Question: How can I mainline the stories of The Next Fix directly into my brain?

Answer: Through the audio barrel of podcasting, baby.

Many of the worlds and futures you'll fix on began their lives in audio form on the Variant Frequencies podcast, from wence the Variant Fiends get their name. Produced into braingasmic sound and fury by Rick Stringer and featuring a cast of the rawest and most talented motherfuckers in the 'sphere, if your mind's-eye can't create it, they'll create it for you.

Download, listen, sample. Then buy the book to experience the whole load.


I’d spotted Carey. He heard the Whirring too. He’d grabbed my baseball bat out of the front seat, and now he was standing, braced against the open passenger side door, in his best Sammy Sosa stance. I couldn’t believe it, not even after knowing the guy for two years. He was actually going to try to tee off on the lo-gi.


They weren’t family in the office. It wasn’t a brotherhood. They weren’t even friends. But they’d all been assigned a singular shitty fate, and that made them the same. When Management descended to rob a corpse of that departed man’s few meager possessions it didn’t stand with the other postmen. One day all of them would be that corpse.

And there were some actions even dead men jerked at.


You thought that was the sun rising over Saturn and ain’t that a sight when really a superflare of magnesium was covering the approach of a creepy-creeper. And by the time the light dissipated they were right on top of you.


War remains a constant throughout human history. How we wage war does not. When a man that has battled with Spartans, Celtic barbarians, and Mongol hordes joins today’s techno military, the question becomes: Is there a place for warriors among soldiers? And when you’ve seen the rise and fall of a thousand nations and empires, can war still hold any meaning?


Spend a night in the far reach with Sherk Maxwell, doctor of broadcast journalism. Sherk is humanity’s last voice of dissent, set forth on a mic and beamed out across deep space to every rift-tripper and manic ET roaming the great void. But as the same slimy threat that evacuated Earth encroaches on Dr. Maxwell’s weird corner of the big black, will it signal the final broadcast of mankind’s last frequency? You’ll have to tune in to find out…


Every twelve hours the light above his door burns bloody and bright. Every twelve hours a new batch rolls off the genetic assembly line, the saplings that will grow into a new human race. And every twelve hours Lofgren Stenz must delve, deep beneath the surface of our shared consciousness. The purpose of the delve is simple: To cleanse human nature of its lesser angels, the savage beasts that long ago were given form . . . and nearly destroyed us all.


Satan has come to St. Jerome’s Catholic School for Girls, and only hitwoman Patricia Sharpe, their least esteemed alumnus, can save the edifice from the Fallen Angel’s influence. But is it the Devil himself that’s taken hold of St. Jerome’s and its students, or just an ancient troublemaker up to old tricks?