Treading Water
A Horror/Fantasy Hybrid Novel
Dallas London’s brother is presumed dead after going missing off the coast of Maui. Now back home in San Francisco, Dallas does denial in style: no sleep and a steady diet of stale pizza, cigarettes, and intrusive thoughts about her brother’s decaying body. But when a philanthropist’s son disappears under eerily similar circumstances and Dallas starts seeing demons lurking in the shadows of her apartment, even she can’t pretend she’s fine.
Enter: Death. In the form of a snarky, sexy young woman, Death is drawn to Dallas’s issues just as much as Dallas is drawn to Death’s mysterious magnetism. Desperate, Dallas makes a deal with Death: Dallas will find out who is stealing the souls of the drowned, in exchange for protection from the demon hunting her. The cost? Dallas must come to terms with her incredible loss, even though it makes her wish she’d been the one to sink in the Pacific abyss.
Treading Water came in first place in the Horror category of the 2024 PNWA Unpublished Novel Contest, and is currently on submission. Ready to dive in? Read chapter one.
Below is a running playlist that gets me in the mood to work on this book.
In Red
A Southern Gothic Horror Novel
Thirty-two-year-old Annabeth Jefferds has spent her entire adult life in Seattle trying to de-program the lessons she learned as a child of the South: stay quiet, do what you’re told, don’t ask questions. Re-starting her life is going well until Annabeth receives a phone call. Her sister, Bean, is sick and her father isn’t answering his phone. To make sure Bean is safe, Annabeth must go back to South Carolina and once again endure the life she’d left behind.
The more time Annabeth spends at home, the more she realizes there’s something strange going on. Annabeth sees odd animals lurking on the edge of the forest, but that can’t be. Rabbits don’t have human thumbs for ears and foxes with broken necks can’t just scamper away. She must be imagining things.
Meanwhile, Annabeth’s ex-boyfriend, Gum, keeps reminding her of the life she left behind, Bean spends her days lying in bed, in and out of coherent thought, and their father wastes his time puttering around the property, muttering to himself.
Annabeth quickly learns that her southern roots run deeper than she thought possible, and she may never be able to dig herself out.
Below is a running playlist that gets me in the mood to work on this book.
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An Epistolary Cyber Horror Novella
User The_Moore_The_Merrier is a day-one listener of NorCal Creeps—a podcast dedicated to real-world accounts of spooky tales. They’re such a superfan, they even started the NorCal Creeps forum. They nurtured it. Watched it grow. Now, after just three years, the forum’s fan base is as big as the podcast itself. It’s where people go to share theories about the latest episodes and argue about the veracity of each one. The_Moore_The_Merrier does their best to moderate—pulling out the truly heinous vitriol like one might pull weeds from a garden.
User Aletheia_Darling started listening to the podcast one year ago, after her mother went missing on a canoe trip along the Russian River. They became a moderator shortly thereafter so that they could read everything on the forum before Merrier censored it. Aletheia has a theory about a few of the stories on NorCal Creeps, one they’re not sure they can keep to themselves much longer. Some of the stories are real. Something is wiping people, things, and sometimes entire towns from reality. Aletheia is going to find out who. The answers are in the stories. They just have to keep listening.
Below is a running playlist that gets me in the mood to work on this book.