release date: October 13, 2016
sub-genre: Horror
About Night Conjurings:
Ghosts, vampires, demons, serial
killers, and other deadly denizens of the dark haunt this collection of
chilling short stories by horror master Harvey Click.
·
An unhappy and unloved
boy summons a substitute mother—with sharp teeth.
·
Two teenage boys learn
it’s better to leave a spooky abandoned house alone.
·
Can ghosts kill? Denise
is about to find out the hard way.
·
When her creative
writing instructor offers to teach Kathy how to write a horror story, she finds
herself trapped inside one.
·
A man discovers he may
be a killer, though he can’t remember the murders.
·
A man with a terrible
past, a wizard from the dark side of the moon, and a pitchfork perform a dark
drama of murder and madness.
·
A time traveler
attempts to bring his dead fiancée back to life.
·
Many people wish to be ageless,
but what happens when an immortal woman begins to lose her mind?
·
An artist literally
draws a dead woman out of her grave.
·
An elderly woman seeks
to recover her forgotten past, but some things are better left forgotten.
·
A petty swindler tries
to buy good luck but ends up with the sort of luck nobody would want.
·
And finally, a brief fable
about a box of very sharp silence.
Night Conjurings is 99c until November
Excerpt:
The pit was no
deeper than a bathtub. A large number of snakes were writhing inside it, and
beneath them was something that looked like a child’s body. Kneeling at the
edge, Butch reached down, grasped one of the snakes, and threw it out of the
pit to the other side.
It looked to
Brad like a copperhead. “Damn, those things are gonna bite you!” he said.
“Hush! I know
what I’m doing, I do this every day. Snakes like her—she draws them like a
magnet.”
He threw out
another one and another, seemingly oblivious to the fangs as his hand darted
down again and again to grasp yet another. Brad saw a growing carpet of snakes
writhing angrily on the other side of the pit, and he was afraid they’d slither
through the shadows over to the side where he stood. He was so intent on
watching the floor near his feet that he scarcely glanced at the body lying at
the bottom of the pit.
Butch threw out
the last snake, stood and took the lantern from Brad. He held it up high and
gazed down at the horrid figure. At first Brad thought it was the body of a
naked girl, because it was female and no more than four feet tall, but the
breasts were womanly.
It appeared to
have been dead for a while because the skin was slate-gray and looked slimy, as
if it was seeping some sort of putrescence. The face was sunken, its skin
stretched tight over the cheekbones and the shut eyes sunk deep in their
sockets. The skull was hairless and oddly shaped, the cranium large and the
chin small and delicate. The lips were black or maybe dark purple, the nose was
small and childlike, and the ears were large and pointed at the top. The small
hands were crossed above the belly like hands in a casket, their nails long and
black like talons.
Aside from the
sunken features and the gray, slimy skin, the body didn’t seem to have
decomposed, and the odor around the pit wasn’t like a rotting body but more
like some sickeningly sweet flower. Brad held his bandana against his nose.
Child or woman,
it didn’t look altogether human, and Brad suddenly realized it was probably a
plastic dummy that had been used in a carnival sideshow. He wondered how Butch
had gotten his hands on it.
“What is it?” he
whispered.
“She ain’t an it, she’s a she,” Butch said quietly. “Her name is Kadava.”
“How do you know
that?”
“She told me.”
“You’re nuts.
That thing’s not alive.”
“Wanna bet?”
Butch held the
cage trap above the pit and unlatched the door. The figure’s eyes snapped open
as the terrified rabbit fell, and the small hands shot up and snatched it out of
the air. The rabbit shrieked, but the sound was cut short when one of the
talon-like fingernails sliced its neck open.
The little gray
woman held the rabbit’s gaping throat to her mouth, slurping and swallowing
noisily as the blood poured into her mouth.
About Harvey Click:
Harvey Click, author of Demon Frenzy, Demon Mania, The Bad Box
and The House of Worms, earned an
M.A. in English from Ohio State University, writing a novel for his master’s
thesis. He has written five other novels, four of them in the horror genre, and
numerous short stories. He has taught English and creative writing for Ohio
University, Ohio State University, the James Thurber House, and OSU’s Creative
Arts Program.
