In James Pyles’ “The Wreck of the USS Hollander,” a deep-ocean research crew descends into the abyss to explore a long-lost WWII sub—and discovers that some crews never stand down, and some debts can only be paid in the dark. Excerpt Cora flipped a switch and the speaker grills fore and aft echoed with the…
Somewhere in Virginia’s Mournful Mountains, fifty miles east of Boring and forty west of Tenebrous, sits a town called Dismal Notch—where the librarian talks to ghosts, the sheriff is a werewolf, and a long dead ancestor won’t stop meddling from beyond the grave. In Debbie Mumford’s “A Dismal Death,” a midnight haunting kicks off a…
November 1941. A British convoy pushes through the storm-tossed North Atlantic, and somewhere in the hold sits a relic that should have stayed at the bottom of the sea. In Charles Eugene Anderson’s “Whispers of the Drowned,” the ocean doesn’t just kill—it remembers. And what it remembers, it will not let the living forget. The…
In the quiet hills of Ireland, beside a sacred spring that no one visits anymore, a goddess waits. Dideacea is the last of her kind—ageless, alone, forgotten. For centuries she has watched the world move on without her. The sacred spring still flows. The question is whether anything sacred remains in the act of tending…
In Robert Jeschonek’s “Aye, Plank,” the most feared instrument of pirate justice becomes the narrator of its own strange, mythic story—a tale of transformation, belonging, and the unexpected places where second chances take root. Set aboard a ship called the Defiler as it prowls Caribbean waters in 1750, this is nautical fantasy told from a…
This is Southern Gothic at its most intimate—not a crumbling mansion full of strangers, but a family farmhouse where every warped board and rusted hinge carries the weight of generations. When Robert Anderson returns to settle his grandmother’s estate, he expects grief. He expects guilt. What he doesn’t expect is MeeMaw herself, risen from the…
In Alicia Cay’s “Above Us, Hell,” a down-on-his-luck treasure hunter and his grandfather chase a salvage score in the Caribbean—and surface something from the deep that should have stayed buried. What begins as a desperate dive into the Cayman Trench becomes something far more dangerous than debt or drowning, as a World War II submarine…
In P. D. Cacek’s “By Still Waters,” a son drives his aging father to a funeral—and straight into the dark heart of a secret that’s been drowning them both for decades. What begins as a quiet act of duty becomes something far more unsettling, as rain falls, memory shifts, and still water reveals what was…
In Annie Reed’s “The Code,” a ghostly enforcer bound to the ocean’s will haunts a dying seaside bar, waiting for a man who broke the oldest law of the sea. Some debts can’t be settled in coin—and the ocean never forgets.cannot be paid with coin, and every storm remembers the name of the thief. Killian…
In Steve Vernon’s “The Wind Witch of Weird Water Harbour,” a desperate sea captain makes a deal with a witch who sells the wind by the knot. But some debts cannot be paid with coin, and every storm remembers the name of the thief. When Captain Donny Parsons’ ship lies stranded in the breathless harbor,…
