Piercing the Veil by Guy Riesen

Release date: December 14, 2017

Subgenre. Horror 

About Piercing the Veil:

 

What do flesh-eating cell phones, brain-enhancing tacos, and a real live dead foot have in common?

They're all tools in the destruction of our world, and a weapons-grade team of heavily-armed Miskatonic University nerds may be humanity’s last hope.

Something is ripping holes in the Veil of energy that separates our world from that of the ancient evils writhing just beyond what we think is reality. Time is running out for Professors Derrick LeStrand, Howard Strauss and their team of researchers as they race to hunt down a mysterious Frenchman who wields Necromantic Death Magic unlike anything they’ve seen before.
Tearing open psychological wounds from Derrick’s past, the cabalistic sorcerer is gathering ancient icons of power to pierce the Veil and bring down the only thing shielding mankind from the relentless horrors beyond.
If they fail, the only questions that will remain are who will live in servitude to the Great Old Ones and who will die…and who will supply Derrick with tacos?
Set against the backdrop of a world where H.P. Lovecraft was not a fiction writer, but a Sweep, a special operative trained to protect the collective sanity of the human race with misinformative blends of fact and fiction … where the Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual is little more than a slightly skewed Audubon Field Guide, and the monster movies you grew up with are more documentary than not.

It’s Lovecraftian Lethal Weapon cranked to eleven.

 

Excerpt:

 

Why is it Breathing?

Derrick watched giant clawed, skeletal hands dig deep gouges in the wooden floor as a massive skull rose from the jagged hole in the center of the room, lifting through a rain of falling ceiling plaster and clattering splinters. Its ragged, yellow teeth looked impossibly large as they gnashed at the wet chunks of dirt slipping through the gaps between its bones, shattered teeth, and remnants of tissue to splat in dark globs of earth that writhed with beige worms and pale maggots.

Derrick could hear the thing’s wheezing breath that, even without lungs behind the massive cracked and splintered rib cage, exhaled a charnel stench of rotting viscera mingled with the copper tang of old blood. The smell was putrescent, a thick miasma that coated Derrick’s tongue, crawling to the back of his throat. As the thing heaved itself bit by bit, through the tear in reality, he turned his head and vomited the remnants of his Burger Queen lunch.

 Ah man, why is that skeleton breathing?

Derrick’s thoughts were slippery and faded almost as quick as they came. He tried to lever himself up against the wall but a pain worse than he’d ever felt exploded from his thigh and his body refused to get up. His vision split and swam, a slow spin that rotated left then snapped back. Double vision and vomiting … that’s not good.

Derrick tried to look down at his legs. There was blood, but he couldn’t focus. He shook his head and regretted it when a wicked pain lanced from the base of his skull to rip at his optic nerves.

Squinting his eyes, he tried to resolve the two giant skeletal figures into one. The creature was pushing its body up through the shattered floorboards. Grave dirt pattered a tattoo matching the wet slopping sounds of torn and pulped organs falling free from the bones, the earthen placenta of an obscenely large desecrated grave.

Derrick fought to remain coherent against the mental assault of what he was seeing. Too many organs, he thought watching thick ropes of intestine spill to the floor, loops catching and tearing on the splintered jagged edges of the hole. Then more, tumbling out with slick masses of wet earth … and more.

Where’s that dirt coming from … we’re on the second floor?

Why can I only see black beneath the floorboards? 

Seeing the rip in reality was like staring at a sheet of black carbon nanotubes … flat-black, nothing. There was no howling sound, no glinting of light, but an opening, a void, a gate … to somewhere else.

With a thick sucking sound, the colossus pulled its giant rotten emaciated feet from the hole in the floor. Chunks of gelatinous flesh sloughed from the bones, sounding like jello squeezed through fingers. The peeling flesh looked strange with skin of different colors mixed with the gray-green pallor of rot. Loose muscle stripped off like string cheese, but didn’t seem to match the bones and tendons. The thing squatted, covering the shrinking rip in reality that had birthed it, hunched in the squalid room that was much too small to contain it. Derrick gasped as the gate between its feet snapped shut.

 

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About Guy Riessen:

Guy Riessen is an American author of contemporary dark fiction spanning the science fiction, horror, fantasy and crime genres. Born in 1967 in South Dakota, he grew up in the Southern California beach town of Huntington Beach. He moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1985, graduated with a degree in English from UC Berkeley, and has been living in the wild lands north of San Francisco ever since. After nearly two decades of creating artwork in the visual effects industry for feature films, he returned to his first passion: writing speculative fiction.

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Retribution by Guy Riessen

Release date: June 20, 2017

Subgenre: Horror

About Retribution: 

 

Brian Lockewood grew up knowing the pain of abuse and loss, but his own turn toward hatred and violence will teach him that retribution is a dish best served cold...and wet...and filled with rats.

A Dark Psychological Supernatural Horror Novelette

Excerpt:

 

His flashlight beam caught hints of rats scurrying into the shadows as he stepped into the room.

Goddamn rats! Fucking creepy-ass shit.

He shuddered as he shined the light back and forth to make sure none were waiting to leap on him. Using the head of the flashlight, he pulled one of the hanging cabinet doors open. Inside were moldering piles of soggy cereal. Rats had chewed holes in the boxes and their contents had leaked and turned to viscous sludge in the humidity. Cockroaches scuttled back into the cracks as the light fell across them.

Only thing worse than disease ridden rats are nasty, swarming cockroaches.

The sink had a slow drip. Plink. Brian was sure the porcelain basin had been white at one time, but now a green slime had grown up from the drain and around the faucet. The rest of the bottom of the basin was brown with minerals from the water slowly dripping into it. He stared into the sink, watching a drip grow slowly larger, hanging to the lip of the faucet like a transparent bulbous sack. Plink.

***

Just a month after Brian’s ninth birthday, which his mom celebrated by baking him his absolute favorite, chocolate cake, Brian stood next to their kitchen sink. There was a slow drip from the faucet. Plink. Mom had cleaned all the dishes and neatly stacked them on the drying rack.

Dad said the kitchen must always be clean enough to eat off the floor.

Or he’d goddamn make them eat off the floor.

Plink. Another drip landed in the clean, white porcelain-enameled basin.

On the table where Brian ate breakfast every morning before school, there was an empty bourbon bottle. It was tipped on its side. A glass was next to it, a slick of bourbon on the bottom.

It was warm that day, but since it was Fall, there was a stiff breeze blowing outside. The windows of the kitchen were open and the cool air moved across the room. A shadow moved slowly across the table, cast from the sun coming in through the screen door.

Twisting slowly, his mom’s feet dangled above the clean linoleum floor. There was a belt looped through the metal light fixture in the middle of the ceiling. It was one of his dad’s belts.

Her face was black and purple, lumpy, and her left eye bulged out like a grotesque caricature of someone surprised. But her right eye just peeked out through a slit where her swollen eyelids didn’t quite meet. She had her makeup up on, like dad always wanted, but her lipstick was smeared on the right side and made it look like her mouth was stretched out. Her lips were puffy under the red lipstick and her tongue was a dark purple and lolled from between her teeth. There was a pool of fluid under her feet, one of the kitchen chairs was tipped over, and the room smelled of bourbon and urine.

The police found his dad down at the bar two blocks over. He said he didn’t know anything about what happened. He’d been at the unemployment office all morning, sat in the park that was on the way home for maybe a few hours, then went to the bar. He said he hadn’t been home since 9am.

They ruled it a suicide. Said his mom took her own life.

Brian knew there was no lipstick on the glass slicked with bourbon. But he couldn’t tell anyone. His dad would know.

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About Guy Riessen:

Guy Riessen is an American author of contemporary dark fiction spanning the science fiction, horror, fantasy and crime genres. Born in 1967 in South Dakota, he grew up in the Southern California beach town of Huntington Beach. He moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1985, graduated with a degree in English from UC Berkeley, and has been living in the wild lands north of San Francisco ever since. After nearly two decades of creating artwork in the visual effects industry for feature films, he returned to his first passion: writing speculative fiction.

Website

 

 

Fruiting Bodies by Guy Riessen

Release date: February 16, 2017

Subgenre: Horror

About Fruiting Bodies:

 

It’s 1979 and a secret all-out war between science and nature has erupted in the forests of the eastern United States.

Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, also known as the Zombie Fungus, infects the brains of ants. A daring military mission has recovered samples and it looks like the fungus just evolved into humanity’s worst nightmare.

Excerpt:

There wasn’t enough starlight filtering through the branches to light up shit. Johnny “Shrub” Kieterman reached up and snapped on the IR LED, switching the goggles to active-vision. Looking down, he saw filaments glowing in the infrared, filling the hole, looking like spider webs or arteries. He could see and feel the stuff undulating and writhing around his calves.

     Shrub tugged at his legs, pulling up at his right knee with both hands. His leg remained stuck. He yanked his tac-knife from the sheath on his thigh and jabbed and sawed into the glowing threads. In the green light, more glowing white goo leaked from everywhere along the sides of the hole, staining his pants, blade and hands. He cut with his right and dug and pulled at the filaments with his left. The hole seemed to be filling with the thin webbing faster than he could cut it away. As he watched, a thicker vein of material as big around as his gloved thumb slithered and jerked out of the muddy side, flopping wetly from side to side, twisting and moving like a worm freshly baited on a hook. 

     Shrub’s breath came hot and fast now as panic set in. He could see the thick, white, probing thing twisting closer to his boot. As soon as it touched the canvas and leather, it pulsed out from the side of the hole, twisting, wrapping and entwining from the heel of his boot up his calf. The pointed tip, glowing wetly in the artificial light appeared to back up, then jabbed into the back of his knee, right between the straps of his knee pad. Pain shot through Shrub’s leg, like alcohol poured on an open wound.

     The pain urging him on, Shrub sliced through the pulsing thumb-thick appendage and hauled his feet out of the grip of the thrumming webs. He fell backwards, knocking the AN/PVS-5 off his helmet. Gooseflesh raised across his skin; He scraped and rubbed with both hands where the white root had penetrated his knee. He grabbed the sample case again and tried to race for the tree line. His knees weren’t working at all, so he shuffled on his thighs and forearms, his knife still gripped in his right hand. With his left, he dragged the case.

     Painful heat was spreading out from the wound. The tree line was getting closer.

His eye caught his pale reflection in the knife blade. His face a grimace of pain and determination, and what the hell?  He looked at his reflected eye, and he could see the red veins from the corner to iris bulging, even pulsing. His sclera writhed with motion beneath the surface.

     Shrub grabbed the red smoke grenade from his tac-belt. The bad-shit-is-going-down red smoke. He pulled the paper-tabbed wire ring with his teeth and threw it as hard as he could through the trees and out into the clearing. He could see the red puffs beginning to billow and spread from the aluminum can. His arms twitching and not quite responding, he pulled the silver sample case up and back to the side. He saw the flesh of his forearm start to bubble. Lumps rose and fell, tracks of raised, web-like tracings sliding and moving just below the skin.

 

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About Guy Riessen:

Guy Riessen is an American author of contemporary dark fiction spanning the science fiction, horror, fantasy and crime genres. Born in 1967 in South Dakota, he grew up in the Southern California beach town of Huntington Beach. He moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1985, graduated with a degree in English from UC Berkeley, and has been living in the wild lands north of San Francisco ever since. After nearly two decades of creating artwork in the visual effects industry for feature films, he returned to his first passion: writing speculative fiction.

Website

 

The Hunger by Guy Riessen

Release date: January 23, 2017

Subgenre: Horror, Weird Western

About The Hunger: 

 

James Dempsey, a cold-blooded British assassin is sent to the frontier wilderness of the 1860s Canadian/American border to hunt down the Wendigo, a deadly supernatural creature capable of clouding the human mind and driving men to cannibalism. With futuristic technology, and deadly skill James' hubris drives him with a hunger to succeed at any cost.

But as the temperature drops in the wickedly bitter nights of the North, who is hunting whom?

Fans of Lovecraftian Mythos Horror will revel in this brutally dark and gritty battle between greed, pride and an insatiable hunger.

A Weird Western Mythos Short Story of 6065 words.

Excerpt:

 

"The ground was completely frozen, James' boots crunched icy pine needles with every step. He moved a couple paces away from the fire and spun around when he felt something grip his arm. Kitchi stood, one hand on James' shoulder, illuminated in the green glow from the chambers of James’ pistol. Kitchi raised a finger to his lips. The soft fur soles of Kitchi's boots made no sound as he stepped past James. In the dim starlight, James could just make out the shadow form of Pannoowau crouched over the fire ring. He could see the sparks from the flint, but frigid air carried little sound, like everything was smothered under a wool blanket.

James turned back to where Kitchi was standing half-lit by the stars. The Indian stood at the edge of the shadow cast by a massive white pine. He muttered something in Cree and shook his head. James could see nothing in the dark of the shadow, so he said in a harsh whisper, "What is it?"

Flames began to glow back in the fire pit, pushing back the shadows. Kitchi tucked his rifle under his arm and pointed at the frost-covered ground. Pannoowau stepped up behind them, uncovered the lens of an oil lantern and held it out. The flaring light revealed huge swaths of red blood punctuated with white bits of bone and chunks of flesh and entrails strewn about the base of the pine. Steam still rose in lazy arcs from carnage. In the light of the lantern, James could see their supplies and packs scattered about.

"Damn!" James shouted, stamping his boots against the hard ground, "Damn and Hellfire! Where's the other horses? We’ll need to split some of this between the other saddlebags."

"Quiet!" Kitchi said. "Wendigo close."

"Wendigo?" James asked. "It must be something bigger than that, it killed and dragged off a thousand-pound horse. A grizzly?"

Kitchi took the lantern from Pannoowau and said, "No, Sir James, not grizzly, Wendigo. And not just one thousand-pound horse...three horses." Kitchi shined the lantern around, picking out two other massive swaths of blood. The wagon overturned and splintered.

"Bloody hell!" James walked through the area lit by the lantern, kicking some of the supplies and burst saddlebags into a central pile, "How the Devil could all this happen when we were asleep just 10 yards away?"

"Wendigo have power over men's minds. Make you sleep. Make you wake. Make you hungry. Once you sleep, Wendigo can control. What you see. What you hear."

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About Guy Riessen:

Guy Riessen is an American author of contemporary dark fiction spanning the science fiction, horror, fantasy and crime genres. Born in 1967 in South Dakota, he grew up in the Southern California beach town of Huntington Beach. He moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1985, graduated with a degree in English from UC Berkeley, and has been living in the wild lands north of San Francisco ever since. After nearly two decades of creating artwork in the visual effects industry for feature films, he returned to his first passion: writing speculative fiction.

Website