Books by S T Cartledge

"A work of poetic surrealism reminiscent of the films of Guillermo Del Toro and the Siúil A Rún manga, The Girl From The Other Side" - Carlton Mellick III Margot and Blanko live on the Isle of Flowers, blessed by the rose gold light of the cherry blossom sun. In the season of the Cold, they build bonfires on the beach to ward off the malicious shape-shifting sea creatures known as tourists from the island.Each year their home becomes colder, their resources become tighter, and more tourists swim ashore and murder the locals, bury them beneath the cherry blossom trees, and take their identities like nothing ever happened. Can they survive long enough to sort out real from imposter and put a stop to this hostile takeover?From Shane Cartledge, the author of The Orphanarium, comes a surreal YA bizarro novella about young love and finding one's true identity.

Here is us. We are here in the Orphanarium. Think: a city in a massive box, vacuum-sealed tight. No one is allowed outside. Here, people are born out of the air or made like computers and put together. Daff is me and Dil is you and together we are twins pulled from the same vacuum of space. Cyberia is our friend android and she has a window in her head, a sphere like a crystal mind monitor. Our pet is called Killy, a cyborg dog who was born out of the air like you and me, but has since been built up with robot parts so she can live longer. This is the way things are. And the way things are right now is all about the situation with the Elementals. Some people are calling it a war. For others, it's more of a slaughter. Us or them, it's never specified. We try so hard to stay alive but the chaos spills through the walls onto us. There is no control. But there's always talk of what's going on outside the Orphanarium. Whispers of what's happening out there, while we're over here surrounded by candylions grazing on their holographic grass. Truth is we don't know until we find out. The Orphanarium is a surreal dystopian novel reminiscent of early bizarro works like Lost in Cat Brain Land by Cameron Pierce and Sea of the Patchwork Cats by Carlton Mellick III, as well as the poetic dreamscapes of Richard Brautigan and Hayao Miyazaki.