D Street Stories
Tales of dark magic from the district
Our (once-resident) curator of tales
Author Brent Winter—an Atlanta native and a former denizen of D Street—has mined the lore of this neighborhood to collect and create stories about people whose lives intersect with “the coolest neighborhood you’ll never find” (Creative Loafing).
Read about Brent’s history and get to know him.
He writes, “I miss the D Street strange, so I was thrilled when the DSDA asked me to serve as gatherer of stories from the district. Below are the first selections—a couple of short stories, an oral history, and two longer tales that I wrote as a novella and a novel. More are on the way.”
I Did Some of That D Street Acid You’ve Heard About
A correspondent for VICE gets more than she bargained for when her investigative reporting sends her on a psychedelic odyssey that transgresses the known boundaries of existence.
Sisterhood of the Elf-Shot
It’s not stalking if you don't intend to hurt them.
That’s what she tells herself as she secretly eyes the silver-haired woman. She just needs to find the right person to help her withstand an uncaring world. That’s why she’s taking a class in spellcrafting at a D Street magic shop, and how she met her newest obsession. And that’s why she uses magic to invisibly follow the silver-haired woman on a mysterious errand to a wooded riverbank on the outskirts of town. But the events that take place on that riverbank could change her life forever—if she survives.
Sisterhood of the Elf-Shot is available as a paperback and an e-book on Amazon.
Blood Family
Alex Whitfield lives a life of studied normalcy, in sharp contrast to his deeply dysfunctional family: uncle in prison for arson, half-sister missing after a stint in rehab, father dead by suicide in a psych ward. But Alex’s normal life is shattered one night when he finds his half-sister, April, lying in his bathtub with her wrists slashed—until she disappears a few seconds later.
Alex is terrified to think he might have inherited his father’s madness, but when he confides in a friend, she suggests that Alex might not have been hallucinating; instead, perhaps he saw April's ghost. Alex doesn’t believe in ghosts, and he doesn’t want to believe April is dead, either. Still, he dreads hearing what a doctor might say about his sanity, so he delays the inevitable by letting his friend take him to see a “witch” who supposedly can help him.
Thus begins Alex’s reluctant journey from the streets of Atlanta to the mountains of Appalachia and from this world to the next one as he’s forced to grapple with hidden truths about himself, his family, and the very nature of reality. Along the way he’ll find friends and enemies among both the living and the dead, and he’ll learn why his father really committed suicide, why April went missing, and why she desperately needs his help.
Blood Family is available in paperback at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and IndieBound, and as an e-book at Amazon, Apple Books, and Barnes and Noble.
The Magician Next Door
“The story I want to tell you is about my neighbor, Clyde. We live—well, used to live in the same apartment building on D Street. Thing is, Clyde disappeared last month, and nobody around here seems to know where he went or what happened to him. So now he’s my ex-neighbor. Last week the landlord taped an eviction notice to his door. I guess all his stuff’s still inside his apartment. No telling what might be in there, given what he does for a living.
“See—there’s no easy way to say this, but Clyde’s a necromancer.”
Spoiler alert: “The Magician Next Door” contains spoilers for Blood Family. Don’t read it until you’ve read Blood Family first.
Sarcophagus
Randall sat drowsing over a translation of an Egyptian magical papyrus, something about spells to grant the heart’s desire, which he’d thought would be interesting until he read nine or ten of them in a row, at which point they started to blend into a sort of uber-spell about the one thing you had to do to win your true heart’s desire, and she looked at him with her big, dark eyes and reached over to the book in front of him and turned the page and pointed at the symbols and said, You can’t have your true heart’s desire until you—
Spoiler alert: “Sarcophagus” contains spoilers for Blood Family. Don’t read it until you’ve read Blood Family first.