FICTION
The Mad Ophelias
A few weeks before the plant exploded, the local sheriff found a barefoot young woman in a hospital gown limping down the middle of the road nearby. It was pitch-dark out, a thick layer of clouds blotting out all the stars in the night sky. She was shivering in the autumn cold, hair shorn to where he could see the #MadOphelia tattoo inked on her scalp.
The woman carried what looked like a soccer ball made of clear plastic. It appeared heavy, not like it was filled with air, but water. A glistening, fleshy tube connected the ball to somewhere under her gown. The glare of his cruiser’s headlights illuminated what was inside the ball.
An unmistakable, curled-up fetus.
In an alternate yet all-too-familiar reality, an organization of women called The Mad Ophelias was labeled terrorists after the gruesome bombing of a Patriot Keepers rally. Rumor has it they’re also behind the attack on a research lab experimenting with artificial wombs.
Are they really responsible? What’s their true agenda? The head of the movement will speak only to a professor if the interview airs live. But is that just a setup for something even worse, this time with the whole world watching?
From J. Lincoln Fenn, author of Poe, Dead Souls and The Nightmarchers, The Mad Ophelias is a horror thriller that explores a gender war pushed to mad extremes.
Read the first chapters for free on Substack
The Nightmarchers
From the award-winning author of Dead Souls and Poe comes a bone-chilling novel where a mysterious island holds the terrifying answers to a woman’s past and future.
In 1939, on a remote Pacific island, botanical researcher Irene Greer plunges off a waterfall to her death, convinced the spirits of her dead husband and daughter had joined the nightmarchers—ghosts of ancient warriors that rise from their burial sites on moonless nights. But was it suicide, or did a strange young missionary girl, Agnes, play a role in Irene's deteriorating state of mind?
It all seems like ancient family history to Julia Greer, who has enough problems of her own. A struggling journalist, she’s recovering from a divorce and is barely able to make rent, let alone appeal the court’s decision to give sole custody of their daughter to her ex-husband. When her elderly great-aunt offers her an outrageously large sum to travel to this remote island and collect samples of a very peculiar flower, as well as find out what really happened to her sister Irene all those years ago, Julia thinks her life might finally be on an upward swing. She’s also tasked to connect with the island’s Church of Eternal Light, which her great-aunt suspects knows more about Irene’s tragic death than they’ve said.
But Julia finds this place isn’t so quick to give up its secrets. The Church is tight-lipped about the deaths that have contributed to its oddly large cemetery, as well as Irene’s final fate. The only person who seems to know more is a fellow traveler, Noah Cooper, who thinks that Julia’s not the only one on a mission to find the rare flower...which, if the rumors are true, could have world-changing properties.
What Julia does know is that the longer she stays on the island, the more the thin line begins to blur between truth and lies, reality and the fantastical...until she finds herself face to face with the real reason why the island is taboo...
Dead Souls
A relentless, devil-deal horror thriller about immortal souls, from the award-winning author of the acclaimed novel Poe.
When marketing executive Fiona Dunn walks into a bar feeling defeated, she chalks a charming stranger’s claim of being the Devil up to a drunken pickup line. But a few drinks in, he offers her a wish in exchange for her immortal soul—and a mysterious “favor” to be called in later—Fiona takes the bait.
Bad idea. Now Fiona’s part of a hidden circle of “dead souls” whose reckless bargains with the devil have bound them to unspeakable acts. Each carries a business-card contract, and each lives in dread of that blank “Favor” finally being called in.
As bodies start piling up, and favors are called in one by one, Fiona realizes that the true horror is not the deal—it’s the terrifying, inevitable price. Racing the Devil’s deadline, she must outwit the master of Hell himself…or lose more than her soul.
Dark, gripping and twist-filled, Dead Souls blends supernatural suspense, occult horror and Faustian dread in a high-stakes thriller you won’t be able to put down.
Poe
Winner of the 2013 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award in
Sci-fi/Fantasy/Horror
It's Halloween and life is grim for twenty-three-year-old Dimitri Petrov. It’s the one-year anniversary of his parents’ deaths, he’s stuck on page one thousand of his Rasputin zombie novel, and he makes his living writing obituaries. But things turn from bleak to terrifying when Dimitri gets a last-minute assignment to cover a séance at the reputedly haunted Aspinwall Mansion.
There, Dimitri meets Lisa, a punk-rock drummer he falls hard for. But just as he’s about to ask her out, he unwittingly unleashes malevolent forces, throwing him into a deadly mystery. When Dimitri wakes up, he is in the morgue—icy cold and haunted by a cryptic warning given by a tantalizing female spirit. As town residents begin to turn up gruesomely murdered, Dimitri must play detective in his own story and unravel the connections among his family, the Aspinwall Mansion, the female spirit, and the secrets held in a pair of crumbling antiquarian books. If he doesn’t, it’s quite possible Lisa will be the next victim.
Multi-award-winning editor Michael Bailey brings you the next volume of the You, Human series, with fiction illustrated throughout by L.A. Spooner, poetry illustrations by Orion Zangara, and an introduction by Maxwell I. Gold. Volume 2 contains poetry by Linda D. Addison on the Three Laws of Humanity, along with 12 novelettes by today's masters (and a few newcomers) of dark science fiction.
An anthology of dark science fiction and fantasy,co-edited by Darren Speegle and Michael Bailey. Prisms are instruments, mirrors, metaphors, gateways humankind must pass through in order to achieve, to overcome, to realize, to become. Contained herein are nineteen transformative tales from some of speculative fiction’s most brilliant minds. So open your eyes and let the light pass through . . .
The end of December is different. Dead dark, bleak and without remorse. The wind that had a pleasant briskness to it just a few weeks ago now has a knife’s edge...At Halloween the veil between worlds grows thin, but in winter it’s ripped clean open, and in the unrelenting cold we see straight through to the other side. And the other side sees straight into us. It is not a time for revelry. It is a time for ghost stories.
