When you arrived at the house, the house that was too affordable, the house that had a reputation and that no one wanted to buy, you were prepared. The signs were all there: the overgrown lawn, the family cemetery in the backyard, the dead flies collecting on the windowsills. You walked the perimeter and found…

The town was to blame. That was it, their heathen ways, their wights in the hills, every knock or scratch accounted for by some new devil. He’d been instructed to leave sugar on the church steps, and to throw the skins that grew over heated milk into the fire to feed the spirits. It was…

Originally published in Darkness Blooms. A. On the way home from work, your stomach rumbles from hunger. You haven’t eaten since you ran out of anemone soup yesterday. You live in a time when housing and hygiene products are provided by the government, but human worker bees must barter for food. The extraterrestrials that conquered…

We walk the shoreline|of the Ohio not touchingso nothing keepswinter from numbingour fingers. I stopto watch the dead thingsfloat by—a hollowedlog bobbing the current,the pale glisten of a fishbelly, an accompanying stink.The crests push to comb the edges for more debris,lapping at the toesof our shoes, where they sinkin mud and squelch when we liftthem…

October 13 The return to my grandmother’s house might be ill-advised. My husband certainly thinks so. I left him behind in London and took the train through the misty hills, the silent towns. I am secretly pleased. This, I think, is how I was supposed to make this trip: alone on a rainy day, the…

Originally published in Spirit Machine: Tales of Séance Fiction. overture Two girls meet. The first, a glassblower’s daughter, hides behind the thick arm of her father. When he places a glass brooch in the other girl’s hand, the other girl smiles as bright as the midday sun. i. reliquary “Some of my learned colleagues posit…

Do not leave. The words, translated as best we could, were inscribed on the alien artifact dangling from a delicate silver chain around my neck. I knelt beside a row of carrots in Garden Habitat One, running my fingers through the fronds. The feathered greenery was tipped with silver, almost metallic in appearance. Glancing around,…

There’s a forestfossilized underground. I dream of them—each outlinedskeleton, bones crushed into the darkshadows that shape them. They havefaces,even the trees. You can see whole limbs, each leafa perfect, pointedoval. They hang overhead, as if to shade you from a sunneither of you can remember seeing. Their voices sound like a moaningwind, the kind that…

My experience of queerness in horror fiction began with a vampire’s victim. I don’t actually recall the first time I read Carmilla, J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 novella about a lonely lesbian vampire and the girl who falls in love with her. I remember being fourteen or fifteen, already having read the story, regarding it…

“It is clear that there can be no single correct interpretation or understanding of Baba Yaga.” – Andreas Johns Perhaps no other folktale villain is as ubiquitous as the evil woman. If you’ve ever read a fairy tale, or listened to the yarn of folklore, you’ve come across a malicious stepmother, a wicked witch, a nasty…