Otherside: a novel

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Sara Barkat is the author of the National Indie Excellence Awards finalist The Shivering Ground & Other Stories, which the great book critic John Wilson declared after reading, "Sara Barkat is an original."

Besides writing fiction, she is also the illustrator of two gothic stories in graphic novel form: H.P. Lovecraft's The Colour out of Space and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wall-Paper.

Sara adores art, sailing, random coding projects, and quantum physics. You can find her at sarabarkat.com

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Contents of Otherside: A Novel

1 - Old Tomo

2 - The Trash Heap

3 - Cat’s Cradle

4 - The Seekers

5 - Durley Street

6 - The Mission

7 - Blood

8 - Lilia

9 - Dee

10 - Marla

11 - The Body

12 - Frontline

13 - Scummer

14 - The Impossible Tunnel

15 - Saeinth Arth

16 - Our Rituals

17 - Jan

18 - Otherside

19 - The Lighthouse

Timeline

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Otherside: A Novel — Excerpt

Jason had spent the week off-duty in the port-houses, floating tethered by massive cables to the ground of the planet, upon which the elevators would run up into the low-atmosphere. Those places were neither here nor there, and no one looked twice at anything. He spent the week gambling away exactly thirty percent of his monthly credits; he kept the rest locked to send directly to savings. He wasn’t going to end up washed up like old Tomo, who spent the time shuttling between his job sorting the recyclables and the casinos where he spent all his money before he could use any of it. But even old Tomo was good enough to hang out with; if you could get him to leave the hooks for two seconds. Jason had his ways; yanking them off worked. The disorientation of leaving the VR made Tomo mad enough and dizzy enough to be dragged off without a fuss to go eat and take care of himself and perhaps be bribed into a story before he drifted back into the dripmachines.

“Why d’you wanna hear about it?” Tomo said, with a singular frown. His icy blue eyes were still intimidating, his big, calloused hands threaded through with stick-tags and rings.

“I told you,” Jason said, like always. “You’re the only one who ever escaped.”