Better the Devil

Notes

The first edition is an omnibus ebook version of five previously published chapbook short story collections (Romance With Capsicum, The Skeleton of Contention, Madonna Park, Plutonian Parodies, The Fanny Fables, To Err Is Divine (a collection that was selected but was never previously published), and The Devil You Don't (an original collection of flash fiction). The "Revised Edition" (2013) adds one other original collection, The Dangerous Strangeness. The 2019 print edition replaces The Fanny Fables with Young Tales of the Old Cosmos, and heavily revises the contents of The Devil You Don't. As the author explains in the foreword of the second edition: "The third, fourth and fifth chapbooks were supposedly issued in 2009 by Ghostwriter Publications. I say 'supposedly' because the publishing house in question was a scam, one I fell for. The 'publisher' announced the imminent appearance of all three chapbooks, accepted money from readers for them, but never delivered a product. He kept the money and fled instead... Mind you, there were a few copies of each chapbook printed to trick me into thinking they did exist in larger numbers, and some of those mock-ups probably did end up in circulation, certainly not more than a dozen of them, though." The reason for creating a second edition of this omnibus is also explained: "...I never received a penny for [the first edition of] Better the Devil, because the publisher who issued it wasn't kosher, and still isn't." It appears that the first edition was pulled from Smashwords and Amazon after the revised edition was published.