In the tradition of those vintage 5-song extended play vinyl EPs, here are five new short stories, in genres ranging from historical to supernatural and psychological horror. This 52-page trade paperback as well as an e-book can be ordered here.
An 80K-word military thriller, just recently completed (11/24) in its third (and hopefully final!) re-write, pulling much of its realism from the two-and-a-half years I spent (1980-82) on active duty at Naval Station Adak, in the Aleutians of Alaska, I’m currently searching for an agent to take it on!
You can preorder the Kindle edition HERE!
Allie and her mom are hard at work recreating the dress of a nineteenth-century ancestor Clare Rapple for the upcoming Founder’s Day celebration. Nate, newly arrived in Rappleville after losing both parents in a terrible car accident, wishes for one last chance to talk to them one last time.
Both teenagers find themselves caught up in the web of the local Legend of The Ringing Rocks: the Ghost Notes, and the secret of possibly bringing the dead back to life. What Allie and Nate don’t realize is that the Ghost Notes might bring back more than fabled ancestors, or lost loved ones. The Ghost Notes might also bring back bad things, creatures, nightmares…
My first novel.
Philadelphia, 1983: Who is walking the streets of this city, committing crazed, inhuman acts only on victims with very particular things in common? Is it a serial killer, or is the monster stalking the cobbled streets of this ancient city something else, something even older, more insane, more unspeakable than the homicide detective charged with solving the murders can possibly imagine? After all, who could imagine the Bone Worms?
My fourth story collection.
Sixteen science fiction stories, all of my previously published SF plus a new one, with illustrations, and story notes. No horror, fantasy, or dark suspense…just all SF.
My second novel.
There has been a death on the University campus. Chloe Hutchins, a painting major at the Art College, has been found hanging from a tree in the campus orchard, with a rope dyed purple. Was it a performance art project gone terribly wrong? Or perhaps a suicide? Or something else?
Ed Schuyler, the detective from the County Barracks assigned to the case, is open to the ideas of both accident or suicide as the cause. As for the other, though…murder?
My second story collection.
Seventeen stories, over half published here for the first time, spanning the same range of genres (horror, SF, dark suspense) as Keith's previous collection "It's For You", with fourteen full-page interior illustrations drawn by the author, and an introduction by Tony Tremblay. Also included is the first act of Keith's new supernatural mystery novel "Dog Star".
Cy is a student at a major university in upstate New York. He is an art major, studying painting. He is also haunted. He survived a horrific automobile accident when he was just five, an accident that took the lives of both of his parents. So who is haunting Cy? And perhaps just as importantly: why?
My first story collection.
Nineteen career-spanning stories (five that are original to this collection) of horror, SF, fantasy and dark suspense ... all of them dark rides, dark speculations ... of people and monsters, and every shadow in between. Profusely illustrated by the author, with an Introduction by Bram Stoker Award winner Norman Prentiss, and extensive Story Notes.
My third story collection.
READ ME, a novella, is a mystery story and a ghost story combined, and fits hand-in-glove with nine other ghost stories in this collection, including two new stories, “The Retirement” and “The Wrinkle”, published here for the first time.
Under one cover: The novel The Bone Worms, and the two related long stories: Up in the Boneyard, and Close the Door.
LTJG Charlie Lang is Officer-of-the-Deck on his first midwatch aboard his new ship, a Navy frigate, somewhere in the North Atlantic. What he and the rest of the crew on the bridge encounter, entering into the edge of the radar sweep on a collision course, is the horrific stuff of this little SF tale.
Arthur Hubbard just purchased another painting for his NYC art gallery: an Expressionist portrait of a red-headed woman in a lurid green dress. He already owns two others, all different paintings, all by different artists, but the subject, the redhead in a green dress, is the same. Why is Arthur so compelled to seek out more paintings, more portraits, of her? The most important question, however, is: why is she haunting him?
Corporate has sent Ed to a field office in a city he has never visited before, to 'clean house'. Since this will take time, a rental property is arranged in an old row house in an old section of the city. Ed's 'hatchet-man' work at the field office over the next several weeks is unpleasant enough, but there was one thing he didn't count on: the strange door through the common wall - a door which shouldn't be there - connecting to the house next door ... and what he finds on the other side.
Mark and his parents are thinking of moving across town to a fine old sprawling Victorian, one with a tower room above one of the front bedrooms upstairs. Mark's parents offer that bedroom to Mark. A new bedroom with his own private tower? But when he takes the steep ladder-stairs from the bedroom up to the tower for the first time, Mark has an overwhelming feeling that this tower room, and the house itself, must be haunted…
Mix paleontologists and physicists at a remote dig in Wyoming, both in search of a 20-ton carnivore, the former group for the bones, and the latter for a live specimen. What could possibly go wrong?
What could possibly go wrong by adding a small blue-glass figurine of a cat, purchased for just a dollar at the local care-and-share shop, to the figurine collection on the parlor mantel? What could go wrong, horribly, ghastly wrong, indeed!
KILLER is a murder mystery. The murders themselves are not mysterious, but why Cal – alone now on his farm with only his cats and dog for company – committed them, tells the tale.
Charles Midwich, a recent retiree, decides to move to a new state, a new town, an entirely new life and lifestyle. What he finds once he gets there, and settles in, is nothing like what he ever expected.
This story, first published in Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine in 1985, concerns a crew of 23rd-century pirates on a voyage of discovery and plunder. Their course is south, from the Catskill Archipelago into unknown waters, in search of the fabled Empire State.
A quarreling couple driving in a nighttime fog find a safe haven at a roadside diner. What they find inside solves their argument, but not in the way they expect.
Professor Declan Curraugh is returning from a secret monastery in Ireland to a classified military archeological dig in the Aleutians with bad news. He knows the only solution to the crisis at hand, the answer to a mystery that only he can solve.
Tim returns his wife's body to Maine to be buried in her family's cemetery plot on the mainland. What he doesn't know is that her grandfather has other ideas ... an island funeral.
The Red Rangers, a secret club of ten-year-old friends, are waging war against Moon Ash & Rubbish from their clubhouse fort in the vacant lot across the street. The Rangers soon discover, however, that the trash company has a secret weapon against their sling-shot marbles. A horrific, deadly weapon. In the holes.
Edward, an android tasked with shepherding two rich clients on an interstellar voyage, is faced with an impossible choice: follow their orders, or break one of the prime Laws of Robotics.
A young orphaned boy named Obe, who is nothing more than a servant in a remote mountain-pass inn, is befriended one Winter's night by a lone traveller, a wizard, the boy discovers, a Gelder Lord, who has a story to tell him, and a wondrous yet deadly secret to share.
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David Brown knows a lot of things. He works in the Chestnut Street Public Library as a book runner, and he knows there are two-hundred and thirty-seven concrete sidewalk squares between the front stoop of his apartment house to the front steps of the library, and fifteen steps to the library’s two front doors. He also knows where every single one of the ten-thousand six-hundred and eighty-three library books are located in the back stacks…until one day, when he discovers a book in the stacks he has never seen before…
What would you do if someone takes a pot-shot at your car as you travel along a highway in the middle of nowhere? Most people would just count themselves lucky to be alive, pay the repair bill, and move on. Other people, though, might decide to do something else…
Little Juanita is very sick, and her big brother Augustin is carrying her on his back, trying to reach the nearest doctor. The doctor will demand money, however, so along the way, Augustin is forced to beg…
In this science fiction tale set several centuries in the future, a brother and sister are investigating an ancient part of their House where the walls no longer move, and the House no longer answers their questions, and there is no one to help them in their search for … The Can Man.
In this Post-Apocalypse tale, Mal is a hunter-gatherer for The Nest. Whenever he finds something with metals, or is edible to bring back, he either collects it, or kills it. On one foray, he finds two things: something edible, fresh meat, ready to go on the hooks in The Nest's galley for that day's meal…and a present for his ailing daughter, to ease her pain, and maybe make her smile.
Charlie, a recovering alcoholic, volunteers to help look for his neighbor's boy, lost in a snowstorm. Fighting his demons, Charlie discovers a rapidly disappearing trail of footprints in the snow, going off into the darkness of a farmer's field. What he finds at the end of that trail, tells the tale.
This is a story written especially for pre-teens.
Annie and her dad had routines. Every Thursday, after school, they went to the library to take out books for the week. That was a routine. Every Friday night they went to the movies, and shared a Super Colossal tub of popcorn. That was a routine, too. Saturday was Clean The Apartment Day, and a visit to some place special, like the park, or the zoo, or the museum with the dinosaur bones. Sunday was fresh donuts from the bakery at the corner, reading the newspaper funnies, and church. Monday nights they went food shopping at the supermarket, “Because on Mondays all the fruits and vegetables are the freshest,” her dad said. Routines, all of them.
Tuesday nights, Annie and her dad had another routine: on Tuesday nights, they did their laundry at the Laundromat. And that was where Annie met the old man with the long beard … and where the magic happened.
One by one, homicide detectives, both active and retired, are coming up dead. Is there something that links them? Some past case, perhaps? Could these be revenge killings? That's what Detective Frank Graham, the last detective standing, must try to figure out, before the murderer comes for him.
Mrs. McTeague's third-floor front room has not been let for over a year. Could it be that persistent draft that puts prospective tenants off? When one day a Mr. Aleph arrives to rent it, immediately, for cash, Mrs. McTeague can hardly believe her good fortune. That is, until Mr. Aleph's visitors begin arriving…and never leaving!
Harry lives in a future society where memories can be bought and sold. Most memories aren’t worth the time it takes to experience them, but Harry has one he is sure everyone wants and he is just as sure he will never sell it.
Sometimes revenge, and justice, comes at the end of a rope, in a neighborhood alley, with no way out.
There's something waiting, up there, in the Boneyard. Watch where you go; watch how high you go. The ones who live up in the Boneyard just might reach out…and drag you in.