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horror fiction
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
Click below to purchase your copy today!
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!
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.
Lights On Distant Shorelines
Fourth Time, First Win: NaNoWriMo 2021
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Text Mining: Cujo
When it comes to my least favourite King novels, Cujo is third. Why? It’s disjointed, for one; a lot of the book is taken up by the foibles of the Sharp Cereal Professor and honestly I can’t bring myself to care enough about the dying art of marketing kid’s cereals in the early 1980s. Also, the Trentons are not sympathetic characters. Look, I’ve written elsewhere about how your characters don’t necessarily need to be likable. I’ve gone off at length about how needing your characters to be the reader’s best friend is just a trap that encourages an immature fanbase that will rise up and kidnap you when you decide to kill those characters off…
Wait, actually, I think that was Misery.
Text Mining: Roadwork
The third Bachman novel, Roadwork, is another portrait of a seethingly angry man acting out against his grievances with society. In Rage, the protagonist dealt with his anti-social angst by taking his classroom hostage and killing two teachers. In The Long Walk, the protagonist deals with it by joining a ghastly game show that runs people down to their deaths. Roadwork is a little less kinetic than either; the protagonist here, George Dawes, simply gives into inertia and refuses to progress along with everyone else. A highway extension is slated to destroy an old suburban neighbourhood and Dawes is in charge of finding both a new house to live and a new location for the industrial laundry he works for. In an act of rebellion against the inherent unfairness of the situation, he decides to do neither. He refuses to vacate his property, and ends up getting shot and killed in a stand-off with the police.
Text Mining: Firestarter
Firestarter: another classic King tale of a troubled young girl who develops strange psychic powers and uses them to literally burn people alive. Charlie and her dad are chased by a mysterious U.S. alphabet agency bent on weaponizing the intersection of science and paranormal research. Half the book is the chase; the other half is the catch, and that combination makes for some interesting results, as we’ll see.
