Four Houston youths find their nice, normal lives interrupted as mundane and supernatural threats collide in C. D. Kester’s novella length dark fantasy. Teenager Richie Sterling lives with his dad in the Los Hermanos Trailer Park along with his best friends Jose, Frankie, Jaime, and Roberto. They live normal lives, playing capture the flag or shooting hoops, dreaming of making music together, dreaming of getting out … but not yet. This all changes one night when, during a sleepover game of telling each other scary stories, Jose reveals something that feels far truer than the urban legends the ..read more

Lęina has come to Brazil in search of her mother, following a trail of clues in search of The Garden, a place documented in one of her mother’s journals. Lęina’s journey is not going to be an easy one and the parameters are somewhat unclear from the start: After all, her chase may result in finding a missing woman, her remains, or even her ghost. The Garden is a place that demands a sacrifice of some kind: when you visit the Garden, there is a promise you must make. a sacred vow you have to take. a toll your soul must pay. The Garden, Location 14 As Lęina’s and her guide Angelo delve into th ..read more

In 2018, Stephen King released the fifth Holly Gibney story in his novella collection If It Bleeds. That story, which is the titular tale, “If It Bleeds,” is something of a follow-up to Holly’s previous adventure, The Outsider, and might have been conceived as something of a closure for Holly herself, but it nevertheless leaves the door wide open for King’s variation on Travis McGee. Holly is a seeker, a finder, and most certainly a keeper of a character. So much so, King’s next book, which hits shelves next week (and which we will consider at some point in the next couple-few weeks) is all a ..read more

Years ago, when Joe R. Lansdale was finding his footing as a writer, his fan base, and his career, the author published a collection called Stories by Mama Lansdale’s Youngest Boy for Author’s Choice Monthly. When it came time for the paperback edition, the author added a lengthy story he penned for the Dark At Heart anthology to round out his collection (then going by the name Bestsellers Guaranteed). That’s the book that may well have the most egregious example of truly unrepresentative cover art—a smirking dragon sitting atop a mound of books, all but winking at the audience. It’s stock ar ..read more

Patrick C. Harrison III (aka PC3) is a horror author with plenty of ideas. Recently he announced a leap into semi-regular self-published novella length works, a line of books dubbed PC3’s Splat Life. The first of these, The Sludge Tab, might only clock in at about 40 pages of story, but it is a surprisingly ambitious piece. Prior to the story, the author advises readers that his work is part of the splatterpunk and extreme horror subgenres, and that an awareness of the schools of writing might smooth the waters a tad. It’s as concise a warning as a reader might offer, suggesting all the trigg ..read more

Yalxi has escaped her pursuers, outfoxing them enough to take stock of her situation and weave one more spell. Her one hope is to summon the shapeshifting nahual and bargain for its assistance. A risky move, but one she will have to take. Otherwise, between bloody gashes on her forehead, her gut, and her foot, she’s not going to go much further on her own. Luckily, willpower is a key to sorcery, and though she’s running low on everything else she does have plenty of that. To hold the nahual close, she will need blood and salt. To bargain with her murdered mentor Teotah, she will need grit. An ..read more

When he was a young man, Roger Daye was not the prettiest model in the box. He was a homely sort, the kind who walked the beautiful homecoming queen Amy Towers home and longed for her from afar but never had a chance with her for anything else. Especially when her beau, Randy, showed up, got jealous of the little wimp, and broke his arm as a show of alpha manliness. Roger’s first sexual experience was pretty horrible, and generally his life fell into awful patterns. However, all that changed in his forty-second year when he met a widow who loved him for himself. She left him after eleven happ ..read more

Danny was a screw up as a kid, but his Dad wanted his older brother to take charge. Sure, their Dad was an even worse screw up, an abusive son of a bitch who belonged as dead as he got. But the request remains. It is what rings through the unnamed narrator’s mind when Danny shows up on his doorstep in the middle of the night, blitzed out of his skull, covered in blood and still wearing a condom he did not use to completion. The words of an embittered father are more powerful than a son’s conscience. Even twenty years after his death, the man’s hurricane force of will continued to generate fe ..read more

During his cross-country journey, Grey found a lot of women who wanted their husbands dead. He met several in bars, slept with some, dodged others. He’s never stupid enough to take them up on their requests, but he does have to wonder why they think he’d be game for this. She turned over in bed, ran her fingers through the wet thatch of his chest hair, and said, “I want you to kill my husband.” Grey wasn’t surprised. It seemed like every third woman he ran into wanted her husband dead. No divorce. No let’s get him into AA or rehab. No he’s the father of my children, sweet baby Jesus he deser ..read more

With his latest quartet of novella length pieces, Ronald Malfi tries something a little different: he approaches the subject of storytelling from four different angles and finds plenty of anxieties to analyze and fears to foment. In “The Skin of Her Teeth,” Hollywood agent Gloria Grossman goes in search of a missing client and finds terror in the most unlikely place. Screenwriter Davis McElroy was supposed to send the script for his adaptation of bestselling novelist John Fish’s The Skin of Her Teeth to Paramount weeks ago. However, after he went off to his remote cabin to work, he soon enoug ..read more