My dark sci-fi story Arrivals at Hope Station Have Been Indefinitely Postponed has been accepted by Stupefying Stories. It’s framed as an urgent announcement on an interdimensional travel platform.
Attention, Travelers. Due to circumstances entirely within our control—but beyond our collective will to change—all arrivals at Hope Station have been indefinitely postponed, and the Station is now closed. Travelers entering the Station should abandon Hope and proceed to the exits immediately.
My sci-fi horror story A Piece of the Sky has been accepted by The Lost Poetry Club podcast. It’s told through the testimony of the surviving member of a two-person asteroid mining crew that picked up an unfortunate souvenir during their expedition.
With all due respect, sir, you don’t know what you’re talking about. There was no way Bakely could’ve known what the thing was when he picked it up. It looked like a rock. Hell, it was a rock, just a hunk of the asteroid’s crust that he grabbed as a souvenir for his kid. There’s no way he could’ve known it was a nest.
My cryptid horror story No Bones, Just Skin has been accepted by the Chilling Tales for Dark Nights podcast. It’s about a brother and sister who have a terrifying encounter with an abúhukü, a rainforest demon known for dissolving the bones of its prey and leaving the empty skin behind.
Manuel’s older sister, Liliana, stood next to him, looking up at the body hanging high in the tree overhead. The carcass was little more than a shriveled husk of a man, a wrinkled bag of skin draped boneless and formless across the jungle’s dense lattice of vines and branches. It was almost as if the man had been turned into a garment, as if someone had slit him down the back, extracted his skeleton, then tossed him carelessly into the tree like an old bathrobe.
My short humor essay An Open Letter To Those Who Declined My Facebook Event Invite has been selected as a Top Pick of the Year for 2023 by the editors of The Weekly Humorist. It’s a heartfelt letter to those who felt they had something better to do than attend my Game of Thrones Footie Pajama Bar Crawl. You know who you are.
Of course, some of you had legitimate reasons why you couldn’t attend. Frank couldn’t come because he wanted to spend some time with his kids. He’s a family man, which is hardly a crime. Well, in this case it was, hence the Amber Alert. But his heart was in the right place.
The Dark Stars anthology from Shacklebound Books is featured on the British Science Fiction Association Awards longlist. This anthology contains three of my original dark sci-fi drabbles.
My modern dark fantasy Dragonsbreath has been accepted into the Streets of Fire and Shadow anthology by Treeshaker Books. It’s the story of a teen forced to wear a fireproof mask to protect himself and others from a power he can’t control.
This story is an odd one for me: a little bit fantasy, a little bit horror, and a little bit (gasp!) romance.
The woman’s head lurched forward as her SUV slowed to a jarring stop, its bumper only inches from the police car parked sideways across her lane. Half a dozen emergency vehicles crowded the street ahead of her. There were police cars. Fire trucks. An ambulance.
The woman watched with mounting horror as a pair of paramedics lifted a gurney out of the ambulance and began wheeling it up the driveway of a nearby house.
Her house.
My short horror story The Churchyard Grim has been accepted by Dark Horses Magazine. Loosely based on the English legend of Black Shuck, a young girl takes refuge in a church from the hellhound that is hunting her.
We thought we would be safe in the church. We were wrong.
Two drabbles—one stalker horror, one dark sci-fi—have been accepted into the Drabbledark III anthology by Shacklebound Books.
I took a bit of a step back from short fiction in 2023, writing little more than a few drabbles after April. However, I had plenty of stories from 2022 queued up for publication, along with a healthy dose of reprint acceptances. Of the few stories I did write this year, all have been accepted but few have been published yet—I’ve already got 19 stories scheduled for publication in 2024.
If you’re interested in my submission stats, as well as my awards-eligible stories and podcasts, please read on.
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My post-apocalyptic sci-fi horror story Die on Your Feet has been accepted by Antipodean SF for both their publication as well as their radio show.
The story is about a group of survivors huddling close to the ground to avoid whatever is lurking in the fog just overhead. It’s an allegory about what happens to people who deny the reality of their situation, despite all the evidence telling them they are wrong.
“It ain’t real,” Grady insisted. “Think! Have you ever actually seen one of the things up there?”
“No, but I’ve seen what it does to people.”
Warren Benedetto 