Bio: Marcia Hanson lives in Saint Clair, Michigan, observing Canada out her front window. Her roommate, a cockatiel named Chee Chee, helps her with all her writing, sitting on her shoulder and critiquing. She's webmaster of Stories and More web site and Editor of Stories Short and Long Email Ezine. She wrote technical manuals and designed and wrote class materials for the robotics and machine communications specialties for fourteen years; now she's turning her keyboard toward fiction.

If it's called evil, is it necessarily malevolent and that called sacred necessarily benevolent? Doesn't it depend on who's designating evil and sacred? "Gather, Darkness!" addresses these and other issues including loyalty, duty, fear, and other human foibles. In a planetary struggle for freedom from oppression, the rebels use the strategy of the establishment -- they use science to make what appears to be religious phenomena. The plot is complex and well paced and the characters dimensional -- I felt sympathy even for the worst villain, and frustration with a few heroes of the cause. I highly recommend this novel. It's good literature and good science fiction.

Do you like Horror stories? I enjoy a good shiver down my spine, but shy away from nausea producing gore. If that's how you feel, try The Well by Mike Sirota. It takes you from the early settlers of Fire Valley to the present, and from American society to the mystical world of the Modoc Indians. The Modocs called the valley *Sayka loluk*. They knew about *monadalkni*, so they watched and hoped to be prepared when they were needed. This is the story of a family caught in a seemingly irreversible nightmare. The Lowells, Greg and Janet, and their children, Mark and Allison, are going on a vacation to Greg's birth place. Greg was taken from the valley when he was an infant, so he has no acquaintances to visit or childhood memories to share. So why did he feel compelled to visit here -- and why wouldn't his parents ever speak of what occurred when they lived in the valley? You see, Gred Lowell's mother was a Padgett. His great-grandparents were Wallace and Rebecca Padgett, the Padgett family that was among the first settlers in Fire Valley -- during the time of the Fire Valley Massacre. I recommend this ebook to anyone who enjoys Horror stories. I'll read it again and again.