Horror

Anya sat bolt upright in bed and sucked in air through clenched teeth. Her nightshirt clung to her skin and her hair was smeared wetly against her cheek. She gasped…

Vacant heart and hand and eye,Easy live and quiet die. —Sir Walter Scott I. Providence, Rhode Island, 1848: The Hotel Bar The bar in Edgar Allan Poe’s hotel is a…

The new client was a hugely fat, fez-wearing mystery gink from the incest-and-incense-redolent East. He had beautiful hands, ripe with purple finger jewels. He seemed a little too happy to…

1. It’s been fifty years since I first heard the Pipes of Eld. I was fifteen when the ancient-modern sound emerged: flutes, crude wood or shining silver, reed-pipes, recorders and…

1 My dear Mrs. Shelley — No, that won’t do — she’s neither “mine” nor dear —  To Mary — No, that sounds like a dedication, when nothing of that…

I was never one of those people who hates the rain. Some people—most, I suppose—see the gray clouds rolling in like fluffy waves and feel the first few drops tap…

Leo ran his pawnshop out of a brick storefront he rented in a strip mall just outside of town. It had a Cut-Rate Vacuum on one side and on the…

The stockings were up, the tree was strung, and the night was aging quickly, when John saw Matty sit up in bed and stare wide-eyed at the ceiling. “He’s here,”…

“I don’t see why you’re so upset,” she said, tapping the ash from her cigarette. They were sitting outside on the back porch. It was August, still warm in the…

I was just a kid from Saragossa, in Aragon. Christian Spain at its most honest and authentic. Bad soil, tough meat, sour wine, sparse firewood . . .