Out now (February 3rd, 2024) in one of my favourite short fiction outlets, Crow & Cross Keys, is my latest short story, “Lights On Distant Shorelines.“

This one is indicative of my turn toward Weird, as in New Weird Horror.

I watched the intro loop of the machine, a game I’d never heard of called Venetian Runner. The noise was still all around me, and I tried to make myself OK with it. On this stretch of the coast, the hungry ghosts were rare, or so the settlement we’d passed through a day or so back had intimated. If you could scrounge, fish, and make do, there were places to hole up and wait for the next moon cycle to begin. We’d been through a lot in the last few months, losing three people we’d grown close to, including Maggie’s friend Brenda who she’d known since the beginning of the Rejection. Any place where the hungry ghosts weren’t seemed fine to us. On the screen, a princess in a rich blue silk dress ran through an exotic yellow jungle. She leapt from side to side to dodge swinging jungle beasts on twisted red-and-yellow vines and used a kind of swirling spin kick to knock out enemies directly.

Breathing easier, I walked out of the beach entrance and wandered out onto the sand. The night air was cool and damp, driven by a stiff salty breeze coming off the ocean. I wiggled my toes into the gritty sand and closed my eyes.

The beach is a borderland, a strip of neither here nor there that lies between the land and the ocean. Before the Rejection, the land was comforting; ordered out of the wilderness, the built environment spread out to house us, employ us, entertain us. On the other side, the ocean: crawling chaos, essentially unknowable, capable of killing us in seconds. Between them, the beach. Land’s end, the farthest you can go in that direction. The wind blows over the sand and changes it constantly, shifting it this way and that. People, in those flyblown bygone days, came and went, visiting but always in motion, stepping into the ocean but never too far.

Once you’ve read that, be sure to check out my other short fiction from recent days, including pieces with Sinister Smile Press, BLEED ERROR, The Brazenhead Review, and Quill & Crow’s Bleak Midwinter.