Tag Archives: horror

My short story “Blood Trail” Accepted for Publication in “Zehlreg Augustus Grindstone’s Spectacular Western Oddity Emporium”

western

Screen capture from hyperion-tales.com

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I don’t have a lot of details yet, but my “E.E. Durban, Occult Consulting Detective” short story “Blood Trail” has been accepted for publication by End of the World Publishing.

The theme is called Zehlreg Augustus Grindstone’s Spectacular Western Oddity Emporium and is “where the Wild West meets the vast worlds of Fantasy!”

More specifically:

Our theme is intentionally broad to allow would-be contributors to rustle the dogies of their imaginations as freely as possible. A few ideas we have had, purely as examples, are: What would it be like if there had been dwarves around for the California gold rush? What animals elves or orcs might drive and what antics might ensue? How would a saloon fight go if some folks in the saloon were magic users? For that matter, what would magic look like/be used for and how would the general populace use it? Show us Sitting Bull with magic that controls water! Show us ghost riders chasing the Devil’s herd! Show us Billy the Kid with a wand! Or on a dragon! Or both! Show us Annie Oakley, Magic Missile Sharp-shooter! The possibilities are endless.

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Book Review: “Pines” (2012) by Blake Crouch

pines

© James Pyles

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I found out about the SciFi/Mystery novel Pines by Blake Crouch when I was looking up something totally unrelated. I had watched (again) the pilot episode to the 1966 Irwin Allen TV show The Time Tunnel and was wondering why the government would want to invent time travel.

Time travel, contrary to popular fiction, isn’t easily weaponized. If you want to change the past and say prevent anyone else besides the U.S. acquiring nuclear weapons, it would be incredibly complicated. Unforeseen variables could cause all kinds of unanticipated results, assuming you could change your own timeline at all.

It gets complex and it’s not the focus of this review. In one article I read, Blake Crouch said that changing time would most likely not be possible. If you tried to, as in the Back to the Future movies, prevent Marty’s Mom and Dad from meeting in 1955 so they couldn’t get married and ‘make” Marty, time would find another way for them to get together and sustain history.

I became curious about Crouch and looked up his books, finding the Wayward Pines novel series. My local library had a copy of “Pines,” so I checked it out.

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Guardian

camping

PHOTO PROMPT © AJ Wilson

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Some idiot family from the suburbs thinks owning an SUV gives them license to off-road to a wilderness area and then trash it. I bet they think taking the little kiddies down to the lake is some sort of adventure. Those trails haven’t been used in years and with good reason.

I walk over to the blue foldout chair, have a seat, and wait. Fortunately, he doesn’t come out until dark. With any luck I can get these people out of here before he wakes up. As the guardian, I’m the only thing between this family and an immortal killer.

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Movie Review of “M3GAN” (2022)

megan

© James Pyles

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Last night (as I write this), I watched the 2022 horror film M3GAN.I normally don’t watch horror films. I’m not overly fond of being terrified and calling it “entertainment.” However, I do have an interest in AI and humanoid robots. So a few days ago, when I saw the Blu-Ray at my local public library, I decided to give it a whirl.

The disc gave me the choice of watching the theatrical version (PG-13) or the unrated version (anything goes). Naturally, I selected the latter.

The story begins with a little girl (Violet McGraw as Cady) in a car with her parents going on a ski trip. The girl is playing with an advanced robotic furry doll run from her tablet and invented by her aunt. Snow in the ground, icy roads, fog, and a snowplow out of nowhere, and the parents die in a car crash.

Meanwhile her aunt Gemma (Allison Williams) who is supposed to be developing a better, cheaper furry AI doll with her team Tess (Jen Van Epps) and Cole (Brian Jordan Alvarez) are actually working on a prototype “child” android named M3GAN (Model 3 Generative Android).

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Secret Sequel to “Shoot the Devil” Coming Soon


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You may recall that I have a short story in the anthology Shoot the Devil called “Wolf in the Wind”, which by the way, seems to be doing pretty well. It’s got 91% four and five star ratings on Amazon.

There is a sequel coming out soon which I can’t really talk about yet, but it’s the same basic theme set against a completely different background. My story was a lot of fun to write.

However where a number of other stories in the first book were more strictly in the realm of spirituality and the supernatural, mine also included elements of steampunk, if you imagine that, and set in the 1880s in Idaho City, Idaho (which is a real place that exists today).

I’m writing this because ahead of the sequel’s publication, the publisher and we ten authors, are asking for more reviews of the first book.

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Night Delivery

sat

Image source: Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie

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Motionless, she stood gazing down the tunnel. The path extended as far as the eye could see, encased by walls of grimy bricks. That wasn’t very far since Colleen’s flashlight battery seemed to be dying.

“Not now when I’m so close.” She didn’t dare speak out loud. It was bad enough that they could find her by her light, but without it, she would be blind.

She readjusted her backpack, the load seeming to get heavier with every step. Colleen asked herself for the thousandth time that night if the job was really worth it. It paid well enough so tuition and textbooks weren’t a problem but that was because of the potential danger.

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“Wolf in the Wind” Now Available in the Anthology, “Shoot the Devil”

shoot the devil

Cover art for the anthology “Shoot the Devil.”

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It wasn’t supposed to come out until October 1st, but the anthology was just “too extreme for pre-order.” Available on Amazon right now in both digital and paperback the Crucifixion Press anthology Shoot the Devil: Ten Tales of Humans Defeating the Demonic. The Amazon blurb says:

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“Wolf in the Wind” Appears in “Shoot the Devil” Anthology October 1st

shoot the devil

Cover art for the anthology “Shoot the Devil.”

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My steampunk, occult, horror, western short story “Wolf in the Wind” will appear in the Crucifixion Press anthology “Shoot the Devil” on or about October 1, 2022.

Too often, the modern world wants us to avoid confrontation, to pretend that evil doesn’t exist, that the bad guy is always misunderstood, “the hero of his own story”. Even when people can be bothered to admit that evil exists, they just encourage us to be ‘nice’. To be ‘understanding’ and ‘compassionate’. Anything but actually facing the evil and driving it out with extreme prejudice.

-From the Foreword by Eric Postma

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Coming in October in a New Anthology: “Wolf in the Wind”

wolf teaser

Promotional image from Crucifixion Press

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My short story “Wolf in the Wind” was accepted some months ago for a new anthology, but it won’t see the light of day (so to speak) until October. Until then, here’s a small taste.

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Review of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Ep9, “All Those Who Wander”

wander

Scene from Star Trek Strange New Worlds episode “All Those Who Wander”

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Finally got to Star Trek: Strange New Worlds ep 9 All Those Who Wander. We’re near the wrap up of the first season. This one is the horror movie, monster episode. It’s been compared to Alien (1979), Aliens (1986), Predator (1987), and if you factor in the cold, to The Thing (1982).

The Enterprise is already on a priority mission to deliver materials to space station K7, without which, all the station’s systems including life support will shut down. Now they’ve been ordered to find a lost starship, the USS Peregrine, which isn’t a Constitution class starship but sure looks like one. It transmitted a distress signal four days ago before crash landing on a desolate L class planet and has not been heard from since. The planet’s atmosphere blocks communication and transporter functions.

Pike decides to lead an away mission in two shuttles, allowing the Enterprise to complete it’s task at K7.

This is also a farewell party, complete with Pike’s cooking, for the cadets, Uhura plus two we haven’t met before, one receiving a promotion to Lieutenant. That means they are the “red shirts” and are sure to die.

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