DarkWinter Press New Release: A Thousand Miles of Road by Joseph Kraus!

DarkWinter Press is thrilled to announce our latest release, the story collection A Thousand Miles of Road, by Joseph Kraus, available now on Amazon in paperback and e-version for Kindle! You can buy it here!

About A Thousand Miles of Road:

A Thousand Miles of Road is a collection of eight stories, including three novelettes, which take us through the lives of everyday people whose journey is upended by the existence of another.

Melanie, who after enduring years of domestic brutality, escapes her ruthless husband the only definitive way possible, and from behind the counter of a jewelry store years later, she helps a man take the same dark path out of his own prison.

Maggie has a disease growing inside her, but when even the doctors won't believe her, she is forced to search through the abuse of her childhood to find her own escape from what is killing her.

When Mary comes to, a hundred miles from where she was the night before, in the apartment of the last person she'd ever want to wake up next to, she must find her way back to where she started, if that place even exists anymore.

In these and other stories, Joseph Kraus explores the duress of being alive through characters whose struggles feel like a thousand miles of hard road.

Excerpt from "The Love Store", the first story in the collection:

"What does your honey like?” Melanie’s voice was like a wisp of conversation from another room that slips under the crack of a door, something you had to strain to make out and never were sure what you’d heard. The bend in her words made people think she grew up somewhere down south and far away from the frozen sidewalks outside.

The guy wore a sweater zipped up so tightly that it would leave notches in his neck when he took it off that evening. His hair cut was so fresh the clippings must’ve still been prickling on his neck, and his own face still unrecognizable in the mirror, an alien unto himself.

            For 30 minutes now he had been circumnavigating the store, removing the costume necklaces from the metal trees and letting each one dangle off his hooked finger before putting it back, rotating the bracelets around the velvet-covered rod to get a look at every glass stone before moving on, and forever spinning the turnstiles like a kid who wants nothing more than to hear the chittery earrings and send the brooches shooting out in every direction. Thirty minutes in a store as dinky as Love Tokens was enough time to wear the carpet down to foam. Just couldn’t make up his mind. His honey was one of those.

About The Author:

Joseph Kraus teaches creative writing, English, and debate at Portsmouth High School in New Hampshire as well as coaches the debate team which recently competed in Harvard’s National Speech and Debate Tournament.  He completed his Masters of Arts in Fiction Writing from the University of New Hampshire where he was awarded both the Elizabeth Jones Scholarship and the Dick Shea Memorial Prize for his writing.  He resides in Portsmouth with his wife and two boys.  His work shows influences of his midwestern upbringing and has been published in a variety of literary outlets including The Binnacle and Scars Publishing.