Five poems wrestling with the Big Picture; the meaning of life and death, the aching transition-cradle to grave, night to day, blossom to decay. Figments with egos. Zip.

The Fartian Chronicles: satire. The Other Foot: anti-correctness propaganda. Elaine: a sketch for the lovelorn. A Deeper Cut, and The Other Side: horror mini-dramas. The Book Of Ron: You guessed it.

A feast for readers with warped imaginations and high expectations. A haunted butchering under a full West Virginian moon. A vigilante superhero with a penchant for torture and due pontification. A tender tale of senior abuse and love's salvation. And more. Nothing shallow here, nothing trite. No lifeguards on duty, no buddies permitted, no water wings allowed.

Microcosmia pursues offbeat protagonist Cristian Vane, an emotionally troubled young liberal who's just come into the staggering Vane fortune. With his newfound wealth and responsibility, Vane sets out to put his cosseted life back together, but a series of gut-wrenching misadventures in the real world produce a complete nervous breakdown. The young heir surfaces with a fresh perspective: wealth is wasted on the wealthy; his bequest is a golden opportunity to do something magnificent in a heartless world. Sickened by a documentary featuring scammed Ethiopian famine victims, he sets off for Africa to build his utopia. Though Vane's misplaced magnanimity results in East-West friction and internal rivalries, he still manages to create his magnum opus, even as cutthroat pirates, a vile Eritrean colonel, and a doomed affair with a gorgeous, control-freak journalist push him over the edge. The tale concludes with an overwhelming assault by the Eritrean Army during the mother of all desert locust plagues.

A shadow haunts the sunny streets of Venice Beach, working his way through all the women and valuables he can handle. So far he's been lucky. But too much of a good thing makes a man careless; he gets sloppy, he lets down his guard. From bizarre arrest to explosive conclusion, Freak is a wild rollercoaster of a ride, featuring impossible escapes, a dizzying manhunt, and a gothic mini-movie of a courtroom confession, wherein you'll meet the real Nicolas Vilenov, slippery opportunist and soulless predator, bogeyman of a thousand suppressed dreams.

Kevin Mikolajczyk, a slow and loveless Santa Monica teenager, ran away from home in 1967 to meet Haight-Ashbury's burgeoning Summer of Love. Along the way he lost his friends, his virginity, and his focus. Of greater importance, he lost his heart to a pretty, manipulative psychopath who used, abused, and dumped him at the first opportunity. Kevin, a profound epileptic, reached the fabled City and, after surfacing from a series of grand mals, was robbed, raped, and brutalized prior to being shanghaied by a busload of marauding Jesus Freaks. A must-read for all liberals, truth seekers, and species apologists in general.

Signature is a futuristic sci-fi adventure recounting the political upheaval, social collapse, and revisionist reconstruction of 22nd Century Western civilization, as witnessed by a group of doomed intellectuals through a series of decoded holographic events. There's a price to knowing too much. What these men learn will impel them through a plague-ridden hell of madness, barbarism, and duplicity, in a world that may or may not be a multi-layered illusion.