Ebook $4.99 · free to read with Kindle Unlimited
October 31 is live.
It’s thirty-one stories, all of them set on the same night. The earliest is set in a French cathedral town in the 1400s, and the last one happens tonight. In between there’s a whaling ship, a plague year, a Prague attic, a trapline in the Ontario bush, a Louisiana funeral home, a Nebraska farm with a letter on the kitchen table that nobody wants to open.
Every story runs on one idea. The old warnings (do not answer, leave before dark, feed it first, count them twice) were not superstition to the people who made them. They were instructions. Someone came home frightened enough to tell the next person what had worked. The stories in this book follow the people who have to decide, on the worst night of their lives, whether to believe them.
Read the opening
This is how the first story begins. It’s the page that shows up in Amazon’s Look Inside, so if it works for you, the rest of the book will.
> In a Hand the Clerk Can Read
> October 31st, 1897 — a farmhouse in the Carpathian foothills.
>
> The boy who came for Dr. Emil Coțofană did not knock. He threw stones at the shutters until one split, and by the time Emil had the window open he was already shouting up, winded. The bride would not wake right, and Vasile Petrescu was tearing the house apart after somebody who knew what to do.
>
> Emil dressed in the dark rather than spend a match and took up his father’s bag: lancets, quinine, the brown bottle of carbolic he had carried back from Vienna and never once opened here, because nobody in this valley trusted a wound cleaned with anything that did not smell of church.
>
> At the coat pegs he glanced at the calendar without meaning to, and the thought that arrived was not a physician’s thought. It was one flat word.
>
> Again.
>
> He could not have said what he meant by it. He put his hat on and went out and did not examine it, which was the most characteristic act of his professional life.
The valley knows something Emil has spent nine years trying not to know. The story is about what happens when a trained man is the only one in the room who hasn’t read the rules.
Who this book is for
- You like horror that builds instead of horror that splatters.
- You read the footnotes. There’s a Note on Sources at the back that says what’s recorded history, what’s folklore, and what I made up.
- You want something to read one piece at a time. Stories run from about ten minutes to twenty-five.
- You already know that the scariest word in a ghost story is usually again.
If you want gore, this isn’t your book, and I’d rather tell you now than find out from a review.
What’s in it
Banshee, strigoi, changeling, golem. A kobold behind the hearthstone. A carnival that takes half your ticket. Stingy Jack and his lantern. A chupacabra panic on a South Texas ranch in 1996. A haunted doll bought for four dollars at an estate sale. A boarding house in Victorian London where someone is being fed on, and a maid who knows exactly where to put the salt and iron, and where to leave a gap.
Each story stands alone. Read in order, they move toward the title story, the thirty-first, where all the warnings start sounding at once.
Read it one night at a time
Starting October 1, I’m running the 31 Nights challenge: one story a night through October, ending with the title story on Halloween. There’s a free printable calendar with every night’s dateline so you can track where you are. Get the calendar →
I’ll also be posting a companion piece here for each story, covering the real folklore or history it’s built from, with no spoilers. The first one goes up tomorrow: the Irish legend of Stingy Jack, and why the jack-o’-lantern was never about pumpkins.
Formats
The ebook is out today and enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, so if you subscribe, it’s free to read. The paperback and hardcover are on their way for anyone who wants a copy on the shelf or plans to give one as a gift before Halloween. I’ll post here when they’re live.
One ask
If you read it, leave a review, even two lines. For a new book, reviews decide whether Amazon shows it to anyone else. An honest two-star review helps more than silence does.
Every warning was true once.
T. P. Grimbard
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Also in There Be Monsters: Then and Now · Deep Down · Among the Dead