horror – ghosts & haunted houses

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Summary: Damien is a 14 year old orphan that has grown up  in foster homes all his life. He finds out that he is a "Vampeal" , a child born from a vampire and human. If that wasn't bad enough Damien is a teenager that is dealing with his feelings for other boys. Damien is put into a home that the foster parents are very religious and he ends up on the street. Patrick is Damien's caseworker and if fresh out of college is assigned to look after him but finds out that Damien is no longer at the foster home. So Patrick sets out to look for him, which turns out to be a very dangerous road for both of them.

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Summary: ONE UNDERWORLD ENTANGLEMENT. ONE HAUNTED MUSIC VENUE. ONE CHANCE TO MAKE IT OUT ALIVE. Despite the ghosts, Barry Matthews takes on the job as booker for the Boardwalk View Hotel. But the renovations uncover something much more sinister. When Barry “Bazza” Matthews leaves his band The Maggots to become the booker for Melbourne’s hottest music venue, he never expects to find a link to the past buried deep within the rubble from the renovations. And now the new spate of threatening phone calls are becoming as troubling as the disappearing visitors and the malevolent activity in the basement. Trapped within the hotel with the alluring Simon, or Felicia, depending on his choice of outfit, they must join together to survive the threats from outside, as well as the dangers growing within the walls of the hotel. But the longer the renovations go on, the stronger the dark forces become. Will Barry and Simon uncover the secrets behind the hotel’s sinister history before it’s too late, or will they become the hotel’s latest victims? Rainbow Awards 2021 - Honorable Mention "Wonderfully strange" - Rainbow Awards   Website: https://www.gracehudson.net Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gracehudsonauthor Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gracehudsonau Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/gracehudsonau.bsky.social Bookbub: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/grace-hudson Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Grace-Hudson/author/B010TJ6XVG Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@GraceHudsonAU Twitter/X: https://www.twitter.com/GraceHudsonAU Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/gracehudson

Word Count: Click here to reveal102,000 (Click here to hide)

Summary: Can you hear it? Whispering in the dark. Secrets only the dark knows. Joseph Moore, choir director for the First Baptist Church of Lenora, Nebraska, has secrets of his own. Terrible, lonely secrets. One that involves natural human desire. One that calls forth powers he cannot begin to understand. Both with the potential to destroy him and those he loves. Now the world is changing. The darkness, the shadows, the ghosts, are closing in—and Joseph and his lover, Kevin, are being stalked by a merciless demon, hell-bent on possession. Can you hear it now? There in the dark. It's whispering your name.

Word Count: Click here to reveal24,074 (Click here to hide)

Summary: While Sacrum Umbra showed us the darkness of our own shadow, and In Ventre Tuo the guts of our inner monster, The Lesser Apocrypha is still another beast altogether. Meant to gather together the stranger stories, it contains some of the more surreal and ephemeral stories, the ones that just are without much rhyme or reason. Stories like an odd moment in the park, the strange child who won't stop haunting you, an alien invasion that gets very personal, an AI born of a lolcat, monsters in the woods, and a spell gone terribly wrong.

Word Count: Click here to reveal32,507 (Click here to hide)

Summary: In Sacrum Umbra you were treated to tales from the shadows, the literary darkness that lives within all of us. Here you will find tales of another sort, the type you might find in the less wholesome end of the collective unconscious and the very depths of the gut. From stories of childhood gone horribly wrong to sex and madness with an impossible cost, this is where you'll find the more gruesome end of the spectrum.

Word Count: Click here to reveal1100 (Click here to hide)

Summary: A muddy trench in France during the Great War wasn’t the most auspicious place for Tom and Michael to reach an understanding of their own natures. A small, individual tragedy unfolds … But then Tom discovers a place beyond, where he and other men like him are blessed with all that life denied them.

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Summary: When college student Muriel Aubrey inherits an old house in a small town, she imagines that moving into the rural community will be deathly dull. But the old house once belonged to her eccentric granduncle, a professor said to be researching something mysterious before his untimely death. Then Muriel finds the research notes that had been hidden away in the old Victorian; and she discovers what the professor was researching: vampires. It isn’t long before Muriel meets residents of the small town who knew the professor almost a century ago, and learns that everything he wrote in the notes he kept is true...And then she finds herself stalked by a vampire hunter.

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Summary: It’s been twenty years since the quiet Midwestern town of Lakeview was struck by tragedy.  But every year on the anniversary of the event Teddy returns home for ‘The Reunion’. Lakeview, like Teddy, has secrets and not all mysteries should come to light.

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Summary:

Withrow Surrett, cantankerous vampire lord of North Carolina, is passing the long winter nights of the off-season in the sleepy resort town of Sunset Beach. When the nights are long and humanity slumbers, where else would a vampire go but the beach? This is no mere vacation for Withrow and his cousin Roderick, though. They’re hunting down a nest of nasty elder vampires who want to take over the world!

Of course it’s not that simple, because for Withrow nothing ever is. Withrow and Roderick - and their team of frienemies, rivals, and allies - soon learn there are stranger things afoot than vampiric machinations among the dunes of Sunset Beach: mysterious mortals, twisted sorceries, and fleeting apparitions. Through sabotage, espionage, and bare-knuckled brutality Withrow must find and stop the elder vampires before they play the ace up their sleeve!

Kick back in the sand with the fourth installment of this vampire and urban fantasy series, perfect for fans of Rick Gualtieri, Jeff Strand, or Christopher Moore.

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Summary: The Fright Factory is here to help you as you labor in the control room, on the assembly line, or mixing the chemicals of inspiration and imagination in huge vats that give off dark and eerie vapors. Here you'll find guidance in drawing up the blueprints of your story along with a selection of tools to help you customize your design. The elements of horror include the setting, the tingle of suspense building into genuine fear, and of course the Monster. Those are the basics. From there horror can become ghost stories, tales of suspense, splatter and/or gross-out horror, and what might be called the O. Henry approach (twist endings). Cross-genre writing mixes in police procedurals, P.I. stories, and medical horror. Romance with monsters has become popular. You can also throw in the weird western, the Elder Gods, and Joe R. Lansdale - a category unto himself. Whether you're telling a weird tale in the classic tradition of Clark Ashton Smith or creating cutting edge steampunk frights, the long and venerable history of the horror story has also spawned a set of clichés you'll want to avoid. Now the whistle shrieks, signalling the beginning of a new shift. Time to set the machinery of the factory in motion as we explore the art and craft of building better horror.