“You know why they always have a fence around the graveyard?” my grandpa asked me.

A brittle October afternoon flashed past outside the truck windows.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because people are just dying to get in!”

Neither of us laughed. As we passed the cemetery, we surveyed all the corpses pressed against the wrought-iron fence, collapsed there after getting this far under their own steam. A few that had managed to get inside industriously dug their own graves, anywhere they could find the space.

There was no sign of the cemetery attendants.

Soberly, Grandpa said, “Guess that fence wasn’t enough.”

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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.