With Halloween coming up, I thought it might be nice (?) to serve up a few horror stories. Zombies have become a bit too trendy, as Becoming Normal shows. When She’s Ready isn’t supernatural horror, and might not be categorized as horror at all, but it still seems to merit a place here. Childhood Fears […]
I haven’t showered in ten days. My scalp fosters a family of bacteria, but the table of party food — chunks of chicken, weenies slathered in mystery sauce, and eyeballs — has been sitting there for two days. Its smell leaves mine in the dust. “Nance, we’ve practiced this.” Mom yanks on her matted clumps […]
She wakes up early. She gets her hair up, she gets her things together, and she’s out the door. If she can do that, she can do anything. She keeps her boots in the car. She carries extra socks, band-aids, saline for her eyes. She comes prepared. Life is unpredictable. She puts on her boots […]
In the town by the sea it was the day of the poll, and the poet regarded it sadly when he woke and saw the light of it coming in at his window between two small curtains of gauze. And the day of the poll was beautifully bright; stray bird-songs came to the poet at […]
Charles took a moment to look at the houses on his street while the last bit of sun vanished. Broken windows and kicked-in front doors stared back across overgrown brown lawns. Rusting cars slumped on driveways. Weeds pushed through cracks in the sidewalks. He ran through his checklist: backdoor secured, garage door bolted, storm windows […]
O’er the midnight moorlands crying, Thro’ the cypress forests sighing, In the night-wind madly flying, Hellish forms with streaming hair; In the barren branches creaking, By the stagnant swamp-pools speaking, Past the shore-cliffs ever shrieking; Damn’d daemons of despair. Once, I think I half remember, Ere the grey skies of November Quench’d my […]
My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature. I choose weird stories […]