Melee, Magic & Puke: A Pinty Lightbottom Adventure: 1

At three-and-a-half feet tall, Pinty Lightbottom is the shortest psychopathic bar-owner and professional adventurer in all the realms. When his ex-fiancée is kidnapped, her father conscripts Pinty to bring her back home. Things get more complex when the rescue mission leads Pinty into the middle of a full-on war inside the local thieves guild. In doing what he does best, Pinty is abused, beaten, stabbed, sliced, clawed, drowned, berated, poisoned and otherwise exploited by everybody he meets. It doesn’t help that his ego well exceeds his cranium (so one might say the abuse is well earned). As he cuts a bloody swath through the mystery of the guild war, we meet his many companions, including his ever loyal Muel; Mavis, the head cook of his pub The Bottom Up; and Gloom, a cat with the nasty habit of turning invisible in a murderous rage of hunger.

Stephen Cassady is a late bloomer to writing. He earned his writing chops more than a decade ago when he edited the University of Calgary's creative literary journal SansCrit for four years, and graduated with an English minor earned through creative writing. For a few years after graduation he published a youth-content magazine.