All The Best Things In Life Are Free

 Another day with an e-ton of good freebies. There's a bit of free fiction at Smashwords, including the Midnight Surrender anthology, with stories by pro writers in it.  There are many great audio stories from the usual suspects, as well as a few new sites, including Protecting Project Pulp, which has a reading of one my favorite 1950s SF stories "A Game of Rat and Dragon."  For variety, some audio fiction that doesn't fit in the usual categories, such as "The Lives of Things" which includes a story performed by Leonard Nimoy.  And last but not least, some comics including the complete, or nearly complete Elfquest saga. in flash online viewing - my least favorite format, but in this case worth it. Back sometime this weekend.





Fiction 
At Smashwords:
     "A Slave To The Coin" by Debra Dunbar. Fantasy.
     "Ring of Destiny" by Eric Quinn Knowles.  YA Fantasy.
     "Midnight Surrender (A Paranormal Romance Anthology)" by Kris Kendall.
     "Mage Eye The Dracodonius Chronicles Beginnings" by Kristopher Adkinson. Fantasy.
     "Grinneth" by Chris Turner. Fantasy.
     "Matt Archer: Monster Summer" by Kendra C. Highley. YA. Adventure.
     "Defender of the Departed" by Jeff  Young. Steampunk.
     "Scavenger" by C M Weller. Science Fiction.
     "The Hamadryads Lament" by Jeremy Bloomfield. Fantasy Poem.


 Flash
At Daily Science Fiction: "My Mask, Humanity" by D. Thomas Minton
At Everyday Fiction: "Darker Ever After" by Milo James Fowler.
At Flashes in the Dark:"Love Story" by James Marlow.
At 365 Tomorrows: "Little House on Thuprair-E" by Desmond Hussey.
At Weirdyear: "With A Whimper" by Tina Anton.

Reviewed Free Fiction
At BestScienceFictionStories.com: "The Red Hell of Jupiter" by Paul Ernst.

 Audio
At Antipodean: The AntiSF Radio Show 171.  Speculative Fiction.
     the program that brings you weird short speculative stories along with weird new music
At Classic Tales Podcast: "Carmilla" part 1 of 4 by J. Sheridan Le Fanu. Horror.
    "But dreams come through stone walls, light up dark rooms, or darken light ones, and their persons make their exits and entrances as they please, and laugh at locksmiths" And so the story of Carmilla begins with a childish nightmare which proves to have been real.
At Escape Pod: "Techno-Rat" by  Brad Hafford. Science Fiction.
    “It’s a slight vibration, see. An ’ologram shift called glitching. The generator keeps the image dynamic, right. So it has to refresh at a specific rate.” He tapped his nose, a signal that he was imparting secrets. “Oy, there it goes again!”
At Fantastic Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs: Episode 18 of Tarzan of the Apes.
     "The mutineers of the Arrow, have abandoned Jane Porter and her companions on the coast of Africa in front of Tarzan’s cabin."
At Protecting Project Pulp: “A Voice From the Fog” by Ben Ames Williams. Adventure.
    “And then nothing more for a while—and then the noise of a man swimming, and a paddle rattling in a canoe, and after a bit the noise of a man paddling away.”
At Protecting Project Pulp: “The Game of Rat and Dragon” by Cordwainer Smith. Science Fiction.
    “Only partners could fight this deadliest of wars—and the one way to dissolve the partnership was to be personally dissolved!”
At Pseudopod: "Singing By The Fire" by Jamieson Ridenhour. Horror.
     directly inspired a decade of recurring snake nightmares and by a masterful little poem by North Carolina poet Robert Morgan, called “Mountain Bride” -but that near-decade of snake dreams underpins it like venom
At Tales to Terrify: "Do No Harm" by Tim Waggoner. Horror.
     “Do No Harm” was first published in “Zombiesque,” an anthology of zombie tales, DAW Books, 2011
At Audible: Legion by Brandon Sanderson. Details at SF Signal.


Comics
At Atomic Commie Comics: Kenton of the Star Patrol "Corsairs of the Coalsack" (1950).
At Elfquest.com: The entire Elfquest saga.
At Fury Comics: 333 Golden Age Sci-Fi and Horror comics, among others, for online viewing.


Other Genres
Audio at Crime City Central: "Fred Menace, Commie for Hire" by Steve Hockensmith. Noir.
Audio at The New Yorker: “The Lesson”  by Jessamyn West. Mainstream?
Audio at PRI: Selected Shorts - The Lives of Things
      In Steven Millhauser’s “In the Reign of Harad IV” a court miniaturist longs to create smaller and smaller worlds; Aimee Bender’s “Americca” pokes slyly at the land of plenty by giving one family too much; and in Abigail Thomas’s “Rocking Chair” a crumbling antique tests a marriage. The readers are Leonard Nimoy, Jane Levy, and Kate Burton.
Audio at Protecting Project Pulp: "The Eagle of Kuwahi" by C. Hall Thompso. Western.
     On came the greedy suckling pigs; those white men who’d do any wrong for a tiny pebble of yellow gold. 
Audio at Tales of Old: "A Small Death"  by D.J. Barber. Noir.
Audio at Tales of Old: "The Tempting of Tommy" by J.R. Lindermuth. Historic Fiction.