Preorder. Publishing October 2023.

Signed copies will not be available on US orders, but we will have some signed copies available for Canadian orders. We’ll be sending books directly to the author and he will sign and mail them from up there. Use the Canada Only—Where the Pavement Turns to Sand shipping option to get $5 shipping.

Ride along on a journey with these 20 stories by Sheldon Birnie through the wild and wondrous backwoods of the Canadian prairies, out to where the pavement turns to sand and the possibilities are as endless as the horizon…

From close or would-be encounters with extraterrestrials, lycanthropes, bigfoot and the Ogopogo, haunted hockey skates and more, Sheldon Birnie’s new collection of short-fiction Where the Pavement Turns to Sand takes readers on a midnight cruise through the Canadian prairies before dumping you back on your doorstep, unsure as to what exactly just transpired.

A golf pro claims he was abducted by aliens before the big local tournament, though townspeople figure he finally fell off the wagon. A line cook comes face-to-face with something from his worst nightmare only to be mocked mercilessly by his peers. A beer league hockey player worries he didn’t do enough to help a former teammate, with tragic consequences. In these 20 stories, the mundane and the menacing meet over a pint at the local rink on the darkest night of the year, or around a midsummer bonfire beneath the stars on the shores of a deep forbidden lake.

Where the Pavement Turns to Sand is a collection of working class, everyday heartbreaks and bad decisions. In a refreshing rural Canadian setting, the characters in these slice of life tales stumble through divorce, debt, bad sex, and boring jobs, but also curling robots, aliens, jackalopes, wendigo, lots of legs wet with urine, and (maybe) sasquatches with an unexpected whimsy. What makes it work is Birnie’s signature dark humor and conversational style that makes every story feel like it was your neighbor telling it to you over a beer around a campfire, or at the rink. Surprising, entertaining, grimy and weird.

– Meagan Lucas, author of Songbirds and Stray Dogs and Here in the Dark, Editor in Chief of Reckon Review.