Author: Grimbard

  • There Be Monsters: Deep Down Is Out Now — 13 Stories About What Waits Below

    There Be Monsters: Deep Down Is Out Now — 13 Stories About What Waits Below

    There Be Monsters: Deep Down is available today on Amazon in Kindle ebook and 6×9 paperback — the second full collection in the There Be Monsters series.

    Thirteen stories. One direction: down. Into water, into rock, into the caves and drowned places built to keep people out, and into the parts of a person their own family never sees.

    What Is There Be Monsters: Deep Down About?

    Deep Down is a 13-story horror anthology about depth — what happens when people go looking for the bottom of something and find it’s occupied. Each story follows a different account of someone who ignored a warning that turned out to be true.

    Then and Now, the first collection in the series, kept its monsters close to the surface — in the familiar world, in places readers already had reasons to be. Deep Down goes further than that book did, into locations built to be entered once and not questioned.

    A sample of what’s waiting in the collection:

    • A sister recovers her drowned brother’s final dive footage and learns he wasn’t afraid of what took him.
    • A Navy SEAL team boards a drifting ship expecting pirates and finds eight hundred people who tore each other apart from the inside.
    • Below a Belizean blue hole, something older than the water waits exactly where the light gives out.
    Illustration of a diver discovering a sunken shipwreck in green water

    What Makes This Collection Different From Then and Now?

    Deep Down pushes further into an inhuman narrative voice — several stories are told from a perspective that experiences the world in a way that is internally coherent and externally wrong. That’s the collection’s core structural idea, and it’s what separates it from a standard monster anthology.

    The monstrous in these stories isn’t positioned as an outside threat opposing human characters. It functions as an extension of human nature — the part that the ordinary world has no category for, that has nowhere else to go, and that goes down instead. Three things carry that idea through the book:

    1. Every story is a recovered account, not a narrated legend — something that happened to a specific person who believed the warning didn’t apply to them.
    2. The horror predates the humans who find it. Nothing in this collection was summoned. It was already there, waiting in a place with no relationship to time the way people experience it.
    3. The archive format continues from Then and Now. Grimbard doesn’t appear in the stories — only collects and orders them, the way the There Be Monsters series has worked since the first book.
    Illustration of a diver descending into a Belizean blue hole

    Where Can You Buy There Be Monsters: Deep Down?

    There Be Monsters: Deep Down is available now on Amazon in Kindle ebook and paperback, and it’s enrolled in Kindle Unlimited. Because it’s part of KDP Select, the ebook is Amazon-exclusive for now — it won’t appear on Gumroad or any other storefront.

    Format Where Notes
    Kindle ebook Amazon Included with Kindle Unlimited
    6×9 paperback Amazon Same listing, print edition

    Who Is T. P. Grimbard?

    T. P. Grimbard collects warnings for a living — the kind that used to be posted at the edge of a map, before maps stopped admitting there was an edge. Every account in the There Be Monsters series is presented the way it was found: as something that happened to someone who thought the warning didn’t apply to them. The archive is always growing. It has never once gotten smaller.

    If you’re the type of reader who finishes a Deep Down story and immediately wants to know what else waits in dark water, Boxcar Children was many horror readers’ first taste of kids finding things adults had stopped looking for — and it holds up as a surprisingly good gateway into the genre.

    Get the Boxcar Children on Amazon

    New accounts, annotated classics, and a free welcome story land in your inbox when you sign up for the Grimbard newsletter.

    Pinned question for the comments: Which regional rule from your hometown do you still follow today — and do you know where it actually came from?

  • It Walks by Night (Annotated) Is Live — Grimbard Classics of Horror No. 2

    It Walks by Night (Annotated) Is Live — Grimbard Classics of Horror No. 2

    It Walks by Night is out now in an annotated Grimbard Press edition, available today on Amazon in ebook and paperback.

    John Dickson Carr’s 1930 locked-room horror-mystery just entered the U.S. public domain on January 1, 2026. Grimbard Press is the first imprint to reissue it with new editorial material built specifically for horror readers, not mystery collectors.

    What Is It Walks by Night About?

    It Walks by Night opens with a man’s severed head sitting upright in a sealed gambling-house card room, facing a door no one entered or left through. Detective Henri Bencolin has to explain the impossible before the killer decides someone else needs to disappear.

    The setting is Fenelli’s, a fashionable gambling house above the Seine in 1920s Paris. Two doors, one window, all three watched the entire time the murder happened. That is the puzzle Carr hands you on page one, and he does not soften it with reassurance that it will make sense later.

    Here’s what makes this one worth reading as horror and not just detective fiction:

    • The impossible crime, not the clever criminal, is the point. Carr wrote it as a 23-year-old obsessed with the idea that something could not have happened and then happened anyway.
    • Bencolin is closer to an exorcist than an inspector. His interrogations read like something out of Poe — the guilt in the room matters more than the evidence in it.
    • The book was born from theater, not crime fiction. Carr’s earlier draft, written at Haverford College, was titled Grand Guignol — a direct nod to the Parisian theater (1897–1962) that staged horror through graphic, clinical stagecraft rather than suggestion.
    Illustration of a shadowed Victorian hallway outside a locked card room

    What’s New in the Grimbard Press Edition?

    The Grimbard Press edition adds five pieces of original editorial content that don’t exist in any other current printing of the novel. The original 1930 text is untouched — everything new sits around it, not inside it.

    This is Grimbard Classics of Horror — No. 2, following The Beetle (1897) as the first title in the series. Each entry gets the same treatment: annotate a public-domain classic that belongs on a horror shelf, not just a mystery or literary-fiction one.

    New material in this edition:

    1. Editorial Introduction — “The Head in the Card Room” — context on Carr, the novel’s 1930 debut, and why it reads as horror wearing a mystery’s structure.
    2. Author Biography — John Dickson Carr’s life and his run as one of the defining voices of the locked-room subgenre.
    3. “About This Edition” — a note on the text, sourcing, and what Grimbard Press changed (nothing) and added (the surrounding material).
    4. “Edgar Allan Poe’s Shadow: Horror and the Locked Room” — an essay tracing the line from Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” through Carr’s impossible crimes.
    5. Suggested Reading — where to go next if this is your entry point into locked-room horror.
    Illustration of a shadowed hand, one of the new interior illustrations in the Grimbard Press edition

    The edition also carries 26 new interior illustrations, available in both a full-color deluxe printing and a low-ink black-and-white edition for print-at-home readers.

    Where Can You Buy It Walks by Night?

    It Walks by Night (Annotated) is available now on Amazon in Kindle ebook and 6×9 paperback, and on Gumroad as a pay-what-you-want ebook and companion art pack.

    Format Where Notes
    Kindle ebook & paperback Amazon Live now
    Ebook — Deluxe (color) + Low-Ink (B&W) editions Gumroad Pay what you want, $2 minimum — both editions in one download
    Illustrated Art Pack — all 52 interior illustrations Gumroad Pay what you want, $7 minimum — full color + B&W sets

    Who Is T. P. Grimbard?

    T. P. Grimbard writes horror and dark fiction under a pen name built from two instincts: the Bard, a lifelong tabletop storyteller, and the Grim, the part that can’t walk past a haunted house without going in. Grimbard is also the author of There Be Monsters: Then and Now, There Be Monsters: Deep Down, the standalone story Rabbit Season, and the debut novel The Scarab.

    If a locked room with a severed head in it is your kind of opening chapter, the same instinct that built this annotated edition runs through The Other by Thomas Tryon — a slow-burn psychological horror novel about twin brothers and the kind of secret a small town keeps without meaning to.

    Get The Other on Amazon

    More annotated classics, new fiction, and a free welcome story land in your inbox when you sign up for the Grimbard newsletter.

  • The Craft of “Don’t Do X”: Why Rules Are the Most Powerful Tool in Folk Horror

    The Craft of “Don’t Do X”: Why Rules Are the Most Powerful Tool in Folk Horror

    Three rules. That’s all the setup my story “Rabbit Season” needed.

    Bank the fire before you sleep.
    Don’t drink the spring water in May.
    Don’t shoot the white ones in winter.

    And underneath: DON’T BRING IT HOME. 1903.

    By the time a reader reaches the actual horror in that story, they’ve already done most of the work themselves. The rules told them something was out there. The rules implied a history of people who learned what they knew the hard way. And the rules established a logic — which means, in the reader’s mind, that violating them has consequences. The horror becomes almost secondary. The anticipation of violation does most of the damage.

    This is not an accident. Rules are the most powerful structural tool in folk horror, and I think about them more than almost anything else when I’m plotting.

    Why Rules Work

    The rule implies the failure.

    That’s it. That’s the whole mechanism. When you tell a reader “don’t open the door at midnight,” you have just created, in the reader’s imagination, a vivid image of someone opening the door at midnight. You’ve created the dread before the action. The rule functions as foreshadowing compressed into an imperative.

    What makes folk horror rules specifically effective — versus, say, rules in a haunted-house thriller — is that folk horror rules come attached to community. They were taught. Which means someone taught them for a reason. Which means someone, probably multiple someones, found out the hard way what happens when you don’t follow them.

    The rule is a compression of suffering. When a grandmother passes down “don’t look at the lights in the woods,” she is summarizing a trauma. The reader feels the weight of that compression even if they never see the original event. The rule carries the past with it.

    The Three Components of a Good Horror Rule

    After a lot of trial and error, I’ve landed on three things a horror rule needs to work.

    It has to be specific without explaining itself.

    “Don’t go into the woods at night” is weak. It’s too broad. It doesn’t have the texture of something real. “Don’t whistle after dark in October” is better. It’s specific enough to feel like it comes from somewhere — someone, at some point, whistled in October and received a consequence — but it doesn’t explain what. The specificity implies the knowledge. The silence implies the dread.

    It has to be possible to break.

    This sounds obvious but it’s the mistake most writers make. If the rule is impossible to violate in practice, it doesn’t generate tension. “Don’t fly to the moon” is a rule with no teeth in a contemporary setting. The rule has to be something a reasonable person could break under pressure, by accident, or because they don’t believe it. The more plausible the violation, the more the reader worries.

    It has to cost something visible when broken.

    The consequence doesn’t need to be immediate and it doesn’t need to be fully explained. But the reader has to sense that breaking the rule matters. This is often established through the rule itself — “don’t bring it home” implies that bringing something home has happened before and the result was bad enough that someone carved the warning into wood.

    The Rules Conversation as Exposition

    One technique I use repeatedly: the scene where an older character explains the rules to a younger one, and the younger one doesn’t fully believe them.

    This accomplishes three things simultaneously. It delivers the rules naturally, without the author simply listing them. It establishes the intergenerational structure of folk knowledge — the fact that someone who lived through the consequences is passing this down. And it creates dramatic irony: the reader understands the rules are real while watching the character who will eventually violate them dismiss them as superstition.

    The conversation also lets you calibrate the older character’s delivery. Are they frightened? Matter-of-fact? Resigned? The emotional register tells the reader how seriously to take the threat. The best folk horror rule deliveries are calm. Not dramatic. Not pleading. Calm and specific, the way you explain not to touch a hot stove — because the person explaining it has accepted that there’s no way to make someone understand until they’ve been burned, and they’re trying anyway.

    What Not to Do

    The mistake I see most often: explaining the rule.

    “Don’t open the cellar door because the thing in there will kill you” is not a rule. It’s a warning. It has already evacuated the mystery. The reader knows what’s in the cellar. The dread is gone.

    The rule should always know more than it says. The best rules feel like the summary of a longer story that the story itself never quite tells. You’re always building on implied history, never on explicit history.

    The second mistake: too many rules. If you have six rules in the first chapter, the reader can’t hold them all as live threats. Three is the traditional structure — it’s not arbitrary. Three is about the limit of what a reader can track simultaneously as specific sources of dread. If you need more, introduce them in sequence as the story goes deeper, not all at once at the front.

    Rules as Character

    There’s one more thing rules can do that I’ve been using more lately: they can characterize the community that made them.

    A community that has a rule against looking at the lights implies a community that believes the lights are watching back. A community that has a rule against naming certain things implies a community that believes names have power. A community that has a rule about the spring water in May implies a community that keeps records, that noticed a pattern, that did the work of encoding the survival knowledge in transmissible form.

    The rules, read carefully, tell you who these people were. What they feared and what they took seriously and what they refused to let die.

    That’s the part that keeps me coming back to this structure. The rules are a horror device. But they’re also a portrait.

    “Rabbit Season” is available now — find it on Amazon as part of There Be Monsters. More folk horror fiction coming soon.

    Join the Grimbard list for craft posts, creature features, and new fiction drops.

  • The Mothman and the Bridge That Fell

    The Mothman and the Bridge That Fell

    Forty-six people died when the Silver Bridge collapsed on December 15, 1967.

    It was the evening rush hour in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. The bridge connected the town to Gallipolis, Ohio, across the Ohio River. A single corroded eyebar — one link in a suspension chain — failed first. The rest followed in under a minute. Thirty-one vehicles went into the river. The water was thirty-five feet deep. Many of the dead were still in their cars.

    The disaster was later attributed to a stress fracture in the eyebar that had been present since the bridge was manufactured in 1928. A manufacturing defect. It had been building toward failure for nearly forty years, and no inspection had caught it.

    This is the fact-record version of what happened at Point Pleasant.

    The other version begins thirteen months earlier, in November 1966, when a creature no one had a name for started appearing near the town.

    What People Saw

    The first widely reported sighting came from two couples driving near an abandoned munitions plant known locally as the TNT Area. They described a large humanoid figure, grey or brown, with wings folded against its back and eyes — the eyes are always the detail people lead with — eyes that were large, red, and reflective in headlights. The figure rose from the roadside, spread wings that witnesses estimated at ten to fifteen feet, and followed their car at speeds up to one hundred miles per hour without appearing to beat its wings.

    Over the following year, more than a hundred people in the Point Pleasant area reported seeing something similar. The accounts are not all consistent — some describe a creature closer to seven feet tall, some shorter; some report a distinct chest structure, some don’t. What stays consistent across nearly all accounts: the wings, the red eyes, and the unsettling quality of encountering something that was aware of being watched.

    Local newspaper reporter Mary Hyre documented many of the sightings. She also reported, in the same period, an increase in anomalous phenomena around the town — unusual telephone interference, Men in Black-type encounters, poltergeist activity. John Keel, the journalist and paranormal investigator whose work eventually became The Mothman Prophecies, arrived in 1967 and spent months in the area interviewing witnesses.

    And then the bridge fell, and the sightings stopped.

    The Harbinger Question

    The leap that popular culture made — Mothman as disaster prophet, a creature that appears before catastrophes to warn the unheeding — is more complicated than either believers or skeptics tend to present.

    The factual record is this: the Mothman sightings clustered in a thirteen-month period and ceased after the Silver Bridge collapse. Witnesses who claim to have seen it reported feeling dread, not danger. No one reported the creature pointing at the bridge. No one reported anything that could be interpreted as a specific warning.

    What happened was that the disaster arrived, the sightings stopped, and human pattern recognition did what human pattern recognition does: it connected the preceding anomaly to the tragedy that followed. This is called the clustering illusion and it’s one of the most consistent features of human cognition. We are extremely good at finding patterns and extremely unreliable at distinguishing real patterns from coincidental ones.

    And yet.

    Keel documented sightings of similar creatures preceding other disasters — the Chernobyl disaster, the collapse of a bridge in Germany, the Virginia Tech shooting. Not all of these hold up to scrutiny. Some are apocryphal. But enough of them were documented before the events in question that the pure-coincidence explanation starts requiring more weight than the available evidence comfortably bears.

    I’m not a true believer. But I’ve learned to be cautious about how confidently I dismiss the pattern, because the pattern keeps showing up.

    What the Creature Might Actually Be

    Here’s where I find the Mothman legend genuinely interesting as a piece of cultural history: the biological explanations are more plausible than most people realize, and they don’t actually resolve the problem.

    The most credible naturalistic explanation is that witnesses encountered a Sandhill Crane — a large migratory bird with a wingspan of up to seven feet and eyes that reflect red in low light. This is not a bad explanation. The TNT Area is adjacent to wetlands that cranes use. The height of some witness descriptions matches a crane in flight at unusual angles.

    But it doesn’t explain the hundred-mile-per-hour pursuit. It doesn’t explain the consistent account of red eyes that were described as watching. It doesn’t explain the broader anomalous phenomenon period that Hyre and Keel both documented independently.

    The biological explanation handles the creature. It doesn’t handle the context.

    What I think the Mothman legend is — and this is purely my read — is a community under prolonged stress (Point Pleasant had significant industrial problems, economic decline, and several smaller-scale disasters in the preceding years) generating a meaningful symbol for anxiety it couldn’t otherwise articulate. The creature showed up when things were already wrong. The bridge confirmed what the appearance had suggested.

    Communities do this. They have always done this.

    The Mothman didn’t cause the bridge to fail. But it might have been the shape that the town’s dread took when it needed somewhere to live.

    Point Pleasant Now

    The town of Point Pleasant has fully embraced its most famous inhabitant. There’s a Mothman Museum on Main Street and a twelve-foot stainless steel statue that has become one of the more photographed roadside attractions in West Virginia. The annual Mothman Festival draws tens of thousands of people every September.

    This is not cynicism — I’ve been to roadside attraction towns and I’ve watched communities find dignity and economic purpose in owning their strange history. Point Pleasant does it well.

    The TNT Area is still there. The wetlands are still active. Sandhill cranes still migrate through.

    If you go in November, and you’re driving the back roads after dark, and something large rises from the roadside ahead of you and holds your headlights in its eyes —

    Well. You’ll know to pay attention to the bridges.

    Creature features, folklore deep dives, and the horror that lives in specific places — join the Grimbard list.

    If you want to read the fiction this research feeds: There Be Monsters: Then and Now

  • What Visiting Haunted Places Actually Feels Like

    What Visiting Haunted Places Actually Feels Like

    My partner and I have a tradition when we travel. Before we book anything, we look up what died there.

    Not morbidly — or not only morbidly. It’s more that the historical weight of a place interests us, and that weight is usually attached to the bad things. The flood. The fire. The crime that nobody quite got to the bottom of. The building that used to be something else before it was what it is now.

    We’ve done ghost tours in a dozen cities. We’ve walked through cemeteries at hours that made the groundskeepers nervous. We’ve stood in rooms where, by every account we could find, something happened that the people who lived through it couldn’t explain.

    I want to tell you what that actually feels like — not what the tour guides say it feels like, and not what the skeptics say it feels like. What it actually feels like, from someone who pays attention for a living.

    The First Thing Is the Cold

    Not in the “cold spot” paranormal sense, though those are real enough. The first cold is the one you feel before you know why.

    We were in a 19th-century hotel in Savannah — I won’t name it because Savannah has so many haunted hotels that naming one feels like endorsing a TripAdvisor entry — when I walked into a hallway on the third floor and stopped. My partner, two steps behind me, also stopped.

    Neither of us said anything for a moment. Then she said, “Do you feel that?”

    I did. Something in the air pressure, maybe. Something in the way the light behaved. There was no visible reason for either of us to stop.

    The room at the end of that hallway, we found out later, was the one.

    I’m not making a supernatural claim. I’m making an observation: human beings have threat-detection systems that are very old and often accurate, and old buildings that held bad events have a way of triggering them in people who aren’t defended against them. Whether that’s atmospheric or architectural or something genuinely paranormal is a question I don’t have a confident answer to.

    What I do have is the memory of stopping in that hallway.

    What the Tour Guides Know

    Ghost tour guides are, almost universally, the most interesting people in any city.

    They are amateur historians who became professional storytellers through necessity — nobody hires you to just stand on a street corner and recite municipal history. You need the ghost. But to get the ghost right, you have to get the history right. The haunting is the hook; the history is the substance. The best guides understand that the history is scarier than the ghost.

    The guide who walked us through a preserved antebellum district in South Carolina didn’t dwell on the apparition sightings. She spent forty minutes on the documented history — the people who died there, the records that survive, the gap between what the official accounts say and what the oral tradition preserved. By the time she got to the story of what people claimed to see in the third-floor window, she didn’t need to sell it.

    The thing had weight.

    What the Skeptics Get Half Right

    Skeptics are correct that most people on ghost tours experience what they came expecting to experience. Priming is real. If you tell someone a room is haunted and then dim the lights, you will generate phenomenological reports of haunting. This is not controversial.

    What the pure debunking stance misses is that “you experienced what you came expecting to experience” doesn’t fully explain every account, and it doesn’t explain why the content of those accounts is so consistent across time, culture, and witness.

    If a room has been generating reports of a woman in gray standing in the corner for one hundred and fifty years — reports from people who didn’t know each other, who visited in different eras, who described the same gray woman in the same corner — pure priming doesn’t actually account for that. Priming explains individual suggestibility. It doesn’t explain the anchor.

    I hold these things loosely. I am not a true believer. But I am also not someone who finds pure materialism a satisfying explanation for everything I’ve personally stood in front of.

    Why We Keep Going

    The honest answer is that visiting these places is a form of paying attention to the dead.

    History has a way of becoming abstract — names and dates and events compressed into summaries that carry no weight. Standing in the room where something happened does something that reading about it does not. The scale comes back. The reality of it.

    I write horror about places. The specific texture of a room, a hallway, a ridge at dusk. I can’t generate that texture from research alone. I need to stand somewhere and let it do what it does.

    My partner comes because she finds history genuinely moving, and because she has, on two occasions, experienced things she hasn’t found a satisfying explanation for. She isn’t frightened by those experiences. She finds them interesting. It’s one of the things I like most about her.

    The cold in the hallway. The woman in gray. The man on the ghost tour who looked at you like you’d asked about roads.

    These are not the same kind of evidence. But they’re all evidence of something. The places hold what happened in them, one way or another.

    I’d rather go look than not.

    Writing about haunted places and folk horror — join the Grimbard list for creature features, dark tourism notes, and new fiction: Join the Grimbard list

  • Why Appalachian Horror Hits Different

    Why Appalachian Horror Hits Different

    There’s a scene I keep coming back to, not from any book or film, but from a conversation I had with an older man at a ghost tour in western North Carolina a few years back. He’d lived in the same holler his whole life. Someone on the tour asked him if he believed in the things we’d been hearing about — the lights in the woods, the shape that walked the ridge at night.

    He looked at them the way you look at someone who’s just asked if you believe in roads.

    “Believe in it,” he said. “I’ve seen it.”

    That exchange is, in miniature, what Appalachian horror is. Not atmosphere. Not aesthetic. Witness.

    The Geography Does Something

    Mountains do specific things to human psychology over generations. They cut off. They contain. They create what sociologists call “geographic isolation” but what feels, from inside it, more like the world forgetting you exist.

    The Appalachian range runs roughly 1,500 miles from Alabama to Newfoundland, with the densest cultural concentration in a band stretching from northern Georgia through West Virginia. The settlements that took hold there in the 18th and 19th centuries were often cut off from the nearest towns by terrain that made travel genuinely dangerous for significant portions of the year.

    That isolation does two things that matter for horror.

    First, it concentrates tradition. The oral histories, the rules, the stories that would have diluted over generations in more connected communities stayed intact. Practices that died elsewhere survived. Beliefs that modernized away in cities held their shape in places where modernity arrived late and partially.

    Second, it means the community becomes the authority. When there’s no external institution to appeal to — no sheriff an hour away, no hospital, no court — the community develops its own mechanisms for managing fear, conflict, and the things that happen in the dark that nobody has a good explanation for.

    Both of those conditions produce folklore with teeth.

    The Things That Live Here

    Appalachian folk horror has a specific creature catalog, and what’s striking about it is how local it is. The Wampus Cat. The Tailypo. The Bell Witch — not a ghost so much as a presence, a force, something that understood the Bell family well enough to hate them specifically. The Booger. The Raw Head. These aren’t imports. They’re not Greek mythology dressed in new clothes. They grew from this place.

    They’re also not uniform. The Tailypo legend varies significantly from county to county. What the creature wants, what it looks like, whether there’s any way to survive encountering it — these change based on who’s telling it and where. That variability is a sign of living tradition. Dead traditions calcify. Living ones adapt.

    The Wampus Cat is a good example. In some versions it’s a pre-contact shapeshifter, a woman transformed by the Cherokee as punishment for witnessing a sacred ceremony. In others it’s simply a mountain lion that has been wrong for too long, something that started natural and became something else by accumulation of wrongness. The two versions are doing different cultural work, but they share an anxiety: things here can change into what they are not, and you won’t know until it’s too late.

    What Hollywood Gets Wrong

    Most Appalachian horror films make the same mistake. They treat the mountains as backdrop for urban people to suffer in. The locals are either villains or props. The horror is generated by the gap between the sophistication of the protagonists and the otherness of the place.

    This is not Appalachian horror. It’s tourism horror — horror about what happens when you leave your comfort zone. The mountains are incidental.

    Real Appalachian horror is horror about the place — the way the land holds memory, the way communities deal with what they can’t explain, the way the isolation creates both tight bonds and the kind of silence that lets bad things persist. It’s the difference between a story set in the mountains and a story that could only be set in the mountains.

    The gold standard is still the oral tradition itself. Second to that, look at what writers like Ron Rash and Wiley Cash do with the region in their fiction — not explicitly horror, but working with the same raw material.

    Why It’s Having a Moment

    Appalachian horror has been mainstream-adjacent for a few years now, and I don’t think that’s coincidental. We’re in a cultural moment when a lot of people are asking questions about what gets preserved, what gets lost, what survives in communities that were cut off or overlooked, and what that survival cost.

    Appalachian folk tradition has answers to those questions. They’re not comfortable answers. They’re the kind of answers that involve the lights in the woods and the shape on the ridge and the old man who looks at you like you asked about roads.

    But they’re real answers, from people who were paying attention.

    That’s what the best horror has always been.

    My fiction lives in this territory — folk horror, creature stories, the kind of dark that grows in isolated places. There Be Monsters: Then and Now collects thirteen of them. Start there.

    For more folklore, regional legends, and the horror that feels like it came from somewhere — get on the list.

  • The Skinwalker: What the Navajo Legend Actually Warns Us About

    The Skinwalker: What the Navajo Legend Actually Warns Us About

    The version of the Skinwalker that lives on Reddit is a bipedal thing that chases cars on desert highways. A speed demon. Something you catch at the edge of your headlights doing something no human body should be able to do — running alongside you at seventy miles an hour, or crouched where it shouldn’t fit, or looking at you from the wrong direction in your mirror.

    That version is terrifying. It’s also about forty percent of the actual tradition, stripped of the part that makes it genuinely disturbing.

    The Skinwalker — yee naaldlooshii in Diné bizaad, which translates roughly as “by means of it, it goes on all fours” — is not primarily a speed story or a pursuit story. It is a transformation story. And the thing it transforms is the most frightening part of all.

    What Gets Made

    A yee naaldlooshii is a human being who has chosen to become something else.

    Not cursed. Not bitten. Not inherited. Chosen.

    In the Navajo tradition, a Skinwalker is a practitioner of ‘ánt’įįhnii — what outsiders translate as witchcraft — who has completed a specific, deliberate act of corruption. The nature of that act varies in specificity across accounts, but the consistent element is this: it involves the killing of a close family member. A sibling. A parent. A child.

    The Skinwalker does not become evil through supernatural contamination. The evil act is the threshold. You have to cross it yourself.

    This is what separates the yee naaldlooshii from almost every other monster in Western horror tradition. A werewolf is often a victim. A vampire was transformed by violence done to them. Even the ghost typically died in circumstances they didn’t choose. The Skinwalker chose — and what they received in exchange is not just speed or shapeshifting, but the removal of the constraint that had held them inside a human moral framework.

    The power is real. But the cost is your self.

    The Skin and What It Means

    The “skin” in Skinwalker is literal. The practitioner wears the pelt of an animal — typically coyote, wolf, fox, owl, or crow — to take on that creature’s form. This is where the highway encounters come from; a person wearing a wolf skin running faster than a vehicle, or a figure crouched impossibly in the road, is the physical expression of a human inside an animal body.

    But the specific animals matter. Every one of them carries weight in Navajo cosmology. Coyote is the trickster, the boundary-violator, the one who appears at the margins of order. Wolf is dangerous power. The owl — same as with the Wendigo tradition — carries the dead. These aren’t random choices. The practitioner isn’t just putting on a disguise; they’re wearing a relationship to the world.

    The closest thing in Western tradition might be the berserker — a Norse warrior who wore a bearskin and was said to fight in a state beyond human reckoning. But the berserker transformation was temporary. The yee naaldlooshii does not have an off switch. The boundary between the practitioner and the animal gets thinner with use. Eventually, some accounts suggest, there’s nothing left that remembers being human.

    The Skinwalker Ranch Problem

    In 1996, a Utah ranch became famous — notorious — as a hotspot for Skinwalker activity. Livestock mutilations. UFO sightings. Poltergeist phenomena. A series of books, a documentary, and eventually a cable television series followed.

    Here’s the problem: Skinwalker Ranch is in the Uintah Basin of northeastern Utah. The land is associated with the Ute people, not the Navajo. The Skinwalker is a specifically Navajo tradition. The two are not the same.

    The conflation is not harmless. When a piece of indigenous knowledge gets detached from its cultural origin and reapplied to a piece of land it has no historical connection to, what you get is not expanded understanding — you get a brand. The terror tourism around Skinwalker Ranch has generated considerable money. The Navajo Nation has generated approximately none of it. And the tradition gets used in ways that erase the context that makes it meaningful.

    I’m not saying the Uintah Basin doesn’t have strange history. It might. But whatever is happening there is probably better understood through Ute cosmology, if through any indigenous lens at all.

    The Skinwalker has been adopted by horror culture in ways that the community it came from has, repeatedly and explicitly, asked people to stop. When you see that pattern — a specific ask from a living culture to stop appropriating their spiritual tradition as entertainment — it’s worth pausing to ask what you actually gain by ignoring it.

    Why the Warning Still Matters

    Strip the cultural mechanics away entirely and the core of the Skinwalker legend is this: power is available to people who are willing to do the thing that cannot be undone. And the transformation that follows isn’t just physical. You don’t just get fast. You get outside the community that would hold you accountable. You become something that moves at the margins, that cannot come back into the firelight, that must keep moving because stopping means being seen for what you are.

    Every community has people who chose that trade.

    The Navajo had a name for them. That’s not superstition. That’s observation, compressed into a form that survives.

    Horror draws on traditions like this one because they’ve already done the work — they’ve looked at the dark thing directly and named it. I try to do the same in my fiction. If you want to see what that looks like, There Be Monsters: Then and Now is a good place to start.

    Want more folklore, creature features, and the kind of horror that came from somewhere real? Join the Grimbard list.

  • What Horror Knows About Fathers That Hallmark Never Will

    What Horror Knows About Fathers That Hallmark Never Will

    Father’s Day is a greeting card holiday pretending to be a human one.

    The cards show men grilling. Men fishing. Men asleep in recliners with the game on. The language is warm and rounded and careful, the way language gets when people are trying not to say the complicated thing. Best dad ever. My hero. The man, the myth, the legend. All of it true, maybe. None of it the whole picture.

    Horror knows the whole picture.

    The best horror fiction has always understood that fathers — really understood them — in a way that no greeting card company has the stomach to. The genre has given us Jack Torrance and his typewriter. Ray Molina sitting in a motel room at two in the morning, listening to his son sleep while something tapped from under the floor. Abel Crowder at a church table with his hands flat and his face the color of old lard, carrying sixty years of a dead man’s name — that last one from my own collection, There Be Monsters: Then and Now. Fathers who loved fiercely and held on too long. Fathers who sealed something up and told the children not to touch it. Fathers who stayed when every instinct told them to run — and fathers who ran when they had no other answer.

    That’s not a condemnation of fatherhood. That’s the truth of it. Fathers carry things. The good ones, the bad ones, the ones doing their best in a house that slopes and a life that costs more than they planned for. Horror just won’t let them put it down.

    This Father’s Day, we’re celebrating that.

    A Father’s Day Short Read — Out Today

    To mark the occasion, I’m releasing a brand new short horror story written specifically for Father’s Day. It’s the kind of story that gets at what the holiday actually is about: the things fathers protect their children from, the things they can’t, and the weight that passes between one generation and the next whether anyone meant it to or not.

    The Father’s Day Card is available right now on Gumroad.

    It’s a short read — written to finish in one sitting, ideally tonight. Consider it a different kind of Father’s Day gift. One that takes the holiday seriously.

    Gifts for the Horror Dad in Your Life

    If the father you’re celebrating has a shelf of paperbacks with broken spines and dog-eared pages, or a watchlist three seasons deep, or a habit of finding the one horror podcast nobody else has heard of yet — here’s what to get him.

    These are not the obvious picks. Skip the gift baskets.

    For the Dad Who Reads

    A collection he hasn’t found yet.

    The horror canon is deeper than most people go. Stephen King is the obvious entry. Shirley Jackson is the obvious next step. After that, things get interesting. If your dad has read The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle and is looking for the next thing, point him toward Thomas Tryon’s The Other, which came out in 1971 and still has no business being as unsettling as it is. Or toward Robert Aickman’s strange stories, which are the closest thing to reading a half-remembered dream that the genre has ever produced.

    The Other by Thomas Tryon

    The Collected Strange Stories by Robert Aickman

    For the dad who prefers his horror American and rural and steeped in the kind of dread that comes from knowing a place too well, Laird Barron is the name most horror readers get to too late.

    The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All by Laird Barron

    And if he’s the kind of reader who wants something new rather than catching up on the canon — something he won’t find recommended everywhere else — my own collection There Be Monsters: Then and Now is linked horror stories set across generations of the same family. Abel Crowder, from the opening of this post, has his story here. It’s the kind of book that rewards a slow read and a quiet house.

    There Be Monsters: Then and Now by T. P. Grimbard

    For the Dad Who Watches

    Something he won’t forget.

    Before the screen: the right pair of headphones. Horror audiobooks and horror podcasts are a different experience through speakers than through something that actually isolates you. The Sony WH-1000XM5 is the standard recommendation for a reason — noise cancellation good enough to make the rest of the house disappear, sound detail that rewards a narrator who knows what they’re doing, thirty hours of battery so he’s not hunting for a cable halfway through something good.

    Sony WH-1000XM5 Wireless Noise-Canceling Headphones

    The Wailing (2016) is the best horror film of the last decade that most people outside the genre haven’t seen. A small-town detective, a sick daughter, a stranger in the woods. It runs two and a half hours and earns every minute. Your dad will be thinking about the ending for days and won’t be able to explain why he can’t stop.

    For something domestic and slower and deeply wrong in the way only the best slow-burn horror is, Hereditary holds up. If he hasn’t seen it, that’s the gift.

    If he has seen both and is looking for something older: Don’t Look Now (1973). Grief and fathers and the things we think we see when loss has rewired us. There’s a reason it’s still on every serious horror list fifty years later.

    For the Dad Who Has Everything

    A piece of the shelf.

    If your dad is a serious reader and collector, signed or limited editions from small press horror publishers are the gifts that end up displayed rather than buried in a pile. Cemetery Dance Publications puts out limited hardcovers of major titles with author signatures. Subterranean Press does the same. First editions of classic horror — real ones, not reprints — can be found through AbeBooks for less than people expect.

    Cemetery Dance Selected Fiction by Stephen King

    For something more affordable: a leather bookmark, a quality reading lamp, a Moleskine journal for a dad who writes in the margins of everything he reads. These are small things. The right small things matter.

    Moleskine Classic Hardcover Notebook

    BenQ e-Reading LED Desk Lamp

    For the Dad Who Creates

    Tools for the work.

    If your dad writes, or has a story he’s been meaning to get down, or keeps a notes app full of opening lines and goes quiet when you ask about it — get him something that treats the work seriously. A dedicated writing app license. A year of a craft newsletter. A copy of Stephen King’s On Writing, if he doesn’t have one, which remains the most honest book about writing that anyone has produced without meaning to write a book about writing.

    On Writing by Stephen King

    And if he’s ready to go from the notes app to the page, the single best thing you can give is time. Uninterrupted hours. The kids handled, the house quiet, the expectation removed. That’s free. It’s also the rarest thing most writing fathers have.

    The Part the Card Gets Wrong

    Father’s Day cards suggest that fatherhood is something you’ve already done. Past tense. A record to celebrate.

    Horror knows it’s ongoing. Something you carry into every room. Something that waits under the floor of wherever you are and taps until you deal with it, and the men who do well by their children are not the ones who sealed it up and put six screws in and hoped it would stay quiet. They’re the ones who eventually picked up the drill.

    Happy Father’s Day to the ones still holding it.

    The Father’s Day short story is available today only on Gumroad. Grab it here: The Father’s Day Card

    All book links are affiliate links. If you buy through them, a small commission comes back to support this site at no cost to you.

  • New Short Read: “Rabbit Season”

    New Short Read: “Rabbit Season”

    There’s a rule carved into the inside of the old camp door, and Lee has read it his whole life.

    Don’t shoot the white ones in winter.

    It’s 1935. The snares have been empty for six days. The egg money stopped covering the lamp oil a month ago, and Lee’s father has gone quiet in the way a man goes quiet when he’s run out of everything except the next bad idea. So when a white rabbit sits out on the snow at thirty yards — not hiding, not bolting, the white of it wrong against the white of the weather — the rule loses.

    The rabbit comes home.

    What sits down to supper after that is the part I’ll let you read for yourself.

    “Rabbit Season” is live now as a standalone short read. It’s quiet, Depression-era folk horror — the kind built on an old warning, an empty woods, and a family hungry enough to ignore both. If you like your horror patient and your endings earned, this one’s for you.

    Read “Rabbit Season” on Kindle: https://a.co/d/0bnT7fuu

    It’s pulled from my anthology There Be Monsters: Then and Now — thirteen stories, each one its own bad idea. If “Rabbit Season” gets under your skin, the rest are waiting.

    Get the full collection: https://a.co/d/04jKPYNx

    And if you want a free story to start with, I’ll send you one — no charge, just a quiet place to begin.

    Grab your free story: https://preview.mailerlite.io/forms/2428558/192190473470740064/share

    Bank the fire before you sleep. And if you see a white one this winter, leave it where it sits.