Hey, Western Horror Readers, SplatterPunks, Fellow Authors, and so forth. In this blog post, I hope to answer questions & give insights into my thinking as an author, specifically in regard to my published collections of short stories. I've published an array of them - all of which are to be found within my books: "Look Away Dixieland: A Collection of Western Horror Stories" (i.e. 13 in all) & "A Book Without A Name: Western Horror, Splatter Western, Southern Gothic Anthology" (5, plus one narrative poem, plus 1 sonnet). ***Be advised, my books are so profusely violent and disparaging that they are not suitable for all audiences. They'd easily be placed within the realm of Extreme Horror. Also, due to the nature of this blog post it has spoilers/i.e. an overview of each of my short stories. May God have mercy on your souls.***

SHORT STORIES in "LOOK AWAY DIXIE LAND"

• Beneath The Dark Puddle (Supernatural Horror)
This is the first short story that adds depth to a race of characters who're referred to as chthonic idiot gods. It also introduces a proxy called the sodden man and alludes to the villain being Peter Grimm. Additionally, some inspiration for this tale of terror was inspired from the movie "Tales From The Crypt: Demon Knight." Its protagonist is a clergyman targeted by this insidious foe.

• Beyond The Veil (True Crime Horror)
This story is about the real-life serial murderers known as "The Bloody Benders." An enormous amount of details are accurate in this fictitious horror story. Its protagonists are two young boys, one of which is intrigued by the salacious Bender Daughter - Kate.

• A Light In The Darkness (Home Invasion Horror)
A wife and mother stationed at a Southern Lighthouse during the American Civil War face off against several sex-crazed, diabolical Union Naval officers who've made their way there by boat. She'll have to do what she can to protect her ailing husband and young daughter from the monstrous men.

•Blood Runs Cold (Super Natural Horror)
Following alongside actual demonology and cryptozoological records, this work of fiction is about the Wendigo; a demon spirit that the indigenous people of Ruperts Land would report possessed and drove its victims to mass-murder and cannibalism

• Vessel of Dishonor (True Crime Horror)
An escaped deranged negro slave who's gone out of his mind with hate, wanders upon a household where a mother and her two young children reside alongside a few slaves of their own. The whole household is at risk of the most hellish of crimes.

• Amaranthine Rhapsody (Existential Horror)
Somewhere on the edge of life and death a protagonist journeys through the abyss to find her lost love.


• The Axe of Perun (Slavic/Russian Horror)
While it is a spoiler, this is the earliest appearance recorded of Peter Grimm. The story also deals with serfdom, Russian lore, and history.


• A Bullet for Johnny Dove (Western Horror)
About as Western as anything I've ever written (geographically), this is a really gritty dark story that takes place after the American Civil War.

• People of God (True Crime)
The Pentecostal Awakening happened in the very late 1800s. People. While I by no means aim to break-down the whole history of the revivalistic movement, I would point out that more than any other church the Pentecostal Movement was initially more receptive to women and negro, thereby causing bigots to rise up against them in violent sacrosanct aggression. Therein lies this tale.

• The Thin Man (Cryptid Horror)
This is an Easter-egg horror story about a ghoulish character who plays a large part in the God Walks The Dark Hills series, and is primarily known as The Lincoln Man. He's somewhat inspired by The Slenderman, Spring-Heeled Jack, etc.


• The Old Stone Well (Cryptid Horror)
What do runaway slaves and monsters have in common? Well for one, this terrifying tale. This was somewhat inspired by an episode of Amazing Stories.


• A Life Wasted (Victorian Horror)
For the third and final time in this book, a Peter Grimm story comes alive with more violent twists. This time it is in Victorian England, prior to his appearance in "God Walks The Dark Hills Book I."


• A Bedtime Story (Cryptid Horror)
This is exactly what it sounds like, some children telling a story. However, sometimes stories are rooted in truth.

SHORT STORIES in "A BOOK WITHOUT A NAME"
Two of the works attributed to me within this book were originally published digitally only as an experiment to see how well that'd do. Amazon(dot)Com wouldn't use them because according to them they were too short. Howbeit, I knew of shorter eBooks that were published exclusively on Amazon, so there's that. The rest of these, excluding the sonnet, we all written for open submissions. As a writer, I talk to other writers, one of which told me that she doesn't do Open Submissions because they're over-saturated. One by one, I received the nicest rejection letters telling me how they received such massive amounts of submissions, it was hard to choose, but these weren't selected to be a part of those. Again, it's something I tried - only because I was coming out with an anthology of my own and would put anything they didn't use in it. Here goes.

• The Dead Are There (Narrative Poem)
Of the handful of my own contributions scattered throughout this book, I began with my narrative poem. It's dark and vile. Honestly, though I dub it Western Horror, it's more nebulous/true crime from the first-person perspective of a serial murderer.

• Beast of Burden (Western Horror)
While my protagonists tend to be Confederates, Copperheads, and such, who often express real-life views and historical facts as portrayed before revisionist history came along to diminish the conquered South, there is still the ugly factor of Slavery. Occasionally, I've had a runaway slave as my protagonist. "The Old Stone Well" in the afore mentioned book "Look Away Dixieland" did that. This story focuses on a kind suffering negro slave, a vicious slave-master, and a plantation owner's two sons. It looks through the boys' eyes and follows them. The anthology that this was written for had the theme of "Earth." My mind, therefore, looked to the rigorous labor that slaves endured in the hot fields. Like most of what I write, this is really cruel.

• Subnormal (Supernatural Horror)
Within horror, a lot of people have different thoughts as to what is scary. I feel that the feeling of helplessness is scary. Thereby, I write horror surrounding that. However, horror is also about being disarming. This story was written for a bizzaro-horror. Essentially, they asked for a monster story. If you've read my books, then you know that I tend to skew towards the demonic. Really, it is an inversion of what most people would think, and yet there have been records of possessions like this. I thought, "Wouldn't it be scary to have a little non-verbal, mentally-retarded boy to become possessed by a demon, and the initial signs of it to cause him to act and speak just like a regular child?" ...Basically, it keeps getting worse from there. That is what this story is though.

• She Devil (Supernatural Horror)
If you mixed the Western Horror movie "The Wind" with the demonic entity known as Lilith together this is exactly what you'd get. This is the first time I've utilized this female demon entity in any of my stories. It's really quite vile too.

• My Bed In Hell (True Crime)
If you've read "Ain't No Grave: God Walks The Dark Hills Book III" then you know I can write torture. If you were going to turn a short story of mine into an R-rated type snuff film - this might work. Of course, it is children being abused. With that said, it's not as harsh as a lot of things that I (or Jack Ketchum) write.

• Cruel As The Grave (True Crime)
My last entry (before my sonnet) is the afore (only digitally) published short story about a man who has two wives. One of them is awful to the other. It's during the American Civil War near Chattanooga, along a real-life place called Suck Creek. This story takes some really ugly turns.