You looked so confused when you possessed your portrait. A portrait you never commissioned yourself.

I had spent most of my life painting your likeness. Getting closer and closer to a perfect reproduction. When at last my painting looked just like your face, your soul had no choice but to return to me.

At the sight of my face peering too close at your picture, you frowned. When you recognized me, the one who tormented you in life, now in death, you shrank back within the ornate frame.

But you could not escape.

When I grinned, though soundless, you screamed.

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Summer’s Latest

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.