"Family at Dinner" / Shroud Magazine / Issue 6 (Summer 2009)

After spending years, literally, on the maybe list of two major magazines (one ended up folding, I finally pulled it from the other), my surreal story "Family at Dinner" has been accepted for publication in the new horror magazine Shroud (http://www.shroudmagazine.com/). This is a slick horror print magazine which has been gaining quite a reputation. The story is slated to appear in the upcoming issue 6 this Spring. This will be the first issue for Shroud's new major distribution program, so the magazine should be available at most every Barnes & Noble and more!

Check out the line up of this issue, L.L.Soares, Rick Hautala, Bev Vincent, and a ton of other incredible writers. This one's going to be quite cool.

"True Fashion" (flash fiction) / Jack Haringa Must Die! / June 2008

Jack Haringa Must Die!

This short-short, in which I kill fellow scribe Jack Haringa in a men's clothes store, was first debuted in my blog as part of Kill Jack haringa In Your Blog Day (a joke birthday gift orchestrated by fellow writers Nick Kaufmann and Paul Tremblay), has now been collected into an anothology of 22 other entries, all originally published in the author's respective blogs on that fateful day. For fun, but also as a fund-raiser for the new Shirley Jackson Awards. Check it out, it's only ten bucks. Order directly from the publisher and they'll earn more towards the award

"Box" / Coach's Midnight Diner 2 (Spring 2009) & Relief Journal (Summer 2008)

Honorable Mention in Ellen Datlow's Best Horror of the Year, Volume 1!

Fellow writer Michelle Pendergrass, who is co-editing this anthology, a follow-up to the successful Coach's Midnight Diner, invited me to write a story. CMD is an interesting mix of Christian themes with horror, not soft or sanitized, no rules, hard horror but which deals in some way with faith. I did some free writing, word association, came up with the image of someone living in a box, and went from there. Personally, though the subject of the story is rather grim and serious, I have to admit it was one of the most enjoyable writing sessions I had with a piece. Also, all humility aside, I think it's one of my best stories in a long, long time. Special thanks to Holly Wang, who works with my wife Janet, who got hold for me phonetic translations of selected lines of dialogue from English to Mandarin Chinese. This dialogue adds a lot to the story, on many levels.

The stories in this anthology are tremendous! "Box" was also featured in Relief Journal 2.2, as a way of promoting the anthology (it was this appearance that garnered the Honorable Mention above). Relief is a tremendous (and refreshingly-liberal) Christian literary magazine.

"Lavish" (reprint, transated into Hungarian as "Bőség" / Galaktika Science Fiction / January 2008

"Lavish", my short story which inspired the novel Margaret's Ark, is now appearing in the Hungarian science fiction magazine Galaktika (the January 2008 issue). I'm sharing the magazine with the likes of Harlan Ellison, which is very cool indeed. The story title is translated as "Bőség".