I got a summer job working in an occult supply store. There, I met the scariest person of my life: myself.

“I need wasp stingers,” I told myself. My face stared dead-eyed from beneath the hood of my favorite jacket.

As I handed the packet across the counter to myself, I said, “What happened to us, man?”

I grabbed both my wrists. “Don’t accept any invitations,” I hissed. “It’s not the nature of the cult, it’s the peer pressure.”

I thought back to the email I’d just received and shook my head. It was too late. I had already accepted.

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Beneath the Bluebonnets: Tales of Terror by Texas Women

Read my eco-horror short “Well Being” in this fabulous new anthology, in which a mother follows strange impulses from tainted water to find her daughter.

From Mary Shelley to Tananarive Due and Mariana Enríquez, women have long shaped horror—often without equal recognition. Living closest to the genre’s edge, women know these fears firsthand: lost autonomy, violence, childbirth, survival.

Set in Texas, a land of haunted histories and increasingly restrictive laws, Beneath the Bluebonnets emerges from the raw intersection of terror and endurance. Written by twelve Texas women writers: R. J. Joseph, Lauren Oertel, L.H. Phillips, Kathleen Kent, Madison Estes, Jess Hagemann, Emma E. Murray, Jae Mazer, Iphigenia Strangeworth, Jacklyn Baker, S.G. Baker and edited by Carmen Gray, this collection is urgent, unflinching, and deeply haunting—stories that refuse to look away.