Crime Horror Fiction

In The Meaning of Blood: and Other Tales of Perversity, award-winning author and Edgar Allan Poe scholar Chuck Caruso combines his deep roots in the American Gothic with his own contemporary sense of macabre humor. These 15 stories of dark fiction range from crime thrillers to western noir to grotesque horror. Each twisted tale displays Caruso's unique blend of wry prose, feverish storytelling, and tragically flawed characters discovering that even the most innocent encounter can lead to death. Or sex. Or both.

Gathering of Waters is a deeply engrossing tale narrated by the town of Money, Mississippi - a site both significant and infamous in our collective story as a nation. Money is personified in this haunting story, which chronicles its troubled history following the arrival of the Hilson and Bryant families. Tass Hilson and Emmett Till were young and in love when Emmett was brutally murdered in 1955. Anxious to escape the town, Tass marries Maximillian May and relocates to Detroit

Disgraced in the psychiatric hospital where he'd practiced for nearly 30 years, Dr. Walter Freeman has taken to traversing the country and proselyting about a very new kind of salvation: the transorbitol lobotomy. With an ice pick and a hammer, Freeman promises to cure depression and catatonia, delusions and psychosis, with a procedure as simple and safe as curing a toothache. When he enters the backwater Oklahoma town of Burnwood, however, his own sanity will be tested.

Thirty-year-old Vern Sanger and 35-year-old Reed Haskell are taking a trip down Hell's Interstate. Where they are going, they have no idea, but they are distributing death and destruction all along their way. Vern, an escaped convict, and Reed, a cold-blooded murderer, are living on the proceeds of their ongoing, two-man crime wave. So far, so good, but there are forces at work that Vern cannot even begin to fathom or suspect. It's only a matter of time before Hell's Interstate turns the bend and leads him down a path he certainly never expected to travel.

It’s the summer of 2015, Brooklyn. The city is sweltering from another record-breaking heat wave, this one accompanied by biblical rains. Edith, a recently retired legal librarian, and her identical twin sister, Kat, a feckless romantic who’s mistaken her own eccentricity for originality, discover something ominous in their hall closet: it seems to be phosphorescent, it’s a mushroom . . . and it’s sprouting from their wall.

The Exceptional Crimes Unit stopped another criminal: Lucy Speckle. The brilliant FBI agent, Christian Windsor, pushed her to suicide....watching as she cut her own throat. It changed Christian, though, and those around him are starting to notice. He's darker. Harsher. Crueler. His partner, Luke Titan, couldn't be happier because he engineered the whole thing. If anyone knew Titan's true intentions, they'd call him a psychopath. They'd lock him up. They'd put him in the electric chair. Too bad his genius keeps him hidden in the shadows.

At the end of Yellow Street, in a ruined junkyard of a house, an angry outcast hatches a scheme to take revenge for all the wrongs he has suffered. With the help of three alienated neighborhood kids, he plans to hide razor blades, poison, drugs, and broken glass in Halloween candy and use the deadly treats to maim or kill dozens of innocent children. But as the clock ticks closer to sundown, will one of his helpers - an innocent himself, in his own streetwise way - carry out or defeat the plan?

He’s a writer seeking solitude. They are four women on vacation looking for fun and relaxation. But when they meet they will find only terror. An appalling crime will lead to an unthinkable, gruesome revenge. In the deep woods of Mountain Rock, no one will hear the screams, the agony, the mayhem. No one will hear them die.

There'd been several killings in Melville. Unusual killings, no witnesses, no clues, and no suspects. Sheriff Jim Bonner was having a time trying to narrow his search down. He had no idea where to look, or what he might be looking for. The murder was so gruesome, so unexpected, neither him nor his deputy, Smitty Younger, knew where to start looking. Whoever was doing this to his peaceful town was clever and covered his tracks. So Jim set about setting a trap for the villain.

Have you ever done something you wish you could forget? Wracked with grief after an accident killed his wife and unborn child, all Marc Lucas wants is to wipe his memory. Until he returns home one night to find that his key doesn't fit in the lock and his wife is alive, well and pregnant - but claims not to recognise him. Marc is drawn into a nightmare world, one where it's impossible to separate reality from fiction. Is he going mad? Or is there a conspiracy at work - one that could cost him his memory?

The killer loved seeing his victims ablaze, gleefully watching as their bodies were consumed by hungry, merciless flames. Later his pulse would race at the sight of the orange glow in the night sky, and the sounds of the fire engines as they screamed toward the raging infernos he had created. Chicago coroner Dr. Dean Grant had seen many gruesome things in his time. But nothing had prepared him for the nightmares of smoldering horror that were spread out on the morgue slabs in front of him.

Chicago, 1881. The idea of a female detective is virtually unheard of. But when famed crime buster Allan Pinkerton opens his agency's doors to a handful of women, one intrepid actress with her own troubled past is driven to defy convention and take on a new and dangerous role. Since the age of 11, when her mother was murdered, the life of the theater is all Lilly Long has known. Now 22, she has blossomed into an accomplished Shakespearean actress.

It is a gritty and violent tale of a man on the run. His life destroyed by an insidious cult, he has no choice but to kill to survive.

Pursued by one demon into the clutches of another, the ordinary life of Mary Ann "Polly" Nichols is made extraordinary by horrible, inhuman circumstance. Jack the Ripper's first victim comes to life in this sensitive and intimate fictionalized portrait, from humble beginnings, to building a family with an abusive husband, her escape into poverty and the workhouse, alcoholism, and finally abandoned on the streets of London where the Whitechapel Murderer found her.

Savannah has grown up preparing for the end of the world. Her father is Teddy Unser, ex-con and doomsday prepper devoted to the day he and his family will have to run. But Teddy is tired of waiting, and when Savannah is 14, he steals a water truck and commits a cataclysmic attack in which Savannah and her little sister Mía find themselves accomplices.

By day, punk-rock runaway Charity Blake struggles through a stream of dead-end jobs and the haunting memories of her past. But at night she is the Harpy, sprouting wings with black feathers, and claws made for tearing the flesh of her prey. Having survived a lifetime of abuse and torment from a sadistic man who broke her spirit, Charity's physical manifestation of her grief and anger allows her to hunt down those like her abuser. Only this time, Charity isn't a helpless little girl praying for things to end. Now she is the monster, and hell hath no fury like a harpy scorned.

What happened eight years ago on that fatal night was to be buried, along with Greg, and never to be spoken of again. When seven-year-old Charlotte relays a message from beyond the grave, her father, Derek, is shaken. Struggling to keep that night hidden, loose ends return, along with an inquiring detective in search of the truth. As the past unfolds, the small town of East Millinocket is soon terrorized by a string of murders, leaving the victims coated in a vile substance.

After Ralph accidentally runs over a deer, he decides to take the animal home and ends up serving prime venison to his wife that evening. Soon, his thirst for blood becomes something different, and his life slowly spirals out of control. As the body count rises, a local schoolteacher and a young woman become involved in the mystery. But, is Ralph really the Beast of Bodmin?

The Postmaster looked over my shoulder. As I turned to look I saw a flicker of movement from across the street. I felt unseen eyes peer at me. He walked away without another word. I watched as he climbed onto his bicycle and sped away down the street. I turned back and looked over my shoulder. Someone had been watching us.

A tale that beats back our assumptions about the time of Jack the Ripper. Not the grim story of an unfortunate drunken prostitute killed before her time, but one of a young woman alive with all the emotional complexity of women today. Running from a man wanting her to pay for her crimes against his brother, Mary Jane Kelly must recover a valuable hidden necklace and sell it to gain the funds to leave London and start over elsewhere.