A nurse gives a tow truck driver her number while the spirits watch attentively. Sasquatch and Chupacabra clash across universes. A skeleton billionaire throws his annual halloween party. A woman kisses her husband good night and locks him in a room in their basement. And twelve more.
"Brendan Detzner's vibrant prose is an awakening for readers still looking for the perfect collection of short fiction."
-Wayne Allen Sallee, author of The Holy Terror and Fiends by Torchlight
"Brendan Detzner's best stories start with some of the most famil- iar tropes of horror and science fiction. Haunted trees, mysterious stage magicians, sentient computers, and talking skeletons are all in evidence, as well as sea monsters, invisible friends, and a twisted variation on the old Jekyll & Hyde story. But then he sur- prises the reader, again and again, by refusing to take us down the familiar paths, instead opting for side roads that most of us never even noticed were there. Contained in this collection are sixteen tales of the truly unexpected. Highly recommended for fans of experimental horror."
-Michael Penkas, Black Gate
"Detzner will creep yer shit out. Have spare drawers when you read him."
-Patty Templeton, author of There Is No Lovely End
Genre: FICTION / HorrorBeasts has sold a few hundred copies in e-book and paperback. The stories it contains have appeared in a few different electronic, print, and audio venues, most notably "Spirits of the Wind", which was produced in an episode of Pseudopod.
In The Fall
Shawna's father told her repeatedly as she grew up that if she told anyone what happened in their home he would kill her, and her mother. As Shawna got older and gained a better understanding of her circumstances, the rule made less and less sense- her family lived in a trailer park and privacy was mostly a foreign concept, everybody knew exactly what was going on- but still, she never did tell anyone, even after her mother died. She solved the problem another way, when she was sixteen and bigger, and after her father's stroke had destroyed his coordination on the right side of his body. He grabbed her, she decided this was as good a time as any, hit him in the face with an iron, put down the iron, stabbed him in the chest several times with a steak knife, unplugged the television set as he collapsed, wrapped the cord around his neck, and squeezed.
Her father was a fuck-up, in spite of everything. She had resolved not to be.
An elderly man two plots over had made intermittent attempts to teach Shawna his version of financial literacy, and had used the lunchbox where he kept his money safe from the banks and the government as an object lesson. The lunchbox left the trailer park with her.
She spent most of the next year hitchhiking. It was spring when she left.
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Dutch
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Translation in progress.
Translated by Kevin Mulder
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Spanish
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Translation in progress.
Translated by James Sada
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