"The Netherworld Central Railway" by S. R. Brandt

Current Tags

hell, train, demons, love, fantasy, humor, dreampunk

Categories

Fantasy

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The Netherworld Central Railway

Author's Description

For some people, life feels like a train ride through hell; for Cyrus Perdita, it actually is... All Cyrus has are the clothes on his back, a message promising good fortune in New Mexico, and a train ticket to take him partway there. As he waits, he spies a massive old iron train. Curious, he draws closer. A stranger offers to trade tickets, granting Cyrus cross-country passage on the train he's admiring, complete with a private cabin. Adventure calls and Cyrus has nothing left to lose.

Why I Chose it

I checked this out because my search term of the day was "train". And then I started reading and just kept going.

Anyhow, the cover on this one doesn't really follow genre conventions, and I'm not actually sure where the story is heading. In fact, I'd say there's a non-zero chance it will all fall apart and meander aimlessly at some point, but... 

Just go read the first episode right now! This story sucks the reader in with an intriguing puzzle and then drops it and moves on to the next, and I'm so taken in that I'm only mad that I can't do the same with my writing. I may have to read this just to understand why I love it so much.

[34 episodes so far, with 6 updates in the last 30 days.]

Who Might Like This

Me. I might love this. And I'm not sure why. But also, anyone who loves adventure stories that are so fresh you don't care where they are headed.

Unrelated Griping

I've found searching on random terms gives me a much better selection of interesting stories than clicking on any of the categories.

Seriously, Kindle Vella, your ability to display stories is terrible. That's why I'm reduced to searching on random nouns to find stories. I've even had stories show up in my searches that didn't have any episodes at all. I wish there was a way to download a spreadsheet of all the stories along with their descriptions, keywords, categories, number of episodes, and the last time an episode was added.