Urns & Other Short Stories
Urns takes place in Montauk on the far east end of Long Island, NY. Keith has been visiting Montauk since he was in grammar school, and to this day spends a week out there every year with his extended family. He began to write Urns late one night and into the early morning hours on one of his visits. Sadly, The East Deck Motel, to which he refers, is now gone but should a reader visit Montauk and Ditch Plains Beach, they will find many of the other landmarks in Urns still there.
Triad
Triad is the story that remains the closest to its original iteration, heavily influenced in tone by Edgar Allan Poe. Keith first put it on paper in 1975 during spring break during his freshman year at Tulane University. He revisited it in 2016.
A New Arrangement
A New Arrangement is the most straightforward story in this collection, its characters are oblique amalgams of people Keith met in Manhattan after moving back in 2010. It appears here with minimal revision from the original.
The Revisiting
The Revisiting is set in Ogunquit, Maine, another of Keith's favorite, though less visited, summer vacation destinations. He wrote it while living in Littleton, Massachusetts in 2008, and it appears here in its original form.
The Minions Of Time
The Minions of Time has changed a great deal from its original telling. In 1979 Keith was deep into writing a work in progress that is to this day, unfinished: The Six Stones. As he wrote Minions, he realized that it had wandered into some of the mythology underlying The Six Stones. At that time, being more occupied with writing a thesis than connecting some dots between these two pieces, he left Minions in its original form. He only truly returned to it after rewriting Those Left Behind in 2008.
The Pigeons
The Pigeons is his most recent story, written in 2016 after he finished Urns. It is set in Manhattan. The first draft was quite different from this final version, which is more character-driven and better researched.
Those Left Behind
Those Left Behind definitely is the oldest tale herein included. Rooted back in the early 1970s, it was a pulpish horror story worthy of the high schooler Keith was. And so it remained until thirty years later when, in 2008, he found it while he was organizing various and sundry old papers. He had recently reread Minions and decided that he needed to connect it more explicitly to The Six Stones. Keith began to play with the high school short story, which then emerged as part of The Six Stones mythology. In 2013 he again revised this story in conjunction with Minions. That is the version included in this collection.