Horror - Stories

Owen has never met his best friend.

For four years Xavier has been a voice in his headset. Xavier knows about the dog Owen lost at nine. He knows which voice Owen uses when he's lying about being fine.

Xavier lives two thousand miles away. That's what Owen believes.

At midnight, when a man appears under the tree across the street and won't leave, Owen calls the one person who always picks up.

Xavier tells him to breathe and stay away from the window, and promises he's safe.

Xavier means every word.

He's lying about almost everything else.

A note on this story: it is written in the dense, melancholy register of 19th-century Gothic fiction, and does not shy from grief, loneliness, or loss along its way to its ending.

For a hundred and fifty years, Jack has walked a county that has forgotten him, a farm boy who bartered his soul at a crossroads and paid twice over for it. Refused by Heaven, unclaimed by Hell, he has only a stolen coal to light his way, and windows he can watch but never touch.

Then he finds Julian's: nineteen, ill, certain no one would notice if he stopped waking. As October nears Halloween, the veil thins, and an old bargain comes due.

John, Hutch, and Putter are the kind of frat bros who use a girl in the middle so they don’t have to name what they’re doing together.

On Halloween there's no girl, but there is a campus legend every freshman has already dared: the grave of Midnight Malcolm, the sodomite witch hanged in 1693.

Call him three times and he comes back to claim what’s his.

It's been said that suffering builds character. And there are few that know suffering better than young Justin. Only 14 years old, he has found an easy way out. A suicidal tendency that he is hoping will bring an end to his misery. But when he meets a mysterious boy at the end of Navy Pier one dark evening...he is given an alternative. One that will give him purpose, and set in motion the events that will lead to his ultimate destiny....in a world not like our own.

Blackwater is not a school. It is a pressure cooker.
For boys deemed a problem by their families or the law, the remote fortress on the North Sea offers only one path to freedom: break, or be broken.

As he navigates the unforgiving hierarchy Calloway discovers that rebellion is not just possible. It is the only way to survive. Their growing connection becomes the foundation of a resistance that threatens to expose the unspeakable truths hidden within Blackwater's walls.

The tide is coming in. And not everyone will make it out.

In which a formerly dead alchemist does no work to solve his own mysterious resurrection, instead too busy falling in love with the eldritch entity stalking him.

Luca's sister is getting married. The music is playing. The champagne is flowing. Everything is perfect—until Luca spots him across the ballroom. The man who stole his youth. The man who broke him and threw him away. Now Marco is back, playing the charming family friend, his dark eyes promising destruction. Luca can't leave. He can't tell anyone. And Marco knows it. Trapped in a nightmare of silk and flowers, Luca must survive the night without shattering—or destroying his sister's perfect day. But some predators don't know when to leave.

Noah Wayward has built a fragile life with his boyfriend Shane, held together by prescription pills, emotional walls, and the careful suppression of a traumatic past. But when Noah's estranged older brother Joshua, freshly released from prison, appears without warning, the equilibrium shatters triggering something primal in Noah. Something that's been waiting, silently, patiently, for a way out...

Ly was different. He saw his surroundings differently. There were way too many worlds he had to belong to. His train of thought had no breaks, and his emotions got too loud at times. Sometimes he simply wanted to disappear.

Welcome to the world of Ly trying to figure out how to breathe in his chaotic life without losing himself or the man he loves.