“Yikes! That’s a creepy story!”

As you can probably tell already, I enjoy Halloween, and I never lost my childhood love of creepy, scary stories. What I find most terrifying in horror stories is not the big reveal of the monster or the alien or the big gory mess but the signal that something isn’t quite right in a chilling and unnatural way. Subtle abnormality creeping up, a sneaking shift in reality. (Some favorite examples of this are the beginnings of Gregor Xane’s horror novellas Six Dead Spots and The Hanover Block.) That’s the kind of scariness I aimed for in Bearing, so the above comment from an early reader made me happy.

I read horror, but never thought I’d be writing it. Then I shared some data on authors’ earnings in various genres with one of my Goodreads groups, and a horror writer commented that he would have to switch to romance because that was where the money was. I replied, “Horror-romance?” We were joking, but a few other writers began to play with the idea and one suggested we should create an anthology of horror-romance short stories, each based on one of the seven deadly sins. My choice: sloth. I enjoyed the challenge of making laziness frightening.

Because my story was more than three times as long as the other contributions to the anthology, far exceeding the word count limit, I withdrew from the project and set my horror-romance aside for a while. Now, it’s almost Halloween, and I’ve released it as a ninety-nine cent stand-alone.

Bearing

 A tale of paranormal horror based on Native American myths.

Mikayla, young Apache woman attending a powwow with her family, becomes entranced by an outsider, a Cree man who shows up without his Apache girlfriend. As her fascination consumes her, Mikayla changes in ways both pleasurable and frightening, powerless to overcome his dark magic until it may be too late.

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