Author Description

You know that feeling. Foreboding—the feeling that bad, or evil, awaits us at some point in our future, distant or near. It’s like a pressure at the back of your brain, a whisper that it can all go terribly wrong. The sense of foreboding reminds us the bad is coming—but we don’t know exactly when. Here are 14 tales where evil is nosing the chinks in the lives of the unsuspecting, searching for a way in and ready to wreak havoc. But these are no ordinary sufferings and miseries: cults, mythical forest creatures, elder gods, psychic powers, murder, parallel universes, monsters, death, nature gone awry, zombies, ghosts, and husbands. In these 14 tales, things don’t bode well: In Lisa Morton’s “High Desert,” abandoned in the desert one woman learns the hard way that some spines pierce deeper than others. Nature figures out how to take a sinister upper hand in Bill Bodden’s “When to Let Go.” “Coffin” by Alison J. McKenzie asks the question ‘can you exist without being alive?’ Jennifer Brozek explores the difficulty, and danger, of trying to understand one’s own mind in “A Test of Vigilance and Will.” In “Jenny” by Lee Call, curiosity and love possess their own perils, but when they cross paths... Yvonne Navarro’s “Meet Me On the Other Side” delves into an alternate world and explores love and sacrifice in the face of an impending apocalypse and libidinous beasts. Which is worse—a natural disaster, a monster, or a husband—is the question at the heart of Allie Yohn’s “In the Very Air You Breathe.” "Frostlings" by Chris Marrs gives us the definitive answer about family and love—and mythical creatures. “Still Life With Shattered Glass” by Loren Rhoads exposes a morbid hobby, and where it leads. Joan De La Haye’s “Getting Rid of Charlie” examines that father-daughter bonding time is very important—and can come in an aberrant form. In “A Spectacle of a Man” by Weston Ochse, one man finds that better living can come from the Elder Gods, but it’s not going to be pre