Well, it’s the time of the year when love blooms, so to celebrate Valentine’s Day, I’m making available – for free – a short, romantic tale of love, survival, and brain eating in a world overrun by zombies.

I forgot to mention that my brutal, rather confronting story “Wrack” went online on Halloween over at Australian Reader (as part of their Halloween horror special).

I’ve been very keen to harness the power of the web for my fiction, and in that vein, the generous yet mysterious Brothers Gunther have published my story “Itch” as part of the LegumeMan Books free series.

“Itch”, I say?

It begins as an idle rub. A calloused palm. Friction and hair. A lingering heat like a Chinese burn … Scratching an itch can be like a bad high: the satisfaction comes at a price; the itch is appeased but the damage is done. Sometimes, scratching a persistent itch can make people go to bloody extremes and lead to nasty surprises.

(Itch was first published in Horror Literature Quarterly #1 in the US and recently featured in Shards, but thanks to LegumeMan Books, is now available free for the first time in Australia, via the magic of the interwebs!).

The story is thirteen pages of subtly horrific fun, so if you have a spare five minutes, feel free to scratch that itch.

And if those free stories appeal, you can purchase many more in Shards for a measly $17.95 from the Brimstone Press website. The collection features disturbing fun for the whole family!

Have you bought Shards yet? It’s available at most bookstores and book chains (although not in the abundance of, say, Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight), but it should be there nonetheless. If it isn’t, get the salesperson to order it in (Shards is distributed by Scribo Group/Tower books and is available on Titlepage, the bookstore ordering system).

Another option is to order directly from Brimstone Press. If you do order through Brimstone and you want a signed copy, just drop me an email (shane@jiraiya.com.au) or leave a comment on this post! I’m happy to scribble a message!

For those who need convincing, here are 13 good reasons to buy Shards:

1. Great bang for your buck. It’s only $17.95 (plus postage) for close to forty stories and many, many excellent illustrations from Andrew J. McKiernan.
2. Try before you buy! Download the free e-chapbook Shards: Damned and Burning. If you like it, you’ll love Shards!
3. The standard of writing is considerably higher than in Twilight!
4. Like a quick and compelling read while you’re on the loo or catching 10 mins of downtime? What better book than Shards?
5. Curious about flash fiction? Jeff Ritchie from ScaryMinds reckons “Shane Jiraiya Cummings with Shards shows he is not only a master of the flash fiction style of writing but has pretty much written the definitive statement on how it should work. The collection is a strong statement on the validity of an internet-driven writing style and is a must have for any collector of Australian Dark Fiction.” So there ya go.
6. Shards features no less than four versions of the apocalypse. One has zombies, another hints at a plague of celluloid serial killers (Freddy, Jason, Leatherface…). Another apocalypse results in the world completely unravelling.
7. You don’t need to be a gorehound to like Shards. In fact, quite the opposite. Richard Harland said in his intro, “In Shards, there are a few pieces of out-and-out horror, but mostly the horror is delicate, the kind to make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck.”
8. The stories aren’t just plucked out of my arse, unproven and unedited. There are stories in there first published in Shadowed Realms, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Horror Literature Quarterly, Borderlands, and Shorthorror.com, amongst others. Several stories were nominated for Tin Ducks or honourably mentioned in Ellen Datlow’s Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror or the Aurealis Awards.
9. There are eight originals, too, so you’re not just retreading old ground.
10. Curious about my writing? Heard my name but have no idea what I’ve written? Shards is the perfect sampler!
11. The character death count in Shards is remarkably low. The fun is in finding out what happens to the characters who survive the stories and how they’ve changed (for better, or more often, for worse). How are you gonna discover this Schadenfreude unless you buy a copy of the book?
12. Every copy of Shards sold will convince booksellers to stock more actual horror/dark fiction rather than the parade of endless Twilight wannabes. You don’t want to support those books, do you? All it takes for evil to flourish is for good people to do nothing! Buy Shards and prevent the spread of (the non-fun kind of) evil!
13. I heard a rumour that Chuck Norris read Shards and it made his eyes bleed. That’s a hell of a lot of awesome for just $17.95.

Have you downloaded my free chapbook, Shards: Damned and Burning?

What about Brimstone’s new e-zine Eye of Fire?

If not, then where the bloody hell are ya … err, I mean, why the bloody hell not? They’re FREE!

Have you bought Shards yet? If not, and you’re still weighing up whether it’s worth the $17.95 (yeah, it’s pretty damn inexpensive for an indie press book, isn’t it?) … then I have some good news …

Coinciding with the release of Shards is the bonus e-chapbook, Shards: Damned and Burning. This e-chapbook contains six of my stories, including three stories that have never before been published! Damned and Burning also features the dark illustrations of Andrew J. McKiernan.

It is the perfect preview. If you like Damned and Burning, you love Shards!

Shards: Damned and Burning can be downloaded (PDF) for free from the Brimstone Press website (click on the Shards page).

If you’re keen, you can also buy Shards there, too! Although it might be tricky to find, Shards is also available from quite a few Dymocks stores (especially Dymocks Southland in Melbourne), independent retailers such as Fantastic Planet, and online bookstores such as the Australian Online Bookshop.

And as a final reminder, here’s what a few discerning folks have thought of Shards so far:

“With Shards, author Shane Jiraiya Cummings and artist Andrew J. McKiernan take us on a guided tour of the darkest backroads of the imagination. It is wonderfully moody and creepy.”
– Jonathan Maberry, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Patient Zero.

“Shane Jiraiya Cummings with Shards shows he is not only a master of the flash fiction style of writing but has pretty much written the definitive statement on how it should work. The collection is a strong statement on the validity of an internet-driven writing style and is a must have for any collector of Australian Dark Fiction.”
– Jeff Ritchie, ScaryMinds

“Cummings’ work possesses a Stephen King-like quality, creating rich and colourful characters in a handful of words… Well worth the read.”
– Mark Smith-Briggs, HorrorScope