Barnaby the Wanderer: Being the astonishing adventures of a widow’s son journeying the Land of Saints, with a magic cat, a dark ghost and the map of a by Raymond ST. Elmo

Barnaby spends his days staring into the embers of the hearth. Mocked for being the village simpleton, the family fool. But today he’s off to wander the world, with a penny in his pocket, a sack lunch and a treasure map. On the road he’ll meet wonder and horror, friendship and betrayal, battle and blood, love, heart break and the occasional fiend from Infernum. Gathering as he goes, a band of misfits to join his unlikely treasure quest. Together they’ll journey across lands of ston

As I Was on my Way to Strawberry Fair by Raymond St. Elmo

SPFBO7

Two strangers aide one other on a dark country road; and vow to meet again at the local Renaissance Fair. To do so they must learn to see beyond their own masks. And united, to win past a host of fairy glamours, crazed role-players, angry jugglers, sinister bikers and the secret of the ancient charter of Strawberry Fair itself. I will find you at Strawberry Fair, I will win you a lion, a tiger, a bear. I will buy you ices, electronic devices And give you a kiss for finding me there. A romance in masks.

The Origin of Birds in the Footprints of Writing by Raymond St. Elmo

SPFBO6

Clarence St. Claire is a programmer who cherishes an orderly life. His motto: ‘work is important; people, not so much’. His determination to be The Most Serious Person on the Planet is threatened when he becomes haunted by a mysterious manuscript from his past: 300 pages of possibly random bird tracks. Risking his career and self-possession, St. Claire dares to pursue the manuscript against the opposition of hackers, the NSA, the ghosts of famous writers and doubts of his own sanity. Lost in a maze of bird-prints and their possible meanings, St. Claire determines to summon the late writer Jorge Louis Borges to help with the translation. He will dream Borges into existence, exactly as Borges wrote of doing. But this act stirs the opposition of a secret order of past writers, who may, possibly, have their own agenda. The duel between St. Claire’s reality and theirs leads to a final encounter in The Dark Library, before the dread conclave known as The Tribunal of Dreams. ‘Origins’ is a book about books, about magic realism and artificial intelligence, virtual reality and languages, and how sensible people wind up in strange situations by strangely sensible steps. It is built of the words books whisper to each other alone after the library has closed. It ends as it must: with the hero tossed into a pit by Edgar Alan Poe. Kidding. I mean, that last does happen but the final ending is the hero finding the answer and getting the girl, as well as his sanity back. Mostly back.