Iron & Ashes: A Measure Set in Steel

Coming soon from Monroe St. Press and John Spencer, author of the Surge Series and Last Ride On The Galena Coach Road and Other Tales:

  Iron & Ashes, a literary cycle—part epic poem, part lyric narrative, part stage play, part novel—set in late 20th century Illinois, where progress presses against memory, and shortcuts threaten to erase what still holds. 

Some roads aren't remembered. They're measured. 

Along a worn stretch of U.S. 40 near Effingham, Illinois, in the late 1970s, a scrapyard sits just off the road—ordered with a precision that borders on reverence. Nothing there is accidental. Nothing is wasted. Every piece of metal, every tool, every remnant of industry is placed, accounted for. 

The man who keeps it that way is Silas Vance. He is not a dreamer. Not a man given to abstractions. 

He is a builder. An octogenarian engineer. 

A man who has seen the great works of the world—canals cut through continents, steel raised into skylines—and who has chosen, deliberately, to step away from wealth and status into something quieter... but no less exacting. 

And yet—he is not alone. There is a presence in that yard. A witness. 

Arthur. A son who never came home from the Second World War.    

In Iron & Ashes by John Spencer, the past does not fade. It watches. It measures.

As Effingham begins to grow—pushed by the same restless force that has always driven expansion along the old roads—pressure mounts. Land is wanted. Deals are made. Corners are cut. Lines are bent. 

But some men do not bend. 

And some places do not yield without being measured first. 

In Iron & Ashes, Spencer utilizes the plumb bob as a central metaphor, representing Silas Vance's unbending moral compass. It symbolizes the conflict between individual craftsmanship and the destructive fires of progress. A Scriptural image, used by Old Testament prophets to call attention to ancient Israel's departure from the straight and true. 

 As an engineer of the old school, Vance uses his literal and metaphorical plumb line to expose crooked shortcuts, legal loopholes, and ethical compromises, and forces the town to look at what they are losing in the name of progress. 

  However, this is not a story about resisting change. It is about judging it. About whether what is built stands true... or comes up crooked. 

 Setting Iron & Ashes along U.S. 40 is also significant. Originally, this was the National Road, commissioned by Thomas Jefferson in 1806 as the first federally funded highway. It carved through the wilderness to open Illinois to pioneer settlement. Effingham grew out of the dirt along this original trail.

With the explosion of the automobile in the 20th century, it became U.S. Route 40, the "Main Street of America", lined with mom-and-pop gas stations, diners, and yards that served a traveling nation. 

 By the 1970s, however, it had been superseded by Interstate 70, which bypassed local businesses. Towns began to decline and developers stepped in to clear out the old landscape for corporate expansion, and this is the historical turning point that inspires the conflict in Iron & Ashes. 

This story, like John Spencer's other stories, demands that the reader stop and look vertically, by the steady weight of the plumb line. From the perilous freedom trails of the antebellum Surge Series, to walking the restless paths of the Galena Coach Road, or standing with Silas Vance amidst the iron and ancestral ashes of an Effingham scrapyard, the lesson remains the same. 

The road runs through it all. 

And it keeps its own account. 

Iron & Ashes—Coming Summer 2026.

 

Inside Last Ride On The Galena Coach Road and Other Tales — Full Story Guide

Some roads you travel. Some roads take hold of you.

 

We have had a few people ask what’s inside Last Ride On The Galena Coach Road and Other Tales, so here it is—clean and straight on through.

Twenty stories. One long road.

A journey that will take the reader down dusty forgotten paths... to the very edge of tomorrow.

These are road stories—set across Illinois, the Midwest, wartime Europe, and a near-future grid—but each one turns on something deeper: memory, burden, choice, and the long pull of the road itself.

Complete Table of Contents with Story Highlights:

1. Notes From The Earth – A Woodland boy plays a "held note" to gain the land's permission long before the grid of settlers reshapes the world.

2. Last Ride on the Galena Coach Road – A young Vietnam vet caught between a muscle car's momentum and a fading stagecoach trace, meets his destiny where past and pavement collide.

3. The Boy Who Took the Reins – A coming-of-age tale about a young boy carrying the responsibility for a stagecoach team, learning the weight of the road in both his hands and heart.

4. Night Freight – A truck driver carrying a load through a raging dust storm on Route 66 outruns his nemesis only to find he must choose between revenge or restoration.

5. The LeMans – A high-stakes night drive in a Pontiac LeMans, where urgency, mechanical trust, and raw fear define the road ahead.

6. The Last Mile Out of Davenport – A late-night drive leads a young man onto a haunted stretch of blacktop where his brother's fatal crash still echoes.

7. The Long Road Home – A man travels a long Midwestern road where the past walks beside him, and home waits only if he can endure the journey.

8. For Your Safety – A near-future convoy story where surveillance systems and automated control turn safety into confinement.

9. Filling Station, Dusk – A quiet roadside vignette capturing human connection at a rural gas station at sunset.

10. Whiteside and The Comet – A historical fiction piece set in the winter of 1858, blending a celestial omen, the arrival of iron rails and the Underground Railroad.

11. Kickapoo Drift – In the summer of 1972, fourteen-year-old June floats the Kickapoo Creek, discovering memory has its own current, apart from the road.

12. Twilight Hollow – A mythic Midwestern tale where the land itself holds memory, resistance, and hidden bargains.

13. Out of Road – A psychological and symbolic story about reaching the literal and emotional end of the path.

14. The Store at the Fork in The Fog – A time-slip story featuring a Desert Storm veteran encountering a 1950s general store outside normal time.

15. The Road to La Ricamarie – A World War II-era story set in rural France, where a road becomes a refuge for a child.

16. Trigger Road – A historical Underground Railroad story where land, instinct, and vigilance create a hidden sanctuary.

17. Grid-Drone – A dystopian future story about resistance, mechanical freedom, and a last run in a controlled system.

18. The Reckoning at the Edge of The World – A mythic road canon combining poetry and prose, where Miller the surveyor returns to settle his final account.

19. Where The Dust Would Not Settle – A reflective story about patience, stewardship, and restoring a stretch of road through time.

20. The Road Ascendant – A final, philosophical story where a road breaks beyond the horizontal world and points upward.

From stagecoach traces to blacktop highways... from river drift to digital grid... these stories follow the marks we leave—and the ones that refuse to fade.

Slow down. Watch the verge. The reckoning is earned.

 

 

 

A Long Awaited Return: John Spencer's Last Ride On The Galena Coach Road and Other Tales

After a lengthy hiatus, John Spencer has released a new book. 

For readers who discovered him through the Surge series, this may come as a surprise. Last Ride On The Galena Coach Road and Other Tales is not a continuation of that world. It is something different —quieter, more reflective, and deeply rooted in place and character. 

Last Ride on the Galena Coach Road and Other Tales is a collection of stories shaped by landscape, memory, and the choices that define ordinary lives. Some are historical in tone, some intimate and contemporary, but all carry Spencer's signature attention to human tension — the moment where a decision matters. 

The title story evokes a vanished era of stage routes and rough roads, where travel was uncertain and endings were rarely tidy. Other tales explore equally precarious crossings — between past and present, loyalty and regret, safety and risk. 

Why the gap in Spencer's work? Writing takes time. Living takes time. And sometimes the stories worth telling require both. 

This collection reflects growth — not only in craft, but in perspective. Readers will find the pacing more deliberate, the emotional stakes more internal, and the storytelling confident enough to let silence do some of the work. 

At Monroe St Press, we are proud to publish work that values substance over speed. Last Ride On The Galena Coach Road and Other Tales represents that commitment: carefully written, thoughtfully assembled, and grounded in storytelling that respects its readers. 

Eric Brighteyes: Granddaddy of Sword and Sorcery

Monroe St. Press' latest paperback release, Eric Brighteyes by H. Rider Haggard, is among Haggard's less famous but still influential adventure stories.  

While Haggard is best known for his stories set in contemporary or ancient Africa (King Solomon's Mines, Allan Quatermain, She), Eric Brighteyes, published in 1890, was set in medieval Iceland and written in a style resembling that of the Viking/Norse sagas. 

The first modern English translations of the original sagas had appeared in print in the 1860s. Icelandic scholar Eirikur Magnusson of Cambridge University taught the Old Norse language to William Morris and collaborated with him on translating several classic sagas, including The Story of Grettir the Strong (1869) and Volsungasaga (1870).  Magnusson and Morris also worked on a six-volume collection of translated sagas published between 1891 and 1905. 

Haggard traveled to Iceland in 1888 and wrote Eric Brighteyes shortly after his return. He also composed an in-depth introduction outlining the history and purpose of the sagas, and how they blended history and fiction: 

From generation to generation skalds (storytellers) wandered through the winter snows, much as Homer may have wandered in his day across the Grecian vales and mountains, to find a welcome at every stead, because of the old-time story they had to tell. Here, night after night, they would sit in the ingle and while away the weariness of the dayless dark with histories of the times when men carried their lives in their hands.... To alter the tale was one of the greatest of crimes: the skald must repeat it as it came to him; but by degrees undoubtedly the sagas did suffer alteration. The facts remained the same indeed, but around them gathered a mist of miraculous occurrences and legends.

He dedicated the book to Empress Frederick of Germany (Victoria Adelaide Mary Louisa), eldest daughter of Queen Victoria and widow of Emperor (Kaiser) Frederick III. Frederick had just been diagnosed with throat cancer when his father, Wilhelm I, died in March 1888, and he was ill for most of his 99-day reign. The Empress had told Haggard that her husband "found pleasure in the reading of my stories". Knowing that his writings had brought "an hour's forgetfulness of sorrow and pain" to the dying Emperor was, Haggard wrote, a knowledge "far dearer than any praise". 

Those who read and were influenced by Eric Brighteyes included J.R.R. Tolkien, who cited it as an inspiration for The Lord of the Rings, and Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian. It contains numerous plot and character elements that became common in 20th- and 21st-century sword and sorcery, including inter-family and inter-tribal warfare and supernatural influences wielded by a priest, sorceress or similar figure.  It even includes a "red wedding" similar to that portrayed in George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series, which formed the basis for the TV series Game of Thrones. 

The Monroe St. Press edition of Eric Brighteyes also includes numerous vintage illustrations drawn by Lancelot Speed. 

Announcing Team Monroe St.

Join Team Monroe St. in our quest to hasten the day when diseases such as Huntington's, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and numerous cancers are cured. With your contribution to our efforts, our loved ones could live longer and healthier lives.  

All it requires is the unused power of your computer, smartphone or other internet connected device. 

Folding@Home (FAH) is a distributed computing project that harnesses the available resources of personal computers owned by volunteers all over the world to tackle one of the greatest challenges in modern medicine and biology.

What is "Folding" and Why Is It So Important?

"Folding" is the process by which organic proteins — the substances that make up our bodies' cells and vital organs — are formed into molecular chains that make them functional. Understanding how these proteins take shape, and modeling the myriad shapes these proteins can take, could shed light on how diseases such as cancer develop and how they could be cured or prevented. 

However, analyzing the billions of possible folding combinations is a task beyond the capability of any single computer to handle in a reasonable amount of time. In 2000, Stanford University researcher Vijay Pande, PhD, launched a distributed computer network to handle the complex mathematical calculations required for protein folding research. Thus, Folding@Home was born. 

Solving Problems Faster

Current FAH director Greg Bowman, assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics at Washington University in St. Louis, says the project enables otherwise insurmountable research tasks to be completed far more efficiently.

"To model just one millisecond of folding, even for an average-size protein, on a top of the line MacBook Pro would take something like 500 years," Bowman said in an interview. "But with Folding@Home, we can split these problems into many independent chunks. We can send them to 1,000 people at the same time. Running those calculations in parallel, we can take problems that would have taken 500 years and instead solve them in six months." 

Putting Your Computer To Work

FAH currently has more than 110,000 volunteers using their home/personal computers and other devices to perform these intense calculations. Its goal is to recruit 1 million folders. 

Participants can choose the types of research they would like to contribute to — from cancer or Alzheimer's to antibiotic resistance. Many have signed up in honor of someone who is living with or has succumbed to one of the diseases being researched. Participants can also form or join teams whose statistics are tracked as a whole. 

FAH links your home computer or mobile device to software that works with Windows, Mac, Linux or Android operating systems. The calculations use only the portion of your computer's power that is available at any given time — more when your device is idle, less when it is being used. 

You can continue to use your device for other tasks while the folding calculations are performed in the background. Your device can perform the calculations at night or while you are away at work or school, all the while helping medical and biological researchers come closer to their goals. You can also devote to this effort a spare or slightly outdated device that you are not currently using regularly. 

Think of it as YOUR chance to play a part, however small, in solving one of the greatest scientific challenges of our time... comparable to putting humans on the Moon or Mars! 

Get Started!

For more information on FAH, or to sign up, visit https://foldingathome.org/. 

If you would like to join Team Monroe St., our team number is 235367. You can also submit further questions or suggestions to our contact link above or to our Facebook page. 

A hidden gem of detective literature

The newest title in the Monroe St. Press collection is The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, published in 1868 and regarded to this day as a trend-setting work of detective fiction. 

In 1848, relatives and friends of heiress Rachel Verinder gather at the family estate to celebrate her 18th birthday. On that day, Rachel inherits ownership of the Moonstone, an exotic (and possibly cursed) diamond bequeathed to her by her deceased uncle. When the Moonstone vanishes from her room that night,  an exhaustive investigation begins into who took the gem, and where it might be found. 

Although it was not the first English language detective story — Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and similar short stories predated it by more than 20 years — it is reckoned by some literary scholars/critics to be the first full-length English-language detective novel to attain popular success. Figures such as T.S. Eliot, Dorothy Sayers and G.K. Chesterton considered it among the greatest British mystery stories of all time; in 2014 the British newspaper The Guardian ranked it No. 19 on its list of 100 Best Novels. 

The Moonstone established a number of conventions that remain staples of detective fiction to this day: 

— its setting on an upper class English country estate 
— the involvement of a professional investigator whose skill contrasts with the ineptitude of the local police
— introduction of "red herrings" and false suspects to keep the reader guessing 
— an elaborate reconstruction of the crime
— a final, shocking plot twist 

Author Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) was a novelist, playwright and essayist who worked closely with Charles Dickens and served as an editor of Dickens' periodical All the Year Round.  His other well-known works include The Woman in White (1859) and No Name (1862). Many of his writings touched upon issues considered sensational by Victorian standards, such as divorce, illegitimacy and the disadvantageous position of women in legal matters. 

The Monroe St. Press edition of The Moonstone is available at this link.  

Monroe St. artists on Bandcamp

If you have visited our Music Page recently you may have seen links for our artists That That Is and Aerostat on Bandcamp. What sets Bandcamp apart from numerous other online music companies that have risen to prominence in the past 20 years? 

Bandcamp allows artists and recording labels not only to upload their music, but also to control how they sell their work, as well as the pricing of their work, and to sell associated merchandise. Artists can also offer their work in physical formats, including CD and even vinyl records. 

Since Bandcamp was founded in 2008, more than 3,500 labels and 600,000 artists have sold music or merchandise through it. The company operates on a "fair trade" music policy in which revenue is split approximately 10-15% to Bandcamp, roughly 5% to processing fees, and 80-85% to the artist. Since, as its website states, "we only make money when artists make a lot more money", it's become a hotspot for emerging artists of all kinds. 

Standalone music streaming companies have, in the past decade, continued to lose money and industry-wide recording sales have continued to decline. Many, if not most, artists no longer make any substantial income from recording sales. Ethan Diamond, one of Bandcamp's founders, stated in 2017 that "the seemingly inevitable upshot of these two trends (declining streaming and recording sales) is that the majority of music consumption will eventually take place within the subscription rental services of two or three enormous corporations, who can afford to lose money on music." In turn, he added, these corporate giants will increasingly dictate what music is recorded and heard. 

But Bandcamp was and is determined to buck those trends.  In 2017 Bandcamp enjoyed its sixth straight year in the black, along with double-digit growth in every aspect of its business. Digital sales increased by 16% for albums and 33% for individual tracks. Even more astonishing was its growth in physical sales: vinyl album sales increased 54%, cassettes 41%, and CDs 18%.  

"We want a music platform to exist where the playing field is level, where artists are compensated fairly and transparently, and where fans can both stream and own their music collections," Diamond said. 

Bandcamp also is generally more consumer-friendly than other music services. Browsing, sampling and choosing music at the site is easy and enjoyable. You may also discover new artists and artists outside of the mainstream music industry that you might not have found otherwise. 

These reasons and others are why Monroe St. has included Bandcamp among the marketplaces through which we make our works available. To explore Bandcamp and its offerings, visit https://bandcamp.com/.