 Summer of Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Volume 5, edited by Dustin Bilyk.
Full disclosure: I'm one of the contributing authors. This is a wide-ranging, imaginative collection of speculative fiction. A lot of the stories have unhappy endings, but not all. There are a couple of really sweet ghost stories, "Serenity" by Susan L. Lin and "The Mechanic for the Dearly Departed" by Nicholas Yanes. Another ghost story, Graham Darling' "Immaterial Witness," is a ghostly twist on a whodunit. On the SF side, there's "The Burning Basement Sky" by Dannye Chase, a time-travel story about a real-world tragedy, the 1942 Cocoanut Grove fire in Boston. "Human Relations" by Sean E. Britten is a funny first-contact story from the point of view of a public relations expert. And there's a very dark humor in "Canyonlands Cello Kachina" by Gary Every. Like may stories in this collection, you think you know where it's going, and then it takes a very sharp turn. Possibly my favorite was "Walking the Labyrinth" by David Gray. A con man plots to kill his "tree hugger" girlfriend. Things don't go as planned. I guess that counts as a happy ending? As for my story, "In the Flesh," it's set in a near future where everyone can hide behind avatars and usernames, not just online but all the time. Who would we be under those circumstances, and how would we know each other? Trigger warnings for violence, fatal fire, harassment, substance abuse, cruelty to people and animals.
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