From Sheep to the Stars: A collection of abnormal tales

Reality is negotiable, gravity is optional, and somewhere behind your hypothalamus, a tiny mustached bureaucrat may be running your mouth for you. Welcome to “From Sheep to Stars,” a wildly inventive short story collection that swings from ancient prophets to android shepherds, from occult detectives to a lighthouse keeper's revenge, never once pausing to be serious.

This genre-bending anthology blends humorous fantasy, science fiction, and dark comedy into eleven stories that refuse to sit still. A theater prompter accidentally triggers a multiverse-wide pandemic of pointless small talk. Nostradamus stumbles on a vision of the future so absurd he blames the mushrooms. Istrian partisans fight fascists, demons, and body-snatching aliens side by side. A vampire hunter and a foul-mouthed orc bond over cheap beer and water polo. Shepherd androids accidentally open first contact with the galaxy while baking potatoes over an open fire. And beneath a quiet waterfall in Istria, something ancient breathes through the limestone, waiting for its century to turn.

Written with the same razor-sharp, unapologetically adult sense of humor that runs through all of Vanja Spirin's work, this collection of absurdist fiction and satire is for readers who love their fantasy weird, their science fiction irreverent, and their comedy dark, quick, and completely unpredictable. Equal parts myth, parody, and philosophical nonsense, “From Sheep to Stars” proves that the line between the sacred and the ridiculous was always thinner than we thought.

If you enjoy short story collections that mix fantasy, sci-fi, and humor into something entirely their own, saddle up, the sheep are just the beginning.