The Djinn Garden
by Stephen Goldin
In a world of Arabian Nights adventure, a band of heroes is on a quest to reunite the Crystal of Oromasd and save the world. One of their number, the beautiful young djinn named Cari, vanishes on a mysterious island in the Central Sea and the others must avoid being enslaved themselves and defeat a powerful invisible demon if they hope to rescue her.(This is a story from The Parsina Saga.)The twenty original Twilight Zone-like short stories of this diverse fantasy and science fiction collection take place mostly on contemporary Earth, or on some slightly futuristic or altered Earth, where a technology, ghost, dragon, demon, curse, or space-alien intrudes. Vampires and zombies are avoided. Sometimes calamity is averted, sometimes it is not. The perspective is an adult one; a PG rating may be appropriate for some stories, as sex or violence is sometimes alluded to though not graphically depicted. A list of contents with links to each story is provided to aid reader navigation through the collection, and a link back to the contents list is provided after each story. (Note: some e-book formats do not support this feature.) The last story is a continuation of the first story, otherwise the stories are not related to each other and do not appear in any particular order, though some of them are related to subsequent e-book novels. In the list of contents a brief phrase describing each short story has been included to aid story selection. The brief introduction which precedes the stories provides the author's perspective on short story advantages compared to novels. Finally, following the short stories a brief description of the author and pending near-term e-book novels is included.