Showing results by author "Ronald Kelly" in All Categories

Midnight. Some call it the witching hour. Others call it the devil’s hour. Here in the graveyard, midnight is a very special time. It is a time when ghostly spirits are at their strongest, when the veil between our world and theirs is at its thinnest. Legend has it, that while most of the world is asleep, the lack of prayers allow the spirits to communicate under the cover of darkness, among the headstones, their whispers rustling in the leaves of the old oak trees. But if you’re here in the graveyard, you can tell yourself it’s just the wind....

When you first enter The Halloween Store, things seem normal. Fun and frightful decorations, ghastly costumes and masks of the season, and bags of candy galore. Then, as you travel farther into its shadowy depths, things begin to change. The air smells of damp autumn leaves and candle-scorched pumpkin. The shelves of All Hallows’ Eve fare grow darker and more disturbing. Strange and unsettling things of Halloweens past and present lurk amid the cobwebs and dust....

In this collection of harrowing holiday tales, Ronald Kelly leaves 10 frightful and horrific gifts in the Christmas stockings that hang from the mantle of your cheerful fireplace. Ghastly and gruesome presents that slowly unwrap and burst into life while you are tucked, snug and warm, in your bed and take on nightmarish form in the icy winter hours of Christmas Eve, turning comfort and joy into terror and dread.

Halloween is more than a holiday; more than a fun time of candy and costumes for the young. It is inoculated into our very being at an early age and there it remains. As we grow old, it grows dormant… but it is still there. For the lucky ones, such as us, it emerges every year, like a reanimated corpse digging its way out of graveyard earth to shamble across our souls. And we rejoice… oh, if we are the fortunate ones, we most certainly rejoice.

Institutionalized is the latest anthology from the creators of The Better Off Dead series. This installment brings you stories of the mentally unbalanced, the damaged and disturbed, and the criminally insane. Some are locked up. Some are not. We recommend you sleep with one eye open.

It was a legend in Fear County. A hideous, flesh-eating creature - part snake, part earthbound demon - that feasted on the blood of innocent children in the cold black heart of the Tennessee backwoods. But 10-year-old Jeb Sweeny knows the horrible stories are true. His best friend Mandy just disappeared. He also knows that no one has ever had the courage to go after the monster and put an end to its raging, bestial hunger. Until now.

The rural town of Old Hickory. Tennessee was a quiet, picturesque community...until the O'Sheas came to town. Becoming the new proprietors of the town's only funeral parlor, with the help of their charming patriarch, Square McManus, the Irish family was wholeheartedly accepted by the local town folk. The thing began to happen. Strange things...horrible, unspeakable things...in the dead of night. The sighting of wolfish beasts congregating around an open grave in the town cemetery.

Down below the Mason-Dixon Line, deep in the shadowy hills and hollows of Tennessee, lives a teller of terrifying tales and a spinner of dark yarns unlike any you have ever heard before. Stories to chill your bones and pepper your flesh with goose bumps. What his true name may be, no one knows for sure. But, if you listen closely, you can hear his voice ringing through the dead of night!

Driven by the desire to rescue his abducted son and a relentless thirst for retribution, the zombified gunfighter, Dead-Eye, continues his search for the renegade vampire, Jules Holland, and his unholy entourage. Accompanying him on his journey is the Louisiana mojo man, Job, who is hellbent on putting an end to his daughter Evangeline's wicked shenanigans. As long as she possesses the demonic tome, Necronomicon, and holds the ability to open the otherworldly Hole Out of Nowhere, no territory is safe from the infinite evil the dark enchantress has at her fingertips!

It was passed down from generation to generation. The legend of The Dark'Un, the strange beast that roamed Pale Dove Mountain. The dark monster that no one had ever seen - at least not and lived to tell about it - except, so it was said, old Fletcher Brice who lived at the foot of the mountain. No one really believed in The Dark'Un. It was just a story to make a child's flesh crawl.

Vile, unstable, brimming with ill intent, like pus on the verge of eruption. Repulsive to gaze upon and even more disturbing to comprehend. It reaches out and discovers that the others—its siblings—have abandoned this cancerous womb long ago. Angry and alone, it thrashes violently…tearing, clawing its way from dormancy into daylight…and onto the dark playground of your bookshelf.

Below the pale orb of a full moon, a lone boat navigates the dark channels of the Louisiana bayou, moving between ancient cypress and the heave mats of Spanish moss that dangle from their gnarled limbs. Who are the two who brave the swamp at night? One is a lanky Cajun man by the name of Pierre, while the other is his visiting cousin from Tennessee. The man folks call...the Old Storyteller.

Josiah Craven had been all but forgotten for nearly a hundred years. To his descendants, he was nothing more than an imposing image in an old tintype photograph and the subject of stories told in hushed tones before the fireplace at night. A traveling mountain preacher who had returned from his wanderings and died under mysterious circumstances - buried in an unmarked grave with a wooden stake through his heart. Dudley Craven had heard the tales, but never believed them...until his plow unearthed an ancient coffin in the center of a lonesome mountain pasture.

He’s back! That was the first thought that crossed Cindy Biggs’ mind when she heard of the brutal triple-murder in her hometown of Coleman. Yes, the awful crime was nearly identical to the one performed during her hard-scrabble childhood at the time of the Great Depression. But this was 2014, not 1936. Cindy was no longer an innocent nine-year-old child, but an elderly woman who used her gift of second sight to assist the police every now and then.

Little Cindy Ann knew things no one else knew and saw things no one else saw. Ever since she'd nearly died of fever, the gift of second sight had been hers. Only, it didn't seem like such a gift when the other children called her a witch and wouldn't play with her. Or, when her visions resembled nothing so much as her worst nightmares.

This audiobook features two books: Black Christmas and Bloody Legacy. Also includes the short story "Killing Time". The citizens of Cedar Bluff, Tennessee, have never recovered from the Christmas Massacre of 1978 - that tragic day when Richard McFarland, armed with a shotgun, abandoned his wife and son and selected a local church as the stage for a bloody, murderous rampage. McFarland paid for his crimes in the electric chair. Yet, not even death will stop him from finishing what he started.

The summer of 1932 was a troublesome one for Jack Alder. His grandmother's health was fairing poorly, they were having a difficult time making ends meet during the Great Depression, and the town banker was threatening foreclosure on the family farm. The future seemed dismal and help was nowhere in sight. But Grandmama's faith in God brought renewed hope in the form of a childhood toy lost decades ago in an abandoned cave; an antique toy that could earn enough to drive the wolf from their door. It would take a journey across three rural counties to get them there...

It usually happens by chance. You are alone in a deserted parking lot or at an interstate rest stop, when a man approaches you out of nowhere. An average-looking fellow with a good-natured smile; a man who, in your opinion, certainly couldn't harm a fly. Then, in a flash, it happens. The pepper spray, the duct tape, the forceful imprisonment in the oily darkness of a car trunk.

Repulsive. Disgusting. Beyond the realm of good taste...A serial killer records the abominations he has committed...on the only journal he has in his possession. All stem from a voodoo curse cast upon the unfortunate survivors of a Louisiana family...This is the sick stuff.

Seven tales of terror that could only beat in the dark, diseased heart of Dixie.