Sometimes people laugh when theyÕre scared. Sometimes people scream when they laugh. We at Dark Lane Books will, of course, leave it up to the reader to decide what the correct response is to the stories contained in out seventh anthology. Matthew M. Bartlett sets the woozy tone with his short story, Baal Protects the King. Beyond that the reader is, we hope, left not knowing what to expect from these twenty tales. There will be fear, sure, and there will be laughs. There will be war-torn battlefields, animal enclosures, deep forests, windswept moors, and fantastical lands not yet mapped. Welcome.