A young girl who suddenly begins to hear a mysterious voice in her garden . .

. a small-town librarian with an insatiable interest in books and the study of the human condition, whose basement hides a chilling, improbable secret .

. .

a man who finds himself searching for the true meaning of heaven on New Year’s Eve . .

. These and 16 other intriguing tales of the unusual make up Sticktown & Other Stories by author Bill Smith.

In the genre of the pulp fiction stories of the 1930s and 1940s and inspired by the works of the Twilight Zone's Rod Serling and Fahrenheit 451's Ray Bradbury, Sticktown & Other Stories takes readers on an exhilarating, and often haunting, ride through a carnival house of mirrors, where there is a surprise around every turn and where almost nothing is exactly as it seems. In Detective Rheinkamp’s Last Case, we are introduced to 66-year-old William Rheinkamp who is spending the final day of his career searching for a boy who disappeared years before.

In The Man on the Bus, we meet Phoebe Summerfield, whose gift of precognition has brought her face to face with the man she recognizes as her future killer. And in Accident in a Small Town, we are invited aboard a passenger train to ride with a young woman on her way home for Christmas, only to discover that her journey has taken her on an unexpected and extraordinary detour.

Sometimes bittersweet, often joyously optimistic, Sticktown & Other Stories might best be summed up in the opening words of Nathaniel Brown from the short story The Walking Tree:“I’d like to tell you a story, but before I begin, I need to warn you that it’s a story you’ll likely find quite difficult to believe . .

. ”.