The Works of Jules Kiss

==Written as J. Sheldon Kerr==
A Pound of Flesh
The story of an intelligent, psychic hammer with a penchant for ironic justice. The hammer lies in wait and possesses people, leading them to be... justice. People. Hammering. A plot brews and spirals out of control, involving Freemasons and ancient, also intelligent, non-hammer tools, leading to a cosmic game of rock-paper-scissors. (The hammer is the rock.) (The rock wins.)
Buzzkill
A serial killer, an electric razor, and his stilted romance with a local barber. The thrilling climax occurs at their high school reunion, when they catch each other setting the same person up for a kill.
Buzzkill threw a lot of people off- they were expecting ‘standard Kerr faire’ and it turned out to be a surprisingly complex dysfunctional romance with murder peppered into it, not as an afterthought, but as an integral movement within the narrative.
Instep
The police are looking for a killer, following a trail of partially-crushed bodies. What they don’t know: The killer’s got a crab claw for a left foot. Detectives corner him at a yacht club, during a singles’ meet for fiftysomethings. Finally, they take him down - in a sea of crushed silverbacks.
NOW A TROMAFILM!!!!!
Psychosomatic
This thriller will blow your mind. Across Manhattan, people began to have tingling sensations in their limbs, until they succumb to the most peculiar paralysis - for one day. When they recover, they are all Reginald F. Burkheimer.
How do you stop a man who is becoming an entire city? With a really, really big bomb.
Sisyphusphilis and Other Stories
A collection of short stories.
*Sisyphusphilis: A man notices he’s developed a genital infection, and then feels compelled to travel to Greece to find the perfect boulder to roll.
*BEES!: Imagine, if you will, The Birds but with bees.
*Frankendick: A mad scientist creates the perfect detective, by combining the corpses of history’s greatest. Why? Because someone else already made the perfect criminal.
*Heat Wave: The hottest Autumn in San Diego history brings a rude awakening - people are reverting to homo habilus left and right.
*The Soup: Fred won the Michigan lottery, and now he’s going to be melted into meat goo.
*The Telltale Wart: It seemed over and done so easily, when Jim Fever killed his landlord and walled him into the basement. And then a bulge began to grow, a wart just like the one on his landlord's face, swelling from the wall, growing like a bilious pustule on the cement. Throbbing... hairy.
*Das Malevitch: Kasimir Malevitch painted the square, because a primordial god visited him and impregnated his mind. Another unusual story for ‘Kerr’, Das Malevitch culminates in a man giving birth in that most Jovian of fashions - from his head.
==Written as Jules Kiss==
What It Says
A clan of people have obeyed the guidance of a computer-driven stone head in their village for hundreds of years. One day, it simply stops talking - and a boy and a girl from the village take it upon themselves to find out why. The book ends with them finally understanding that it ran on a generator with a massive fossil fuel reservoir that simply ran dry.
To Me, Personally
A man meets an older gentleman who gives him specific instructions to prevent a number of horrible things from occurring, culminating in the development of a time-travel machine sending the user back specifically fifty years.
...Except each time it’s built sooner and sooner, leading to a paradoxically-spiralling grandfather clause situation in which the man becomes every patriarch for a family, throughout history.
Beside Themselves (and Other Stories)
A series of short detective stories, written in a fashion discretely emulating Edgar Allen Poe's detective fiction. Kiss' detective, Leonid Pynchon, is an homage to a hard-boiled and noir author from America, despite the stories being set in a fictional nation, 'Algions,' with intentionally vague terminology confounding readers' attempts to identify technology.
With these stories, Kiss does his best to foil conceits of detective fiction - all the evidence the reader needs is present to solve any of the illustrated crimes, but the villain is rarely the first individual encountered, and at times they are canny enough to retain a great deal of distance from the scene.
Category:Metafiction