Horrorscopes: Twelve Tales of the Macabre

Introduction

For my personal sounding-board, Scott Prutton, and for Trevor Faivre, my most devoted fan.

Introduction     

Come in, friends; sit down anywhere you like. It's best to remain indoors this time of night. There are unseen constellations out there; webworks of black stars whose will is madness and whose influence can be malicious.

But all of them tell their stories.

So relax, friends, and enjoy yourselves. Take off your jackets and have a drink, but don't dismiss what you learn here tonight.

In the pages of this book, you will meet a man terrorized by spiders, you will see what happens when you don't pay your debts, and you will find that your adoring pets aren't what they seem. Inside you will get to know the effects of a Tarot reading gone awry, an institutionalized maniac losing his grip, and person obsessed with revenge. You will look into the hearts of an old man who fears his neighborhood children, a man mourning the loss of his daughter, and another who isn't so fond of shopping. You will watch, helpless, as a space mission goes terribly wrong and as a kidnapper uses social media to kill children. You will peek through your spread fingers and finally see what keeps mankind awake at night as the horrors creep ever closer your bed. In short, friends, you will see many things; some of them are extraordinary, but some of them can be found in your own everyday life. The themes will be thick at times- others will be solely for entertainment. But in all of them, you'll find a dose of the macabre, taken with a glass of reality.

 No book is written by a single hand; and the other hands which graced the pages of this book were artful and concise. My thanks go out to Kevin Barba for his wonderful artwork on the cover. Kevin is a good friend of mine and one hell of a talented artist. Some of his work can be found on his art blog, www.kevinbarba.blogspot.com.

Also, many thanks to the crew at www.wattpad.com's very own TheCreepyHomeboys, in whose collections the original publications of “The Needing” and “Payment Methods” can be found. Keep it creepy, Homeboys and -girls.

And, also at www.wattpad.com, the FleetingTerrors team, which first published in their collection Flash Horror my uber-short story, “Night Comes Creeping”. We kept it short and oh so sweet, didn't we?

Lastly, thanks to Thelma Holderness, who introduced me at a young age to a number of books which influenced me as a writer. And for listening as I raved about the many things I would do within the pages of this book.

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