THE HOUSE AT BLACK TOOTH POND—A Starred Review in Publishers Weekly!

WOOT! Publishers Weekly gives my newest novel, The House at Black Tooth Pond, a starred review.

“Rainey brings Lovecraftian horror to rural Virginia in this chilling tale...the grounded and believable characterization of his protagonists makes suspending disbelief easy. This is cosmic horror done right.” Publishers Weekly

I know this week falls in the middle of the Amazon boycott, but if you'd like an autographed copy of the paperback, just shoot me an email at mark (at) stephenmarkrainey (dot) com, and I can almost certainly accommodate you. The audiobook has just come out from Audible, narrated by the inimitable Joshua Saxon; so when the boycott is over, please avail yourself...

In the meantime, here is a list of retailers where you can buy the ebook.

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The House at Black Tooth Pond Review at Publishers Weekly

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THE HOUSE AT BLACK TOOTH POND: New Blurb, ARCs, Pre-orders

Author Michael Laimo just sent along a mighty fine blurb for The House at Black Tooth Pond, due in February from Crossroad Press. 'Tis here:

"Author Stephen Mark Rainey takes the abandoned house in the woods trope and turns it inside out as the walls of The House at Black Tooth Pond close in on the reader page by page, scene by scene. Rainey tells a dark, claustrophobic story bursting with atmosphere, with just enough dread to keep horror fans satisfied, and mystery to whet the appetites of thriller fans."—Michael Laimo, author of Dark Ride, Missed Connection, The Demonologist, and others

Reviewers: You may request a free, advance review copy (either paperback or ebook) from Crossroad Press here.

Pre-order your copy — either paperback or ebook — from Amazon.com here. The audiobook (narrated by Joshua Saxon) will be available in February 2025.

Coming in February 2025: THE HOUSE AT BLACK TOOTH POND

“Welcome to Aiken Mill, Virginia—The Cold Case Capital of the World.”
My new novel, The House at Black Tooth Pond, is scheduled for release by Macabre Ink (the horror imprint of Crossroad Press) in February 2025...and yes, I have the excitement!

AIKEN MILL, VA: A legend-haunted town in Sylvan County, located in a remote mountainous corner of the state. Now, a mutilated body has turned up in the town. During his investigation, Sheriff Bryce Parrott discovers frightening clues that lead him to believe that some inhuman force may be responsible for the killing.

While exploring the darkest corners of Sylvan County, psychology professor Martin Pritchett and his brother, Phillip, happen upon a crumbling, century-old house beside a body of water called Black Tooth Pond. A strange compulsion leads both men back to the house time and time again, but neither can remember any of the events that occur there.

As both Sheriff Parrott and the Pritchett brothers attempt to solve their respective mysteries, their paths begin to converge — paths that lead directly to the ancient, foreboding house at Black Tooth Pond.

Pre-orders will be available very soon. Stay tuned for more... much more!... about The House at Black Tooth Pond!

"Stephen Mark Rainey's talent is on display here like never before. His masterful use of imagery transported me to shadow-haunted Sylvan County. I heard the eerie cry of the whippoorwill, that cry that marks the presence of the evil entity that roams the woods and lurks within the walls of the house at Black Tooth Pond. You will hear it, too."—Mike Davis, The Lovecraft eZine

Cover art by J. Edward Neill; pen & ink rendering by me, circa 1990, of the actual house that is the basis for the setting in this novel.

WIP Excerpt: The House at Black Tooth Pond

Not very long ago, I wrote a haunted house story, titled "The House at Black Tooth Pond," for an upcoming anthology, which will be appearing later this year. I've made blog posts about the place I call Black Tooth Pond, which is inspired by an honest-to-God location here in Martinsville (the most recent blog being "Black Friday at Black Tooth Pond," Friday, November 25, 2023). For the story, I combined that real-life setting with another: an ancient, crumbling house my brother and I discovered not far from Martinsville in the early 1990s. I called it the House of Cabiness because, inside the place, I discovered a massive cache of old mail, all addressed to members of a certain Cabiness family. I suspect that place is long gone, since so little of it remained intact even then, but the memory of it has haunted me ever since.

The drawing above is one I did back when Brother Phred and I found the place.

I believe the story makes for a fine stand-alone tale, but the more I contemplated the idea, it felt like one that could be expanded into a full-length novel. So, quite recently, I set about scheming and plotting and plotting and scheming, and I came up with a workable novel project. At the moment, I'm roughly 30k words into the writing, so I thought I'd offer a little excerpt. Here she be:

#

As Martin sauntered along the walkway, mostly looking at his feet, he heard a deep, booming voice rising above the soft student babble around him. The voice was shouting, “Sinners, take heed! The end times are near! Take heed, all of ye!”

Oh, hell. One of the endless supply of proselytizers that seemed to target the campus more and more lately. They’d always been around, maybe even more so back in his university days, but there recently seemed to have been a resurgence.

The voice came from a huge, black-suited man, with wide, glittering eyes beneath a heavy brow. He stood on the walkway just shy of the stairs to Reynolds Hall. Unless Martin diverted around to the side door, he couldn't avoid walking directly in front of the fellow. In one hand, the man held a thick sheaf of papers—flyers or tracts, no doubt. None of the students passing nearby appeared to take even the vaguest notice of him.

Good for them.

As he approached, he kept his eyes down and walked by without the fellow taking any special notice of him.

Until he reached the stairs of Reynolds Hall. And then the deep voice bellowed, “Beware, Dr. Pritchett, the doom that came to Eden, the country of the snake!”

Martin whirled around, incredulous, and saw the figure standing on the walkway with one arm outstretched, pointing directly toward him.

“Do you not know what you have disturbed, Dr. Pritchett?"

He took a few steps back toward the towering figure. He’d never seen the man before in his life. How could he know his name? Maybe a former student? No. He didn't think so.

But those words. Martin knew them. They came from the pages he’d taken from the House of Cabiness. But no one besides his brother could be privy to what he’d done. No one else could have been out there to see him. Who could possibly know what was written on those ancient sheets?

No one.

No one alive.

#

Old Places, Old Friends

“It’s in the trees! It’s coming!”

Good friends and geocaching partners, Gerry (a.k.a. BigG7777) & Bridget (a.k.a. Suntigres), late of nearby Kernersville, moved to Florida last year, which certainly made Brugger and me sad, at least for our sakes. I know Gerry & Bridget couldn’t be happier with their place down there, and that’s what matters. But since they recently came back to Kville for one of their regular visits, Ms. B. and I spent an enjoyable evening with them last night — at a respectable distance! — with delicious appetizers, pizza, and a few bottles of excellent wine. The night was pleasantly chilly, so we sat around their firepit enjoying the company and goodies until the old people — one of them, at least — began to fade a bit.

This morning, I hit the highway and met the mad Floridians at a lovely little cache where we found a much-needed helping hand. This one earned favorite points for creativity, gruesomeness, and humor. From there, we moved southward a bit through Randolph County, which has seen a veritable explosion of new caches in the past few months, largely courtesy of one labchic1. The majority of them are park & grab hides — meaning they are quick and easy enough to park, jump out, grab the cache, sign the log, and move on in short order. Happily, today, we found ourselves in any number of appealing settings, several of them old and haunted (my favorite kind, believe it or not), including a nice old graveyard. (Sadly, we failed to find the cache at the graveyard; it is likely missing.)

As for settings, I was most taken with the remains of a gas station, which likely went back 50 to 75 years; the crumbling skeleton of an old mansion (oddly, with a decomposing truck trailer parked in front of it); and an old plant of some sort right on the Deep River in Coleridge, where Bridget and I had once unsuccessfully hunted a cache placed by Nefarious Beast Diefenbaker (a.k.a. Scott). I once returned to that plant at Nefarious Beast Diefenbaker’s behest and replaced his missing cache. That replacement eventually went missing, and the cache was archived. So, today, I quite enjoyed returning to the location to hunt a new cache, which we did find, though it took quite a dedicated search.

Gerry and Bridget will be returning to Florida this coming week, so it was great beyond great to spend some quality time with them, which has been in too short supply since they moved. I so hope that in the coming year the pandemic will subside sufficiently to permit less distance between us when we are in close proximity. Given the positive results of this past week’s election, I feel there’s somewhat more reason to have hope on that front.

And so let us hope.

Bridget: “I’m telling you, I SAW a dreadful apparition.” Gerry: “That was just Mark.”

Rest rooms are in the back.

Haunted

I expect the trailer is haunted too.

One of us, at least, is very happy.

The Spooky Place, Part II

Halloween 1974: young Mark gets to help design the Martinsville Jaycees’ haunted castle at The Spooky Place and thus has the most exhilarating Halloween of his life. Halloween 1982: somewhat older Mark again gets to help out at the haunted castle, this time playing both a mad scientist and a roving monster.

In 1982, in that period between graduating University of Georgia and moving to Chicago, I lived at home in Martinsville. Happily for me, the Jaycees again set up their haunted castle at the old Koehler Warehouse. I might mention here that each chamber in the castle was sponsored by various community organizations, and the wonderfully twisted mad scientist chamber was sponsored by, of all places, First United Methodist Church of Martinsville, which I had attended since my youngest days. Apparently, the church needed some warm bodies to man the chamber one evening, and they called me to see if I might be interested. Indeed I was. When I showed up to perform the dastardly deed, I met Blake, a young gentleman from the church, who told me he had brought refreshments as well as a few props to add to the authenticity of the set. The refreshments consisted of a cooler full of cold beer, the props a cooler full of warm animal entrails, courtesy of a local butcher shop.

Inside the mad scientist chamber, I found all kinds of scientific instruments, a black light, a lab table, and a hapless victim — in this case, a department store mannikin that had been chained to the table. What we ended up doing was cutting out a section of the dummy’s abdomen, dumping all that lovely offal inside, and covering it with a sheet. A young woman of our acquaintance stationed herself under the lab table, well out of sight of our visitors. We had a huge butcher knife on hand to facilitate the vivisection.

As the first group of visitors filed in, I explained that my experiments required certain contributions from living human beings, at which time I brandished the knife. The young lady under the table unleashed a barrage of blood curdling screams, and I thrust the blade into the mannikin’s abdomen. Joyously, I began scooping out the entrails, much to the disgust of our unsuspecting visitors. Now, I wasn’t wearing gloves or anything, just some scrubs and an apron. We didn’t have hand sanitizer in those days, so once covered in blood and guts, I was covered for the duration.

The first couple of groups seemed enthralled by the show, and I was having a fine time of it. By the third or fourth group, those entrails had begun smelling right pretty, and it wasn’t long before the aroma began to wend all through the various nearby chambers. Blake wanted to take a turn performing surgery, so I handed over the necessary accoutrements and went off to find a roving monster costume. I think I ended up being a werewolf. It was a hoot, of course, but now and again, folks downwind would detect my presence by the slightly tainted air preceding me.

At the end of the evening, Blake and I drank the rest of the beer, swapped stories about our experience, and parted ways happy. However, when I got home, my folks took one whiff of me and suggested I leave and never come back.

That night marked the end of my participation in the Jaycees’ haunted castle. Not as momentous as my first experience in 1974, to be sure, but it was a memorable and wonderfully disgusting evening.

I would do it again in a heartbeat — though, this time, I would make sure to have plenty of sanitizer on hand.

Read “The Spooky Place” Part 1 here.

The Spooky Place, Part I

Because I am reasonably old, I have quite a few Halloweens under my belt (although I am not that overweight), and a long list of favorite Halloween memories. For me as a youngster, Halloween was a special, thrilling time. In certain circles, it might be common knowledge that I was the world’s most terrified kid. I mean, up through my elementary school years, even into middle school, I spent a considerable percentage of my day-to-day life genuinely, heart-poundingly, mind-numbingly terrified. I am certain this innate, inexplicable terror was among the most motivating reasons for my becoming a writer of scary things once I grew up. I don’t know whether Halloween represented a means of making peace with my juvenile fears, but I do recall that dressing up in costumes (the scarier the better) and trick-or-treating was both exhilarating and cathartic. (I still love the costuming and socializing aspects of the season.) As often happens with youngsters, once in my late teens and through my early twenties, Halloween lost some of its shine; however, as a full-fledged adult, my passion for all things Halloween came roaring back, and it has been my favorite holiday for more years now than it hasn’t.

Perhaps my most memorable, most exciting Halloween came when I was fifteen, in 1974. At that time, much to my parents’ chagrin, I spent most of my waking moments immersed in scary, monstrous, otherworldly realms of fiction — cinematic as well as literary. In May of that year, The Martinsville Bulletin ran a full-page feature about me, following my sale of a Godzilla vs. the Thing filmbook to the long-dead but well-remembered monster movie tabloid called The Monster Times (see “Accent on Nerds” from October 6). I have no recollection of how anyone at the Bulletin came to find out about this particular feather in my cap, but the piece caught numerous eyes, including those of the Associated Press, who picked up the article and thus facilitated its publication in newspapers around the country. And as a result of that, WLVA-TV, Channel 13, out of Lynchburg, VA, sent a crew to my junior high school one day to interview me that I might further elaborate on my blathering from the newspaper article. Exciting times. Also as a result, a couple of members of the local Jaycees, who had begun plotting a massive haunted castle attraction for Martinsville, sought me out to recruit my help with the planning, design, and execution of this, their most ambitious community project.

And so, excited beyond words, I attended a series of meetings with the Jaycees to brainstorm ideas for a bona fide castle of horrors, to be set up in an abandoned warehouse in the small community of Koehler, just outside of Martinsville. All the classic creatures would be showcased in their own specially designed chambers: Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster, the Wolfman, the Mummy, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde... with a pretty fair budget to boot. Finally, one evening, just about sunset, the redoubtable Dickie Globman (whose wife, Pam, is nowadays a geocacher of high reputation), came by the house, picked me up in his MG sports car (which was a thrill because I had never ridden with a madman in a sports car before) and drove us out to Koehler.

Holy Yog! The warehouse, an old stone monstrosity half-hidden by trees and rising above the nearby Smith River, was imposing and downright scary even before any attractions had been set up. To enter, you had to go through these massive doors and down a long, earthen-floor passageway into a vast cellar with five-foot-diameter stone columns at regular intervals. What a perfect place to set up a maze of horror chambers! I was ecstatic, and to return a few times to contribute to the physical grunt work — sweeping away actual cobwebs and piles of dust, setting up sheets of polyurethane, connecting miles of extension cords, and the like — only heightened my anticipation of its completion. On top of everything, I got to write and illustrate the promos that ran in the Martinsville Bulletin. I wish I still had some of those little ads because, as crude as they might have been, they were among the most fun artistic projects I ever undertook.

For whatever reason, I wasn’t present when the actors for the various horrific roles came on the scene, but on opening night, my little brother and I dared to enter the now-transformed halls of this most haunted of haunted castles.

I couldn’t believe it. I had been in some big, scary, professional haunted attractions before, but this thing blew me away. The rooms, full of sparking, screeching scientific instruments; massive spiderwebs; fluorescent passageways leading to dizzying abysses, all were fantastic. And through it all, expertly made-up monsters roamed, screamed, and grabbed (ah, for those good old days!).

This place... this spooky, spooky place... was Halloween heaven. And from that moment on, to me, the old Koehler warehouse became known as simply “The Spooky Place.” At some later time, one company or another purchased the warehouse and returned it to its more traditional usage, which sadly put the kibosh on the classic haunted castle. The Jaycees moved the attraction to another location or two in Martinsville proper, and I think they were pretty good, but I had no hand in them. The most memorable thing about one of those was coming out of the exit and stepping on a stray roofing tack, which went through my shoe and punctured my sole, so that, upon taking off said shoe, I left a lovely trail of very real blood out to the parking lot. At least I’d had a tetanus shot at the time, and the wound healed up without complication.

Nowadays, the Koehler warehouse is still operating, I believe, but it’s still a spooky, spooky place, and I used to have a geocache placed right out in front of it. That one had to be archived, but I still have an active cache on the Smith River Fieldale Trail, just across the river, that overlooks the warehouse. I doubt the Koehler warehouse will ever again serve its true purpose — as a haunted castle — but the memories it offered me, and many others, are priceless.

In 1982, I made something of a return to the fold for that year’s Koehler Halloween event. It, too, was classic stuff, although the rest of that Halloween season was far from joyous. More on that one tomorrow, or whenever I can get around to it.

Be spooky. Safe, but spooky.

Read “The Spooky Place” Part 2 here.

Grudge? What Grudge?

There's a new geocache in town, so this afternoon after work, I went after it. It's a little cache called "Grudge Much?" (GC7VV8G), which brought me to what may be the most haunted house in Greensboro. It's a sprawling structure with three distinct wings, as you may be able to make out from the aerial photo above, from the Geocaching website. (The smiley icon indicates the cache placement and that I found it.) There's no telling how old the old manse is, but the surrounding forest has completely swallowed it, and although a maintained trail passes only a few yards away, getting up close to the place is challenging. I took a shitload of photos of the place, inside and out, and figured I'd share them here.

Weird thing is, when I took a selfie near the cache, my image came out all kinds of wonky. There is a rumor that a longstanding grudge resulted in the house falling to ruin, and I now have to wonder whether that grudge has reached out to touch me as well.

Time will tell, I reckon.

Grudge? What grudge?

The view as you approach

Did I mention the forest has about swallowed the whole house?

It is a welcoming place.

Looking into one wing of the manse

Another view of the interior

The parting view

The Haunted for Halloween

Supernatural hauntings are a source of endless fascination for me. Not that I even remotely believe in ghosts, marauding spirits, demons, or other inhuman entities, but there's something about the prospect of them that have, since I was a little kid, sent the most wonderful shiver down my spine. I generally prefer stories rooted in the supernatural to those based on the mundane, regardless of twists, turns, and degrees of probability. It's when the improbability of the supernatural is portrayed as ultimately believable that I most tend to stand up and take notice.

A good many years ago, I found myself watching a TV movie called The Haunted with my ex-wife, initially drawn in because it starred Jeffrey DeMunn, whom I've always admired as a character actor. At first, I took it to be just another low-budget, cringe-worthy melodrama, the kind that dominated the Lifetime network and its ilk in the 1990s. But as I continued to watch, I found myself feeling less contemptuous and more unsettled. And when it comes to movies, unsettling is a pretty admirable quality.

The story, supposedly based on actual events, is commonplace enough: the Smurl family moves into a new home and strange things begin happening to them, such as household items disappearing and reappearing somewhere else, unplugged appliances catching fire, light fixtures crashing down on unsuspecting children, and — finally — formless apparitions frightening family members and then vanishing. At first, the weirdest events only happen in Janet Smurl's (Sally Kirkland) presence, so that her husband, Jack (DeMunn), is initially skeptical. But one night, while they're lying in bed, Janet hears whispered voices seemingly coming from her pillow, and when Jack lays his head on her pillow, he hears them as well. Being devout Catholics, they seek help from their church, but the best that good Father Larson (John O'Leary) can offer them is marriage counseling and an offer to bless their house. He comes to perform his blessing ritual, only to discover there actually is some dark presence in the house. After reporting his finding to the church, he is forced to inform the Smurls, with some obvious personal relief, that the bishop will not allow him to help them with their spirit problem.

Not knowing where else to turn, the Smurls make contact with paranormal investigators Ed (Stephen Markle) and Lorraine Warren (Diane Baker), who agree to check out their claims. The Warrens, who came to prominence as investigators in the case of The Amityville Horror (and have since appeared in numerous other fiction-based films, such as The Conjuring and Annabelle) confirm the Smurls's worst nightmare — that an actual demon has latched onto them with the intent of destroying the family. The Warrens attempt to drive the demon and its minions out, but this endeavor appears only to anger the supernatural visitor, for after a brief period of silence, just long enough to make the Smurls believe it has been defeated, the entity returns with a vengeance.

A sympathetic priest from an Episcopal church attempts a full-fledged exorcism, but this attempt also backfires. Having alerted the press to their plight — in hopes of finding someone who can vanquish the force that seems determined to overwhelm them — the Smurls are dismayed when, instead of assistance, all they receive is an onslaught of reporters, cranks, and vandals, who allow them not a moment's peace. At last, a group from the Sacred Heart Society comes for a visit and, in a vast show of love and affection for the family, appears to be successful in driving away the evil spirits.

The Smurls, no longer able to live in their house due to endless invasions of their privacy, move to a new community, seemingly free from any further supernatural torment. As they are settling into their new house, however, they receive a rude reminder that escaping a demon's wrath may not be as easy as all that.

Jack (Jeffrey Demunn) and Janet Smurl (Sally Kirkland)

The fact that The Haunted doesn't rely on a big-budget special effects or lavish sets works measurably in its favor. Over the first hour of the movie, tension rises because of the increasing transformation of the familiar and safe into the unfamiliar and dangerous. One of the best moments in the movie is an early scene of Janet hearing the voice of her mother-in-law, Mary (Louise Latham), calling her from another room. When Janet replies that she is in the kitchen, the voice calls out again, louder and more plaintive. Impatient, Janet repeats her call to her mother-in-law, but now Mary's voice comes from inside the otherwise empty room. A reprise of this scene at the end of the film makes for perhaps an even more chilling effect, since we now understand the disturbing significance of this fakery.

Another effective scene takes place in the Smurls's bedroom, while they are asleep. Janet wakes up hearing whispering voices, seemingly from her pillow. At first incredulous, Jack insists that she is merely imagining things, but when he places his head on her pillow and a soft voice whispers something indecipherable to him, he reacts with near-violent fear. Shortly afterward, Janet feels cold fingers touching her leg. Jack places his leg over hers and then he feels the questing fingers, prompting another strong, fearful reaction.

The first apparition of the demonic force is its best — it's merely a dark, formless shadow that creeps across the screen, only briefly revealing contours that appear more or less human. In a couple of scenes, we see very typical, translucent human figures that are not particularly scary, though it's rather refreshing, even for the film's time, that they are not accompanied by garish light shows or other spectacular, over-the-top special effects. The only true physical manifestation of the entity comes when a rather maniacal-looking young woman spontaneously appears on the stairway and assaults Jack Smurl. The woman transforms into a heavyset, ogre-like brute who seems intent on sexually molesting a disbelieving Jack.

The actors in the production are uniformly convincing, with DeMunn and Kirkland standing out in their parts (Kirkland received a Golden Globe nomination for her performance in this movie, though she lost to Judy Davis for One Against the Wind). Granted, the whiter-than-white, 1980s middle-class characters might ring less true for today's audiences than they did at the time, but the verisimilitude of characters, setting, and events in The Haunted outshines that of most far bigger productions of similar theme, such as The Conjuring and Annabelle, which I mentioned above. These characters are people you know — perhaps they're your family — and the fact they are not exaggerated, as is too often the case, makes them both believable and sympathetic, traits too rare in too many horror movies. You don't have to be religious — or a believer at all — to understand the natural compulsion for these people to seek assistance from the church, which proves itself not only impotent but irrelevant. Even paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, who may in real life be seen only as opportunistic frauds, are portrayed with respect and depth, which for the purposes of this fiction adds another, agreeable layer of verisimilitude.

The Haunted was based on the book by the Warrens, along with Jack Smurl and Robert Curran, supposedly the true chronicle of events at the Smurl house. I don't believe the movie is available on DVD, though it can be viewed in its entirety for free on YouTube.

The Haunted makes for some mighty fine Halloween viewing, I can tell you. Four out of five Damned Rodan's Dirty Firetinis (at least one of which I am currently due for).

The first apparition of the demon — a dark, moving stain in the air that passes through walls

A face only a mugger could love? A sex-starved demon appears to menace hapless Jack Smurl.

The Browns Summit Chainsaw Massacre?

I love finding haunted places while I'm out geocaching, and I came upon a mighty fine one this afternoon. It's out in Brown Summit, a few miles north of here, on the edge of Bryan Park North, a relatively new extension to the already sizeable park. There's over five miles of hiking/equestrian trails in these woods, only a portion of which has so far been claimed by geocachers. I had gone out after a couple of new ones, and my search led me to the remains of an old homestead, with a crumbling farmhouse in the woods; a couple of collapsed tobacco barns; a field full of abandoned, rusting automobiles; a chugging generator; and an honest-to-god roaring chainsaw somewhere just beyond my line of sight. There's a couple of squalid, dilapidated houses just beyond the woods, both clearly inhabited. The geocache (GC6DNBN) was virtually within sight of this rather forbidding property, and during my search, I kept a keen eye and ear open for the approach of any hostile beings, human or otherwise. Obviously, I lived to tell the tale, and I rightly look forward to heading back out that way in the coming days.

Multiple dead cars... multiple dead bodies?

It fall down!

Still alive to tell the tale — for the moment.