Bad Gurus

"Jay O'Connell has something to say and he says it with passion and fire." -Warren Lapine, Hugo Award winning editor and publisher of Fantastic Stories, Weird Tales, and other publications Prepare yourself for the happy ending that tears your guts out. Costas had a terrible secret. His work helping the Old Man on the first floor had turned into something both wonderful and horrific. The Old Man was insane and now Costas hoped he was, too. Otherwise, the fate of the Earth lay in his hands... Mostly, Garrison wanted to be living another life. One in which he was happily married, meaningfully employed... and thinner. Much, much thinner. A late night infomercial turned his dream into a reality, and then, a nightmare... Morgan hated the term 'con man.' He thought himself more of a... rogue psychotherapist. He helped clients make the most important decisions of their lives, and wasn't the least bothered if they wound up dead. There were far worse things than dying. Morgan knew this from personal experience. Helen had been the girlfriend from hell-beautiful, irresponsible, irresistible and imperious. Now she was standing on Evan's doorstep with a child-ostensibly his. Helen was fleeing a cult on route to Oceania, the Libertarian Free State... and did Evan want to come along for the ride? Stanley, the last human employee at the Lower South Bronx TeachNet facility, was a glorified security guard and janitor tending the automated learning systems. He knew that Joel, the poverty-stricken kid acing his corporate qualifying exams at terminal 1050 would be worth a hundred of him-if he survived the recruiting process... Chris hired Peebles, the pot-bellied, hairy private detective and zen master as a dating coach. "Insight is painful," Peebles told him, and so Chris endured his abuse, only to discover that getting everything he'd ever wanted came at an unforeseen cost... These stories are filled with people you know living fifteen minutes in the future. Hero and Antihero, losers and the lost, dreamers and fools and people stuck in ruts, in for a rude awakening. People that want things. People that need things. People on the brink. Jay O'Connell re-emerged on the short genre fiction scene in 2013 with a sudden outpouring of short stories and novellas in the SF pro press which transmuted his mis-spent years in east-coast tech-bubble start-up culture into something weird and wonderful. This is his story, one of those mid-life transformations that gives hope the future might grant an unlikely redemption, if only we keep our head in the game.