Category: There Be Monsters

  • Free September 4–8: There Be Monsters: Then and Now

    Some warnings are only stories until you are the person standing at the gate.

    From September 4 through September 8, There Be Monsters: Then and Now is free to download on Kindle. It is the first book in my There Be Monsters series: thirteen illustrated tales of folk horror, haunted places, buried histories, and the quiet moment when an old rule turns out to have been useful.

    Inside are a bell that rings for the dead when no one has died, a lake tour that returns without its passengers, a sealed crawlspace, a well with a price, and other places where people learn too late that curiosity is not the same thing as permission.

    Get the free Kindle book on Amazon

    If you read it and it gives you something to think about, an honest Amazon review helps an independent horror author find the readers who may actually want this kind of book. Constructive feedback helps, too. I do not need a particular rating; I value a real response after you have spent time with the stories.

    Every warning was true once. Some are still being written.

  • 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.

    Continue exploring folk horror

    About this short read

    Rabbit Season is a compact Depression-era folk horror story about scarcity, inherited rules, and the terrible logic of a bad decision. It is drawn from There Be Monsters: Then and Now, but it is meant to be read as a complete, uneasy tale on its own.

    Is this story for you?

    • Choose it if you prefer quiet rural dread to graphic violence.
    • Expect an old warning, a winter landscape, and horror that arrives by degrees.
    • Start here if you enjoy historical or Appalachian-inflected folk horror and want a short first taste.