Welcome to the website of author Edward Trimnell!
What if the safest place you ever knew became the most dangerous?
Lee McCabe returns from Iraq expecting peace.
Instead he walks into murder, corruption, and a county where everyone seems to have something to hide.
His only choices:
Fight.
Run.
Or die.
BLOOD FLATS is just $1.99 through July 24.
When I published 12 Hours of Halloween, I thought of it as a standalone novel.
Over time, however, I realized that the setting itself had far more stories to tell.
Halloween in suburban Cincinnati during the Gen X era provides a unique backdrop for supernatural fiction. Kids still roamed neighborhoods after dark without cell phones. Parents gave them a little more freedom. Familiar streets, parks, and neighborhoods became places of mystery once the sun went down.
That world is simply too rich to leave behind after a single novel.
My newest story, The Gold Coin and the Crow, expands that universe.
Like 12 Hours of Halloween, it takes place on Halloween night in 1980. It features a different cast of characters and tells a completely standalone story, so you can read it whether you’ve already read the novel or not.
The story begins with what seems like a simple trick-or-treat stop. A strange homeowner has no candy to offer, but he does have something far more tempting: nineteenth-century gold coins scattered throughout his backyard.
There is only one catch.
You have to get past the crow.
From there, the story becomes an increasingly strange journey into the supernatural, filled with the nostalgic atmosphere of suburban Halloween nights, childhood curiosity, and the unsettling feeling that the ordinary world may not be quite as ordinary as it appears.
If you enjoyed the mood, setting, and Gen X nostalgia of 12 Hours of Halloween, I think you’ll feel right at home in The Gold Coin and the Crow.
This is also just the beginning.
My goal is to continue expanding the 12 Hours of Halloween story world with additional tales set during different Halloween seasons, following different characters, and exploring new supernatural mysteries—all while returning to the same familiar world of autumn nights, suburban neighborhoods, and the strange things that sometimes happen when the barriers between worlds grow thin.
Because some things can only happen on Halloween.
I released a new book over the weekend: KUWA 6226!
This is the story of a deadly online urban legend. (See description below!)
Throughout the world, people who make Internet inquiries about Kuwa6226 meet violent deaths.
In online forums and chatrooms, people are warned not to mention the mysterious entity.
But who, or what, is Kuwa6226? A supernatural force? A cult? A global conspiracy?
Most people say that it’s better not to ask…and Kuwa6226’s reign of terror goes unchallenged.
***
Then two unlikely sleuths, from opposite sides of the world, unite.
Minoru Watase is a corporate IT employee in Japan. Julie Lawrence is a college student in the American Pacific Northwest.
Julie and Minoru have each lost a friend to Kuwa6226. Together, they are determined to discover Kuwa6226’s true identity and eliminate the menace.
Their search will take them from the streets of Tokyo to an American college town in Washington State. When they finally come face-to-face with Kuwa6226, Julie and Minoru will be unprepared for the revelation…and the ruthlessness of their adversary!
It begins in 1979.
No cell phones. No GPS. No cameras everywhere. People hitchhiked. Strangers disappeared. And a lonely road could take you somewhere you never intended to go.
DEADLY BYWAYS is my new six-book series of character-driven crime stories set against the dangerous roads and hidden places of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The first book, THE DUNGEON, is set in 1979.
All six books will be released during the second half of 2026.
THE DUNGEON is available now on Kindle and in Kindle Unlimited.
The Woman in Crosley Tower is a new title for preorder in my Uncanny Ohio series. It’s a novella of about 24,000 words. The novella will be released on June 26, 2026.
This horror/dark fantasy story is based on a single question: What would happen if a woman disappeared inside a building in the University of Cincinnati during the summer of 1987, and emerged 39 years later?
There is a lot more to it than that, of course. This is a story for fans of parallel world stories, and tales of liminal zones (like the “backrooms” urban legend). And since much of the story is set in 1987, there is also a generous portion of Gen X nostalgia, an element which is rapidly becoming part of my “brand”.
I’ll have some more posts about The Woman in Crosley Tower in the days and weeks ahead. For now, here is the Amazon pre-order link.
The Woman in Crosley Tower will be initially released in digital-only format (Kindle). For those of you who like to read on paper (and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, of course!) the title will be released in a combined volume with several other Uncanny Ohio titles later in the summer/fall.
Also, The Woman in Crosley Tower will be in Kindle Unlimited, at least for the foreseeable future. So you can read it there if you’re a Kindle Unlimited subscriber.
-ET
In the mid-1980s, I became a rabid fan of Stephen King. My fandom started with a random confluence of events, as so many things do.
My sophomore year of high school, I had a job manning the checkout desk at my school’s library during my study hall period. So I had plenty of exposure to books. One day, I happened across a paperback copy of Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot.
The novel had been made into a two-part television miniseries five years earlier (1979). I had seen the miniseries, and it had creeped me out. I remembered enough about the miniseries to know what the novel would be about, but not enough to ruin the book for me.
I was instantly hooked. I blazed through ‘Salem’s Lot in only a few days. After that, I checked out every book in the school library that was written by Stephen King.
When I exhausted the school library shelves, I turned to the Waldenbooks and B. Dalton stores at the local mall. This was in the mid-1980s. By this time, Carrie, The Shining, Cujo, and Christine were already published. Rose Madder, The Green Mile, and 11/22/63 were still years in the future.
Teenagers are natural-born fanatics. During those years, I was a fanatic of Stephen King’s work in the same way that I was a fanatic of the music of Rush and Led Zeppelin. During the remainder of my high school years, I read Stephen King’s novels and short story collections with a dogged, joyful determination. I wanted to read everything he had written to that time. (And given Stephen King’s prolificness as a writer, there was a lot to read even then, in the mid-1980s).
By the time I graduated from high school in the spring of 1986, my dedicated reading had more or less caught up with Stephen King’s prolific writing. But a few months later, Stephen King had a new novel out, and it was widely billed as the writer’s magnum opus.
I looked forward to the book weeks before it came out.
The “it” I’m talking about is It, Stephen King’s mammoth horror epic. The book was released on September 15, 1986. I purchased my copy that very same day. I know this, because I preordered the book from the B. Dalton’s at my local shopping mall.
I remember starting the book while on a break at my university library. (I attended Northern Kentucky University in the fall of 1986.) To say that I was in an anticipatory mood would be a gross understatement. Here was 1,138 pages of new fiction from my favorite author.
What followed was one of my first experiences in youthful disillusionment (Many more were to follow, of course; but those are other episodes for other essays). It dragged. The novel contained too many subplots, too much padding, and a long, saggy middle.
What I loved about Cujo, Carrie, and the short stories in Night Shift were King’s fast pacing, narrative discipline, and literary economy. Most of these early works were written when Stephen King was still establishing himself as a writer, and was therefore subject to marketplace competition.
By 1986, though, Stephen King was already a celebrity writer. His short story “Trucks” had been made into a movie that summer, Maximum Overdrive. King was frequently interviewed, and widely known as “the Master of the Macabre”. He had even done a television commercial for American Express. In 1986, American pop culture was still characterized by scarcity and monolithic names. In popular fiction, King was one of those monoliths, alongside big names like Danielle Steel and Tom Clancy.
No discussion of It would be complete without mentioning the book’s controversial sex scene—what amounts to an orgy among its adolescent characters.
As a mature adult in 2026, I am supposed to get in a high dudgeon about the potential exploitation issues involved here. Back in 1986, very few adults did. There were some raised eyebrows, sure; but no public outcry greeted It, not even among members of the religious right. They were too busy lobbying to get Playboy and Penthouse banned from 7-Eleven.
But there was another factor in play for me, at the time. Keep in mind that in the fall of 1986, I was barely 18 years old myself, and only a few months out of high school. I was much closer in age to the members of the Losers Club than to the novel’s middle-aged author. Did my youthful age place me adjacent to something exploitive? Was I somehow a victim in all of this, too? Teenagers of the 1980s were not programmed to ask such questions.
Even at that age, though, I sensed that something was odd about this scene in It. I remember wondering if, perhaps, Stephen King had been drunk or high while writing this scene. (In light of King’s subsequent revelations about his substance abuse struggles during this period, my speculations may not have been too far from the mark.)
The sex scene involving the adolescent members of The Losers Club may or may not have been exploitative. It was, however, inappropriate and unnecessary, and definitely jarred me out of the story.
Forty years after the publication of It, Stephen King is still writing novels and I am still a fan.
Nowadays, however, I tend to read his work more selectively. King’s novellas and short stories are as engaging for me as ever. I often skip his longer, doorstop-size novels. I struggled to get through The Outsider, 11/22/63, and Fairy Tale.
Likewise, my early, teenage attempts at writing fiction were thinly disguised attempts at imitating Stephen King. But after all these years, and so many books of my own, I don’t sense much of King’s influences in my own work anymore. (I will, however, forever admire the stories in his first collection, the aforementioned Night Shift (1978). Every one of those stories is a gem.)
Stephen King is now almost 80, and I’m, well…a lot older, too. I hope King has many more years of writing ahead of him. I can’t promise to read all of his novels, but I’ll always show up for his short story collections.
-ET
I have a new release: Family Secrets. Here’s what it’s about (Amazon description):
“When a Cincinnati businessman connects with a distant cousin on Facebook, he agrees to stop by the man’s remote rural property on his way home from a business trip.
The visit should have lasted thirty minutes.
Instead, he finds himself trapped in a doublewide trailer deep in the woods, drawn into the disappearance of a local girl, and forced to search a dark pond for a body that may—or may not—be there.
But something else is moving through the woods that night.
Something ancient and hungry.
Family Secrets is a supernatural mystery/thriller inspired by regional folklore, nightmares, and the eerie landscapes of the Midwest.”
This is the second book in a new series I’ve created: Uncanny Ohio:
“Uncanny Ohio is a series of atmospheric supernatural tales set in southern Ohio, in and around the Cincinnati area. Traditional ghost stories and urban legends with a strong regional flavor.”
This was a natural move for me. Many of my supernatural stories are set in southern Ohio, and take inspiration from the ghost stories and urban legends that I absorbed as a kid in the 1970s and 1980s.
Family Secrets is currently enrolled in Kindle Unlimited.
-ET
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.
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.
Read NO SURE THING in Kobo Plus. Also available for purchase at Amazon, Google Play, Apple Books, and Barnes & Noble
No Sure Thing: a Gen X coming-of-age novel set in 1988 is now available in Kobo Plus.
Kobo Plus is Kobo’s version of Kindle Unlimited. I’ve been moving some titles in there on an experimental basis.
Kobo Plus, like Kindle Unlimited, will inevitably be swamped with trashy, sexually explicit romance novels. (Unfortunately, that’s probably already the case). But at least Kobo Plus does not require exclusivity. So I’m willing to give it a try for now.
No Sure Thing, like the title suggests, is a coming-of-age novel in a distinctly Gen X setting. While the novel is not autobiographical in any significant way, many of the characters and conflicts presented therein are based on people and situations that I observed myself during the 1980s. So it is authentic, if nothing else.
While there are several “love plots” in the book, this is not a romance novel in any traditional sense. If that’s what you’re looking for, look elsewhere.
But not all of the teen movies of the 1980s followed the traditional romance script. Consider the endings of Risky Business and The Last American Virgin. These were much more disillusionment plots than by-the-numbers romance plots (even though the romance element was heavily used in marketing both films).
Fast Times at Ridgemont High, despite the sex and comedy, also had several unmistakable disillusionment plots: Stacy learned the consequences of reckless sexual experimentation; Brad learned the pitfalls of hubris.
As noted above, No Sure Thing is available at all the major online bookstores.
-ET
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
In the 1980s, there was no social media and no dating apps. We didn’t even have email.
If you wanted to meet someone new, there was usually only one way to go about it.
You had to approach them in person, and strike up a conversation.
Below is a scene from NO SURE THING: A GEN X COMING-OF-AGE NOVEL SET IN 1988. In the scene below, the main character must jump through numerous hoops to meet an attractive young woman:
Since my hand had previously been stamped, I had little trouble gaining reentry to the Casablanca Club. I walked by the doorman as if I owned the place, flashing him a glimpse of my left hand. He gave me no trouble this time.
Once inside, I got another break: there was no sign of Lance Corporal Evans or his fellow marines.
But where was Sergeant George Tuttle, fearless defender of the law in Cincinnati “for more than thirty years?”
Maybe I would get lucky there. Maybe the cop had called it a night, or (more likely) been drawn away from the Casablanca Club by other police business.
I only had to walk around for a few minutes before I spotted her: the young woman from the Tangeman University Center. The pretty blonde who had caught my attention that day.
She was standing by herself at the edge of the nearest dance floor. Where were the other young women she had entered with, the ones I had assumed to be her friends? Was she meeting a guy here?
I didn’t know. And in that moment, I didn’t care. It was full speed ahead.
“Hi,” I said, when I got within speaking distance.
She turned toward me. I thought I detected a flash of recognition.
“You go to the University of Cincinnati, don’t you?” I asked.
Strictly speaking, this was a lame question with an obvious answer. The Casablanca Club was located a few blocks from the university, and we were both of university age. Probably half of the patrons here tonight were university students.
But few lines uttered by young men to young women in bars and nightclubs are brilliant. This wasn’t Toastmasters. Nor was I making an argument before Dr. Blevins. I was willing to improvise.
She smiled, but seemed at a loss for words.
“I think we may have spoken briefly in the Tangeman Center. That day you were looking at all the Armed Forces displays.
“More like I spoke briefly,” she said. “The proverbial cat seemed to have gotten your tongue.”
“There are no cats on my tongue now.”
This had to have been the most awkward line a man ever uttered to a woman in a bar. But it did the trick. She laughed.
“I’m Kim,” she said.
“I’m Paul.”
We talked for a few minutes more. I learned that she was a marketing major…common enough at the University of Cincinnati.
This was actually working, I suddenly realized. There was none of the awkwardness and fumbling that I’d felt when trying to talk to Tara and Courtney.
The difference, of course, was that the attraction with Kim was mutual, rather than one-sided. I therefore didn’t have to talk her into anything. All I had to do was go with the flow, be moderately assertive, and not say anything stupid.
But I was also conscious of Scott, who would right now be waiting for me in my car. I was also aware that in my very presence here, I was defying police orders, and breaking a promise I had made to a sergeant in the Cincinnati Police Department.
“I’ve enjoyed talking to you, Kim, but—”
“But now you have to go.”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“Call it intuition. Or maybe that you seem an awful lot like someone in a hurry.”
“I am in a hurry,” I confessed. “My friend is waiting for me at my car. Before I go, though: would you give me your phone number? I’d like to call you sometime.”
She smiled. “That’s usually what people have in mind when they ask for someone’s phone number. They want to call them sometime.”
A few minutes later, I was walking toward the main entrance/exit of The Casablanca Club with Kim’s phone number in my pocket.
She had written it on one of the club’s cocktail napkins, along with her last name. She was Kim Jones.
I was feeling on top of the world, more or less. Wait until Scott heard about this, I thought triumphantly.
I was outside in the parking lot of the Casablanca Club, almost home free, when everything unraveled.
“I thought you’d learned your lesson,” an older male voice declared. “But I guess I was wrong about that, wasn’t I?”
NO SURE THING: A GEN X COMING-OF-AGE NOVEL SET IN 1988 is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play and Apple Books.
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
NO SURE THING has a new cover. The setting is a modified image of the University of Cincinnati campus, which I attended in the late 1980s.
Who should read NO SURE THING? You’ll enjoy this book if you fondly remember teen and young adult movies of the 80s. The book is based on a number of ideas I’ve been kicking around for years, but it really crystalized when I rewatched Risky Business, the 1983 film that made Tom Cruise a household name.
NO SURE THING is available at Amazon, Google Play, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, and Apple Books.
-ET
People occasionally ask me what I like in the way of poetry. When this happens, I hem and haw around, and try to change the subject. I might suggest the lyrics of Neil Peart, the drummer and chief songwriter for the Canadian rock band Rush.
But that’s a non-answer. Neil Peart mostly wrote song lyrics, which are distinct from—though closely related to—poetry that is meant to be read from a page, rather than performed as music.
The sad fact is: a lot of contemporary American poetry is not very good. Regular readers will know that I’m fond of trashing the twenty-first century. But the decline of English-language verse began far back in the last century. By the time I was born (1968), English-language poetry was already in decline.
Most of it seems to fall into one of two camps. At one extreme, there is sappy love poetry that imitates the late Rod McKuen. At the other extreme, there is slam poetry, which devolved from the rantings of Allen Ginsberg.
But not all is doom and gloom. Richard Wilbur (1921-1997) was a twentieth century poet who wrote verse as the English language gods intended it to be written. That is: with discipline and structure, and focused on concretes rather than abstractions.
Here’s a sample of Wilbur’s classic poem, “Advice to a Prophet”:
“When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God’s name to have self-pity,
Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,
The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange.
Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.
How should we dream of this place without us?—
The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,
A stone look on the stone’s face?…”
That is great stuff. I loved these lines when I first read them, back in the mid-1980s. And I love them still.
I briefly met Richard Wilbur in 1987, when he was a guest speaker at Northern Kentucky University, where I was a student. I was already a moderately enthusiastic fan by this point. I asked him a question or two during the Q&A session— probably dumb questions. But hey, I was nineteen years old at the time.
If you are interested in poetry at all, then you should read Richard Wilbur’s poems. The best way to do this is by purchasing his omnibus collection, Collected Poems 1943-2004: Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Winner―Sixty Years of American Verse. I purchased this volume a few years ago. It is well worth whatever Amazon is charging for it nowadays.
-ET
“The Robots of Jericho” is one of my early short stories. I wrote this back in 2009.
I spent a lot of years in the automotive industry, and countless hours in automotive plants.
Many of these factories had industrial robots. If you’ve ever watched industrial robots move, you’ll agree that they often appear to be alive.
Of course, I know that industrial robots aren’t really alive and sentient. But what if they were? “The Robots of Jericho” is a story about such a scenario.
“The Robots of Jericho” is available in print and ebook as one of the stories in my Hay Moon short story collection. But you’re welcome to listen to the story in the video below:
