My Mother Told Me A Ghost Story Once

From Hiraeth: Dark As Life features dark stories of trying to stay alive under dismal living condItions. Some of those conditions are created by ourselves, others are created for us. A teenage girl is punished for her interest in science fiction. A traveler comes home to a place she has never been. A revenant seeks revenge against her enemies and her friends. You’ll find all this and more on these pages. Turn them carefully.

Contents
 Stories
Devotional by Tyree Campbell
The Girl in 114 by Trevor James Zaple
coming back home to a place I’ve never been by Laney Gaughan
 Flash Fiction
Home Schooled by G. O. Clark
Siren With the Soft Sign by Nadia Gerassimenko
 Poems
Slavery by Yuliia Vereta
An Acquired Taste by Debby Feo
Satan’s Voice by Peter MacQuarrie
A Dead Wizard’s Dust by Matthew Wilson
Features
Movie Review: King on Screen by Lee Clark Zumpe

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I Need You To Listen, And Watch

Shh. Are you ready? We don’t have much time.

In the spirit of the season, Disturb Ink has published, live now, six – count ’em, six – new collections about horror and the everyday technology we use in our daily lives. Each collection delves into the common technology of a specific decade and reveals the dread lurking behind such seemingly benign devices.

ESCAPE looks at film in the 1920s. Back when it was still new, cutting-edge technology, film provided a relatively cheap way for people to entertain themselves, and to beat the heat in the height of summer. But what shadows lurked in the corners of theatres? What terrors might crawl across the screen?

Fireside chats. Baseball games. News as it happens. LISTEN looks at the 1940s, when radio was king, and asks the burning question: what are you hearing, when you turn the dial and finally land on a station that’s broadcasting? Who – or what – might be talking on the other end? For those playing along at home, “Red Rover, Red Rover” is a bit of World War II horror I have in this one.

Once, you had to go to the screen to see what wonders and horrors it might have to show you. Now, in the 1960s, the screen has come to you. WATCH spins tales of what else you might be letting into your home when you turn on the small screen. When you stare into the television, the television also stares back into you. Features “Sorry Girls, He’s Married” by your faithful scribe.

Ah, the 1980s. Has there ever been a decade so reviled and loved in equal measure? I guess it depends on whether you were there or not. By the Eighties, the public was no longer just watching movies – they were given the tools to make their own. Camcorders and home video were the rage, but just what were people recording? Even the most innocent of home movies can take a sinister turn in CAPTURE.

Craig Finn once said, in the midst of a positive jam, that ‘we were wired and well-connected, put it all down on technology and lost everything that we invested.’ He was talking about the Dot Com bust but HOST looks at the 2000s and wonders what else we invested…and what else we might have lost. With the internet, we were all suddenly in much closer contact with each other: chat rooms, message forums, early social media like Friendster. As your parents warned you, though, how do you know what’s lurking on the other end of that chat window?

Finally, the modern day, the 2020s – no better decade to ponder on the essential terror of being alive. Or, more precisely, the daily horror of interacting with beings who might not actually be. LURK examines that most disturbing of commonplace technology, artificial intelligence. What is it telling us? What, if anything, is it thinking?

More to the point, what is it planning?

Available now on Amazon as ebooks, Disturb Ink’s SINISTER CENTURY series is sure to have enough disturbing ink to keep you awake for days. Click on the images above to be taken to the individual collections, or dare to use the button below to take in a hundred years of terror at once!

I Want To Quake In Fear!

Do You Wanna Hear A Scary Story?

Do you like long winter nights? Live for the thrill of wondering what’s lurking in your closet at 3 AM? Know what it means when someone calls a certain time of night “The Witching Hour”? Put your feet down in the middle of the night expecting to feel a cold, bony hand grasp your ankle?

Well, friend, you are in luck. What we have here is a genuine, bona fide, accept-no-substitutes steal of a deal collection of the spookiest, scariest, most haunted and ghoulish collection of horror short fiction that you are likely to ever come across.

Right from the dank cellars of TreeShaker Books comes ANTHOLOGY OF THE DAMNED!

That’s right, three volumes, 13 spooktacular stories each, from some of the best up-and-coming horror authors writing today. Set to release in time for Halloween, these stories will scare the socks right off your feet, which is awfully convenient for the monsters lurking under your bed.

Tell Me More!

Enter a trilogy of chilling volumes where darkness reigns and fear is a constant companion. The Anthologies of the Damned brings together thirteen masterful storytellers per book, each weaving a unique and terrifying tale that will leave you looking over your shoulder and questioning your sanity.

From the twisted corridors of haunted mansions to the eerie silence of abandoned towns, each story in this collection delves into the unknown, exploring the depths of human fear and the supernatural. Whether it’s a ghostly apparition seeking vengeance, a sinister force lurking in the shadows, or an ancient curse that refuses to be forgotten, these shadowy short stories will make you wonder what goes bump in the night.

This set of spooky tales is a perfect read for Halloween, Dark and Stormy Nights, or Sunday Morning Church, and will haunt your dreams, lingering long after the last page is turned.

Don’t hesitate: SMASH that button below like it’s a zombie’s head. And don’t forget to click the button on the Kickstarter page to be alerted for when it goes live! You aren’t going to want to miss this collection OR the rewards awaiting for those ordering early!

I Want To Be Scared!

Honorable Mention: Gutsy Great Novelist Page One Prize!

Been through the social media carousel and now you get to hear it as well! I placed in the top 16 finalists for the Gutsy Great Novelist Page One Prize! It’s a great honor to be selected among all the other finalists, and I’d like to extend a hearty congratulations to the top three winners, whose first pages are truly excellent. Check out those, mine, and all the rest at Gutsy’s Page One Prize page.

The novel that this first page comes from, Those Who Sleep In The Dust Of The Earth, is so close to being completed that it’s actually sort of immoral that I’m not finishing it right now. It will be done probably this week and then revisions will take as long as revisions usually take. It’ll go into the querying trenches all too soon.

Those Who Sleep In The Dust Of The Earth is, at it’s heart, a riff on the old tale of Bluebeard the pirate king, a French folktale that was collected originally in Histoires au contes du temp passé in 1697. Bluebeard, alternately a pirate king or some other form of rich and powerful noble, has been married six times before. Each time, his wife has mysteriously vanished. He marries for a seventh time and the young woman comes to live with him at his vast and opulent palace. The new wife is informed that she has the run of his estate, even while he is gone, and can go into any room in the place except for one. She is forbidden to ever set foot in that one room. Eventually, of course, curiosity overwhelms her, and she goes into the room to find the murdered, bloody corpses of the previous six wives.

In Dust Of The Earth, Bluebeard is a billionaire – near-trillionaire – who made his fortune building the logistics for the European Space Agency to reach for the stars. The wife is an indie folk star, Sasha Brown, who decamped from California to Kansas City to get some inspiration for a new direction for her music. What she found, unfortunately, was an intifada of extremists looking to carve out a fundamentalist homeland in Missouri during the slow collapse of the United States in the near future. She ran for weeks alongside her new girlfriend Mia, only to finally be found out and taken prisoner. For her alleged crimes against morality, she is executed.

And then comes to in the sprawling island estate of our billionaire, Aaron Flynn, who is, to put it mildly, something of a fan.

Are his motives pure? Of course they aren’t. Like Bluebeard’s new wife, though, Sasha is given the star treatment as a top guest at the Flynn Manor – except for any door marked with a certain symbol, which she cannot go into. What’s behind that door is intensely valuable, though, enough that people will pay vast sums of money to find the secrets out. Enough that Flynn would kill to keep it hidden.

Getting a nod for the first page of this book is a good sign!

New Short Fiction – “The Girl In 114”

Hot off the presses at Hiraeth Books, the newest issue of Dark As Life has my newest publication, “The Girl In 114.” Set in the Toronto neighbourhood of Parkdale, centered on the infamous West Lodge towers, the story concerns two generations’ obsession with the same ghost, and the myths and rumours that spring up among locals when the eerie and inexplicable occurs.

“It was just chance encounters at first, stoned kids wandering through the hallways between one place to chill or another. When you’re in an altered state, it’s much more comfortable to get off the elevator on the second floor and walk down to the exits. It avoids the problem where the elevator doors open in the lobby and there’s a mixture of people ranging from disapproving elders from more traditionalist cultures to the overbearing and imposing Spanish woman who runs the rental office. Kids looking to avoid that scene, then, almost always pass through the hallway outside 114. One night, closer to the witching hour than not, a trio came out of the elevator and were halfway down the shabby hall when they saw the little girl standing in the middle of the dirty carpet. She didn’t notice them, and they edged by her with wide eyes and disbelieving expressions on their faces. They could have lied to themselves later about the appearance just being some weird kid, but the side of the girl’s head was stoved in and her eyes flickered. Even then, when her corporeal hold on reality was strongest, her eyes phased in and out of being. The old chestnut about the eyes being the window to the soul never supposed those windows being shattered with a brick.”
Trevor James Zaple, “The Girl In 114”

Grab a copy of Dark As Life 2 and get spooked tonight! Click on the image below to be taken to Hiraeth’s shop. Don’t forget to check out my most recent work with Crow & Cross Keys and Sinister Smile Press, or the full list of available work.