Showing results for "Lightning" in Anthologies & Short Stories

In the midst of a raging blizzard, lightning struck on the night Laura Shane was born. And a mysterious blond-haired stranger showed up just in time to save her from dying. Years later, in the wake of another storm, Laura will be saved again. For someone is watching over her. Is he the guardian angel he seems? The devil in disguise? Or the master of a haunting destiny beyond all time and space?

"The Lightning-Rod Man" appeared in 1854, in Putnam's Monthly Magazine no. 20 (August). What grand irregular thunder, thought I, standing on my hearthstone among the Acroceraunian hills, as the scattered bolts boomed overhead and crashed down among the valleys, every bolt followed by zigzag irradiations, and swift slants of sharp rain, which audibly rang, like a charge of spear-points, on my low shingled roof. I suppose, though, that the mountains hereabouts break and churn up the thunder, so that it is far more glorious here than on the plain. Hark! - some one at the door.

Tough, cynical, and clever, Nathan Heller has been called "the perfect private eye", the best investigator that Chicago (where "lightning" means gunfire) has to offer. Created by New York Times best-selling novelist and Road to Perdition creator Max Allan Collins, the classic PI comes vibrantly to life in this collection of 13 stories, all based on real cases of the 1930s and '40s.

As Ian Briggs begins to fall for Marisol, Joanne and Dillon also grow closer. Joanne's new confidence spreads to Dakota but Hector's return upends everything. A public confrontation between Marcus and Hector endangers his relationship with Brittany, and Dakota reverts to form. Meanwhile, the Senator threatens Ginny and the baby.

A man sits at his hearth as thunder shakes the mountains. Then—a knock. A stranger steps in, soaked and shivering, armed not with warmth or need, but with polished copper and an urgent offer. He doesn't sell comfort. He sells protection—against the very sky. The Lightning-Rod Man is Herman Melville at his most compact and cunning. This sharply drawn tale uses one room, one storm, and two voices to stage a quiet war between reason and fear, independence and submission, belief and the glittering promise of safety. It's a sales pitch wrapped in a sermon, disguised as a fable.

Get ready. The storm is coming. As the citizens of Storm, Texas, sway in the wake of the death of one of their own, Daddy's girl Dakota Alvarez also reels from an unexpected family crisis...and finds consolation in a most unexpected place.

Herman Melville's deliciously hilarious tale of the day a door-to-door lightning-rod salesman called upon him.

Chosen for inclusion in William Evans Burton's Cyclopediae of Wit and Humor of 1857, The Lightning-Rod Man was the one Melville tale to be available throughout his lifetime, thanks to reissues of this volume. More a parable than a character-driven story, the Lightning-Rod man is a charlatan who tries to profit by selling fearful people lightning-rods during thunderstorms. The narrator has a difficult encounter with the Lightning-Rod man in this story about overcoming fear and superstition.

After spending the summer of 1853 in the Berkshire Mountains, where he supposedly had a real life encounter with a lightning-rod salesman, Melville published "The Lightning-Rod Man". At the end of this short story, the lightning-rod salesman is exposed for the fraud that he is. However, that will not keep his successors from fanning out to the Middle West, where lightning storms abound and farmers are gullible.

No one thought Curtis Colt had been railroaded for the shooting of a liquor store owner, least of all St. Louis private investigator Alo Nudger. It had been an open-and-shut case of cold blooded murder, and the people of Missouri were just waiting for Colt to be strapped into the electric chair - after all, three eyewitnesses couldn't be wrong. But as time runs out on the convicted killer, Nudger receives a call from Candy Ann Adams, Colt's finance, who insists he's innocent, because she knows who really pulled the trigger.