First off, as you might gather from the image, there’s a new story up in the fiction library, and it’s called Letter From a Killer. Guess what it’s about? Yeah, grotty scary crime. Do you suppose a handsome cop shows up to make everything OK? Probably not, but I guess you have to read to…… Read More
This month’s free story is up, and it’s called Dialogue With Fury. Word of warning on this one: While I produce a lot of dark stuff here, this one touches on some particularly evil behaviors, right at the final sentence reveal. It’s a mix of rural Gothic Americana and the ancient Greek avengers of those…… Read More
This short and nasty crime story won the Richard Eastman Founder’s Prize for Prose in 2021.
What it says. This is not SF or horror though, just gritty, gritty crime.
TW for domestic violence. Who is really the most powerless in this mess?
Technically science fiction, but there’s nothing in here that we couldn’t have by 2022, given sufficient political will. It’s a story about how public safety could be different in America, told mid-change.
An exploration of the hard, repetitive work that goes into serial killing, and catching a serial killer and, also, making linocut prints.
Also available as a .zip file of several formats.
A trio of dangerous scumbags mouth off about their assorted felonies, producing an emergent narrative about murder, blackmail, and bitcoin.
Also available in ePub and Kindle formats.
A brief thing, prompted by the detonated fiction experiment. A short, bruising story about teenage theater humiliation.
Also available in: ePub File, Kindle Format
The award-winning story of love, death, choice, and multiple-universe theory.
Also available in: ePub File, Kindle Format
A rancid slice-of-life illuminating four self-absorbed pieces that fit together into something much more sinister.
Also available in: ePub File, Kindle Format
A piece of brief, character-driven literary fiction (meaning “neither pornography, mystery nor fantasy”) based very loosely on someone I met at the dojo.
Also available in: ePub File, Kindle Format
A cop and a crook drive out in the middle of nowhere, late at night, and dig a grave. Then they try to decide who has to get in it.
Also available in: ePub File, Kindle Format
Martial arts students try to avoid getting hurt when they lose control of themselves.
Also available in: ePub File, Kindle Format
A taciturn judo instructor unexpectedly tells a chilling story about his childhood.
Also available in: ePub File, Kindle Format
Whatever Happened to Lala? has nothing unnatural or uncanny going on. Just unhappy.
Also available in: ePub File, Kindle Format
A story about a man who tries to do something decent, only to have it go entirely off the rails.
Also available in: ePub File, Kindle Format
A man with an exciting and important life tries to trade it all in for a chance to write his novel about Protestant settlers in Nebraska. It is a work of satire. Additionally, I have read this one aloud as a podcast! Hooray!
Also available in: ePub File, Kindle Format
A young prisoner writes to the novelist who inspired him. Special thanks to Dizzy Banjo for the prison door sound used in the podcast!
Also available in: ePub File, Kindle Format, m4a podcast, mp3 podcast
Two girls in a psych facility share personal information.
Also available in: ePub File, Kindle Format
Needs it, I say! This is a simple historical fantasy about a girl in love. Light and frivolous. Well, OK, there may be a witch.
What if strange visitors from another world mainly wanted to visit museums and go to concerts?
This is a TrueType font named 13Aelfin. Feel free to download and use as you see fit. It has both capitals AND lowercase!
This is another TrueType font, called 13Abyssal. Use it freely. Again, it’s only capitals.
This isn’t a story, it’s a TrueType font called 13Asimar. Feel free to use and distribute it. (It only has capital letters.)
My next novel is entitled The Forgotten Monk and it’s currently getting funded on Kickstarter. If you’re at all curious about the story of a martial arts monk with amnesia trying to solve the mystery that is himself, check it out.
My first podcast experiment is imperfect, but it was free, after all. It’s from the setting of REIGN.and is now available in text form in Worlds of Their Own. It has swordplay, adultery, revenge, and an incontinent donkey.
In a society with strictly defined castes, concretely proscribed gender roles and rigid family expectations, how do youngsters wind up blood-covered and naked out in the forest?
Also available in: ePub File, Kindle Format
A Bronze Age narrative in the Lovecraft Mythos vein, featuring a grandma seeking her missing son in the company of her grandchild.
Also available in: ePub File, Kindle Format
Rural Gothic Americana meets the Greek goddess who avenges those who harm their kin. Warning: This one alludes to the sexual harm of children.
Mitch just wants to sell his unique crafts online. What’s the worst that could happen? No, it’s worse than that. Worse still. Keep going.
Do you like ghost stories with sad, sensitive children? Here’s one!
Opening a gateway to a parallel Earth without animals opens up possibilities for carbon sequestration and Insta posts.
Three survivors traverse a revisionist Cthulhu Mythos postapocalypse America.
A brilliant young scientist has a plan to save the future. But the question is… is it affordable?
What if strange visitors from another world mainly wanted to visit museums and go to concerts?
This was meant to be a horror story, but it just got funnier and funnier as I wrote it.
A tragic tale of fitness, excess, Mick Peltier, Unknown Armies, and trying to make the best of a bad situation.
You like zombies? Here, have some zombies. Have a full-on zombie apocalypse. Also some love.
A slightly Unknown Armies tale about a faded rock star meeting a retired CIA psychic.
A short story about murder, unreliable psychic powers, and spectral abuse. It’s vaguely Unknown Armies related.
If you wonder why robots would try to kill all humans, the surprising answer awaits in this TERMINATION SHOCK short story, the downloaded stream-of-consciousness of a murderous AI. It’s in various formats, no malware.
The personal journal of an Army psychic assassin covers the dangers, history and developments of American psychic warfare. Click here to download an archive with PDF, eBook and other formats.
It’s got a cop and a crook facing cosmic horror — or maybe just the quotidian, everyday kind. You can download a .zip file of alternate formats here.
Imagine a zombie apocalypse with no biting, where the smartest man alive is a C+ student. Now make it bleaker. There you go. You can also download a .zip file with alternate formats.
Ever wanted to read SF about people crammed in a space ship after Cthulhu rises from the deep? If so, you can download various versions at this link, or just click the title card to read the PDF online.
What would you do if one day you found out quite a lot of people were gross? If you want to see my answer in a format other than PDF, there are several in this archive.
Cosmic horror about the presidency, ripped straight from today’s headlines. If you want file formats other than PDF, you can find them in this .zip file.
In collaboration with the skilled and dapper John Leavitt, I’m now posting up a four page SF comic, in convenient PDF form. It’s about humans developing faster-than-light travel, but it’s not accomplished by dint of hard work and far-seeing genius. We just kinda bumble into it.
It’s reality TV about extinct sentient species. Possibly less of a bummer than you’re thinking, though. Click here to download an archive of various formats, PDF included.
A short SF story about (maybe) the first human to survive first contact with an alien species. It shares a setting with FAILWORLDS and the game/podcast/media melange TERMINATION SHOCK. You can download various formats, including PDF, here.
If you’re looking for something, well, sexy, this story isn’t it. It’s more about the idea of sex in society than it is about sex as it’s enjoyed. It’s strange and surreal. You can get it in several formats by clicking here. Or if you like, just the PDF.
It’s about… it’s… well, it’s weird and hard to explain. And it’s only five pages long.
You can also download a .zip archive with non-PDF formats.
Reluctant as I am to write stories about writers, this one also has possession, cruel magic, epic halitosis and oh so much alcohol.
Also available in: ePub File, Kindle Format
The wreckage of my first attempt to ransom fiction, which ran aground on the reefs of long-form uncertainty. I had a lot of fun writing this, though. The first time major characters get introduced, you get a catalogue of their body scars. It also features a car crash, impromptu surgery, and a tornado. As you might surmise, the title is ironic.
Also available in: ePub File, Kindle Format
Have you ever wondered what a school shooter with fish telepathy would be like? The answer I came up with was far more grim than would have expected.
Also available in: ePub File, Kindle Format
If anyone could possibly deserve to be chased, manhandled, drugged, beaten, drugged again and forced to toil for jeering captors, it’s the protagonists of this story. It’s set in the slave revolt of 1791 and based on medical fact.
Also available in: ePub File, Kindle Format
As part of the Ardwin ransom, I agreed to write a story incorporating ten elements demanded by donors of $50 or more. Here is that story. It is not tidy, but hopefully fun. (One element was that I had to include myself as a character. Otherwise, I don’t do that.)
Also available in: ePub File, Kindle Format
A story of icy calculation, burning revenge, and mysterious death set in Finland.
Also available in: ePub File, Kindle Format
He thinks he used to be human, but the question is, what does that mean for him and his mission? Also available as a splendid podcast!
Also available in: ePub File, Kindle Format
A bit of near-future fiction concerning the monetization of a woman’s voice.
Also available in: PDF, ePub File, Kindle Format
The novella sequel to SWITCHFLIPPED has Kung Fu, despair, and pillow talk on index cards.
Also available in: ePub File, Kindle Format
A far more plausible narrative about contacting aliens, the risks, the rewards, and the difficulty of telling them apart.
Also available in: ePub File, Kindle Format
A SWITCHFLIPPED-like narrative about time control, choices not made, and the dangerous combination of senility and firearms.
Also available in: ePub File, Kindle Format
Is it better to believe or deny? Does it matter if the deity you consider exists or not? What if it makes perfect sense… and is unspeakably vile?
Also available in: ePub File, Kindle Format
If you had a cell phone that could text with the dead, what secrets would you seek out? Which would you try to cover up?
Also available in: ePub File, Kindle Format
An ambitious biologist gets a big promotion! And drugs!
Also available in: ePub File, Kindle Format, m4a podcast, mp3 podcast
A young girl in an impoverished future finally finds out what her family has planned for her.
Also available in: ePub File, Kindle Format
A collection of tinkered-with literary tools and scholarly examinations of the same, including my collaboration with Katy Harrad, “Requiem For a Manic Pixie Dream.”
A squamous mass of Mythos horrors, ranging from the gore-shook and jagged through opioid arabesques of delirium.
A 21st Century bestiary featuring the Catoblepas, the Trashsquatch, and my own entry on the Tedious Finch.
Like the original Whispers From The Abyss, but two-ier!
BY NO MEANS VULGAR is a collection of short stories inspired by The Play’s The Thing, a Shakespearean roleplaying game.
Come and enjoy new visions of the King, expanding and deepening the fragments glimpsed in the award-winning True Detective television series, penned for your delight by a host of master scribes eager to guide you to a new world of delirium, despair, and madness.
This volume brings together seventeen masterful tales of cosmic horror inspired by Lovecraft’s work.
You are NOT CLEARED for this book.
These eight tales of cosmic horror and personal apocalypse were not written to make you feel secure about your place in the universe. They are here to unsettle you, to horrify you, and to challenge your misguided notions of history, humanity, and morality. Enjoy.
Take your seat.
Delta Green: Dark Theatres presents eight new stories of intrigue and horror, eight theaters in which desperate actors engage clandestine passion plays for the grim amusement of alien gods, Witness the horrors of the Raids on Innsmouth the terrible secrets of World War II, the tropical nightmare of Vietnam, the chill vacuum of Yuggoth, the asynchronous folds of space-time, and much more.
Down a lonely alleyway, under a starless sky, lies a city that never was, yet is: the Mad City, where nightmares walk the streets, and a good night’s sleep can get you killed. Here, then, is a book from that place.
Sentient robots on a murderous rampage. Deadly pirate attacks in deep space. An adult entertainment star on the run. Espionage in a diner in space. These are the tales of the Bulldogs!
These confusing times of Internet trolls, one-percenters, toxic fame, and impending singularity cry out for clarity—the clarity found in Aesop’s 2,500 year old fables.
This anthology features ten different tales of horror and apocalypse.
With 13 thrilling stories of threatened identity and vanquished disorder, this second volume of the New Hero series boasts a diverse cast of top writers who tear apart and recombine the limits of the serial adventure form.
The Sleep of Reason is a unique and unsettling anthology book. There are no zombies here. No vampires or werewolves. No familiar solutions. No safe havens. Instead, we offer new landscapes of dread. New icons of terror. New arts of horror.
We are like you. We live in your cities, we laugh at your jokes, we share your good times and your bad ones. We meet you in clubs and back alleys, at glamorous parties and dive bars. We need you, to sate our endless hunger. We are your Kindred.
The WHISPERS FROM THE ABYSS ANTHOLOGY is the first ever H.P. Lovecraft inspired collection created specifically for readers on the go. All 33 spine-chilling tales are concentrated bites of terror.
Adventure without limits!
