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Neighbors
You can choose your friends, but you can't choose your neighbors.
For a full quarter of his life, twenty-year-old Gus Lancer has been a resident patient at Haven Space, a sanatorium and rehab clinic formerly isolated in the chaparral of southern California but now surrounded by the suburban sprawl of inland Orange County. The peculiar degenerative condition shredding his nervous system has paralyzed him from the waist down and robbed him of all but the most strangled attempts at human speech, but he has recently discovered that he can apparently understand and communicate with the various animals he meets.
Rolling his wheelchair out under the care of El Brujo, one of Haven's therapy cats, he becomes more and more involved in the lives of the humans, dogs, cats, crows, squirrels and others forced into the close proximity of the neighborhood. And when some of these neighbors begin acting in a most unneighborly fashion, Gus finds that he might be the only one capable of keeping events from spiraling completely out of control.
Some chapters of this work were published previously on the website Fur Affinity—thanks to Renee Carter Hall and Sean Silva for the prompts that inspired them—and the first three chapters were published in the anthology Bronies, edited by L. Lambert Lawson, Kazka Press, June, 2012. The cover art is by Tom Payne, www.eyeballpress.com
Michael H. Payne's stories have appeared in places like Asimov's SF magazine, the annual Sword & Sorceress collection, and the Writers of the Future contest anthology, and his novels have been published by Tor Books, Sofawolf Press, and "Hey, Your Nose is On Fire" Industries. Norman Spinrad has called his work "the sort of thing for which the word 'sui generis' was invented."
For a full quarter of his life, twenty-year-old Gus Lancer has been a resident patient at Haven Space, a sanatorium and rehab clinic formerly isolated in the chaparral of southern California but now surrounded by the suburban sprawl of inland Orange County. The peculiar degenerative condition shredding his nervous system has paralyzed him from the waist down and robbed him of all but the most strangled attempts at human speech, but he has recently discovered that he can apparently understand and communicate with the various animals he meets.
Rolling his wheelchair out under the care of El Brujo, one of Haven's therapy cats, he becomes more and more involved in the lives of the humans, dogs, cats, crows, squirrels and others forced into the close proximity of the neighborhood. And when some of these neighbors begin acting in a most unneighborly fashion, Gus finds that he might be the only one capable of keeping events from spiraling completely out of control.
Some chapters of this work were published previously on the website Fur Affinity—thanks to Renee Carter Hall and Sean Silva for the prompts that inspired them—and the first three chapters were published in the anthology Bronies, edited by L. Lambert Lawson, Kazka Press, June, 2012. The cover art is by Tom Payne, www.eyeballpress.com
Michael H. Payne's stories have appeared in places like Asimov's SF magazine, the annual Sword & Sorceress collection, and the Writers of the Future contest anthology, and his novels have been published by Tor Books, Sofawolf Press, and "Hey, Your Nose is On Fire" Industries. Norman Spinrad has called his work "the sort of thing for which the word 'sui generis' was invented."
214 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 1, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 11, 2023
I was drawn in by the cover. I got bogged down in the middle, so I skipped to the end, and the ending made me curious about how we got there, so I went back and read the rest of it. It's a very unusual story and there were moments of real insight. I am going to take a look at the author's other work/
September 17, 2023
This book kind of snuck up on me. I didn't know what to expect and didn't have any expectations about it. It started out like most stories do but soon the characters had my attention. By the end of the book I found that I want to know more about Gus, El Brujo, and all the other delightful characters in the book. The drama with a couple of neighbors added to my desire to learn more,
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews