Available from lulu.com
-
New Title Release! The Horror Beneath Koble’s Hollow
My Lovecraftian novel, The Horror Beneath Koble’s Hollow, is now available as an ebook from Amazon and other vendors. The print copy will be out in a few weeks.
The back cover blurb reads:
Miners in Koble’s Hollow should be extracting coal from the seam below their isolated little Appalachian town. Though they have been digging furiously, no coal has been shipped off their mountain in years. Something else has been drawing them deep underground, something that needs their help to get out, something that has changed the people of Koble’s Hollow into beings no longer human.
Professor Lincoln Davis, born and raised in the hills of West Virginia, has found success as an academic and activist in the large cities of the lowlands. But now a voice from his past is calling him back home for the first time in decades. Enough time has passed, or perhaps the voice has made an offer so beguiling, that he can’t quite remember why he left in the first place. As he travels the miles toward home, though, his memories begin to return, and he starts to recall fleeing the hills at night and in secret when he was little more than a boy. Before he reaches the end of the road, will he remember why he was running for his life from a place called Koble’s Hollow?
Available from
Publisher: PublishDrive
Publication date: November 25, 2025
Language: English
File size: 1.5 MB
Screen Reader: Supported
Enhanced typesetting: Enabled
Word Wise: Enabled
Print length: 137 pages
ISBN-13: 979-8999807939
Page Flip: Enabled
-
Only 2 More Days! Kindle Countdown Deal on Esau’s Fables
First: Huge thanks to those who have already purchased the book during this Countdown. I am honored and full of hope that you will enjoy the book.
Esau’s Fables: Prose Poems by Jedediah Smith now available as a Kindle Countdown Deal for $0.99, marked down from its original list price of $6.99, from November 8, 2025 to November 15, 2025.
Details:
Publisher: Mount Diablo Books
Publication date: January 23, 2025
Language: English
File size: 2.9 MB
Print length: 111 pagesWorking in the tradition of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, John Lennon, and Jorge Luis Borges, Jedediah Smith uses surrealism and the absurd to travel easily between Homeric battle fields and Universal monster sets, quantum physics and the Fortean paranormal, archetypal mythology and modern pop culture. As the author puts it himself in “Carnival Road,” the a story about an unpaved lane that is in some inexplicable way hallucinogenic, each parable “creates its own logic that is neither symbol nor allegory but an insistence upon a world of its own making, where images connect in ways that cannot be explained, only experienced.”
From Esau’s Fables:
The Last Manson Girl
A news report states that the last Manson girl surrendered to authorities today.
She had been married to a police officer.
She had become a grandmother to sixteen, a great-grandmother to four.
She had hosted a public-access talk show for ferret owners in LA.
She smelled like cinnamon and nutmeg.
She decrypted the Voynich manuscript which gave her the gift of powwow.
She raised organic vegetables in an urban garden and chanted to keep the gophers away.
She had been seeking a return to the Edenic among the butchers of living flesh, a paradise under the red and black flag of the ax.
She has kept a journal since 1970 which runs backwards toward the Fall.
She might save us all. -
Starting Today! Kindle Countdown Deal on Esau’s Fables
Esau’s Fables: Prose Poems by Jedediah Smith now available as a Kindle Countdown Deal for $0.99, marked down from its original list price of $6.99, from November 8, 2025 to November 15, 2025.
Details:
Publisher: Mount Diablo Books
Publication date: January 23, 2025
Language: English
File size: 2.9 MB
Print length: 111 pagesWorking in the tradition of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, John Lennon, and Jorge Luis Borges, Jedediah Smith uses surrealism and the absurd to travel easily between Homeric battle fields and Universal monster sets, quantum physics and the Fortean paranormal, archetypal mythology and modern pop culture. As the author puts it himself in “Carnival Road,” the a story about an unpaved lane that is in some inexplicable way hallucinogenic, each parable “creates its own logic that is neither symbol nor allegory but an insistence upon a world of its own making, where images connect in ways that cannot be explained, only experienced.”
From Esau’s Fables:
Triton’s Trumpet
A man’s wife mailed his daughter a box of seashells from the ocean. Cupping them to her ears, she loved to hear the waves crashing and roaring, each in its own pitch, loving best that of a Triton’s Trumpet, bigger than both her hands together, gripped around it intently.
That night she took it to bed with her. Hours later her father was awakened by her crying. In the girl’s room he sat on the side of her bed and told her, There was a girl crying. Her head ached with sound, and when I cupped her mouth to my ear, I could hear waves. Did you see her? She was here, I’m sure of it.
The next night, the girl closed Triton’s Trumpet in her dresser drawer. Hours later her father was awakened by the house creaking as it tipped like a ship. In the girl’s room he sat on the side of her bed and said, There was a girl choking. She lay on her back while saltwater sputtered and plumed from her mouth as if she were a beached whale returned too late to the sea. Did you see her? She was floating still on the water’s surface.
The next night, the girl smashed the Triton’s Trumpet into small fragments. Hours later her father was awakened by the sharp scent of rust on the water. In the girl’s room, he sat on the side of her bed and said, There was a girl being razed. Sharks swirled through the currents of water and air, whipping their heads from side to side in a frenzy of teeth shivering her into fragments. Her eyes met mine while it continued, and there was disbelief. You believe me, don’t you?
In the morning, he placed all the fragments of his daughter he could find into a box lined with crumpled papers and mailed them back to her mother in the ocean.
-
2 more days until Kindle Countdown Deal on Esau’s Fables
Esau’s Fables: Prose Poems by Jedediah Smith will be available as a Kindle Countdown Deal for $0.99, marked down from its original list price of $6.99, from November 8, 2025 to November 15, 2025.
Details:
Publisher: Mount Diablo Books
Publication date: January 23, 2025
Language: English
File size: 2.9 MB
Print length: 111 pagesWorking in the tradition of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, John Lennon, and Jorge Luis Borges, Jedediah Smith uses surrealism and the absurd to travel easily between Homeric battle fields and Universal monster sets, quantum physics and the Fortean paranormal, archetypal mythology and modern pop culture. As the author puts it himself in “Carnival Road,” the a story about an unpaved lane that is in some inexplicable way hallucinogenic, each parable “creates its own logic that is neither symbol nor allegory but an insistence upon a world of its own making, where images connect in ways that cannot be explained, only experienced.”
From Esau’s Fables:
The Enormous Whisker
Feeling the need of increased stature among his peers, Pepkin decided to grow a beard like those of the great philosophers or Tolstoy or Brahms, and so he stopped shaving. When his beard came in though, it came not as many hairs but one enormous whisker. It grew just above the jawline of his right cheek and resembled a tree trunk. Since it lacked the look of a conventional beard, he thought about shaving it off but decided to give it some time and see how it developed.
As it grew longer, it continued to thicken and soon grew quite heavy. He found himself tilting his head to the right most of the time, as one with classic paralysis of the fourth cranial nerve, and people thought it gave him a contemplative air. In fact he found himself being given considerations he never had before. Friends would listen attentively as he spoke. Strangers would ask him to opine on matters of the day. Clergy sought his advice on matters both theological and lay. Pepkin noticed other men adopting what had come to be called the Pepkin Tilt.
He worried this imitation might dilute his uniqueness, but it was about this time his enormous whisker began to sprout fruit. At first they were just small green nuts clustered at the end of the whisker, but over time they blanched until they looked like pulpy white berries. The weight of the fruit and the still-growing whisker itself caused it to bend down, and the fruit would sway and slap against Pepkin’s chest as he walked. While some men tried to mimic this look as well, with beaded scarves or lengths of pasta, the consensus was that Pepkin had taken his innovation too far. He found himself shunned.
So, he stayed in his apartment more and more, then retreated even farther, rarely leaving his bedroom. Finding the open space of the vast room vertiginous, he constructed a canopy over his bed and brooded inside. After several weeks within this crib, his fleshy berries began to split and ooze a viscous liquid. From within, little baby snakes emerged, each with a face identical to Pepkin’s. When all the snakes had hatched, he took a razor and shaved off his enormous whisker. From its fine-grained substance, he built a boat and sailed it out to sea. The snakes sunned themselves on the deck while Pepkin steered the wheel.
Those who saw them go tried to tell the story of their departure, but few would believe them. So, the storytellers formed their own clubs and societies. They would take turns retelling the tale of Pepkin. They called it “tilting.”
Jedediah Smith 