Tales of Mystic Park is a collection of short stories that follows the lives of various families in Northwest Pennsylvania from the Civil War to today, showing the effects of the war on each generation. Through tears and laughter, each family has a compelling story to tell as the years pass by. The theme that connects them all is that the effects of war never end as they each struggle to cope with the future. Both tragedy and comedy, the stories in Tales of Mystic Park can be enjoyed independently yet they connect as a novel. Baby boomers, rural families, hunters, and fishermen, as well as Amish community, will readily relate with the characters in these stories as they grapple with the generational aftereffects of the Civil War.

Scott Gardner was raised in Titusville, PA, the home of the first productive oil well in the world and the birth of the petroleum industry. He graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 1978 with a BA in English writing and has been scribbling stories intermittently ever since. Scott moved to Florida in 2017. When the world became unsettled with the advent of COVID-19, he returned to his fiction, and his characters enthusiastically welcomed him back. Together they finished this collection of short stories set in the Oil Creek Valley, the valley that changed the world.