Author: Catherine Jordan

The Creature Under Your Head: (20 Stories of Horror, Sci-Fi, Crime and Fantasy) is your escape from our mundane world. In this collection, you’ll experience fear and fantasy, scares and suspense, science fiction and terror taking you away to new realms of possibility. Here is your open invitation to other worlds. An entrance to past and future realities. The Creature Under Your Head will scare you, mystify you, entertain you, and make you laugh. Caution: the stories contained within are highly addictive and may be hard to put down. A whole new reason to sleep with the light on. Twenty tales of darkness and travels to alternate dimensions written by Morey Kammerman.

This collection from Morey Kammerman offered fast reads, omniscient point of view (which I like), fitting titles, marked details, and horrific reads—not a single story bored me. Yes, the editor in me caught a few typos and the overuse of punctuation (hey, even the best of the best has typos, and like lawyers, editors are their own worst clients) but that did not stop me from immensely enjoying this read. Kammerman set up every story with an enticing hook, and his voice came alive in almost every story. I’m going to focus on a few of my favorites.

“The Man Who Grew Success” will appeal to all authors. Rejection and writing go hand-in-hand. Harold’s ADHD and crazed thoughts regarding his unpublished stories hit all the sore spots. Then Harold noticed a growth on his head. Reading this made my head itch.

“Four Daughters” is a banter filled exchange between two strangers. The witty dialogue kept me reading and laughing.

“Luxury Apartment for Rent” takes a young couple through a portal into the horror of history. I can envision this story on the screen. As a traveler, I had gooseflesh while reading.  

“Castle in the Clouds”, a funny, futuristic video game left an uncle and nephew foiled by the fickle finger of fate. 

“Stream of Consciousness” appealed to me with this line on page 54: …in my earthly life, I was an adventurer; but by no means depressed. That’s the thing about dying. People always fill in the details. This character spent his life savings on the best raft, then tightened his wallet for the economically priced life-vest. So, what’s the moral here? Read it and see.

“Meat Special: Aisle Nine” elicited plenty of “Ew!” and guffaws while I read about a cursed grocery store with its meat department gone wild. 

“Dating in the Future”—I’d have cried if I weren’t already married. 

Kammerman saved the best for last. “The Legend of Sarah Silver”, about an 80’s valley girl who rises from the dead to make music, wistfully ensures us that music lives on long after death. 

I’d read another from Kammerman, and I encourage you to read this one.

4 out of 5 stars

Available from  Amazon.

With a forward from Lee Murray, four writers offer a selection of 20 varying works within this anthology. Stephanie Ellis gives 2 longer stories, while the remaining 3 women penned six pieces.

Theresa Derwin leads the collection of includes poetry and shorts. She authored two original takes on the victims of Jack the Ripper, and explore who-really-done-it. “Isolation” examines the gloom and the weight of our toughest decisions. “Tummy Bug”, my pick from her stories, told a relatable and alienating narrative regarding women’s reproductive system (a neatly packaged body horror). 

Ruschelle Dillon’s witty and gruesome writing…let’s just say I won’t look at cats the same way again. Dillon gives the reader a haunting and biting example of jealousy, a journalist who fails to heed warnings, mental illness accompanying a dollhouse, one hell of a Halloween party, and my favorite—song tunes which humor the tale of life and death between a hatchling and a moth. 

Stephanie Ellis’s longer yarns, “Painted Ladies” and “Beyond Hope”, added not only variety, but depth. Ellis peels away the masks and the lengths women go to retain their beauty—its painful love and loss. She explores corporate irresponsibility and the buried emotions of human connection. I favored “Beyond Hope” with its flavors of Dante’s Inferno and the movie Poltergeist.

Alyson Faye’s poetry and stories kept me turning pages even though my dinner sat waiting on the table. I heard scratching noises in the walls, I met a dandy of a ventriloquist and his creepy fiend, and I visited a family in a ghost town. Her western horror, “The Blasted Tree” was my favorite of Faye’s, and it brought to mind several photographs I have of gangly trees growing amongst nothing else in the barren desert. 

Women have a unique perspective on horror. Most females have a talent with body horror. All four of these writers deserve a place on everyone’s bookshelf.

5 out of 5 stars

Available from Amazon.

I tend to judge a book’s reading potential by its cover. Till We Become Monsters cover design—a rendering of a recognizable antlered skull dripping with danger—earns 5 stars. 

Family history and jealousy are the bones to this monster, the children are its flesh. 

Korin Perrin is a little boy who’s quite aware that monsters are real. So says his grandmother, who is quite the storyteller. Set in small-town Minnesota with a population of just 278, Korin’s older brother Davis is a brat; no spoiler there. Korin had a special relationship with his grandmother. It has abruptly ended. And Korin blames Davis. 

Headlee does a great job setting her account. I feel myself getting comfortable in Grandfather’s leather reading chair. I hear Grandmother’s tone, and her love for Korin. Minnesota’s cold, cold winter, which bodes well for any thriller, made shiver and reach for my blanket.

As with any good story, I was pulled from the comfort of my chair into the dark world of changelings, wendigo, and bears–oh my! A lot happens within this tale that I can’t discuss due to spoilers. There are woods and there are hunters. I will tell you there’s a twist—I do love twists! Headlee’s novel (her first, by the way) is an easy read, and it’s not laden with a huge cast. Good dialogue, and plenty of action to keep you reading. I read a galley copy so I won’t refer to any typos or formatting issues.  

4 out of 5 stars

Available from  Bookshop and Amazon.

Ever hear the cliché, beauty is only skin deep? The author’s premise asks, what if love were only skin deep? Though dark and sad, this was a love story. And it centered around all things love: unrequited, self, selfless, detached, sexually based attraction, and unconditional. 

In my mind, true love lasts forever. Sexually based attraction is lust. Self-love changes as we change. So as I read, I kept thinking—if the love was real, then it would last regardless of a moult because love is not a feeling or an emotion. The act of caring and giving to someone else. Having someone’s best interest and wellbeing as a priority in your life. To truly love is a very selfless act. 

But this is fiction, and Whiteley’s unique story falls under the weird fiction genre. Her tale belongs to Rose. In the novel’s first half, Rose’s present is told in first person present tense, and her past (backstory) in third person past tense (the chapters are titled with a time stamp to help follow the narrative). The second part of the novel encompasses Rose’s future through the eyes of a secondary narrator—Mikhael Stuck. The narrative jumps around, but like reading a classic or another language or a foreign idea, I quickly got used to it. 

This quote sums up Rose’s perspective about moulting:

If only other emotions were lost in the moult. Fear, pain, guilt, sadness: why must these remain? Some people say it’s because those emotions are true, lasting, while love could never survive for longer. But I think love is the strongest feeling of all, and that’s why it has to die, and be sloughed away. Otherwise it could kill us. I remember how I would’ve taken a bullet for Max, or murdered someone who threatened him. Surely I’m better off without those false feelings. 

Why are skins like this? We’re never told in Rose’s world—they just are. With Rose, a new skin equals a new life—the old one’s personality and emotions end. She looks the same, but isn’t. She remembers the transition, but not the emotional attachments. 

This is one of those rare books that on the surface sounds unrelatable, until you read it. What if you could shed your emotions like a snake sheds its skin? A fresh start. You wouldn’t miss those emotions because they’re gone. What a relief, right? Or…maybe not. In Whitley’s novel some people save their skins, and those feelings can be awakened when the old skins are touched. 

Interesting, thought provoking, and unusual, I give this 4 out of 5 stars.

Available from Bookshop and Amazon.

I love Shirley Jackson. I love haunted house stories. Most of all, I love a great ending. Kaplan’s novel delivers all three. This is a gothic tale about an eyesore of a mansion on the edge of a swamp. Wakefield Manor is inhabited by ghostly memories, literally. There’s a twisted spine of a staircase and broken furniture covered in white sheets. Her book centers around a family of women and their conflicts. But this is not about the past. A new appearance—the future—takes center stage, and it’s in the form of a creepy kid.

This is Samantha Wakefield’s narrative, written in first person point of view. Sam, her pregnant sister Elizabeth, and their mother Agnes, reside in the home. They are unafraid, yet unhappy. Kaplan writes that the house is webbed in shadows of the distant past. “I have seen memories here that are too old for me to remember, older even then my mother and my grandmother…”

Sam is privy to apparitions of her younger self and of her ancestors. Sam’s visions are harmless and untouchable… Until the futuristic child enters the picture, a faceless boy, her sister’s unborn baby.

It’s easy to recognize the unapologetic inspiration from Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. In fact, Kaplan’s story invokes many recognizable character names: Julian, Agnes, Jonah, Clementine, Constance, and Meriday. But don’t be mistaken—this is not a retelling of Jackson’s classic. Kaplan’s fresh prose includes an entity in the swamp, a dark hallway, and a secret locked room. This slow burner lingered in my imagination long after I put it down.

5/5 stars

Available from Bookshop and Amazon.