"Just Deserts"

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These ten stories, carefully selected from scores of stories written over Tim Enoch’s twenty-year career, deliver Just Deserts. The word “deserts” that can mean wasteland, a place of banishment—punishment—is pronounced as desserts, the best thing you can get. "Just" can mean “only”, but it can also mean rightful. So, if you walk into a shop known by this name, thinking you’ll get a parfait, you’ll get quite a surprise instead. These two novellas and eight short stories carry the title theme. Some subtly, but some in the most painfully—horrifically—blatant ways. Novellas: Tubes - Dylan's parents have lost their jobs and thrown the last of their resources into the defunct Playland Pizza. When Dylan is given the task of finding the source of the bad odor in the play equipment, he comes nose to nose with a very angry young ghost. The Server - Shelley is an ambitious and talented young designer working at a busy Chicago ad agency at the dawn of Web 2.0and internet dating. She's single and would like to meet someone, but competing with the guys in the office makes it hard to have time for dating. She downloads the trial version of a dating app and finds it frighteningly capable of knocking out the competition. Short Stories For Now, You Are Safe opens the collection with a serial killer building his lair The Kiln closes out with the up-close and personal demonstration of him putting it to use. Dogfood takes us to a werewolf cage fight. The Scent is a sentient, predatory, and fatal odor. Deja View takes us through a local wormhole. Point of View gives the concept a twist. The Things Her Things is a tale of monstrous materialism. and, finally, Calling the Shots shows why an incompetent loser should never be put in charge of a hotline to Hell.