I had felt the touch of the wraith for some time when I went to visit a psychic.

“When do I die?” I asked her.

The woman – I had forgotten her name already – gave me a funny look.

“Just, y’know, do your little crystal ball thing and tell me.” I waved my fingers around for effect. “Hurry up!”

Pursing her lips, the psychic said. “I don’t need a crystal ball to know your fate.”

“You don’t?”

She pointed at a stack of newspapers next to the door, bound up for recycling. “I just read your obituary. You died last week.”

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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.