Crime Horror Fiction

Business has been slow for Jack Nightingale, but an appointment with a Catholic priest leads to an interesting new case. Eleven-year-old Christine Warren has been showing worrying signs of developing an alternate personality, who goes by the name of Lydia. It's up to Nightingale to find out whether she's been possessed, or if there's something more to Lydia....

The Box That Jane Built is a short story from a collection called Figments, however, deserves a starring role. Four stories to chill the blood, unless you already have ice in your veins?

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.

Thomas, Ronald, and Wade are three guys just doing the best they can. Trouble is, their best is downright apocalyptic.

Years ago, Thomas Edison invented the psycho phone, a crude device he believed was capable of reaching dead people; but now, Heather Ross has his old phone number, and the dead are calling her non-stop. Heather wants to get rid of the phone but learns they can still reach her through email, television, and billboards. Heather is not averse to talking to lost souls, but will they save her life or destroy it?

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.

The Black Goat is a short story that takes on a contemporary approach of the legend of Van Hunks and the devil. Jan van Hunks is down and out, a functioning alcoholic who is battling a divorce from his wife. One wintry night, he decides to escape the clutches of his studio apartment in the heart of Cape Town and venture out to find the darkest bar he can. He meets a mysterious character along the way who advises him against his journey.

While traveling from New Orleans to Chicago for a rock concert, five college students decide to take a detour. While in Mississippi, they travel a remote highway into the Delta region of the state to visit the infamous Crossroads: the place where blues legend Jack Johnson supposedly sold his soul to the devil. Lost on the old highway, they stop at a rundown gas station to get directions from the creepy attendant that runs the place. But one wrong turn leads to a night that they will never forget....

It is the tale of a DC cop's on and off-duty ghostly encounters with a childhood friend who died in his youth. Hauntings can be murder.

A homeless drifter with lethal compulsions, Johnny finds himself looking for some respite from the voices' prodding in a glass of whiskey in an empty Memphis roadhouse. His efforts to curb his urges to murder are broken when Matt Frost arrives at the roadhouse to escape the despair that has haunted him since the loss of his wife. These two very different men discover common ground in that Tennessee whiskey: Some men drink to drown their sorrows; serial killers drink to quiet their demons.

You are walking through the streets of London. It is getting dark and you want to get home quickly. You enter a narrow side-street. Everything is quiet, but as you pass the door of a large, windowless building, you hear a key turning in the lock. A man comes out and looks at you. You have never seen him before, but you realize immediately that he hates you. You are shocked to discover, also, that you hate him. Who is this man that everybody hates?

Each of the Maguire brothers has his own driving, single-minded obsession. For Jonathan it is his magnificent, talented, and desirable wife, Harriet. For Roger it is the elaborate universe he has constructed in a shed in their parents' garden, populated by millions of tiny insects. While Jonathan's pursuit of Harriet leads him to feelings of jealousy and anguish, Roger's immersion in the world he has created reveals a capability and talent that are absent from his everyday life.

Twenty years after the unsolved case of Stacey Walker's disappearance went cold, a Silicon Valley executive hires the retired Menlo Park police detective Hank Madden to find her body and track down her missing husband, the prime suspect in her unsolved murder.

Cameron Dawson’s got a past he can’t seem to shake, but he’s hoping to change that. He’s moved back home to Faith, New Mexico, and taken a job as assistant sheriff. What he doesn’t realize is that his newest nightmare’s about to begin. Strange things are happening. People are disappearing, and for others, it’s far worse...

After four years working in a New York brothel to pay off a debt to the mob, Nina is nearly paid up and ready to go home. She just needs to see one more client, a recluse who always pays a half-million in cash for a night with the brothel's best girls, but this last trick soon becomes a battle for Nina's soul. Meanwhile, the brothel's sadistic madam has been secretly hoarding money so she can move up in her family's organization, and she's depending on that windfall to tip the scales in her favor, but her driver Ramón has other ideas.

Carjacked and snatched by escaped mass murderer Terrence Hingle, timid diner waitress Tilly Mulvehill becomes the meat in a maniac sandwich when she and her kidnapper encounter the deranged Ritter twins, Dwayne and Dwight. As Tilly fights for her life, she soon discovers that sometimes the only choice you have is to do or die...to Die Dog or Eat the Hatchet. This pulpy Southern Gothic thriller takes no prisoners as it roars towards its gruesome conclusion.

Serial killer Frank Haid, dubbed the Painkiller by Chicago police and media, murders 18 people - all paralytics. Commanded by an unseen presence that he calls ''Father'' and that speaks in the voice of an uncle whose rotting corpse he keeps in the living room, Haid destroys his victims (what's left of them) and evidence in a way that puzzles police. Hardest hit are residents of Marclinn, a home for the handicapped, where survivors decide they must track down the madman themselves.

A homeless man survives on the streets with a gang of pit bulls. They have each other's back, he scrounges for food for them while they serve as his protector on the streets. A gang of thugs, however, begin using their own pits to aid in their assaults and crime....The homeless man is soon suspected of being a part of the "pit bull robberies" as his pack of pits are confronted with the thug's gang.

Sgt. Phillip Davis and Sgt. Anthony Trangotta of the Sheriff's office were under increasing pressure to solve the series of murders that were taking place with increasing frequency among the Tampa Bay drumming community. Fear was spreading like wildfire, and many of the drummers were becoming reluctant to attend drumming events not knowing where the madman who was terrorizing them would strike next.