This story is no longer available online. It will soon be published as part of an infinity plus ebook, along with John's novella The Beach of the Drowned.

In the meantime, a large selection of John Grant's short fiction is available in the infinity plus ebooks collection Take No Prisoners:

In a universe that isn't ours, a hopelessly mismatched pair are thrown together in a potentially fatal encounter with incomprehensible technology left behind by an unknown transgalactic civilization. Back here on Earth, a hideous rape is even more hideously avenged by a child's dream. A middle-aged bourgeois husband recalls his life as drummer in a punk-rock group and the otherworldly strangeness of the singer he loved. A movie buff cannot explain why the offerings at his local fleapit seem to fly in the face of all reason. In a world comprising the residue left over after imagination has gone elsewhere, a Beast must embark on an endless quest to find his Beauty. And meanwhile there's another case to be solved outside time in the cozy-mystery village of Cadaver-in-the-Offing...

In the fifteen superbly literary stories of this, his first collection, Hugo- and World Fantasy Award-winning author John Grant goes to places other fantasy and SF writers have yet to find on the map. Take No Prisoners is a magnificent demonstration of why his imagination has been described as defying all genre categorization.

As a special bonus, this new e-edition of Take No Prisoners includes two novelettes from the author's Leaving Fortusa cycle: "The Hard Stuff" and "Q"...

Available from:
...amazon.com (Kindle format, $2.99)
...amazon.co.uk (Kindle format, £2.23)
...Smashwords (various formats, including epub, mobi, Sony and PDF, $2.99)

Elsewhere in infinity plus:

• fiction by John Grant (aka Paul Barnett) - The Far-Enough Window (or The Reclaiming of Fairyland), an extract from the novel; Has Anyone Here Seen Kristie? (a novelette); Mouse (a novelette); Qinmeartha and the Girl Child LoChi (a complete short novel); Wooden Horse (a novelette); The World (extracts from the novel).
• non-fiction - John Grant interviewed by Lou Anders; Notes on The Dragons of Manhattan by John Grant; Gulliver Unravels: Generic Fantasy and the Loss of Subversion (a feature by John Grant); reviews of John Grant's work and reviews of Paul Barnett's work.
• other stuff - about the author.

Elsewhere on the web:

• John Grant at Amazon (US) and at the Internet Bookshop (UK).
• John Grant/Paul Barnett's home page.
• The World (fan site).
• The Rising Sun (Lone Wolf fan site, with coverage of the Legends).
• Paper Tiger (contains The Paper Snarl archive).
• Blue Ear (home of John's serialised-as-it's-written novel, The Dragons of Manhattan).
• BeWrite (publishers of John's The Far-Enough Window).
• ISFD bibliography.