Tell us a little about your story, “Ada, Awake.”
In 18th-century France, a young widow travels to sell an artifact, only to find the purchaser has more sinister plans.
What particular affinity for the history of France do you have that brings the setting in “Ada, Awake” to life?
Many years ago I had an idea for a novel, and I wanted to set it in a time and place where I could talk about current issues important to me, but without being overt (and preferably pre-telegraph, for plot reasons). I settled on a slightly alternative Ancient Regime France as the primary setting …
"[A] brilliant collection of truly creepy tales by horror's hottest voices! Dark, funny, heartbreaking, and bizarre. Highly recommended!"
-
Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of
V-Wars and
Glimpse
Scary Stories for a Good Cause. From Bram Stoker Award-nominated editor of the cult magazine
Morbid Curiosity comes
Tales for the Camp Fire, a new charity anthology of short stories to help support wildfire relief efforts. Through these pages roam werewolves, serial killers, a handful of ghosts, plenty of zombies, Cthulhu cultists, mad scientists, and a pair of conjoined twins.
Tell us a little about your story, “You’ll Never Be Lunch in this Town Again.”
Back in the day (‘the day’ being the late ‘80s) I read Book of the Dead, an anthology of zombie stories edited by John Skipp and Craig Spector. I was, and still am, a huge fan of zombie movies and was delighted to find that this book existed. I know it’s hard to imagine a time when there weren’t a lot of movies or books to choose from in that genre, but we lived in a time before the remake of Dawn of the Dead …
"[A] brilliant collection of truly creepy tales by horror's hottest voices! Dark, funny, heartbreaking, and bizarre. Highly recommended!"
-
Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of
V-Wars and
Glimpse
Scary Stories for a Good Cause. From Bram Stoker Award-nominated editor of the cult magazine
Morbid Curiosity comes
Tales for the Camp Fire, a new charity anthology of short stories to help support wildfire relief efforts. Through these pages roam werewolves, serial killers, a handful of ghosts, plenty of zombies, Cthulhu cultists, mad scientists, and a pair of conjoined twins.
Tell us a little about your story, “My True Name.”
Two key elements helped in the creation of this story. The first was I had a passing thought about Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, wanting to write something that relates—two drifters roaming the countryside—though I kind of twisted that idea into this horrific vision. The second element deals with names …
"[A] brilliant collection of truly creepy tales by horror's hottest voices! Dark, funny, heartbreaking, and bizarre. Highly recommended!"
-
Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of
V-Wars and
Glimpse
Scary Stories for a Good Cause. From Bram Stoker Award-nominated editor of the cult magazine
Morbid Curiosity comes
Tales for the Camp Fire, a new charity anthology of short stories to help support wildfire relief efforts. Through these pages roam werewolves, serial killers, a handful of ghosts, plenty of zombies, Cthulhu cultists, mad scientists, and a pair of conjoined twins.
Tell us a little about your story, “Folie à Deux.”
“Folie à Deux” grew out of the desire to tell a fractured story, built from a series of found documents, by unreliable narrators. I wanted to write something that built on Lovecraft and Machen and their cosmicism and supernaturalism …
"[A] brilliant collection of truly creepy tales by horror's hottest voices! Dark, funny, heartbreaking, and bizarre. Highly recommended!"
-
Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of
V-Wars and
Glimpse
Scary Stories for a Good Cause. From Bram Stoker Award-nominated editor of the cult magazine
Morbid Curiosity comes
Tales for the Camp Fire, a new charity anthology of short stories to help support wildfire relief efforts. Through these pages roam werewolves, serial killers, a handful of ghosts, plenty of zombies, Cthulhu cultists, mad scientists, and a pair of conjoined twins.
Tell us a little about your story, “Leaving the #9.”
The story follows Adelia, a working class cook who has worked long and hard for a better life and is finally able to take that next step. With her are her brother, Miguel, and a client turned best friend turned “the grandma I never had.” Her sense of reality is shaken when strange occurrences begin to disrupt her attempts to achieve her dream. The setting was inspired by the ongoing gentrification and displacement of the Mission, San Francisco’s historically Latinx neighborhood. A reader described it as “[a] wonderful ghost story …
"[A] brilliant collection of truly creepy tales by horror's hottest voices! Dark, funny, heartbreaking, and bizarre. Highly recommended!"
-
Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of
V-Wars and
Glimpse
Scary Stories for a Good Cause. From Bram Stoker Award-nominated editor of the cult magazine
Morbid Curiosity comes
Tales for the Camp Fire, a new charity anthology of short stories to help support wildfire relief efforts. Through these pages roam werewolves, serial killers, a handful of ghosts, plenty of zombies, Cthulhu cultists, mad scientists, and a pair of conjoined twins.
Tell us a little about your story, “River Twice.”
A friend of mine once told me he would take a bullet in the knees for his daughters. Having observed him with his family for years, I truly believe he would have (though I never tested it). But one of the horrors of life is betrayal by people you should trust—friends, lovers, family—which is matched only by the horror they feel when you betray them. So I decided to write about that …
"[A] brilliant collection of truly creepy tales by horror's hottest voices! Dark, funny, heartbreaking, and bizarre. Highly recommended!"
-
Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of
V-Wars and
Glimpse
Scary Stories for a Good Cause. From Bram Stoker Award-nominated editor of the cult magazine
Morbid Curiosity comes
Tales for the Camp Fire, a new charity anthology of short stories to help support wildfire relief efforts. Through these pages roam werewolves, serial killers, a handful of ghosts, plenty of zombies, Cthulhu cultists, mad scientists, and a pair of conjoined twins.
Tell us a little about your story, “John Wilson.”
John Wilson came about by accident. The un-named narrator was a character in a novella I was working on. She only had a couple of lines, but I figured I needed to know more about her, so I wrote a character background. When I was done, I realized that what I’d basically done was write a short story about her …
"[A] brilliant collection of truly creepy tales by horror's hottest voices! Dark, funny, heartbreaking, and bizarre. Highly recommended!"
-
Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of
V-Wars and
Glimpse
Scary Stories for a Good Cause. From Bram Stoker Award-nominated editor of the cult magazine
Morbid Curiosity comes
Tales for the Camp Fire, a new charity anthology of short stories to help support wildfire relief efforts. Through these pages roam werewolves, serial killers, a handful of ghosts, plenty of zombies, Cthulhu cultists, mad scientists, and a pair of conjoined twins.
Tell us a little about your story, “Graffiti Sonata.”
An artist is under stress; he’s lost his ability to make art, and his wife and child are leaving him. Incidentally he notices some strange freeway graffiti that moves. The two events overlap.
Was there any specific inspiration for the graffiti in your story?
I was looking at some Freeway graffiti and thought what if graffiti moved? The story is built around that what if …
"[A] brilliant collection of truly creepy tales by horror's hottest voices! Dark, funny, heartbreaking, and bizarre. Highly recommended!"
-
Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of
V-Wars and
Glimpse
Scary Stories for a Good Cause. From Bram Stoker Award-nominated editor of the cult magazine
Morbid Curiosity comes
Tales for the Camp Fire, a new charity anthology of short stories to help support wildfire relief efforts. Through these pages roam werewolves, serial killers, a handful of ghosts, plenty of zombies, Cthulhu cultists, mad scientists, and a pair of conjoined twins.
Tell us a little about your story, “Fable of the Box.”
It’s a story about wanting to be more than you think you are, and how that takes you places you would not expect, and maybe shouldn’t go. There are a lot of other influences packed in there too. I’ve always been fascinated by the Sumerians’ idea of the underworld, where instead of receiving a reward for your actions in life you become a shadow of what you once were …
"[A] brilliant collection of truly creepy tales by horror's hottest voices! Dark, funny, heartbreaking, and bizarre. Highly recommended!"
-
Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of
V-Wars and
Glimpse
Scary Stories for a Good Cause. From Bram Stoker Award-nominated editor of the cult magazine
Morbid Curiosity comes
Tales for the Camp Fire, a new charity anthology of short stories to help support wildfire relief efforts. Through these pages roam werewolves, serial killers, a handful of ghosts, plenty of zombies, Cthulhu cultists, mad scientists, and a pair of conjoined twins.
Tell us a little about your story, “Still Life with Shattered Glass.”
“Still Life” was directly inspired by taking MFA Creative Writing classes at the University of Michigan. My classmates’ more literary stories were grounded in theories of art, when I just wanted to explore as many genres as possible. This was back in the day, when students were strongly encouraged to write what they knew. A lot of them (me included) only knew living with our childhood families or trying to adjust to roommates at college. None of us had much life experience to draw on. We read an awful lot of roommate stories.
I set out to write a story about a bad roommate.
"[A] brilliant collection of truly creepy tales by horror's hottest voices! Dark, funny, heartbreaking, and bizarre. Highly recommended!"
-
Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of
V-Wars and
Glimpse
Scary Stories for a Good Cause. From Bram Stoker Award-nominated editor of the cult magazine
Morbid Curiosity comes
Tales for the Camp Fire, a new charity anthology of short stories to help support wildfire relief efforts. Through these pages roam werewolves, serial killers, a handful of ghosts, plenty of zombies, Cthulhu cultists, mad scientists, and a pair of conjoined twins.
Tell us a little about your story, “Seven Seconds.”
I got interested in the guillotine and read several nonfiction books about it. I learned that some people believe there are seven seconds that elapse from the time of beheading to the moment of death. I was scared and intrigued by what you might see in your seven seconds …
"[A] brilliant collection of truly creepy tales by horror's hottest voices! Dark, funny, heartbreaking, and bizarre. Highly recommended!"
-
Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of
V-Wars and
Glimpse
Scary Stories for a Good Cause. From Bram Stoker Award-nominated editor of the cult magazine
Morbid Curiosity comes
Tales for the Camp Fire, a new charity anthology of short stories to help support wildfire relief efforts. Through these pages roam werewolves, serial killers, a handful of ghosts, plenty of zombies, Cthulhu cultists, mad scientists, and a pair of conjoined twins.
Tell us a little about your story, “The Quarry.”
Sure! “The Quarry” is a short story about a bunch of kids out messing around in the height of summer—and then things go south for them. It was inspired by memories of goofing around with my best friends when we were kids, swimming in Lake Anza in the Berkeley hills, as well as a camping trip I took with my family a few years ago on the Eel River.
"[A] brilliant collection of truly creepy tales by horror's hottest voices! Dark, funny, heartbreaking, and bizarre. Highly recommended!"
-
Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of
V-Wars and
Glimpse
Scary Stories for a Good Cause. From Bram Stoker Award-nominated editor of the cult magazine
Morbid Curiosity comes
Tales for the Camp Fire, a new charity anthology of short stories to help support wildfire relief efforts. Through these pages roam werewolves, serial killers, a handful of ghosts, plenty of zombies, Cthulhu cultists, mad scientists, and a pair of conjoined twins.
Tell us a little about your story, “Cooking with Rodents.”
There are a few life forms on our planet that almost universally elicit a response of horror in humans. Some people can keep their cool in the presence of spiders, scorpions, and snakes, though it takes an effort. Rats, though—I’ve seen even exterminators shiver at the prospect of entering a dark crawlspace that smells like rats. It’s an unsurprising fact about horror writers that we sometimes sit around thinking about the most disgusting things imaginable, and often stories come out of this process. Eating a rat is about the most disgusting thing I can think of doing. I wrote this story 25 years ago …
"[A] brilliant collection of truly creepy tales by horror's hottest voices! Dark, funny, heartbreaking, and bizarre. Highly recommended!"
-
Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of
V-Wars and
Glimpse
Scary Stories for a Good Cause. From Bram Stoker Award-nominated editor of the cult magazine
Morbid Curiosity comes
Tales for the Camp Fire, a new charity anthology of short stories to help support wildfire relief efforts. Through these pages roam werewolves, serial killers, a handful of ghosts, plenty of zombies, Cthulhu cultists, mad scientists, and a pair of conjoined twins.
