Content warning: blood mention, implied depression

When you stepped inside the local cavern, you couldn’t have known you’d walked into my throat. Many came and went from here, no one interesting enough to stir me. But you arrived with a different purpose than they, didn’t you?

How your footsteps dragged. Something weighed on you that wanted release.

And release it you did. Directly into the depths of my gullet, you screamed. Long and loud and high.

Delighted, I screamed back.

My much greater voice knocked you flat, ears bleeding. You scrambled away.

That scream must’ve fixed you right up because afterward, I never saw you again.

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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.