Category: Haunted Passages
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Haunted Passages Flash Fiction by Christopher Linforth: “Disconnected”
We came to the hotel to end it all. The building sat tucked in the mountains, part of an Edwardian-era resort. Gentlemen and women used to enjoy the crisp air for a few weeks, then exalt the health benefits back to their friends in the city. All those people, we realized, were long dead. We…
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Haunted Passages Fiction by Alexa T. Dodd: “His or Yours”
When you come home from work, the living room is littered with a grease-tattooed pizza box and dented cans of beer from your husband’s favorite local brewery. You find him in the bedroom, on his laptop, playing a game. Lasers and explosions emanate, muffled, from the tiny speakers. A hundred seams knit the center of…
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Lauren Ireland: Two Poem Rituals for Haunted Passages
Ritual for Becoming Unborn Become a secretthat turns itself inside outbecome the remotest part of yourselfbecome a snake that becomes a dark boatslicing through black brackish waterrich mud, crackling dying thingsquiet dead things.The moon cuts the water andthat’s where you fit your bodyinto the groove of cold light.The water closes around you.The water reflects nothing.Think…
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Whispers in the Ear of a Dreaming Ape, a horror short story collection by Joshua Chaplinsky, reviewed by Avery Cook
Joshua Chaplinsky has concocted a collection of disturbing stories told through voices we haven’t heard from before: serial killers and their mothers, sex cult evangelists and athiest priests, time traveling daughters and undead fathers. Characters are trapped in physical boxes and mental chaoses, unable to escape with their bodies and their lives intact. Written like…
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Layla Saleeby on Soft Fruit in the Sun, Oliver Zarandi’s debut story collection from Hexus Press
Despite its focus on surreal body horror and strange characters who lick alleyway walls or get eaten by their children, Oliver Zarandi’s short story collection Soft Fruit in the Sun surpasses the limitations of shock value, instead developing over time a complex picture of paranoia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anorexia, and emotional detachment from the world. Soft…
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Haunted Passages: “Samples from a Wichita Mountains Ontology,” a hybrid haunting by Seth Copeland
*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. One summer a man fell while rappelling in the Narrows//We could hear him moan up on a cliff/his friends bright puffy squirrels circling//A helicopter lifted him out to Oklahoma City//We never heard what his next ascent was / purple horsemint flanks the lakesidetower\\we gargoyle the boulders keepingpeople…
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“The Over/Under: A Triptych,” HAunted Passages fiction by Melissa Benton Barker
1. The Solid and the Vapor I was sitting on the sofa in my yoga clothes when the phone rang. I had just finished watching a re-run of The Office with my husband and children. My children had gone upstairs to brush their teeth and get ready for bed. “Melissa, you need to come over…
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“The Burial Party”: Vol. 9 Original Fiction by Adrian Van Young
In her invalid’s bunk on the steamer Virginia, the Nurse cannot stop throwing up. When the boat is in motion, it does not afflict her. She could stand on the prow with her face in the wind. But when the steamboat lies at anchor in the hot airlessness of the day, churning faintly, the Nurse’s…
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“call the necromancer”: Four Poems by Leia Penina Wilson for Haunted Passages
volta OR these snapdragon flower seed pods look like little skulls because it’s all imagination & horror baby can youimagine i liketo lookat myself& i never become obsessed— would youlike to lookat my gothic: all the virgin eyes in the worldare made of glass —horror —horror —horror accumulated knowledge abstract: to eroticwith pleasure to ward…
Heavy Feather Review 