"Beneath the Pier," one of my most recent little tales of fear, horror, dread, and woe, is now live at Lovecraft e-Zine (issue #21). The online edition is free. You can get the entire issue for your Kindle or Nook for $2.99, or the podcast edition for 99¢. Here's a little teaser from "Beneath the Pier":
Mercer was only fifty, but they called him "Old Grand-dad," like the
whiskey, because he had made the trip to Lufford Bay every year since
the others were adolescents and his weathered features and thin, sandy
hair made him look wise—or perhaps more apt, battered but unbeaten.
He liked these young people; six of them this year: the sons and
daughters of his companions from trips long past, when the highway
between Georgetown and Charleston was little more than a rutted,
two-lane passage through the pine forests, cotton fields, and marshes.
The highway was bigger and better paved now, but once you left it for
the narrow, sandy roads that snaked toward the bay, you went back a
hundred years, or thousands, into a lonely, primeval landscape that once
had been the domain only of pioneers, pirates, and the Swamp Fox.
Once each year they came, early in the autumn, while the ocean was
warm even as a chill began to overtake the nights. There was too much
marsh and mud here for hotels and tourists, so Lufford remained mostly
unspoiled by humans. Nature, however, had smashed it time and again with
wind and water, leaving behind vast networks of black, reed-ridden
pools and scattered clusters of only the sturdiest oaks, their branches
choked and dripping with Spanish moss, their trunks gnarled, bent, and
knotted. The beach cabin looked as if the slightest breeze might topple
it, yet it had withstood five decades of storms and might stand for just
as many more. Its dark bulk squatted atop a balustrade of bowed stilts,
its sharply angled roof crooked but sturdy, its seams still sealed
against the elements. Mercer didn’t remember what color it might have
been, all the paint long since stripped, the splintered wooden siding
now as gray as ancient cobweb. His father had built the house to endure.
The two four-wheel drive vehicles rattled and shuddered as they
pulled up next to the cabin, their bodies and tires coated with fine
gray sand. Mercer drove the lead truck; he always drove. Without a word
to his companions, he shoved the door open and dropped into a bed of
sand that swallowed his feet to his ankles. The others disembarked
slowly, sighing and groaning after the long drive from Chapel Hill. The
late afternoon sun was hot, almost stifling, but within the hour, the
ocean breeze would turn cool, and come nightfall, a roaring fire would
feel like heaven.
"I thirst," Ted Wakefield rumbled, stretching his arms out, Christ-like. "Rum, I think."
Check out the issue — if there's not too much seriously wrong with you (or maybe if there is), you'll love the hell out of it. Also on board are authors Joe Pulver, Gerry Huntman, Tom Lynch, and Wilum H. Pugmire; artists Nick Gucker, Mike Dominic, Stephen Lukac, Robert Elrod, Leslie Herzfeld, and Adam Baker; and audio readers Vincent LaRosa, Chaz Engan, David Binks, Lew Columbus, and Morgan Scorpion. Lovecraft e-Zine is edited by Mike Davis.