Silverfish: A Fantasy Horror Story

by D.N. Schmidt

Rosalyn is the night shift nurse at a nursing home, and a frustrated writer. She discovers a strange book in a resident's room filled with woodcut illustrations of rituals, people in robes slaughtering lambs and draining the blood into goblets, bonfires with smoke taking on humanoid shapes, and otherworldly creatures. Not only that, a chapter is titled To Invoke The Muses. Desperate for a story idea that will make her feel like a real writer, she decides to take a chance on magic and borrow the book. But is the strange creature she summons actually a Muse, or something far more dangerous?

20 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 6, 2025

About the author

D.N. Schmidt began performing magic shows at age thirteen. While his friends were earning extra cash with paper routes or mowing lawns, he was on stage telling jokes, reading minds, and walking on broken glass.

After a few years, he decided that writing was more fun than performing, and presented much less risk of being heckled. (This was before he found out about internet trolls.) He turned to writing stories. He writes science fiction, horror, urban fantasy, anything weirder than real life.

Although D.N. Schmidt mostly writes speculative fiction, his first novel was a mystery. “They Ate the Waitress?” is the story of a murder at a restaurant for wealthy cannibals. After that came a collection of science fiction short stories called The Doom Tapes, and then The Screaming Void and The Stolen Planet, two space opera novels. He also wrote Inspiration Overdose, a writing prompt generator.

Interested readers can find free stories and writing tips at https://dnschmidt.com.