Her influence started small, but she caught you up in her spellbound following early on. You obsessed with her – the pictures, the status updates, the videos. All about her.

You wanted to be her so bad. It didn’t matter that I said you were more than enough.

Coming home one day to find her in the house – you as her look-alike – shouldn’t have surprised me. But it did. Not a trace of you remained in her face.

She didn’t spellbind me the way she did you. The way you did me. You became a stranger to me.

I miss you.

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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.