Thriller + Mystery

The motel curtains are the color of dried blood, and someone’s scratched a crucifix into the wall between the twin beds. I can’t stop looking at it. The longer I stare, the more it looks like a child did it—uneven arms, the nail marks gouged too deep, like someone didn’t know when to stop, or […]

Stepping into the glade is like stepping into another world. The landscape is desolate, painted crimson by the thousands of fruiting cranberry vines that claim the bog each fall as the other flora dies back. Their fruit bursts beneath the soles of your rubber boots as you walk across the spongy ground and you grimace, […]

Anna doused the dolls in lighter fluid and fed them to the flames. They burned quickly, spitting out toxic clouds of smoke as plastic warped and blackened. Beside her, Mary and Lily shifted and wrinkled their noses, edging upwind. They hunched into their coats, protection against December’s chill. Lily leaned into Mary, her sleek, dark […]

The bar is called Obsidian. With its narrow black on black storefront, one could mistake it for a mirage. Inside it’s long and dark with three doors in the back: one a storage room marked no admittance, another a women’s room with a leaky toilet, and finally a men’s room where it all ends. *** […]

Jane’s hands tremble, her nails ragged. Fingertips pressed to her nose, she breathes in algae. Pondweed. Something else—something rotten. Through the window of the women’s shelter, a ship glides across Lake Ontario, the vessel decked out with lights that skip across the water—glitzy glamour like The Love Boat, that old TV showher parents used to […]

It came again. That shuf-shuf-shuffle of ragged fabric on bare stone. That tapping; that endless tapping. Blackened bone on cold cement. Not his bare stone, no. Not his cold cement. Not here in his twenty-third-floor condo with the private access elevator and the floor-to-ceiling windows. All white leather and polished chrome. No, it came, again, […]

I visited the peat bog just before dawn, when the morning fog was still heavy, hovering over the carpet of peat like a damp blanket. Earlier that morning, I’d noticed peat dried and nailed to the windowsills of most of the stone cottages in town as I wandered the nearly empty streets. “Keeps the bugs […]

He passes her a turquoise paper bag, the kind you get at Watson’s, over the remains of her birthday dessert. Inside are two bottles of toner. She turns them over to read the label. It’s not the brand she usually uses, but this is probably nicer than what she can afford. “There was a buy-one-get-one-free […]

The Hunger haunts me most when I’m nauseous, which feels like it’s all the time these days. Morning sickness, my ass. I throw up at a minimum once per day, and it’s not just in the morning. The nausea is all day, every day; relentless. The Hunger is equally as relentless, though, taunting me through […]

When Crenshaw shoots Anneke, he’s within arm’s reach of me. I watch my hand grab him by the back of the neck. My body follows through, and I keep moving. He loses his balance. I feel the base of his skull stretching the web between my thumb and pointer for a second of resistance, and […]

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.                                     —Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies December 16, 1932 The sun was as hot as the Fourth of July, though it was almost Christmas. I ran a finger over the note in my pocket: I like what you wrote about that creep who killed the kids. Show […]

“Still got a boyfriend?” “You know you can’t ask me that.” Rochelle kept it light, her sing-song Mississippi accent adorable. She tightened the suture on Farmer’s fourth stab wound. One more to go. “I told you, though, you’d be first to know if I dump him.” A major rule – no flirting with the inmates […]