This story began with a question and grew in the answering, as did I, until it became a story more interested in the quest and the asking of the question than in the resolution or answer. That is not to say that this novel does not have a fairly standard beginning, middle and end. Instead, the uniqueness, if there is such a thing, emerges in the content of these parts, in the genres I used, and in the consistent voice of the central character that continually returns to the question. I wondered, (to use a phrase often times overused by Jenson, the main character in the most recent version of this story), why I was here. More precisely, I wondered what a person propelled by this question and the failure to find an answer, or at least an answer that provided any semblance of hope or self-confidence, would do when put into extraordinary circumstances. At what point would he abandon the question, or in this story, at what point would Jenson ultimately give up on his quest? Also, as a writer acutely aware that I write for a reader and not just for myself, I wondered at what point a reader would abandon a character like Jenson or a quest that didn’t have a clear end. These two themes—the questioning quest and the constant slipping away of answers—as well as my desire to create a character and world that were both familiar and yet epic in scale, forced me to write this story. What emerged has been a labor of love and obsession that shows the first person story of a character’s struggle to find his “belong’in place in the world.” This familiar motivation is overshadowed, though, by a more pressing goal—the first person account of a, possibly, unreliable narrator, failed parent and husband who must team up with his estranged wife to save his son. As Tolkien once said, “an author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience, but the ways in which a story-germ uses the soil of experience are extremely complex, and attempts to define the process are at best guesses from evidence inadequate and ambiguous.” What I can say, though, with absolute certainty is that this latest version of the story is a result of maturity and constant curiosity. As I have grown older the central character in the story has changed from a teenage boy fighting ogres and saving damsels in distress to a middle-aged man with phobias and faults battling some of the everyday problems we all encounter—how to deal with fear and feelings of inadequacy and how to rekindle love or talk with a girl. Of course, he still has to battle a strange being from a different dimension and figure out how to fix a secret, illegal scientific experiment so that he can save his son, who has been put into a coma because he has volunteered for an experiment that sent him to a different dimension. But the science and mystery and extraordinary circumstances don’t, or at least don’t always, overshadow the heart of the story. This is a man on a quest to find answers that may not exist, and the questioning quest will, undoubtedly, take him to the next dimension where he will have to find his son, figure out how to come back home, and perhaps…battle God.

THE WINTER WAR is a collection of short fiction set in Sweden.

SHIVA'S DANCE is a collection of connected stories.

A Ceiling of Sky is a collection of ten stories.

Hotel Warren is a novel by Matthew David Charlton.

These are stories about absurd societies, wigs, ill-fated journeys, guttering candles, obsessed fathers, direful glances, tornadoes, uniforms, strange logic, arcane hierarchies, captivity, the impossible, spectral animals, fields, and red light. They take place in invented or imagined historical settings.

A collection of stories that deals with family, religion and death.

Many have chosen to divide the world of fiction into literary and genre. I do not believe these have to be mutually exclusive. Writers such as Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, and Benjamin Percy note the importance of literary devices while simultaneously creating plots that elicit emotional responses from readers. It is my goal to accomplish the same, and bridge the gap between literary and genre fiction in my collection of short stories by using symbolism and imagery to create a sense of the foreboding.

Mormon periodical fiction has had a slow and painstaking development. Not much fiction of worth was produced prior to 1900, but by 1900 the antecedents of a future "mature" fiction were established.The fiction of the years following those initial developments of fiction is largely, as yet, unexplored and unevaluated. It is my purpose in this study to map out the broad areas of this fiction and attempt to measure its literary value.

The short stories in this collection focus on young individuals’, especially women’s, experience and development as they navigate personal relationships and search for a place in the world. Both longer stories and flash fiction are included, and stories are told in past and present tense, and from first, second, and third person point of view. However, the narration of all of these stories stays close to the characters’ points of view, inhabiting their visceral experience. These stories take place in a variety of settings, including a beachside motel, college campuses, bars, and offices. All of these characters, though, struggle with questions of identity, intimacy, and purpose. These conflicts are revealed through the characters’ interactions with others and reactions to their environments, especially focusing on the small details of ordinary events and settings. By depicting these characters’ encounters with the everyday, their sense of self and experiences are shown, and thus the particularities of women’s relationships with their selves, their bodies, and their relationships are represented. In addition to this collection of short stories, the Writing Life Essay in this thesis discusses my development as a writer, my aims, and the writers, such as Dylan Landis, Joy Williams, and Mary Gaitskill, who have influenced my work. A Reading List of influential works, including fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, follows.