Content warning: compulsion

I found you in the morning, kneeling among my spell books. Your lips moved continuously, cracked and bleeding. Your voice had dried out hours ago reciting the same line over and over. Your fingertip traced back and forth beneath one sentence within the volume open on the floor before you.

You weren’t reading that incantation. You’d tripped the trap spell I’d placed on all my books.

Lucky for you, thief, I needed that tome today. I snapped my fingers.

Dazed, you stood.

“What have we learned?”

You repeated that same line a final time. “I will not steal from wizards.”

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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.