Horror Mystery Crime

You can buy anything on the Internet these days. Books, electronics, and Chinese takeout are just a few clicks away. If you're after something more illicit, all you need is a special browser and some bitcoin to spend. Every drug you might want is readily available on the darknet markets. You can also hire a hitman, get a fake ID made, or have an illegal bug delivered to your door. Ben Samsa is a small-time weed dealer and amateur entomologist. He can't resist buying a mysterious bug he finds on one of the black market sites where he gets his inventory. The splurge leaves him with only enough bitcoin to purchase lower quality marijuana than he normally sells. Unfortunately, Ben doesn't realize one of his customers has been flipping his product to a murderous, one-eyed Nazi. He's soon sucked into a hellish nightmare of dread, drugs, and death.

Following a near death experience, 25-year old Arie Stiles decides she might as well take the job nobody else wants: a crime scene clean-up technician. It’s good money, which she could use, and death doesn’t hold a lot of mystery for her. Or so she thinks. Arie isn’t on the job long before discovering she’s been “gifted” with a new psychic talent - the ability to scry. Whether she wants to or not, Arie can read the memories of the dead in their blood.

Jennifer Blake is happy. She's settling in nicely to her new home town. Things are finally returning to normal after the Blood Eagle killings a year ago. She even has a nice, normal job lined up. But Jen isn't a normal person. When visions of a horrendous fire begin to assault her and the bodies of teenage girls begin to appear, she will be put to her biggest test. It will take all of her talents and the help of friends old and new to stop a killer and prevent a tragedy.

After years of silence, the game is back on.... Widower Allan Brown is hosting a support group in his home for the bereaved. One of the guests in attendance will be Amy Lambert, this week marking the five-year anniversary of her family's horrifying ordeal at Crescent Lake. Of course it's hardly a cause for celebration. Still, some unwanted guests plan on attending the support group to help Amy celebrate all the same.

A short fiction work, The Offering is a psychological thriller and a chilling exploration into an unhinged mind.

The town of Pine Ridge has an eerie past, with tales of witchcraft and ritual murders, but when a local man is savagely killed, all hell threatens to break loose. Supernatural detective Jack Nightingale is called in to investigate the brutal slaying - a murder that seems to have been carried out by children - children with dead black eyes....

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?

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.

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.