Robert Appleton's Author Website

All books are currently available for purchase (unless otherwise stated). For excerpts, reviews, and full details of each book, click on the title.

Charlie Runs Rings Around the Earth (sci-fi adventure - short novel, Lyrical Press)

 AVAILABLE NOW AT LYRICAL PRESS

Celebrity athlete, Charlie Thorpe-Campbell is living out his family legacy of being among the fastest men in the world. Arrogant and self-absorbed, he prefers the limelight to facing up to emotional and social issues. And certainly, as the reigning champion RAM-runner, he literally runs rings around the earth.

All this changes when during the annual Tonne Run he is whisked away through a wormhole and finds himself on a barren, isolated planet with the fate of the galaxy resting on his athletic ability.

Will Charlie run rings around his enemies or will he continue running away?

 eBook available here! Priced $4.50

The Basingstoke Chronicles (time travel fantasy - novel, Uncial Press)

  OUT NOW AT UNCIAL PRESS

There was something decidedly unusual about the dead body found floating off the coast of Cuba. The wool of his garment, while only twenty years old, was from an animal extinct for over nine thousand years! A group of professional scuba divers, including Lord Henry Basingstoke and his friend, Rodrigo Quintas, eagerly search the ocean bed for clues. But when they find the secret of time travel in the deep, a fun vacation becomes an obsessive quest to be the first to solve the mystery. This involves a daring journey back through time, to a hidden land of rainforests, deadly creatures, and a doomed civilization. A place where nothing is what it seems. And the longer they stay, the more their adventure becomes, quite literally, a race against time.

 eBook available here! Priced $5.99

 Val and Tyne (horror - short story, Damnation Books)

Dr. Val McCormick runs a successful movie makeup effects business, Splatter House FX. But there's something a little different about the life-like stunt doubles he mutilates on camera. They're a little too life-like. Dead bodies, in fact--re-animated for those spectacular few moments. And now that he's got his big break on a huge Hollywood movie starring William Katt and Tyne Daly, Val will go to any lengths to ensure his gruesome money shot is the most realistic ever put on film. What could possibly go wrong?

eBook available here! Priced $2.50

 Sunset on Ramree (war, action horror - novelette, Eternal Press)

 OUT NOW AT ETERNAL PRESS

February 19th, 1945...

Over 1,000 Japanese soldiers retreated into the fetid mangrove swamps of Ramree Island. Days later, only twenty were found alive. History has come to know it as the massacre of Ramree, when sixteen kilometers of marshland delivered the battalion from their British enemy…straight into a nest of giant saltwater crocodiles.

Inspired by true events during WW2, Sunset on Ramree follows young musician-turned-soldier Shigeatsu Nakadai and his best friend, Kodi, as they head ever deeper into danger. Will friendship be enough to keep them alive in the deadliest place on Earth?

 eBook $3.95 available here!

Now available in paperback on Amazon ($4.50)

 Learn about saltwater crocodiles here!

The Eleven-Hour Fall Book III: Kate of Kratos (sci-fi adventure - novella, Eternal Press) 2009

The final installment in Robert Appleton’s sci-fi survival trilogy.

Jason Remington has been abducted by a monstrous creature. Having barely survived the ocean crossing, Kate Borrowdale must track him through an alien forest and over its low gravity roof. She finds him alive, but he is not alone. Two men and a woman, also survivors from the Fair Monique's crash, have rescued him and killed the creature. How? Kate senses they're hiding a secret and doesn’t trust them. Things look up when she finds a mountain cave for them all to live in. Procuring food proves tricky, however, as it means venturing back into the heart of the forest, where Kate and Jason find themselves being watched...by the real inhabitants.

eBook $5.95 available here 

Grandiloquence  (sci-fi, short story, Eternal Press) 2008

It is the distant future. A giant exoskeleton built around the earth permits anyone who can pay the price, access to the solitude of a space booth—the ultimate place to stargaze, get laid, or just escape for a while...

Benjamin Umbize recently lost his family to a Namibian genocide while he was studying in England. All he wants is a little quiet time to himself, to research a legendary writer...whose suicide is said to haunt Room 328. Bianca Burnett is a famous pop starlet scheduled to meet her boyfriend for a hot tryst miles above the earth. She hides her sophistication beneath a prickly for-the-cameras persona. But tonight, in Room 328, a friendship will develop that no one saw coming, least of all the student and the diva—a friendship that might just change both their lives forever...

eBook $2.50 available here

Now available in paperback on Amazon! Priced $3.95. Click here 

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The Eleven-Hour Fall Book II: The Elemental Crossing (sci-fi adventure - novella, Eternal Press) 2008

Cafe at the Edge of Outer Space (sci-fi romance - short story, Eternal Press) 2008

In the distant future, our overpopulated planet requires all sixteen year olds to undertake a ten-year exile as a rite of passage. Paired with a mate on the voyage out to kick-start adulthood, they must all pass through the café on the edge of outer space, the legendary waystation orbiting Earth.

Frank Archer isn't ready for life away from home. He's smitten with his new girl, Emma Whitaker. But whether he likes it or not, it's time for the boy to become a man. He has a beautiful girl to protect...through the deadliest terrorist attack ever conceived.

eBook $2.50 available here

 Now available in print at Amazon!!  Priced $3.95! Click here 

The Eleven-Hour Fall (sci-fi adventure - novella, Eternal Press) 2008

What if you fell from a great height...toward a ground you couldn't see...and hours later, you were still falling...?

For survival, for love. With the man of her dreams unconscious in her arms, astronaut Kate Borrowdale must escape the treacherous peaks of Kratos and traverse a strange, hidden world beneath the clouds.

eBook $3.50 available here

Now available in paperback on Amazon!! Priced $4.95. Click here

Bits of the Dead (featuring 'Cemetery', a zombie horror - flash fiction, Coscom Entertainment's Bits of the Dead anthology) 2008

The Stag Antler (paranormal horror-mystery - novella, Club Lighthouse Publishing) 2007

It is another sleepy autumn night for the village of Leighton, England, until a naked stranger knocks on Police Inspector Jonathan Greetham’s door. The man claims he is being followed by something deadly--neither man nor beast. Something that can’t be stopped. Skepticism soon gives way to horror as the pursuer arrives to claim its victim—its umpteenth of the night. Across moors, counties, and the width of Europe, Greetham realizes the only way to keep the stranger alive is to keep him on the move, however long it takes. For the occult predator is not of this world, and seemingly no force on Earth can stop it. Greetham and Scotland Yard must race against time to discover its dark origin and true purpose. The year is 1913. The chase is on.

eBook $3.99 available here 

Esther May Morrow's Buy or Borrow (Arthur Everest - fantasy adventure - anthology, Eternal Press) 2008

Who is Esther May Morrow? Why is it that her strange shop, resembling something out of medieval England, has remained unchanged from the nineteenth to the twenty-third century. What is she selling? And who will come to buy...?

Stories in this collection feature a professional cardsharp with a dark secret; an old man, his dying dog, and a chance for immortality; a vengeful Marine and a special pocket watch; and a celebrated male prostitute and his unrequited love...for Olivia de Havilland!

Eerie, amusing and always original, these stories address the personal journeys of five haunted individuals, for whom quirks of time shed new light on their dilemmas. No one who enters Esther May's shop is ever the same again.

Featuring the short stories Spellbound, Gin Rummy, Cretaceous, The Face Never Lies and Miss Olivia.

eBook $3.95 available here

  Now available in paperback on Amazon!! Priced $5.50. Click here 

 Esther May Morrow's Lot 62 (Arthur Everest - spy mystery - short story, Eternal Press) 2009

Julie Blalock is approaching thirty and has an unfulfilling job with an accountancy firm. But she also has a secret—she was once an MI6 Agent. A personal tragedy forced her to quit eight years ago, but a chance offer to return for a one-time op is too tempting to ignore. Her mission—to pose as a rich socialite at Sotheby's, to gain critical intelligence during the most anticipated high-class auction of the year—Esther May Morrow's sale of antique treasures, featuring Lot 62, a prize that has even the Ministry of Defence worried. What secrets will Julie discover on her impromptu return to espionage?

eBook $3.50 available here

Montgomery In Advance (time travel, alternate history - 17,000 words) 2008

The Hard Left (mystery - 700 words) 2008

Musket Ball, Cannonball (time travel action - 2,000 words) 2007

Olympus Mons (sci-fi drama - 3,000 words) 2004

Salt and Jasmine (historical drama - 2,000 words) 2005

Save the World, Tax-Deductible (futuristic - 2,800 words) 2008

Solipsism (sci-fi fantasy - 8,000 words) 2008

Think Me Your Favourite Girl (sci-fi drama - 1,500 words) 2004