Content warning: none apply

You got lost a lot. Like a whole lot. Like so, so much, that I had to start leading the way on your walk home.

But then, of course, you came to depend on me.

“Haunt?” you whispered. You hunched on your friend’s front porch, eyes wide. “You there?”

At first, I thought I’d spooked you, so I hung back.

You shuffled your feet, peering into the night toward your house. Haunting you got boring real quick.

“Um. Can you show me the way again?”

Unbelievable.

Fine. I flashed twice on the path ahead.

Grinning, you scampered in my wake.

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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.