Category: Amazon

Involuntary Deeds: a new supernatural/psychological horror novella

A married woman in the suburbs develops a sudden and inexplicable interest in graveyard photography. Her husband wonders what’s going on with her.

But what secrets is her husband hiding?

Such is the setup of Involuntary Deeds, my new supernatural/psychological horror novella. The novella is set in Clermont County, Ohio, about twenty miles east of Cincinnati.

**View it on Amazon**

Involuntary Deeds is presently available on Amazon. It will be rolled out to the other major retailers (Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, and Apple Books) in the coming weeks.

Amazon description:

Some crimes don’t stay buried.

Pam Vance never cared about cemeteries—until the day she couldn’t stay away from them.

What begins as a strange new hobby quickly turns into something else. An obsession. A need to photograph graves she’s never seen before… places she feels drawn to.

Her husband, Robert, knows something is wrong.

Then the warnings begin.

The ghost of a Revolutionary War soldier appears to Robert with a message he can’t ignore: stay away.

But Pam won’t stop.

Because one grave is calling to her—that of a sixteen-year-old girl who died in 1991. A death long forgotten.

But not by Robert.

As the past closes in, a truth buried for decades begins to surface—pulling the living and the dead toward a confrontation that can no longer be avoided.

‘Involuntary Deeds’ is a novella for fans of classic ghost stories in the tradition of Peter Straub, Shirley Jackson, M.R. James, and E.F. Benson.

AI slop and genre slop: the most pessimistic view possible, and reasons for optimism

David Van Dyke Stewart is waxing pessimistic about the state of indie publishing. In his view, indie publishing is so threatened by AI slop and genre slop that it is no longer worth doing anymore.

He announces in the video below that he intends to “step away” from indie publishing. He’s even flirting with the idea of unpublishing some of his existing novels, because he does not want to be associated with some of the ridiculous excesses that we now see in indie publishing.

A part of me fully sympathizes. As I’ve written previously, I can hardly stand to enter indie writing groups on Facebook anymore. 90% of the authors participating in such spaces are now writing shifter romances, reverse harem—and similarly ridiculous books adorned with man chests. Then there are the dogs and cats solving mysteries, the witch cozies, etc. It is possible for one to feel ridiculous by association.

As for AI…yes, that is a problem of an entirely different magnitude.

And yet…I remain optimistic, if not in the short run, then at least in the long run.

Why? Because I’ve seen this movie before. I remember almost twenty years ago, how everyone was predicting that the entire internet would be taken down—not by AI, but by content farms.

For those of you who don’t remember (or who are a little fuzzy) on the history, content farms were junk sites that were hastily written to maximize clicks in Google search results, and thereby maximize AdSense income. For a few years they represented a real threat to the integrity of the internet.

But the content farms eventually went the way of the pterodactyl. Google changed its algorithm. Search engine users became more discriminating, and learned to recognize query results that led to content farms. The economic incentive for the content farms went away.

That’s what I expect to happen with AI slop (and—to some degree—genre slop). How long can it remain profitable to turn out template-driven trashy romance novels, for instance? Even for the voracious porn/romance readership?

And once you throw AI into the mix, the race to the unprofitable bottom is inevitable. I look for the genre slop writers, and the AI slop producers, to eventually be driven out by their own excesses.

One irony here is that AI slop and genre slop have a mutually destructive, symbiotic relationship. Template-driven, repetitive genre novels are the easiest to produce with various AI programs.

What does concern me is that before it all goes away, it will completely undermine the Kindle Unlimited ecosystem. This is a real threat in the short- to mid-term.

But I don’t look for AI and genre slop to take down indie publishing as an industry. As long as the internet has existed, there have been both outright scammers and individuals who seek to maximize profit by turning out low-effort, repetitive content. That problem is not going to go away. One bag of tricks will simply be replaced by another.

The rest of us will soldier on. As for David Van Dyke Stewart, I hope that he soldiers on, too. I haven’t read any of his novels; but I have watched some of his YouTube content. He strikes me as a thoughtful fellow. 

-ET

A story for summer: “The Wasp”

It is not quite summer, if you want to get technical about it. Summer will not officially begin until Sunday, June 21, 2026.

We are still in April. The schools won’t let out for another six weeks. 

But the mercury here in southern Ohio will hit 85 degrees today. That’s close enough for me.

The above is one of my early short stories, “The Wasp”. I wrote it back in 2009, and it was first published in my short story collection, HAY MOON AND OTHER STORIES.

This is very much a summertime story. It’s also based my lifetime loathing of wasps. I can handle spiders, snakes, and other creepy-crawlers (to a point, anyway). I love honeybees.

But I absolutely despise wasps.

As the old German proverbs goes, “God made the bee, but the devil made the wasp.”

-ET

1932: supernatural zombie horror in rural Ohio

My maternal grandfather, born in 1921, grew up in rural Adams County, Ohio. He told me so much about that time and place, that I sometimes feel as if I lived it all myself.

“Hay Moon” is a short story set in rural Ohio in the summer of 1932. My grandfather never told me a story like this, filled with supernatural forces and the undead. But his real-life accounts of his childhood years helped me add a realistic flavor to the tale, if I say so myself.

You can listen to the story here, or on my YouTube channel (where you’ll find lots of additional audio content).

You can purchase this story as part of my Hay Moon and Other Stories collection. If you like my approach to historical horror, consider The Rockland Horror historical horror series, which is also available in a five-volume boxset on Kindle.

-ET

New Cover for REVOLUTIONARY GHOSTS!

Revolutionary Ghosts is my 2019 novel based on a premise that mixes supernatural horror and history:

Suppose that the Headless Horseman of Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” were to return to terrorize modern-day America.

But not 21st-century, present-day America. (The current century has enough real horrors without make-believe, thank you very much.)

Most of Revolutionary Ghosts is set in 1976, the year of the American Bicentennial. This is historical horror with a cool ‘70s vibe.

The original 2019 cover was, however, badly in need of a refresh. This is the new cover:

You can find Revolutionary Ghosts on Amazon. The book is coming out of Kindle Unlimited on April 1. Shortly after that, you’ll be able to get it on Apple Books, Kobo, Google, and B&N. Library distribution will also be rolled out. So you can read it that way if your local library has an arrangement with OverDrive.

-ET

New release: ‘No Sure Thing’ for Gen X fans of the 1980s

The year is 1988. Anything can happen, but nothing is guaranteed!

Get ready for a coming-of-age story that will remind you of your favorite teen/young adult movies from the 1980s.

As the year 1988 begins, Paul Nelson is nineteen going on twenty. Paul is an economics major at the University of Cincinnati. He has big plans to go to work at a major bank after graduation.

But Paul’s life is not without problems. His first serious girlfriend has dumped him, and his best friend Scott gets all the female attention, seemingly without trying.

Paul meets a witty young woman who seems to be his perfect match. But then he unexpectedly falls for an older woman who has secrets and an unknown agenda.

Paul’s life spins out of control. He’s also incurred the unwanted attention of the Cincinnati Police Department, criminal elements, and a military man who detests him on sight.

Filled with a wide range of memorable characters and a generous dollop of 80s nostalgia, ‘No Sure Thing’ is a fun and fast-paced tale from a bygone but fondly remembered era.

**View NO SURE THING on Amazon!**

TERMINATION MAN: Corporate HR represents your employer, not you

TERMINATION MAN is the story of Craig Walker, a management consultant who specializes in “removing” problem employees through entrapment and techniques of “social engineering”.

TERMINATION MAN is fiction, but it is based on my experience in the automotive industry. The novel’s premise also has a basis in HR practices.

“Managing out” is a common corporate HR practice. When an employee is “managed out”, her situation is made so unpleasant or unsustainable that she will effectively fire herself, and voluntarily resign. This saves the company hassle and expense on multiple levels.

TERMINATION MAN is an embellishment of the managing out practice, of course. But the principle exists, and all HR professionals are familiar with it.

Another thing to remember: corporate HR is not your friend. Corporate HR does not represent you. Corporate HR represents your employer, the company.

This doesn’t mean that corporate HR reps are automatically sinister, venal, etc. (Most are not.) But you should never forget who pays their salaries. (Hint: not you.)

-ET

**View TERMINATION MAN ON AMAZON**

How about a haunted road tale?

ELEVEN MILES OF NIGHT is a tale of horror on a haunted road.

Jason Kelley is a college student who agrees to take a walk down the most paranormally active road in Ohio. His mission: to document the phenomena he encounters on the cursed stretch of rural highway. 

Along the way he encounters hellhounds, malevolent spirits, and trees that come to life. 

If you like traditional supernatural horror tales, you’ll love ELEVEN MILES OF NIGHT. Available on Amazon now.

The year is 1938…

The year is 1938. Betty Lehmann is an undercover German spy. Can anyone stop her? Find out in THE CAIRO DECEPTION, a 5-book, World War II historical fiction series.

**Read it for FREE in Kindle Unlimited**

 

 

1980s flashback: Halloween horror in the Shipley House (a scene from 12 HOURS OF HALLOWEEN)

Halloween 1980

You’re twelve years old, and trick-or-treating with your two best friends.

You know what they say about the Shipley House. Something very bad happened there in 1959.

For more than twenty years, the Shipley house has stood vacant. No one can live there for long.

You’ve been warned not to enter.

But it’s Halloween, after all. How can you resist?

You try the front door. You’re surprised to find that the Shipley house is unlocked. Almost as if the house has been waiting for you.

You go inside, and walk down the hallway toward the bedroom at the end of the corridor.

Be careful: what you find in that room may drive you mad. And you may discover things about yourself that you don’t want to know.

***

The Shipley house is featured in one of the chapters of 12 HOURS OF HALLOWEEN, a Gen X coming-of-age supernatural horror tale set on Halloween night, 1980.

Three young friends decide to go out for “one last Halloween before they enter their teenage years. But this will be a Halloween like no other.

12 HOURS OF HALLOWEEN is available on Amazon, and you can read it for free in Kindle Unlimited.

**View it on Amazon**

Halloween half-price sale! ‘The Rockland Horror: Books 1 through 5: the complete historical arc’

  • Get the Kindle boxset for half-price, now through the morning of October 31st!
  • Horror in the American heartland!
  • Here’s an excerpt from Book 2 (Chapter 1)
August 1882
 
Ellen Briggs, née Ellen Sanders, was in her own house, and she was absolutely terrified.
 
Of course, this was not really her house, was it? It was her marital residence, where she now effectively lived in a state of captivity.
 
Not to mention…absolute terror.
 
She had married Theodore Briggs—railroad tycoon, necromancer, and murderer—only a few months ago.
 
In the early days of the marriage, Briggs had warned her: Stay out of unfamiliar rooms. Although the house was not old, it was home to many old secrets, Briggs had explained.
 
But she had forgotten his warning, in light of all that had happened since then…
Today Ellen had been wandering through the first floor of the massive house. Since her escape attempt earlier in the summer, Briggs seldom allowed her leave. But she could not sit still within these walls. If she remained in one place, she would go completely mad.
 
So today she had gone wandering, even though she had known better.
 
That was how she came across the undead child…
 
The door to the room containing the undead child was located adjacent to the first-floor ballroom. Ellen had opened the door, not realizing that the room connected to the basement via one of the home’s labyrinthine internal tunnels.
 
She reckoned that only later—after it was too late.
 
It was in the basement that her husband kept his worst secrets. Bodies were buried in the basement—and they didn’t always stay buried. Sometimes, they found their way to other parts of the house…
 
Nevertheless, this miscellaneous room had seemed harmless enough when she had first entered it. Heavy draperies were drawn on both of the room’s high windows, but some late afternoon sunlight filtered through.
 
The room seemed made for casual exploration. Various works of art had been stored within it. Paintings bound in frames, but not yet hung, stood stacked against all four walls.
 
Throughout the floor, in a random arrangement, were various statues: of nymphs, cherubs, and Greek deities. There was one life-size replica of the Venus de Milo. There were waist-high vases, and teak dividers carved in what looked like Turkish patterns.
 
The fortunes of Ellen’s husband were vast. He had no doubt purchased most of these items in bulk from a broker, with the intention of placing them around the house at a later date.
 
That work might have been left to Juba, the maidservant whom her husband had ordered killed, for her part in Ellen’s escape attempt. That same escape attempt had also resulted in her husband murdering Wilbur Craine, her former beau and would-be rescuer.
 
As she made her way through the cluttered room, Ellen endeavored to push those thoughts from her mind. She couldn’t think about Juba now. And certainly not about Wilbur.
 
She was kneeling down on the hardwood floor, admiring one of the paintings leant against the wall, when she heard something shift from a corner of the room.
 
Ellen immediately looked away from the landscape painting, toward the movement. She stood up. Something had stirred behind the teak screen in the room’s far corner, near one of the windows.
 
The teak screen was suspended above the floor on a set of wooden legs. In the gap between the screen and the floor, Ellen could see two small feet, clad in simple leather shoes. The shoes were caked with dried mud.
 
The feet moved toward the edge of the screen, but not in proper steps. One foot dragged behind the other.
 
A small figure stepped out from behind the screen. It was short, between four and five feet tall. The very sight of it was absolutely terrifying.
 
***End of excerpt****
 

**View the complete boxset on Amazon***

October 31, 1980: ’12 Hours of Halloween’

A new piece of artwork for 12 Hours of Halloween. (This was made for the “A + content” section of the Amazon listing, so the book cover is deliberately excluded from the graphic.)

As suggested in the graphic, most of the action in 12 Hours of Halloween takes place on October 31, 1980.

This is a coming-of-age supernatural horror story, about three young friends who endure a 12-hour, supernatural curse on the first Halloween night of the 1980s.

View 12 HOURS OF HALLOWEEN on Amazon

What kind of horror?

I don’t do graphic violence, for the most part. (There is no explicit sex in my books, either.) Think: a spooky version of a Ray Bradbury story, with a few nods to some of the classic horror films from the 1980s.

12 Hours of Halloween is available in Amazon Kindle Unlimited, too.

-ET

What kind of horror do I write?

This is a question I received the other day on Twitter.  It isn’t a frivolous question, I suppose. About a third of my titles are classified as horror, after all.

Perhaps I should begin by clarifying what kind of horror I don’t write.

I don’t do excessive gore/violence.

I have never been interested in horror fiction that fetishizes violence and cruelty for the mere sake of wallowing in such things. (If that’s your goal, then why not just watch one of those ISIS beheading videos?)

This means that graphic depictions of torture (for example) don’t appear in my books. Cannibalism is pretty much out, too. (Gross.)

I’m old enough to remember the capture of Jeffrey Dahmer in 1991. Suffice it to say that I am not interested in exploring the most extreme possibilities of human depravity in fiction. Again, what’s the point?

Are you into “splatterpunk”? You probably won’t like my books. Do us both a favor, and read something else.

I don’t like horror tales with unlikable characters.

Likewise, I don’t care for horror stories that simply involve horrible things happening to horrible people.

You’ve certainly seen horror movies that involve the following scenario (or something like it): A group of obnoxious, unlikable people enter a house, and they’re killed off one by one.

But the thing is…you don’t care! The protagonists were all awful people, anyway. (Maybe you were even rooting for the monster.)

I don’t do comedy-horror.

Do you like the Zombieland movies? My horror fiction probably isn’t for you.

I love comedy films—Airplane, Blazing Saddles, etc. Cheers from the 1980s can still make me laugh.

But horror is serious business. There can be moments of levity amid the darkness. There are many of these in some of Stephen King’s novels. (Cujo and The Stand stand out in this regard.) But when the monsters come out, it’s all business. Monsters are serious.

***

So what kind of horror do I write, then?

My influences are Stephen King, Peter Straub, and the campfire ghost stories of my youth.

I have always been fascinated by urban legends. I am endlessly interested in the dark house at the end of the lane, the one that all the kids say is haunted.

A good horror story should involve characters that you care about. If you don’t care about the characters, then you won’t care if the monster gets them. 

A good horror story should involve redemption. The evil is defeated in the end. Or some crucial lesson is learned. Or the human condition is in some way illuminated.

Redemption is a key element of most of the horror stories that we love best. The salvation of Mina Harker at the end of Dracula. The closing scene of The Stand, in which Frannie Goldsmith and Stu Redman wonder aloud if people ever really learn from their mistakes. The last scene in The Dead Zone, in which the shade of Johnny Smith assures Sarah that nothing is ever really lost, nothing that can’t be found.

Note that redemption doesn’t necessarily mean a happy ending. But there has to have been a point to it all.

***

I like ghosts, monsters, things that go bump in the dark. My sainted grandmother was a direct descendant of immigrants from County Cork, Ireland. And every Irishman (even a diluted, generations-removed Irishman like me) loves a good ghost tale.

Let me give you some examples. Here are a few of my horror novels, to date:

Eleven Miles of Night

A college filmmaker takes a walk down a notoriously haunted road, in order earn a $2,000 fee for documenting the phenomena he sees.

This novel contains ghosts, demonic beings, and a long-dead witch who inhabits a covered bridge. Oh, yeah—and hellhounds!

View Eleven Miles of Night on Amazon

12 Hours of Halloween

On Halloween night, 1980, three adolescent friends go out for “one last Halloween”. But they have been cursed by an entity known as “the ghost boy”. As a result, their familiar neighborhood is transformed into a supernatural landscape filled with vampires, wayward spirits, and trees with minds of their own.

View 12 Hours of Halloween on Amazon.

Revolutionary Ghosts

In the summer of 1976, an Ohio teenager named Steve Wagner discovers that the Headless Horseman has returned to terrorize twentieth-century America. The Horseman has brought other ghosts back with him, including the once beautiful (but now hideous) Marie Trumbull, an executed Loyalist.

View Revolutionary Ghosts on Amazon

I have others; but these are the three you might check out first. They are usually enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, which means you can read them for free if you subscribe to that service.

Horror in Kindle Unlimited

Kindle Unlimited is Amazon’s main subscription ebook reading program. Kindle Unlimited gives you virtually unlimited (hence the name) reading privileges to a wide variety of titles, for a low monthly fee.

Not every title listed on Amazon is enrolled in Kindle Unlimited. Literary fiction from the big New York publishing houses generally is not included. You likely won’t find the latest Jonathan Franzen novel in Kindle Unlimited anytime in the near future.

Kindle Unlimited is heavy on genre fiction. This means: romance, space opera, LitRPG, fantasy, and horror.

I have a fair number of horror titles in Kindle Unlimited. I write supernatural horror, in the tradition of Peter Straub, H.P. Lovecraft, Bentley Little and E.F. Benson.

And yes (I know this sounds a bit pretentious) Stephen King. I have achieved barely a gazillionth fraction of King’s commercial success. But his formula of character-based, fast-moving horror is always on my mind when I sit down to write a horror tale.

What kind of horror don’t I write? If you want splatterpunk, or “extreme” horror (aka “torture porn”), then you should skip my books and stories. I have no interest in writing horror fiction that is endlessly grim and/or sadistic. My horror fiction is more akin to the campfire ghost story.

Below are the horror titles that I presently have enrolled in Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program. This means that you can read them for free if you’re a Kindle Unlimited subscriber.

To view one of these titles on Amazon, simply click on the image of any book, or any hyperlink below.

(Don’t have a Kindle Unlimited membership? Click here.)

Eleven Miles of Night

A college student takes a walk down the most haunted road in rural Ohio for a cash prize. This is a “haunted road” story, basically a tale of being stuck on a cursed country road at night. Ghosts, evil spirits, and hellhounds abound. Also, an evil witch that inhabits a covered bridge.

View Eleven Miles of Night on Amazon!

12 Hours of Halloween

A coming-of-age story set on Halloween night, 1980. This is a tale of supernatural events in the American suburb. A classic horror tale for Generation X.

View 12 Hours of Halloween on Amazon!

Revolutionary Ghosts

The year is 1976, and the Headless Horseman rides again. This coming-of-age horror thriller is sure to please readers who appreciate character-based supernatural fiction with lots of twists and turns.

The basic idea is: the ghosts of American history coming back to haunt Middle America in 1976, the year of the American Bicentennial. (And yes, I’m old enough to remember the Bicentennial, although I was rather young at the time.)

View Revolutionary Ghosts on Amazon!

Luk Thep

In early 2016, I read an article in The Economist about the luk thep “spirit dolls” of Thailand.

Manufactured and sold in Thailand, these are factory-made dolls with a unique sales point: each doll is supposedly infused with the spirit of a young child that passed prematurely.

The luk thep are intended to bring comfort to their owners. (They are marketed to childless women.) To me, though, the whole idea sounded rather macabre.

And I couldn’t help thinking: what if one of the dolls was infused with a child spirit that wasn’t very nice? What if that same doll ended up in the possession of an American woman who happened to visit Thailand on a business trip? Luk Thep is a fast-paced ghost tale that spans two continents.

View Luk Thep on Amazon!

The Rockland Horror saga

Spanning a nearly 140-year period from 1882 to 2020, The Rockland Horror is a series about dark events at a cursed house in rural Indiana.

View The Rockland Horror series on Amazon!

Wait! One last thing…

Looking for horror stories you can read online for free?

While I recommend Kindle Unlimited for fans of horror fiction and ebooks, I should also point out that I have a number of horror stories you can read online here for FREE.

From classic ghost tales to creature features, you’ll find a considerable range. Check them out!