Category: horror

Horror on 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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

Hay Moon & Other Stories: Sixteen modern tales of horror and suspense

This was my first short story collection. Although all of these stories contain speculative elements, there is quite a range in plot and subject matter. In this collection you’ll find vampire and ghost stories, but also a few crime stories with a “twist”. Oh, and there are also several “creature feature” stories that are kind of fun.

I Know George Washington and Other Stories: Five Dark Tales

Five dark tales of murder, hauntings, and the undead, set in locations from Tennessee to Mexico.

Coming soon: ‘The Rockland Horror 2’

Sometime later this week or early next week, The Rockland Horror 2 will hit the virtual bookshelves on Amazon.

The Rockland Horror series is for fans of:

  • Stephen King
  • Jennifer McMahon
  • Peter Straub
  • Silvia Moreno-Garcia
  • Jeremy Bates
  • H.P. Lovecraft
  • Adam Nevill
  • T.J. Payne
    among others!

This story will pick up where The Rockland Horror left off. In the summer of 1882, the town of Rockland, Indiana is reeling from the wave of murders and kidnappings that occurred in recent months.

One man, George Marston, has been tried, convicted, and executed for these crimes.

The people of Rockland believe that the terror is over.

But two young women, Ellen Sanders Briggs and Louisa Goodwin, know better.

Since marrying the reclusive railroad tycoon Theodore Briggs, Ellen (nee Sanders) Briggs has found herself living in a state of captivity and abject terror. She is trapped in a big mansion filled with evil spirits, the roaming undead, and her cruel, mercurial necromancer of a husband.

Louisa Goodwin was given psychic powers of insight following her near-death experience. Louisa is struggling to recover from the personal tragedies she suffered during the preceding spring: the deaths of her parents and younger brother.

Louisa’s visions tell her that the situation in Rockland, Indiana is about to get much, much worse.

I’ll be posting links for The Rockland Horror 2 here on the blog as soon as the book is available. If you haven’t read The Rockland Horror (published in February 2021) get it here, or via the link above. As these books are both parts of a series, you should really read them in order.

More updates to follow!

‘The Rockland Horror’: multigenerational horror saga

Available now!

Hey, I’ve got a new horror series coming out. The first book will hit Amazon later this week, in all likelihood. (It is in the final proofreading stage.)

Here’s a little about the series:

Origins of the story: The Evil Dead in a haunted house

One of my all-time favorite horror films is Sam Raimi’s cult classic, The Evil Dead (1981).

The Evil Dead (just in case you’re one of the rare horror fans who hasn’t seen the film) follows a simple setup and plot:

A group of college students decide to spend a weekend in a cabin in rural Tennessee. One of them discovers a copy of the Sumerian Book of the Dead, along with a tape recorder. Both items were left in the cabin by an archeologist—who has apparently met a bad end.

And, of course, the college students throw caution to the wind, and tamper with both items. Because that’s the sort of thing people always do in horror movies.

Hijinks ensue. Evil spirits are roused, and they take over the college students one-by-one, transforming each of them into homicidal zombies.

I loved The Evil Dead, even though I recognized some of its flaws.

What flaws? you ask. The characters are cardboard cutouts, for one thing. Also, there is Raimi’s fondness for blending black humor with horror. The combination mostly worked in The Evil Dead. It detracted from some of his subsequent horror films.

But flaws aside, The Evil Dead was truly a powerful film, especially for the early 1980s. I recall watching it for the first time back in the summer of 1983. I watched a VHS rental copy of The Evil Dead, on the Zenith television in my parents’ living room. (I was 14 or 15 at the time.) For a full 85 minutes, my eyes were glued to the television screen. The rest of the world receded into the background. Only good storytelling can do that.

My concerns and storytelling style are different from Raimi’s. I like more character development; and I don’t like comedy-horror. But I loved The Evil Dead, nevertheless. I’ve long known that I would someday write a story of my own that would take The Evil Dead as its inspiration.

* * *

One day during the long, turbulent summer of 2020, I decided that I wanted to write a book that might best be described as “The Evil Dead inside a haunted house”. Basically, I was aiming for a story that captured the spirit of Raimi’s 1981 movie, without ripping it off.

I wrote an initial story that more or less followed the plot line of the 1981 movie. It was set in the present day. But as mentioned above, I didn’t want to rip off Raimi. I swapped out the claustrophobic Tennessee cabin of The Evil Dead for a big, old house in Southern Indiana. Like all haunted houses, this one had a backstory. (Haunted houses are usually haunted for a reason, after all.)

As I began writing the book, though, I discovered something: The backstory was much more than a backstory. The house had a long, horrific history—as did the people who lived (and died) there.

I realized that one story simply wasn’t going to get the job done.

So I scrapped my original manuscript, and went back to the drawing board.

Instead of starting the story in the present day, I decided to go back to the very beginning, to the origins of The Rockland Horror.

That is where Book One begins…

A total of nine books have been planned out, and are in various stages of writing and development. When completed, The Rockland Horror saga will cover the horrific history of one cursed house from 1882 through 2020.