Vandalia Press imprint: 26 books

The narratives throughout Gary Fincke’s sixth collection of short stories contain newsworthy events that are chronicled secondhand: the shooting of a policeman, the murder of a house flipper, the firing of a teacher for punching a violent student, the accidental drowning of a gay man in a flood,...

Coal burns underground and destroys a small town. A woman confronts police officers with her pet copperheads. A young girl drinks Drano. A man is banned from his favorite bar. Within these eleven short stories, Flannery O’Connor Award winner and poet Gary Fincke brings into focus the small...

In the mid-1970s, Nancy L. Abrams, a young photojournalist from the Midwest, plunges into life as a small-town reporter in West Virginia. She befriends the hippies on the commune one mountaintop over, rents a cabin in beautiful Salt Lick Valley, and falls in love with a local boy, wrestling to balance...

In Magnetic North an aging warrior and his best friend—perhaps his only friend—ride motorcycles to Alaska, with the ultimate goal of riding to the Arctic Circle. It is a ride that mirrors their lives, a ride that causes old stories, old trials, old darkness to come, once again, through the spinning...

Independent Publisher’s Book Awards, Silver Medal, Short Story Fiction In this collection rife with humor and pathos, alienated characters struggle to subvert, contain, control, and even escape their bodies. A teenage girl grapples with pubic hair grown wild, a biologist finds herself in...

The members of Dunlap Fellowship of All Things in Common share everything from their meager incomes to the only functioning toilet in the community house— everything, that is, except secrets. When Omi Ruth Wincott, the youngest member of the disintegrating common-purse community in this small Indiana...

In Crum, a gritty coal town on the West Virginia-Kentucky border, the boys fight, swear, chase and sometimes catch girls. The adults are cramped in and clueless, hemmed in by the mountains. The weight of wonder, dejection, and even possibility loom over this tiny, suffocating town. This story is the...

The Whole World at Once is a collection of intense stories about the experience of loss. A soldier returns home from multiple tours only to begin planting landmines in the field behind his house; kids chase a ghost story up country roads only to become one themselves; one girl copes with the anniversary...

In the third and final part of the Crum Trilogy, Jesse Stone once again embarks upon his constant search for a place in the world. At the start of The Scummers, Jesse hits the road and heads West, looking to experience something - anything - that will fulfill his intrinsic desires to escape, and...

The nine stories in My Pulse Is an Earthquake take place in the clutches of grief. Characters struggle to make sense of sudden losses of life, love, and community. From 1970 to the present day, children and young adults from the Rockies to the Appalachian Mountains guide readers through the valleys...

In this sequel to Crum, Jesse Stone is still on the move. He finds himself in a holy-roller church in Kentucky, on the other side of the Tug River from his native West Virginia, "screaming with the cannibals." From Kentucky he heads to Myrtle Beach, where he gets hired as a lifeguard, although...

Cinco Becknell is the story of a homeless man with no memory. Locked in the emptiness of his mind is a secret, a past, which will either keep him alive or get him killed.  As Cinco staggers through a dangerous journey of rediscovery, he is hunted by psychopaths who want to kill him, and he...