Tales From The Lake, Volume 4: The Horror Anthology, edited by Ben Eads

Release date: October 27, 2017
Subgenre: Horror anthology

About Tales From The Lake, Vol. 4: 

 

The Legend Continues…

Twenty-four heart-rending tales with elements of terror, mystery, and a nightmarish darkness that knows no end.

Welcome to my lake. Welcome to where dreams and hope are illusions…and pain is God.  

• This anthology begins with Joe R. Lansdale’s The Folding Man, one of his darkest stories ever written.
• Kealan Patrick Burke’s Go Warily After Dark pulls us into a desolated world, and reminds us of the price of survival: a guilt that seeps into the marrow.
• Damien Angelica Walter’s Everything Hurts, Until it Doesn’t places us in the middle of a family whose secrets and traditions are thicker than blood.
• Jennifer Loring’s When the Dead Come Home explores a loss so dark, that even the stars are sucked into its melancholic vacuum.

In the spirit of popular Dark Fiction and Horror anthologies such as Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories and Behold: Oddities, Curiosities and Undefinable Wonders, and the best of Stephen King’s short fiction, comes Crystal Lake Publishing’s Tales from The Lake anthologies.

This fourth volume of Speculative Fiction contains the following short stories:

• Jennifer Loring – When the Dead Come Home
• Joe R. Lansdale – The Folding Man
• Kealan Patrick Burke – Go Warily After Dark
• T. E. Grau – To the Hills
• Damien Angelica Walters – Everything Hurts, Until it Doesn’t
• Sheldon Higdon – Drowning in Sorrow
• Max Booth III – Whenever You Exhale, I Inhale
• Bruce Golden – The Withering
• JG Faherty – Grave Secrets
• Hunter Liguore – End of the Hall
• David Dunwoody – Snowmen
• Timothy G. Arsenault – Pieces of Me
• Maria Alexander – Neighborhood Watchers
• Timothy Johnson – The Story of Jessie and Me
• Michael Bailey – I will be the Reflection Until the End
• E.E. King – The Honeymoon’s Over
• Darren Speegle – Song in a Sundress
• Cynthia Ward – Weighing In
• Michael Haynes – Reliving the Past
• Leigh M. Lane – The Long Haul
• Mark Cassell – Dust Devils
• Del Howison – Liminality
• Gene O’Neill – The Gardener
• Jeff Cercone – Condo by the Lake

With an introduction by editor Ben Eads. Cover art by Ben Baldwin. Proudly represented by Crystal Lake Publishing – Tales from The Darkest Depths.

Excerpt:

 

To The Hills

T.E. Grau

Daddy woke me up that night, and put his finger to my lips so I wouldn’t scream, just like he said he would. That’s how I knew.

“Is this it?” I whispered.

“Yes it is,” he whispered back. I didn’t need to hear the confirmation, because his face told me everything.

We’d practiced this before, he and I. He and Brother practiced separate. Mommy and he did too, he’d said, but in a different way, because adults needed to worry about different things.

“Dress rehearsal for the end of the world,” he’d called it.

But that night, it was the real thing. Rehearsals were over.

It was the end of the world.

***

I got up and got dressed, extra quiet, just like he’d shown me, putting on warm clothes even though it was July. My travel pack was ready, stuffed tight with five pairs of underwear and socks, five T-shirts, two pairs of jeans, one wool sweater, a knitted scarf and hat, spare boots a size too big, toothpaste and brush, a bottle of shampoo, hair ties, a compass, a hatchet, pocket knife, and a .22 caliber pistol that I’d shot exactly twelve times, hitting four bottles and a tin can. Firing the gun had scared me. I even cried a little, but Daddy said it was important, to build up muscle memory and lay down a new line of instinct. Probably the most important.

“You need to know how to use this,” he’d said, a frown in his voice. “Against them. You understand?”

“Yes sir,” I’d said, looking down at the pistol, feeling how hot it was after I fired it empty.

“And if they get me, if they get me first, you know what to do, right?”

I didn’t say anything. I knew what to do, which was why I didn’t answer.

***

I pulled the heavy backpack over both shoulders, shrugged it high and tightened the straps, then headed out into the hallway. Daddy was shutting his bedroom door, fastening it behind him with the extra lock none of the other doors had. He’d gotten dressed faster than I did. He’d obviously been practicing more than me.

I stood before him, not moving, hoping it was all a dream and I was still back in my bed. He gave me one last inspection, rifle in one hand, flashlight in the other, full pack slung over his back. He looked about twelve feet tall. A monster killer.

“Let’s go,” he said.

  

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About Ben Eads:

Ben Eads lives within the semi-tropical suburbs of Central Florida. A true horror writer by heart, he wrote his first story at the tender age of ten. The look on the teacher’s face when she read it was priceless. However, his classmates loved it! Ben has had short stories published in various magazines and anthologies. When he isn’t writing, he dabbles in martial arts, philosophy and specializes in I.T. security. He’s always looking to find new ways to infect reader’s imaginations. Ben blames Arthur Machen, H.P. Lovecraft, Jorge Luis Borges, J.G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, and Stephen King for his addiction, and his need to push the envelope of fiction. His first book, Cracked Sky, will be published January 2015 by Omnium Gatherum Media. 

Website | Crystal Lake Publishing