Smoke Follows Beauty

From the depths of comfortably dim forest on the Eastern slopes of Washington’s Cascades Mountains comes Smoke Follows Beauty, a short fiction collection from emerging author Brian Ames. With a distinctly rural sense of place and unforgettable characters, Smoke Follows Beauty takes readers along the hunt for wonder whose game is satisfaction. These tales echo those meant to be spoken around the half-light of campfires, and seeks to restore a needed measure of awe and mystery to life, so lacking in our 21st century existence. The books offers eclectic subject matter - from hunting to horse-shoeing, rescue to unprecedented disaster, colonial Africa, a mountain elk-hunting blind, a bar down the street, to a pleasant apocalypse. Smoke Follows Beauty engages an exploration of the spiritual, paranormal, metaphysical - in the darkest, most ancient parts of the forest, where vapors gather, rise, take shape.