Oddballs: Short Story Collection (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798233325168)

ODDBALLS: A Short Story Collection

Ten twisted tales of misfits, madness, and the beautiful chaos of being human.

Buddy Devine's debut short story collection ODDBALLS is a wild ride through the stranger corners of existence-where ghosts solve their own murders, time-traveling janitors rewrite history, and the apocalypse arrives not with a bang but with the year's first snowfall in a millennium.

These aren't your typical short stories. They're raw, unfiltered snapshots of people on the edge: the ones society forgot, the ones who never quite fit in, the ones still searching for meaning in a world that stopped making sense long ago. From psych wards to parallel universes, from Washington Square Park to the literal end of time, Devine crafts worlds that feel simultaneously alien and achingly familiar.

Inside you'll find:

A man whose "friends" might actually be symptoms of his undiagnosed mental illness-and his desperate attempt to break free before they destroy him completely.

Two gay ghosts turned amateur detectives, solving their own serial killer case from beyond the grave while uncovering a conspiracy that reaches the highest levels of power.

A high school student who accidentally invents a working time machine just to avoid embarrassment, only to get stranded in the 1960s with his wheelchair-using best friend and meet his legendary grandfather in a psych ward.

A civilization where winter hasn't existed for a thousand years, and the first snowfall might signal either salvation or total annihilation.

An aspiring rock band in 1980s New York whose keyboardist unknowingly has bagels and coffee with Lou Reed-and tells him his unreleased lyrics are terrible.

A Victorian gentleman displaced in modern-day New York, struggling with autism, heartbreak, and the crushing realization that Oscar Wilde's era of romance is long dead.

A cosmic horror story where a doctor's obsession with evolution leads to experiments that blur the line between human and hawk-creating monsters that wait in the wings.

And more strange, heartbreaking, darkly funny tales of the beautiful disasters we call people.

These stories ask the hard questions:

• What if your depression, anxiety, and self-destruction weren't character flaws but actual entities trying to kill you?
• Can you solve your own murder if you're already dead?
• What happens when the last romantic in the world realizes he was born in the wrong century?
• How do you maintain hope when the apocalypse is just another Tuesday?

Devine writes with the manic energy of someone who's seen too much, felt too deeply, and refuses to pretend everything's okay. These are stories about neurodivergent people trying to survive in a neurotypical world, queer people searching for connection in the cold digital wasteland of modern dating, artists and dreamers who refuse to give up even when the world tells them they should.

The prose is conversational, urgent, and unapologetically messy-like overhearing the most interesting person at a party tell you their life story at 3 AM. Devine doesn't believe in tidy endings or easy answers. Life is complicated, people are contradictory, and sometimes the only thing you can do is laugh at the absurdity of it all.

From the supernatural to the painfully real, from science fiction to psychological horror, ODDBALLS refuses to stay in one genre.