The Fear County Chronicle #3
Convention appearance news, a cool cover reveal, and vintage RK fiction this time around!
Howdy y’all! It was an exciting week for Ol’ Ron last week with the preorders for my three-chapbook series, SOMEWHERE SOUTH OF HELL, from Death’s Head Press, and the limited hardcover edition of my upcoming memoir and writing guide, SOUTHERN FRIED & HORRIFIED, from Stygian Sky Media. Even when you’ve been in the storytelling business as long as I have (36+ years), you still have bucket list publishers you strive to place your work with. It’s exciting to have not only Death’s Head Press, but also Stygian Sky Media, list the preorder links for two very important RK works of fiction and non-fiction in a single day. To preorder your copies, just click on the titles underlined above. But hurry! Numbers are limited on both SSOH and SF&H, so grab yourself one before they sell out!
Scares That Care Charity Weekend VIII
I'm very pleased to announce that I will be a guest author this summer at Scares That Care Charity Weekend VIII!
Come see me in Williamsburg, Virginia on July 29th-31st, as well as other great authors like Stephen Graham Jones, Rio Youers, Somer Cannon, Laurel Hightower, Ronald Malfi, Kristopher Triana, Stephen Shrewsbury, Daniel Kraus, Cullen Bunn, and John Edward Lawson. Readings, panels, and lots and lots of good horror books! Also, most of the cast of E.T. The Extraterrestrial and Cujo, Danny Lloyd (Danny Torrance of The Shining), and others will be there for the horror movie fans. Be sure to stop by the Southern Fried Horror table and say howdy! I’ll have plenty of books to sell (including several new releases), and if you have RK books that you would like for me to sign, please feel free to bring them.
AuthorCon 2023
As Ol’ Gomer Pyle used to say “Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!”
Although it wasn’t originally in my plans for 2023, it’s now set in stone! I will definitely be attending Scares That Care AuthorCon II on March 31-April 2 of next year!
I won’t be a guest author at this one, but I will have the Southern Fried Horror table set up in the Vendors Room. I should have at least seven or eight new releases available for sell by then, as well quite a few from my backlist of Southern horror novels and short story collections. And, the same as with Scares That Care VIII, if you have RK books that you would like to have signed, by all means, bring them to the table and I’ll be happy to take care of you!
After The Burn… the New Illustrated Edition!
Last Friday was another red-letter day for Ol’ Ron with D&T Publishing’s cover reveal of the new rerelease of my infamous extreme collection of post-apocalyptic horror tales, AFTER THE BURN!
Horror readers who are familiar with the history of this 2011 story collection will recognize the Zach McCain cover art as being the same from the Thunderstorm Books Black Voltage edition, except with a striking new title font. Also, this new edition from D&T will be extensively embellished by Zach, with 17 black & white interior illustrations, and back cover art.
AFTER THE BURN will be available in ebook format at Godless on May 27th, and in ebook, paperback, and hardcover at Amazon on May 10th.
Southern-Fried Storytime with The Old Storyteller
Y’all pull up a tombstone and have a seat! My comic book alter-ego, the Old Storyteller, is cracking open his ancient, dog-eared volume of Southern-Fried Horror tales and hankering to spin you a yarn about spooky goings-on down on the farm. This is an oldie; it first saw print way back in 1989 in a little small press magazine called Tri-State Fantasist. It’s one of those lonesome and forgotten tales… just the kind that the Storyteller loves to share. Before we start, however, there’s one thing you might want to consider. When the rooster crows first thing tomorrow morning, you may want to hide beneath the covers and pray that your doors are securely locked and bolted.
The Hatchling
I reckon a couple of things could have brought it about. Maybe it was that new corn feed I bought wholesale down at the co-op or maybe it was simply some unforeseen deformity. Such things happen on the farm occasionally… two-headed calves and the like. But, then again, I always figured there was some strange and sinister intelligence behind the whole ugly business. Something unspeakably evil. Sometimes I wonder if old Lucifer himself hadn’t seeded that hen and caused the sudden appearance of that godawful egg.
I’ve been a farmer here in Crimshaw County since I was fourteen and that was some sixty years ago. I’ve planted and harvested all types of produce; tobacco, corn, soybean. And I’ve dabbled in livestock, too, but most particularly chickens. Folks from all over the county drive for miles to buy my eggs and poultry. But when I was a younger man my association with chickens was not so innocent. There was a time when I had quite a reputation among the local sportsmen as a first-class breeder of champion fighting cocks. However, I sickened of that blood sport as I grew older and wiser and, much to the relief of my wife Margret, gave it up for honest work.
Anyway, it was a chilly morning in early spring when Margret hollered at me from the chicken coop. “Jake… come out here and take a look at this.”
I had been slopping the hogs, so I set my pail aside and crossed the barnyard to the henhouse.
Margret was standing there in the shadowy coop, a half full basket of white and brown eggs in her hand and a puzzled look on her face. I glanced down at her feet and saw one of our best laying hens stretched out on the earthen floor. I stooped down and picked at it for awhile. At first glance, I thought maybe a fox or a weasel had gotten into the coop and laid waste to the poor critter. But, upon further inspection, I saw that it hadn’t been eaten a’tall.
“This is mighty strange,” I told the wife. “Almost looks like this hen was split in two… from the inside out.”
“No doubt it was,” Margret agreed. “Take a look at what it laid here in its nest.”
I stood up and regarded the long, laying bins that went three levels high along the back wall. In the nest that the Rock Island red had always occupied there was the damnedest egg I’d ever laid eyes on.
The thing was big, the size of a coconut. And it was as black as sin. It didn’t have that flat, slightly granulated texture to it like a regular hen egg. Instead, it was slick as a black pearl. You could see your reflection in its surface, the shell was so shiny.
Well, now, I didn’t rightly know what to do. At first, I figured I oughta take it to the county agent down at the farm bureau and see what they made of it. But then I got to thinking. They’d just turn it over to some dadblamed scientist who would likely crack it open and study its yolk and, hell, what would that tell them? Besides, I was kind of curious as to what sort of chicken would hatch out of such a strange egg. So I decided to just keep the thing my personal secret for a while.
I went to the tool shed and dug out one of the boys’ old incubators that they had used when they were in 4-H club in school. It was a homemade job; just a wooden box with chicken wire windows and hay in the bottom. I screwed a sixty watt bulb into the fixture at the top and, after setting that gigantic egg down deep amid the straw, put the whole kit and caboodle at the far corner of the henhouse.
Oh, another thing I oughta mention. None of those hens in that coop would go near that egg. Acted like they were scared of the thing. And I had me a couple of hearty roosters, too, who seemed even more leery of the egg than those hens.
For a week, I checked on the black egg, making sure it didn’t get too warm or cold. I fussed over it so, that Margret joked that I was so all-fired concerned with the blasted thing, why didn’t I take to sitting on it myself. I had me a good laugh at that and said I surely would have but, with the size of the thing, it wouldn’t do my hemorrhoids a speck of good.
A couple of nights later, I was awakened by the most harrowing racket coming from that henhouse. Such a fluttering and squawking it was, that I grabbed my shotgun and a lantern and went out there to check it out. I found the door ajar and figured, well, this time it was a fox or an egg-sucking dog. Stepping inside, I shone that kerosene lamp around. There didn’t seem to be any damage done; no dead chickens or broken eggs.
Or so I thought. I walked over to the far corner and uttered a curse in spite of myself. That homemade incubator had been ripped apart. The wood frame was splintered in several places and the chicken wire in the front had a hole the size of a good-sized cantaloupe torn in it. And, down in the hay within, was the shell of that black egg, cracked and lying in two halves.
I examined that hatched egg and was more confounded than I was to begin with. There was the most awful stench coming from the empty shell, like raw sulfur. And when I stuck my finger to the slimy residue that coated the inside, it burned my skin like battery acid. I had to run out and wash it off under the spigot of the long-handled pump, it blistered me so.
As I walked on back to the house, I had the strongest feeling that something was watching me from the dark woods beyond the barn. I checked the load in my Remington, but that didn’t make me feel any safer. With a shiver, I ducked into the house and locked the back door behind me.
I had never, in all my years of living on that farm, locked the doors of my own house. I did that night, however, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on why I had done so.
The next morning over breakfast, Margret asked me about that black egg. I told her that some animal had gotten into the coop the night before and smashed it. I wanted to leave it at that, wanted to forget that it had ever existed… but something out yonder in those woods wouldn’t let me.
I didn’t think any more about it, until a week later when my redbone hound, String, came up missing. I searched my property high and low and finally found him down by the creek. Poor String was dead. At first I figured he had died of old age, for he was going on fifteen years. But when I got to checking, I found a single wound on his stiffening body… a tiny hole in his right temple, just beneath one floppy ear.
I couldn’t rightly believe what I was seeing because, you see, I was familiar with that kind of wound, but not in a dog. If you don’t know anything about cock-fighting, let me explain. Just before fighting roosters are thrown into the pit together, the owners attached these tiny, handmade spurs to their feet. There ain’t much to them; just a curved length of steel like a bent nail with leather ties to secure them. The victor of the two cocks is the one who strikes first, driving that metal spur into the side of the other’s head. I told you before, it was a bloody sport and that was one of the reasons I took leave of it.
After burying String down in a honeysuckle hollow, I went to the tool shed out of pure curiosity. I went to my workbench where I knew a pair of those rooster spurs hung on the pegboard; sort of souvenirs for old times’ sake. Well, you guessed it. Those steel spurs were gone. A cold fear hit me then and I figured maybe it would be wise to keep old String’s death from Margret… and especially the disappearance of those spurs.
As it turned out, String wasn’t the only victim. Those two roosters I’d bought to look over the henhouse… I found them out back of the smokehouse. They had died the very same way. A single, clean hole through the side of the head. I took my shotgun that afternoon and hunted the woods over… exactly what for, I have no earthly idea. Nevertheless, I found nothing. Not a track, nor a sign of anything.
Spring passed into summer without incident and then things took a turn for the worse. Someone – or something – tore the back door off its hinges one night and rummaged through the kitchen drawers. Margret took inventory of the utensils the next morning and swore that the only things missing were a couple of old icepicks she used to chip away freezer ice when she was defrosting the Frigidaire. I didn’t grasp the significance of that late night theft until I discovered our finest Holstein milk cow lying in the south pasture a few days later. There was a deep hole in her temple, the wound reaching clean to the center of the brain.
Whatever had killed my cow didn’t stop there. Farmers all over this side of the county began to lose cows and hogs in the same gruesome manner. No animal was ever eaten, just smitten upon the head and left lying there. Alot of crazy theories began to circulate. Frank Masters, who owns the farm down the road a piece, claimed that devil worshippers were to blame. I began to figure that, indeed, maybe there was something of the devil involved, but I didn’t tell any of the fellas down at the grange hall that. I kept my mouth shut and hoped to God that things would die down.
But, of course, they didn’t.
I was cleaning out the hayloft a couple of weeks later, when I came across something that chilled me to the very bone.
It was my pitchfork, the one I had bought at the True Value earlier that year. But something had damaged it, something very strong. Two of the four tines had been snapped off. My mind immediately flashed back to the fighting spurs and the missing icepicks.
That night I took extra precautions before I retired for the night. I checked every door and window in the house, making sure they were securely locked. I even locked our bedroom door and Margret said I was being downright silly for doing so. I wasn’t so sure, though. I lay in bed for a long time before sleeping, turning my suspicions over and over in my mind. If that thing, whatever the hell it was, had graduated from dogs to cows, then what did the missing tines off that pitchfork mean? Did it intend on pursuing larger game now… of the human variety perhaps? The thought so unsettled me that I got up and swapped the birdshot in my scattergun for double-aught buck.
The following morning I awoke and, much to my surprise, found Margret still in bed. She usually rose an hour before I did, so as to fix breakfast before we did our daybreak chores.
I reached over and shook her gently. “Wake up, dear,” I said. “It’s five o’clock. We’re running a little behind schedule this morning.”
She did not answer me, did not even move. When I pulled my hand back it was covered with blood. With a cry of horror, I turned poor Margret over and…
The doctor said the wound in her temple had been made by a very long, very sharp object thrust downward with inhuman force. “It looks like someone drove a railroad spike through the side of her head with a sledgehammer,” he told me after I demanded his honest opinion.
I had been a law-abiding, church-going citizen of Crimshaw County for many years and so I wasn’t suspected. But I still blamed myself for dear Margret’s death, blamed myself for not doing something to prevent such a thing from happening. I grieved for many days after the funeral and, so, I wasn’t exactly prepared for that horrid night toward the end of August.
Exactly why I awoke at two o’clock in the morning was unclear to me. All I know is that I came awake suddenly, my heart pounding, my eyes straining against the darkness. I felt a strong presence there in the bedroom with me and there was that unmistakable scent of sulfur.
“Who’s there?” I whispered, but I knew very well what had come visiting in the dead of night. The foot railing of the big, brass bed creaked as something of great weight perched there, waiting for the right moment to strike.
It was moonlight that saved me. Moonlight filtered through the lacy material of Margret’s hand-sewn curtains and it glinted upon that sixteen inch spur as it stabbed for my head. I rolled aside, off the bed and onto the floor, as the steel tine ripped deep into the pillow my head had rested upon. I could see it against the light patch of the window then… pitch black and bristling with jagged feathers, its spurred feet clawing that bed to shreds like a grizzly mauling its prey.
I brought up my pump shotgun, jacked a shell into the breech, and squeezed off a shot. The force of the blast knocked that hellish thing off the bed and plumb out the upstairs window. By the time I reached the window, the moon had gone in behind a cloud and I could see nothing but darkness. Hurriedly, I struggled into my overalls and, shotgun and lantern in hand, went downstairs to check it out.
Nothing laid on the dewy grass but shredded curtains and shards of glass. It was beginning to think the awful critter had made its escape, when a noise caught my ears. It had come from the chicken coop.
The walk I took across that dark barnyard that night was the longest one of my life. When I reached the henhouse, I found the door open and heard nervous clucking and rustling inside. I gathered up my nerve, jacked a fresh shell into the scattergun, and, holding the lantern ahead of me, stepped inside. After a few moments, I realized that, except for the regular inhabitants, the coop was empty. Just bins of hay-filled nests bearing frightened chickens. I was turning to leave, when the trap was sprung.
It came through the open door, so tall that its fleshy comb scraped the top of the doorframe. If it had been knee-high, I would have said it was a rooster. But since it was well over six feet tall, I could only describe it as being something horrible and demon-like. It strutted into that henhouse with an arrogance that reeked of pure evil. Its wings and tail feathers were oily black, like that of a crow. In fact, it was pitch black from head to toe; the comb and beard, the scaled feet, even the beak was dark as sable. Only its eyes glowed in contrast, burning like red hot coals. Its fury was unmistakable, as was its intent.
It came for me as I backed toward the far wall and, this time, its aim was more true. It struck savagely, the long spur piercing the muscle of my left bicep, pinning my arm to the weathered boards of the shed wall. The pain was horrendous. The lantern slipped from my fingers and shattered on the hay-strewn floor. The flames spread quickly and, soon, the henhouse became an inferno.
With a hoarse crowing that signaled its triumph, it reared back with its other talon, intending to pin my skull to the wall. I remembered the shotgun then and, raising it one-handedly, stuck the muzzle into that hellish rooster’s belly and pulled the trigger. It lurched backward with the blast and the spur withdrew from my arm, releasing me.
I knew I had to get out fast. Flames lapped at the walls like dry tinder, catching the hay of the nests afire. Soon, the whole damned coop would go up. So, I fired again and again, driving the horrid thing back into the far corner with a hail of buckshot. It slumped to the ground, flapping and hollering, but I didn’t take any chances. I left the henhouse, bolted the door behind me, and stood a good distance away to watch.
The boards of that old henhouse were bone dry and the structure went up quickly. I could hear the demon bird inside, shrieking, battering against the locked door in desperation. But my buckshot must have weakened it, for the door held firm. I watched as the coop became a bonfire, completely consumed in flame.
I figured that was the end of the evil thing, when the corrugated tin roof exploded skyward. Like a great Phoenix, that devil cock rose. Its feathers were ablaze, its crow of agony shrill enough to shatter a man’s nerves and drive him to madness.
I raised my shotgun, but did not fire. I watched as the fowl climbed into the dark twilight as if trying to penetrate the very heavens. Then it swung off course, heading over the peak of the barn and toward the open pasture. I ran to the split-rail fence and, before my eyes, it seemed to disintegrate and break apart into a million tiny cinders. They drifted earthward like crimson fireflies, then vanished before hitting ground.
With a flashlight from the truck and my scattergun in hand, I searched the field over that night. I found nothing… nothing but a few scorched feathers.
And, by morning, they too were gone, like ashes upon the wind.
Tomes of Terror: Nightmare Fuel from Indie Horror Authors!
Visceral 2 by Daniel J. Volpe & Patrick C. Harrison III (Stygian Sky Media) Although your other books may shudder and cringe at its presence, this new book of ultra-extreme horror tales should definitely be on your bookshelf. With Visceral 2, Patrick Harrison III and Daniel Volpe join ranks to serve up a jaw-dropping, stomach-churning array of extreme horror tales that leave a dark and disturbing aftertaste in the reader’s psyche. Horrifyingly humorous, shockingly irreverent, deliciously nasty… take your pick. It’s all here to pervade and satisfy the most discerning and depraved of imaginations! Truthfully, “Fair Food” and “Firecracker Kings” are both worth the price of this book alone.
Faces of Beth by Carver Pike (Self-Published) Okay, I admit… I haven’t read this one yet (it’s one of several books I’m taking to the beach with me in June). But I read the Facebook and Twitter posts, I watch which books are lavishly staged and praised on Instagram, and I read the reviews. And, from all I’ve seen and heard, Faces of Beth is possibly Carver’s best book so far. I’ll make that determination when I’m lathered in sunscreen, with the ocean breeze in my hair (okay… my scalp!) When the time comes, and I’m all tanned and rested, I’ll come back and tell you if Mr. Pike floored me with his prose or not (he usually does).
Bishop by Candace Nola (Uncomfortably Dark Horror) I’m a sucker for horror tales that take place in wilderness settings (American mountains and bayous, the Canadian Rockies, the Australian Outback, etc.). Bishop is set in the rugged terrain of Alaska and Candace uses this to great effect throughout the course of the book. Combine the frantic search for a missing mother and her daughter in an isolated and treacherous region and ancient rival horrors, and you have a very exciting and engaging read. Jack London + Laird Barron + Stephen Graham Jones = Candace Nola’s Bishop. Believe me, you won’t be disappointed.
So, once again, the current issue of The Chronicle comes to an end. Glad you stopped by to visit and I hope you enjoyed what I had to offer this time around. See you in a couple of weeks with more news and updates. Many Happy Nightmares, y’all!