdrawn.

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About Fear Itself

Canadian author James K. Moran's debut collection of dark fiction offers fantasy, sci-fi, and horror shot through with hope and friendship. Inside, readers will discover sea serpents among the roiling waters of the St. Lawrence River under a dilapidated international bridge; a misguided bi mage negotiating with a demon he accidentally summoned into his dorm; a baby monitor issuing the voice of an inter-dimensional dark god; a couple in Picton County fleeing an ancient entity they cannot see directly that demands a blood sacrifice; queer ghosts haunting a British nightclub; two salty old ranch hands outside Lethbridge, Alberta, betting on who is a better shot in what may be the apocalypse; a shape-changing huckster seducing apathetic suburbanites; a gay rare-collectibles hunter hunted by a being moving between the Internet, film, and fact; a cat-fished giant marauding the backroads of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry counties; a gay wine shop manager discovering more than a dusty Moscato lurking in the musty basement; and a pterodactyl loose downtown.

About Town & Train

In a small Ontario town, seventeen-year-old John Daniel wakes by the railroad tracks with no recollection of how he got there. Something called him from his bed. Officer David Forester, a recent transfer from Toronto, struggles to fit into the local police force, despite resistance from established circles. Both soon suspect a more pervasive and menacing collusion occurring in town when an antique steam train arrives late in the night. At the phantasmal engine, a conductor promises the desperate locals escape from their town dying with so many closed stores and shattered dreams--but there is no denying what the stranger really brings is the stuff of nightmares.

"Though they traffic gleefully—sometimes ruthlessly—in the terrors that haunt his fraught characters’ dreams (and, all too often, realities)—James [K.] Moran’s stories inhabit a shadowland filled with sights and experiences worth having or remembering: the first, sleep-famished months of parenthood; the memory of lost friends; Canadian woods and waterscapes; the hunt for impossibly rare films, which is almost always more fun, and—in the case of these stories—definitely safer, than completing one of those hunts. These are characters not just clinging to but immersing in their lives. Not that that’s going to save them, of course..." —Glen Hirshberg, author of Infinity Dreams and the Motherless Children trilogy

(Re)Viewed by James K. Moran

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Friday, December 5, 2025

Benched

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