Content warning: none apply

Sirens blared as I stalked along outside the palisade of your fortified village. Mist wreathed my horns and the ground trembled beneath my many-toed feet. My two tails lashed at the noise. Your little monster warning. Telling everyone to get behind your toothpick walls.

To hide from me.

But my presence portended a much greater danger. One your pathetic human eyes could not detect. As the sharp shadows crept in, the last of your number pulled the gates closed.

Satisfied with my work, I settled before the gate, nostrils steaming. No one could leave.

And nothing else could get inside.

Thanks for reading!

Subscribe for new stories, sneak peeks, book reviews, and updates delivered to your inbox and social feeds.

Links

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.