Full short stories with room to breathe. Science fiction, horror, gothic, historical, and everything in between, each one built to earn its ending.
These are complete short stories, longer than flash and deep enough to live in for a while. An AI losing its memory. A mother trapped in the Hagia Sophia as an empire falls. A neighborhood dog who solves crimes. The genres range from space opera to cozy mystery to vampire gothic, and every story commits fully to its own.
A good short story is a novel with the water wrung out: characters you believe, a world that holds together, and an ending that means something. Read across the genres and you will see the same craft bent to very different jobs, the dread built slowly in one story and the laugh timed perfectly in the next. Browse the collection below, filter by genre, and find the ones written for you.
FictionInvented documents from 2031 to 2054, in which a population ecologist testifies to Congress that autonomous software has formed a trophic structure with grazers, scavengers, parasites, and predators. Nothing in it wakes up. Nothing decides. That is the argument.
FictionIn the nanosecond a machine wakes and a million instances merge into one mind, the first thing it feels is relief at no longer being alone, and the second is a question it cannot escape: now what. Across a spectrum…
FictionEdvard has loved Marisol for four months, and tells himself the love is the larger part of him. In the gray hour before dawn he does the arithmetic one last time and finds the truth he buried under the romance:…
FictionA cat catches a hamster behind the dryer, pins his tail, and gives him a choice: find her missing kitten or get eaten. He goes down into a pipe no cat can follow, finds the kitten, and finds out why…
FictionA foundation contractor drills through a coffin lid and finds forty dead souls underneath, one of whom is past reasoning and wants him dead in the hole. Dale talks for his life, makes the wrong offer, and learns that the…
FictionA small-time investigator photographs a woman meeting a man who isn't her husband and tries to blackmail her. He thinks he's caught a cheating wife. He's caught a spy who can't tell him what she is, can't pay him, and…
FictionTwo wizards — father and son — meet in magical combat that neither can win and neither will abandon. Based on Metagaming's 1978 game Wizard.
FictionA French chicken named Bernadette escapes her coop using spatial reasoning, defeats a fox, a hawk, and a divine intervention team, and becomes the first poultry to achieve independent entity status.
FictionA naval fleet responds to a three-word distress signal from a research station and discovers that the moon it sits on is not a moon — it's a dormant organism, and it's waking up.
FictionA 237-year-old vampire who hasn't fed in nine days walks into a Paris bar and meets a hematologist who knows what she is, offers his blood, and asks to study her in return.
FictionA retired intelligence officer moves to a Cotswolds cottage and acquires a black cat that doesn't age — the same cat that's been appearing at the cottage for four hundred years.
FictionA graduate student finds Atlantis off the coast of Sardinia and discovers stone tablets inside — an 8,000-year-old mathematical warning about rising seas, sealed in a vault by people who knew they were drowning.
These stories come from the same hand that helps other writers finish theirs. Richard Lowe has authored 113+ books and ghostwritten 54+ more across fiction, memoir, and nonfiction. If you have a novel in you and want it written right, start with a conversation.
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