For November of 2021, I released Have You Seen Me? over at http://www.godless.com just in time for Thanksgiving!
When his teenage daughter disappears, Offi–former Officer Standish learns he will do anything to find her. In his search he will plummet to lows he’d never dreamed possible, braving trials that test the limits of his imagination and his intestinal fortitude. How far would you go to save the life of your only child?
Just in time for Thanksgiving, I’m bringing you a story that should make you hold your loved ones closer, treasuring family. I don’t want to spoil anything, because I delve into the backstory surrounding what motivated me to write this one in the Author’s Notes at the end of the story…but in the midst of this, you’ll encounter the snippet I’d set aside to share as part of the KillerCon 2021 virtual convention. Sadly, I opted not to dive right into the depravity and that decision did me no favors.
You can pick this up for yourself by going to http://www.godless.com or by downloading the Godless app to your preferred mobile device. The link is below:
In December of 2021, Godless promoted an AntiChristmas event, and since my birthday is December 16th, it seemed like I should definitely get in on the fun. For December of 2021, I released When You’re Here, You’re Fatalities exclusively at http://www.godless.com for only fifty cents.
Donna just started her job as a waitress at Pimento Patch only to find out the restaurant would be shutting its doors for good.
Along with a skeleton crew of slackers, she accepted the offer of full pay to work overnight cleaning the place up in preparation for the looming vacancy. Unfortunately, this particular Pimento Patch restaurant has a dark history, and a sinister presence has something in store for the five crew members on staff that night.
Prepare for the breadstick massacre, because When You’re Here, You’re Fatalities!
Taking inspiration from Italian Giallo, this short slasher takes place in a fictional version of an Olive Garden.
You can check it out for yourself at the following link:
I decided to do something a little bit different, and on February 23rd of 2022, I released Dog Days through the Godless platform. This is not a horror story in the same sense that my other Godless releases have been. Instead, this is based on a real-life event from when I was growing up, and you can read all about it for only seventy-five cents at the link that you’ll find below.
Based on a true story from the life of the author’s uncle, Dog Days is a tale of revenge and the horror man is capable of.
Returning home to find his house ablaze and his dogs trapped inside, Lee Melvin learns that it all has something to do with a good deed he’d done one night. Like a redneck John Wick, Lee will stop at nothing to punish the person responsible for the deaths of his two Dobermann pinschers and the harm he’s caused others.
On June 21st of 2022, I followed up the release of Dog Days with a sequel, Dog Days: The Hunt, and the announcement that it would be the second installment of a trilogy of stories centered around the character of Lee Melvin. The character and the events are still based on my uncle and his life after the true events that inspired Dog Days.
In the snow-covered higher elevations of Montana’s Rocky Mountains, Lee is on the hunt for a black bear, armed with only his bow.
When a couple of poachers kill the wrong prey, Lee takes the law into his own hands and the snow will be pink with blood before he’s through.
In August of 2022, I released The Cold-Blooded Hills. It’s a cryptid monster story that caters to my love of dinosaurs and my exploration of how they might have evolved if they did manage to survive and adapt to the modern world.
Jonathan is a nature photographer, and he’s venturing off the beaten path into a small, largely untouched mountain oasis in the Nevada desert. Hoping to capture images of oncoming monsoon activity as it crosses the barren landscape, he stumbles across a hidden lake and life that should not exist–at least not anymore.
Like many of my titles, you can obtain this by going to http://www.godless.com or by downloading the Godless mobile app for your device of choice. The link is below:
Travel By Bullet returns fans to John Scalzi’s The Dispatcher series following a pandemic that isn’t altogether too dissimilar to the one we’ve experienced in the real world. Unlike the real world, Tony Valdez and other dispatchers like him have had more work than they can handle, as grieving families insist on postponing the inevitable for loved ones hooked up to machines. Unfortunately, resetting only goes so far, and it won’t repair the damage done by the sickness itself. It’s a bleak and depressing scenario we find ourselves experiencing through Tony’s perspective. When a friend is rushed to the hospital, begging Tony to let him die, it triggers a series of events that brings Tony to the attention of wealthy and powerful figures with secrets they’ll do anything to keep under wraps. This installment continues Scalzi’s trend of combining the alternate reality science fiction of The Dispatcher series with an old-fashioned dose of noir that blends perfectly. The overarching mystery is satisfying and sufficiently convoluted, especially impressive considering the relatively short length of the story. I particularly liked the concept behind the title of this installment of the series. The premise of utilizing the reset in that way seems both obvious and strangely horrific. As with the previous two volumes, Zachary Quinto’s narration is superb, lending Tony a uniquely nuanced personality and bringing the other characters (many familiar faces from previous glimpses into the world of The Dispatcher) to life. I hope that Scalzi continues writing these tales and that Quinto continues narrating them because, like Scalzi’s seamless combination of genres, it’s a perfect blend.
Childbirth is always a disorienting, dangerous, and painful experience. As beautiful and fulfilling as it also might be, it remains those things. It should come as no surprise that Todd Love’s Birth focuses heavily on those first three things. It’s a horror story, after all. What else did you expect? Nora’s labor begins early, while she’s alone at home and unprepared. Bleeding, experiencing pain like she’s never known, and horrified that something’s gone wrong, it’s a relief when the professionals arrive and spirit her away to the hospital. Unfortunately, trained professionals can only do so much. Nora’s fear that something might be wrong is well-founded and has something to do with the donor material she utilized. Once again, Todd Love takes the rug by its frayed edge to not only yank with all his might and pull it out from under us, but also leave us sprawling on the floor, wondering what the hell just happened.
This title, like many of Todd Love’s stories, can be found at http://www.godless.com or by downloading the Godless App to your mobile device of choice. The link is below:
Judith Sonnet takes a hammer and chisel to our sensibilities and good taste with her collection, Something Akin To Revulsion: Six Extreme Short Stories. There is nothing safe, nothing sacrosanct, and nothing off-limits within these pages–and that’s how it should be. It was my pleasure to be one of the first to experience LOLCOW, the story that starts this particular collection. Judith’s rendition of this grotesque and graphic tale was the winning performance of the 2022 KillerCon Gross-Out Contest, and with good reason. Plumbing the depths of the internet for hilarious, perverse, and captivating content might provide more stimulation than one is prepared to experience. But like the narrator of LOLCOW, we can’t help ourselves as we return to the trough. Liquid Sick suitably tackles the TERF epidemic, showcasing for readers that those people spend too much time spewing excrement and too little time on empathy. Judith’s own trans experience influences and informs this narrative, and she does an excellent job of providing both amusement and poignant social commentary. Also, apropos of nothing…fecal emesis has always fascinated me. Sonnet’s next story, Rehearsal, provides a grim and unrelenting glimpse into the hours before a school shooting transpires. Kids who did nothing wrong find themselves prey to the whims of cruel and maladjusted classmates with pizza cutters to grind. Body-Crunch takes us to the dimly lit, poorly constructed ring of a backyard wrestling match that goes horrifically wrong. It’s not every day one almost feels bad for a pedophile, but it’s hard not to feel some faint stirring of sympathy as everything comes crashing down–and spilling out. In Coke-Nail, a group of bored, slacker teenagers decide they know where they might be able to score some cocaine. The deal doesn’t work out as planned, but one of them still manages to reach a state sort of like snowblindness. Finally, we have Something Akin To Revulsion, wherein some truly awful preadolescent girls decide they’re going to play a prank on the dumpy, less popular girl in their class. The conclusion might have you in stitches, though, so it’s worth sitting through the horror. Sonnet’s collection is as gripping as it is bleak and nihilistic, and it’s got those traits in spades. Her story notes clarify the inspiration and motivation behind each of the inclusions, and it’s always a pleasure to spend a little time getting to know the author after finishing something that’s hollowed you out like this collection is sure to do.
Stephen Graham Jones has a knack for forcing his readers to look at the world–and aspects of it–in wholly different ways. The Backbone of the World will have you looking at prairie dogs (of all things) and our perceptions of time differently. If this installment of the Tresspass Collection is indicative of what the rest of the stories have in store for me, it’ll be one hell of a trip. Millie Two Bears is a lonely, socially isolated living on property that she’s about to lose with her husband in prison and his family breathing down her neck to parcel up the land. When she invites a peculiar stranger to rent the camper on the property, she has no idea what sort of repercussions it’ll have and how it ties in with the peculiar prairie dogs plaguing the distant edge of her land…and something growing deep in the earth below. Jones’s knack for taking the seemingly prosaic and transforming it into the mysterious and sinister is on full display. The simple reservation life of a woman with all-too-familiar troubles gets upended as her everyday environment becomes increasingly unsettling. Charlotte Flyte’s narration of Millie’s story is superb, and she makes the listener feel as if they’re hearing the story from the woman living it.
In Cerberus Exploitation: A Grindhouse Triple Feature, Patrick C. Harrison III, Mike Ennenbach, and Chris Miller nail the storytelling aesthetic of grindhouse exploitation cinema with a Troma flair. It’s particularly appropriate that I mention Troma since this book begins with an introduction provided by none other than Lloyd Kaufman. Like proper triple-feature experiences, the book contains trailers, film credits (with dream casting choices from the authors), and everything a fan could hope for…aside from the popcorn. Electro-Satan Comes To Wolfe City introduces us to a group of kids hoping to enjoy a summer camping trip, only to have everything disrupted by mutant hillbillies. Ennenbach’s contribution to this collection gets the reader/listener’s attention almost immediately with a musical performance that should have anyone in stitches. From there, it’s a barrage of violence, humor, and all the splattery goodness fans of the genre adore. Patrick C Harrison III then hits us with his twisted take on the women in prison genre with Vampire Nuns Behind Bars. Replete with lesbianism, sadism/torture, scientific experimentation, rebel uprisings/prison riots, and–of course–vampires. Terrible things are taking place at this women’s prison, where political dissidents and troublemakers–and a handful of nuns–are swept under the rug and channeled into one of two secret chambers where horrors await. When a prison break’s attempted, the balancing act that kept the facility functional gets disrupted hugely, and the halls and cell blocks become a slaughterhouse. And finally, we arrive at Chris Miller’s Sons of Thunder, focused on a military recovery mission in the dystopian Hellscape outside of the “safely” bubbled cities owned and operated by corporations. Escape From New York and Assault on Precinct 13 come together, producing a malformed and grim, action-packed adventure. Mutants, terrorists, and doomsday cultists stand in the way of an elite team and one man bent on revenge at any cost. There’s no point in trying to describe the escapades these authors have assembled. It’s something one just has to experience for themself…and I recommend doing so as soon as possible. Daniel Caravetta’s narration is spot-on, capturing the lunacy and low-budget mayhem of grindhouse cinema in a way only a fan of the films could manage.
Domus Necrophagous 