Seven years ago, Conway helped Savannah disappear--but not before they had a sizzling, knock-down-drag-out affair. Now she's back with a shocking revelation. But when she turns up brutally murdered, Conway has no choice but to sort lies from truth.

Poetry. BARNBURNER by Erin Hoover is the winner of the 2017 Elixir Press Antivenom Poetry Award. Kathryn Nuernberger, contest judge, had this to say about it: "The epigraph to BARNBURNER is a call to burn it all down: 'According to an old story, there was once a Dutchman who was so bothered by the rats in his barn that he burned down the barn to get rid of them. Thus a barn burner became one who destroyed all in order to get rid of a nuisance.' There is honesty in this epigraph, raw and brutal, like the narrative voices in Erin Hoover's poems. But there's an irony at play here, an irony perhaps borrowing a bit from the ironies of Frost's 'Mending Wall': these poems don't burn down the cruelties of a homogeneous, racist patriarchy. Instead, they make a muse of it. A muse that can be objectified, stripped bare, and put on a pedestal for all to scorn. Hoover fridges that muse so that one speaker of a heroine after another is vaulted by the shock of such violence into a journey of personal discovery. There are mean-spirited, ruthless characters in these poems and, in a kind of reverse Bechdel test, Hoover wipes away their inner lives and never lets them talk to each other about anything except those they have hurt."

Taking our understanding of political antislavery into largely unexplored terrain, Jonathan H. Earle counters conventional wisdom and standard historical interpretations that view the ascendance of free-soil ideas within the antislavery movement as an explicit retreat from the goals of emancipation or even as an essentially proslavery ideology. These claims, he notes, fail to explain free soil's real contributions to the antislavery cause: its incorporation of Jacksonian ideas about property and political equality and its transformation of a struggling crusade into a mass political movement. Democratic free soilers' views on race occupied a wide spectrum, but they were able to fashion new and vital arguments against slavery and its expansion based on the party's long-standing commitment to egalitarianism and hostility to centralized power. Linking their antislavery stance to a land-reform agenda that pressed for free land for poor settlers in addition to land free of slavery, Free Soil Democrats forced major political realignments in New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Ohio. Democratic politicians such as David Wilmot, Marcus Morton, John Parker Hale, and even former president Martin Van Buren were transformed into antislavery leaders. As Earle shows, these political changes at the local, state, and national levels greatly intensified the looming sectional crisis and paved the way for the Civil War.

In 1933 while running from a bad situation at home and suspected of having set fire to a barn, fourteen-year-old Ross finds haven with a loving family which helps him make an important decision.

For centuries, something has been slumbering deep inside of Kimmler’s Mountain. In the endless darkness, an unrelenting horror has grown...waiting. In the late 1800’s, greed sets it free. A mine owner named Martin Kimmler releases a plague upon the people of the mountain, a plague that turns the dead into ravenous demons. Cannibals. Monsters that exist only to feed and to spread the horrific infection. As the ancient cosmic evil unleashes its Hell on Earth, the men and women from the mountain towns of White Wood and Gilliam form unlikely alliances with Natives from the sacred tribe of the Madoosk. Some fight the onslaught of the dead or travel toward the heart of the mountain, to the source of the plague. Others risk life and limb to escape Kimmler’s Mountain with as much pilfered gold as possible, cutting ruthless swaths across the lawless landscape and through anyone in their way. Battles great and small will dot the blood-soaked mountain as the good in men battles the cosmic evil. The Great Evil is awake. The Great Plague is spreading. The End of Humanity hangs in the snapping jaws of the Hollow Mountain Dead.