Showing results by author "Todd Downing" in All Categories

April, 1925 finds ace pilot Jack McGraw fleeing hostile fighter planes and a mysterious zeppelin over the skies of New Jersey. Then a woman from his past invites him to dinner at Thomas Edison’s home and drafts him into the A.E.G.I.S. foundation. And that’s just Monday. Jack’s mission is to fly an experimental aircraft and lead a crew consisting of his comrades from the Great War against a well-funded secret society bent on pillaging history’s great treasures and amassing dangerous power.

May, 1927, finds the combined crews of the airships Daedalus and Percival in coordinated pursuit of the Silver Star commando forces that murdered Duke's original crew and took Rivets hostage. Intervening in a tribal uprising in Kenya, "Captain Stratosphere" Jack McGraw & Dorothy "Doc" Starr find their replacement mechanic in the form of a young Kikuyu woman and technical prodigy.

Summer, 1982. When two local teens go missing from the riverside town of Calico, Oregon, a middle school nerd steeped in wild conspiracy theories steps in to investigate. With a posse consisting of a busboy, a delinquent, an LA transplant, and a cheerleader, A.J. sets out to prove that a Satanic cult is behind the disappearances, all while dodging the local sheriff, high school bullies, and a deputy drunk on authority.

April 1927 finds adventurer-pilot Jack McGraw and occult expert Dorothy "Doc" Starr extracting a priceless Celtic artifact from a long-sealed tomb on a windswept Scottish island. Following a shootout with Silver Star commandos and a desperate dogfight into the eye of a storm, the airship Daedalus limps back to London - only to discover a former crewmate has gone missing, along with his own airship and its crew!

Thirteen weird and wondrous tales populate this anthology by the author of the AIRSHIP DAEDALUS pulp adventure series. Spanning a 30-year catalog and often satirizing the 20th century ideal of the nuclear family and social mores, Primordial Soup Kitchen is a collection of the stranger side of Todd Downing's short fiction.

November 1928 finds Dorothy “Doc” Starr and "Captain Stratosphere" Jack McGraw raising their daughter when the local AEGIS bureau chief taps them for a new assignment—investigate the source of a strange radio signal originating from somewhere off the northern coast of Greenland. When their home is attacked by agents of the Silver Star, they know Aleister Crowley has gone on the offensive. With wounded crew members, a disabled airship, and the Silver Star in the vicinity, Jack and Doc must race to find the source of the signal and prevent a ghoulish apocalypse.

Handed one last mission by Edison himself, “Captain Stratosphere” Jack McGraw, Dorothy "Doc” Starr, and the rest of the crew head to Seattle, where an aerospace innovator will re-fit the Daedalus with a weapon system for testing off the coast of British Columbia. But the routine mission becomes a perilous fight for survival, both on the ground and in the air. For Aleister Crowley and Maria Blutig have summoned a storm which threatens to open an eldritch dimension, ending the world as we know it.