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Justine Avery is an award-winning author of stories large and small for all. Born in the American Midwest and raised all over the world, she is inherently an explorer, duly fascinated by everything around her and excitedly noting the stories that abound all around. As an avid reader of all genres, she weaves her own stories among them all. She has a predilection for writing speculative fiction and story twists and surprises she can’t even predict herself.
Avery has either lived in or explored all 50 states of the union, over 36 countries, and all but one continent; she lost count after moving 30-some times before the age of 20. She’s intentionally jumped out of airplanes and off the highest bungee jump in New Zealand, scuba dived unintentionally with sharks, designed websites, intranets, and technical manuals, bartered with indigenous Panamanians, welded automobile frames, observed at the Bujinkan Hombu Dojo in Noba, Japan, and masterminded prosperous internet businesses—to name a few adventures. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree that life has never required, and at age 28, she sold everything she owned and quit corporate life—and her final "job"—to freelance and travel the world as she always dreamed of. And she’s never looked back.
She currently lives near Los Angeles with her husband, British film director Devon Avery, and their three adopted children: Becks, Sam, and Lia. She writes from wherever her curiosity takes her.
Reviewed by Jack Magnus for Readers' Favorite
Out There: A Short Tale of the Weird and Wonderful is a contemporary urban fantasy short story written by Justine Avery. Mrs. Susan Anderson is quite oblivious to her surroundings as she walks up the path to her front door. She doesn’t see the flowers blooming or the tenacious cactus, smell the scents of the ocean wafting up from the coast, or notice the wildlife in plain view up on the hillside above the lavish home where she and her husband live. Her eyes, attention and fingers are all focused upon her cell phone as she strolls, her imagination held captive by the small screen and the results of her tapping fingers. When she is finally inside the door, she quickly gets into the mood for dusting and polishing and making sure that everything she sees is perfectly clean, pristine and spotless in her domestic paradise. What she cannot control, however, is the strange brown mass that has somehow appeared outside the French doors to her terrace. It glistens in the sunlight, and the smell it exudes is disgusting.
Justine Avery’s humorous urban fantasy short story, Out There: A Short Tale of the Weird and Wonderful, juxtaposes the wonders of nature with the artificial world of a self-obsessed Los Angeles housewife. I wanted to tear her cellphone away from her face so she would see the lion cubs at play on the hillside and appreciate the salty breeze making its way up from the coast, and then I wondered at her obsessive-compulsive cleaning rituals. Avery sets the scene perfectly with those first few lines, and her imaginative, gentle take on the inanities of the so-called civilized world sweeps the reader from the banal to the fantastic, almost before you know it. This is a tale that is masterfully told, and it left me smiling for a little while and wanting more.
