Horror + Thriller

This is a simple story: a path, a predator. Here is your bloodred coat. Here is your basket of treats. You know the rules. Good luck out there. # First: the path. A magnificent slick black double serpent that cuts through the land and races between cleaver-sharp slices made into hills, revealing the skeletons of […]

1. Jenson and Liv had been in the cabin for two months when the first note appeared nailed to a birch limb arcing over the freshwater spring. Don’t drink the water. It was never meant for your throat. The handwriting was almost illegible. At first, Jenson worried detractors had followed him from their previous life, […]

Midnight; there is no more perfect hour to explore an aging, seaside manor such as Rosebrae. The heir has awaited this moment since his and his wife’s arrival that afternoon. (Pity, they did not make it in time to bid his dying uncle farewell.) Now there is purple country night in the windows, and when […]

From: cust_service@NickersonFoods.net To: dphil2003@yahoo.net Dear Ms. Denise Phillips, Thank you for contacting us about your recent purchase of Cheesy Crinkles. We are of course deeply sorry to hear about your unpleasant experience, and we will indeed study the photo you sent. With only the remaining half of what you call the “leg” in the photo, […]

1. You. The room is familiar to You. It is a forty by forty square with ten foot ceilings and dusty corners. A single globe illuminates it in a neon violet. You breathe in the scent of bodies, blood, and bleach. It stings Your nostril. Burns Your nose hairs. You sneeze. Three of the room’s […]

Briar coaxed her beat-up Volvo to reluctant life and headed down Route 116 toward the gas station. Briar’s father had run the gas station before the witches killed him, turned his organs to wind chimes that clacked soft music through the woods. They rolled his hair into hay bales. In the dark pre-dawn, Briar drove past their silhouettes, wheels of grass and sinew moist with dew.

There was a time I thought a great deal about our sink faucet. It was a sorry little thing—rusted in some places, stained in others. It sat in the space opposite our kitchen—the washbasin once white, now brown. It’d been touched with hands smeared with curry or paint or snot—and each interaction had left its scar, marked it in a way that was repulsive and pitiful. At one point the handle had gotten so dirty we started to grip it with a rag cloth when we washed our hands. No one wanted to be the one to do the gripping.

Toe-curling things happen down at The Lake House. Sex, of course, and howling and injuries and a couple of disappearances, drownings, and once a kid hanged himself from the loft banister and another time a handful of teenagers tore out of there claiming that the walls had started bleeding, and no, they weren’t high, why would you even ask that.

Harrison Burke sat on a park bench at midnight with a sack of six Burgerito’s bacon double cheeseburgers and a giant alligator.  Harrison had not been sleeping well lately.  Or at all, really.

“Don’t leave me home alone today,” she says. “You’re home alone every day. You work at home,” he points out. His name is Johnny or, more informally, Jon. Hers is Katherine, or Katie, or Kat. They sit in the neutrally decorated living room of their colonial-style house. The most striking aspect of the house is […]

Alice had sung that single phrase to Paul one night as they sat on their haunches at the back of the yard, stoned and gazing up at the black shape of the hill in the middle distance. Her voice was flat, and the words didn’t fit the tune, but she repeated it until she got bored with the sound of herself. Alice had started calling the hill The Empress sometime over the summer. No one else Paul knew called it anything but the hill.

The Wraith leans against the cinderblock wall of the Quik-Buy on US Route 29 and scratches off a lotto ticket to determine whether you will live or die. You, of course, do not know this. You pull into one of the self-serve stations and read the sign that says cash only. You un-stick your thighs from the bottom of your Toyota’s seats before gathering your trash, shoving your sunglasses into your sweat-damp hair, and making your way inside. You leave most of your weapons in the car. You don’t think you’ll need them.