Bad Moon Books is set to release the second book under its new "Eclipse" Imprint, a limited edition hardcover of approximately eighty pages total, titled Little Graveyard on the Prairie (LGOTP) by horror genre veteran author, Steven E. Wedel. In addition to the title novella, which could perhaps, with equal justification, have been labeled and referred to as being of novelette length, the book contains two additional short stories by Wedel, REUNION and NOCTURNAL CARESS, as well as a discerning Introduction by eminent author Steve Vernon and interesting artwork by artist Paul Groendes.

Many of you might well recognize Steven E. Wedel's name, as he has written, among many other books, a very popular, entertaining, and highly recommended quadruplet of books placing his own mark upon werewolf fiction, namely his "Werewolf Saga" books: Murdered by Human Wolves, Shara, Ulrik , and Call to the Hunt.

In LGOTP, Wedel ostensibly seeks to present his own take on a classic ghost story. Wedel places his story in familiar territory, as the Oklahoma born, raised, and lifelong resident sets this tale firmly in the read-earth farmland of rural Oklahoma. We are quickly introduced to the story's protagonist, Harley Shaw, a middle-aged former alfalfa and dairy farmer and his 363-acre farm located outside the town of Ripley, OK. This is land that his great grandfather first obtained and farmed back in 1889, and that has been kept in his family ever since. Unfortunately, Harley has had a hard life and experienced more than his fair share of adversity. Harley had been married to Rhonda, and had a young daughter, Jenny. During the last "oil-boom" of the 1980's, an oil company had found evidence of oil on the most fertile 200 acres of Harley's farmland, and tried to pressure him into allowing them to drill there. He was opposed, but his young wife, who had dreams of big money, talked him into signing the contracts. No major oil was ever found, and the oil company itself quickly went belly-up and disappeared after having environmentally destroyed the once fertile land to the point that not even weeds would now grow there. This loss of farmland, in turn, caused the farm to turn economically non-viable, and both Harley and Rhonda had been forced to get menial jobs in order to try and make ends meet.

Eventually another tragedy had caused the frustrated Rhonda to give Harley an ultimatum; either give up the farm and sell it, or she would leave and take young six-year old Jenny with her. Harley, being stubborn, never losing faith in the farm, and believing that Rhonda would return once she calmed down a little, refused to sell or move. Rhonda was as good as her word, took Jenny and moved, and is now twenty years later, happily remarried and living in Texas. Harley's daughter is now a grown woman, married, and has refused for many years all contact with her father.

Poor Harley suffers greatly the loss of his daughter's company, and often dreams of her. He also, in an attempt to try and pay the ever-mounting bills, has created a new business, Prairie Gardens Cemetery. He offers bereaved family members the opportunity to have their deceased loved ones buried in the safe and friendly confines of rural OK in a "natural" fashion, sans embalming and with coffin optional, at a much less expensive cost than normal urban funeral homes and cemeteries provide. Of course, Harley isn't doing this for altruistic reasons, and the reality of what he does with his cemetery and those bodies sent for burial there introduce the ghostly and ghastly sub-plot into the proceedings.

It is a somewhat delicate matter attempting to review and discuss various important elements of this story without deliberately or even inadvertently revealing various "spoilers" that could lessen or even ruin the story for the reader. I've therefore tried to err on the side of discretion, which then acts as a limiting factor upon any detailed discussion of the story itself. However, you should all take it as a given that I found Little Graveyard on the Prairie to be eminently worthwhile as a purchase to read. The two short stories that accompany the main novella/novelette; REUNION, which concerns a most unusual memorial service arranged by the parents of a young man who has died in an automobile accident, and NOCTURNAL CARESS, a refreshing yet scary take upon the old childhood "monster-under-the-bed," are both expertly crafted and enjoyably chilling stories that are worth the price of the book alone.

While LGOTP, the novella/novelette is also a very worthwhile read and is, as Steve Vernon so correctly notes, a story of, and filled with, haunted regrets, the story is both something more, and something less, than the sum of its parts. Strange as it may sound, the entire ghostly sub-plot is actually unnecessary to the principal story itself. Wedel has designed and constructed a beautifully written tale of regret and different kinds of loss. It is moving, chilling, and rather stunning, and frankly does not need the ghost story sub-plot, which, it is to be noted, is not identical to the cemetery sub-plot, and feels just a bit "tacked-on" as if to allow the story a more easily arguable horror-genre placement. After reading the story, you can all judge for yourselves how necessary the addition of soil slinging poltergeists is to the proceedings. I personally feel that the story would lose nothing by the subtraction of the sparse references and sub-plot, and might actually be the stronger for their negation. However, in either case, the novella is compelling and wonderfully written, as are the accompanying two short stories. Little Graveyard on the Prairie is yet another fine offering from Bad Moon Books, and further evidence that Steven E. Wedel is a truly gifted author whose works should be on the TBR lists of all serious readers.