I Made Cannibalism Cozy and Other June News

/ Winona Morris / Leave a comment

If you’ve been waiting to take a chance on my work, June is a genuinely amazing month to do it.

June is my birthday month. I’ve celebrated it for 40-something years and I’ve never once published a novel on it, but there’s a first time for everything.

I’ll be launching my first full sized novel ON my birthday. June 22 is going to bring you Borrowed Bones:

A haunting meditation on grief, obsession, and the things we build from our broken hearts.

After the death of his wife, Russ Simmons is barely surviving. He walks in the woods behind his house every night, whispering his love into the darkness. He never expected the darkness to whisper back.

Something emerges from the woods behind his home. It talks to him in her voice, and with each passing night, it becomes more of what he’s lost.

As the creature learns, Hachette begins to suffer. A body is found in the woods, a farmer’s livestock is butchered and sorted like specimens, and a young child goes missing.

At the center of an ever-tightening circle of violence sits a small house where a grieving widower has stopped asking why his wife had to die, and started asking what he’s willing to sacrifice to get her back.

Borrowed Bones explores the terrible weight of love that refuses to let go, and the monstrous lengths we’ll go to when we can’t accept goodbye.

But that’s not all!



I’ve also been accepted into NEED: Horror Stories You Can’t Live Without.

I’m amazingly excited about that one, because I’m in there with some pretty big names in indie horror. Just look at this line up!

We all hunger. We all desire. We all hope. But more than anything, we all NEED. Need can slice our hearts into pieces like a razor blade. When our need isn’t met, our souls shrivel into a singular agony. It’s all we can think about; pursuing that need is the only thing we can do. In the end, if we need hard enough for long enough, we are extinguished.



This is a book of need. A mother whose children are thirsty, but she has no water, only the blood in her veins. A young man dying for the attention of strangers, for clicks that may never come. A son who will do anything to keep his elderly father alive, even as his flesh decays around him. An addict whose need is killing him over and over, every morning, every day, every night.



You don’t want this book. You need it.

NEED drops on June 10th.

I was in 2 anthologies that dropped in May.

Sinister Sins: An Anthology of the 7 Most Deadly came out on May 9th. My story in that one combines the sins of Lust and Gluttony.

In this chilling anthology, the boundaries of human depravity are pushed to their breaking point. Within these pages, the ancient vices of man take on terrifying new forms, proving that the oldest monsters aren’t hiding under the bed—they are festering inside us. Behind every corked bottle and labeled vial lies a concentrated essence of our own undoing. We treat our vices like remedies—a drop of Lust to cure the cold, a dram of Pride to bolster the spirit, a tincture of Wrath to numb the pain. But every “medicine” has its side effects, and these seven are lethal.

The Corrosives: Witness the slow, acid-like dissolution of the soul through Envy and Greed, where the more you possess, the less of “you” remains.

The Sedatives: Fall into the suffocating embrace of Sloth and Gluttony, where the comfort of the fix becomes the weight of the casket.

The Volatiles: Brace for the explosive reactions of Wrath and the blinding, dizzying heights of Pride—elevations that only make the inevitable crash more violent.

Sinister Sins is more than a collection of tales; it is a catalog of the human condition in its most concentrated form. These stories strip away the clinical labels of morality to reveal the raw, pulsing toxins beneath. Whether sipped slowly or swallowed whole, these sins offer a transformation from which there is no recovery.

So…anybody out there hungry?

Prime Cuts: A Savory Cannibalistic Horror Anthology came out on May 4th. In this The Butchered Writers presentation I have not one but TWO cozy horror stories.

Yes, I made cannibalism cozy. No, I’m not going to explain that. Just trust me.

Read a FREE sample of this one at Thebutcheredwriters.com

What goes on in the minds of those who have a desire to consume flesh? What becomes of the victims of those strange desires? Is there a line a person shouldn’t cross in order to survive or feast? This anthology explores what may be taboo for some but just another meal for others. If you’re hungry come feast on what lies within the pages of Prime Cuts.

ALSO

I have plans to be more active with posts.


I’m still working on a posting schedule, and we’ll work the kinks out together, but I’m planning on more fiction, some articles/personal essays, and more book reviews in June.

As always, comments are my love language. Let me know what you think!

Why Horror Helps My Depression (and Happy Books Don’t)

/ Winona Morris / Leave a comment

For as long as I can remember, I have dealt with depression.

This is true for almost everyone these days, so most of you reading this are probably familiar with the feeling.

There is a particular exhaustion that comes with depression. It is an exhaustion that sleep, sunlight, or any of the well-meaning list of things friends will suggest to you can’t cure. These suggestions might be to exercise more, drink more water, or read something uplifting.

Depression, and its exhaustion, distorts everything. It gives everything a heaviness that doesn’t really exist. Even the things that are supposed to help. Maybe even especially those things.

When I was a teenager, my dad told me it was my choice of reading material that was making me “morbid.” He said I should read something different, something lighter. (Which ended up being “Clan of the Cave Bear” to appease him.)

When you are a fan of horror (books or movies) and people see you struggling, they try to steer you away from that. They point you toward softer, more hopeful stories. Books about healing. Romantic comedies with a happily ever after. They want you to see that the light can win, and that the world can be a clean and uncomplicated place.

If you’ve never struggled with depression, the logic sounds simple enough: if you feel bad, consume something good to balance the scales.

Too bad it doesn’t really work like that.

Well, maybe it does for some people, but when I’m in a depressive spiral, feeding my brain-meat something bright doesn’t lift the dimness inside; it only highlights the contrast. Every cheerful character is a reminder that I am not them. Hopeful endings feel distant and artificial. Things don’t happen that way in real life. Every act of happiness on the page sharpens the edges of what I am lacking, turning something meant to be soothing into a razor’s edge that hurts more than helps.

Why can’t I feel this? Why don’t things resolve for me like that?

It’s not unusual for those books to deepen my depression instead of offering me comfort. They show me a beautiful but uninhabitable alien landscape. One where I will never belong. It becomes a kind of spiritual isolation.

Horror, on the other hand, opens the door and invites you to come sit down somewhere more reality-based.

Horror has an honesty that other genres often avoid. Horror doesn’t pretend the world is fair. It doesn’t insist that suffering is temporary, purposeful, and neatly resolved. It acknowledges fear, dread, grief, and the knowledge that something is terribly, deeply wrong, and is probably going to stay that way.

For me, the atmosphere of horror matches my internal landscape, and that feels like a breath of fresh air. There is tension, unease, and the sense that something is lurking just beneath the surface, and these things are reflections of reality, not distortions of it.

Horror gives shape to the feelings we suffer that are otherwise difficult to articulate.

Living with depression can feel like being haunted. There is a presence that follows you room to room to room. It sits with you, presses into your thoughts, whispers things you don’t want to hear. It changes the way the world looks by dulling colors, flattening sounds, and stretching time into something unmanageable.

If horror understands anything, it is a good haunting.

Horror knows what it’s like to be pursued by something invisible. It knows how it feels to question your own mind. It knows that sometimes the threat isn’t external, because it’s already inside the house. Most of all, horror knows what it’s like to tell someone that something is wrong, and have them brush it off as a triviality.

There is comfort in that.

Not that horror “fixes” anything. It doesn’t. The monsters don’t cure me, and the stories don’t ease the heaviness or the exhaustion. But it validates it. Horror lets me know that the feeling is real enough to be named, shaped, and confronted.

Horror lets sadness, fear, and overwhelm exist without apology.

In many “happy” narratives, those negative emotions are obstacles to overcome as quickly as possible. They are stepping stones to be walked over on the way to a brighter end. But in horror, those emotions ARE the story. They are explored and lingered over, not rushed past as if they were nothing.

For someone with depression, the ability to linger with those negative emotions instead of feeling pressured to hide them under the rug matters.

It’s the difference between being told to “move on” and being told, “Everything you’re feeling is valid.”

Depression often thrives on vague, formless dread. There is a constant sense that something is wrong, but you can not put a name to it, can’t stop it.

When reading (or watching) horror, you can turn those same feelings into something concrete. There is a monster, or a curse, or a stalker in the dark. And when something has a shape, it can be faced.

In horror, as in reality, sometimes the characters don’t win. The ending can be bleak, but there is still a kind of catharsis in watching it happen at all. The narrative arc becomes something you can follow, rather than something that you can’t figure out.

Happy books (and movies) often skip confrontation, especially confrontation with negative outcomes. They leap from struggle to resolution in one graceful stride, smoothing over the mess in between. And when you are stuck forever in that messy middle, that leap feels like a cheat.

Horror doesn’t skip the mess; it revels in it. It laughs in your face and asks, “What if this doesn’t get better? What if it actually gets worse?” Paradoxically, that kind of bleak taunting can feel more comforting than forced optimism.

Because when you’re depressed, hope usually isn’t believable.

Not that horror is everyone’s refuge. Some people out there might actually have their pain and trauma soothed by the “happily ever after”. But if you’re like me and the cheerful stories end up making you feel worse for every good thing that happens to the characters, maybe you should try horror.

Because horror offers something that is comforting without demanding that we feel better before we’re ready. It allows us to sit with the darkness without pretending it will blow away like a bad dream when the sun comes up. Because there is relief in opening a book and finding that the world inside is just as haunted as you feel.

It makes you feel less alone in the dark.

I Spent Easter in Bed (And That’s Just How It Went)

/ Winona Morris / 2 Comments

Happy Easter, friends. Or, well… it was Easter anyway. I was there for some of it.

I woke up sick. Not ER sick, just that low-grade awful where every option feels bad and the bed feels like the only reasonable place to be. That is so normal for me that I know better than to try to fight it. So bed is where I mostly stayed.

My husband and kids headed to Grandma’s to dye eggs without me. Then they went to church without me. I watched all of this happen from the same four walls, which is a peculiar kind of holiday feeling.

There’s something strange about watching your family’s holiday carry on through a doorway, being present enough to see it, too worn down to be part of it.

The parts I did catch

I did drag myself out of bed for the egg hunt. And I’m glad I did. Watching kids hunt eggs is one of those things that’s exactly as simple and exactly as good as it sounds. It doesn’t matter that one of those kids is nearing “young man” and the other is usually a surly pre-teen. Today they were just my eager little boys again.

My oldest went back to Grandma’s to help cook supper. My youngest chose to stay home and played Fortnite in the bed beside me while I played a little Animal Crossing, then drifted in and out of a light sleep watching him mplay.

We had supper together, and Grammas. It was quiet and normal and fine.

Here’s the honest timeline of my Easter:

  • Morning: Bed. Family leaves for egg dyeing without me.
  • Mid-morning: Still bed. Family goes to church.
  • Afternoon: Made it outside for the egg hunt. Back to bed.
  • Later: More bed. Fortnite sounds in the background. Oldest at Grandma’s cooking.
  • Evening: Supper together. Hot bath. Reading. Now this.

What I keep coming back to

The holiday happened. My kids had a good day. Grandma had help in the kitchen. The eggs got dyed and hidden and found, multiple times over apparently, because that’s what kids do when you give them eggs and a yard.

I didn’t ruin Easter by being sick. And honestly, writing that out is a bit of a relief.

Now I really should go back to bed. Still don’t feel great, and I’ve got to go to work in the morning.

Ever had a holiday go sideways on you? Sick days, travel disasters, plans that fell apart? I’d love to hear how your Easter went, good or messy. Drop it in the comments.

When You Have Nothing to Blog About: A Late-Night Honest Look at Writer’s Block

/ Winona Morris / Leave a comment

It’s 10pm, and I have nothing to write about. Not “nothing interesting”. Nothing. A blank where blog ideas should be.

I know the stakes of skipping tonight. Miss one day, and missing the next becomes easy. Then the day after. Then suddenly it’s the end of the month and I haven’t published a single word. So here I am, writing about having nothing to write about. Which, if you’re a blogger, especially a personal blogger like me, is probably one of the most relatable things you’ll read all week.

The honest truth about a “boring” life and blogging

Here’s my reality: I go to work. I come home. I sleep. Months pass without me leaving the house for anything other than those two destinations. I don’t even do the grocery run anymore, my husband handles it. Work. Home. Sleep. Repeat. You can see how that’s not exactly fertile ground for content creation.

And yet here’s the strange thing…I used to be a prolific blogger/journaler. As a teenager, I filled journal after journal. Handwritten, no internet, nowhere near as “eventful” a life as I have now. And I never ran out of things to say. My life was just as uneventful, arguably more so, and I wrote as though every day was worth documenting in full.

I wrote as if my life were the most interesting thing in the world. What changed?

The real reason writer’s block hits harder as we get older

I think I’ve landed on something. Teenage me wasn’t writing about what happened. She was writing about what might happen. Hopes. Plans. Dreams she was still building toward. The future was open and full of possibility, and that possibility was endlessly interesting to explore on paper.

Now? The future has arrived. And some of those plans didn’t pan out the way I expected. It’s harder to write with the same breathless wonder when you’re no longer looking forward to an unknown life because you’re living the known one.

That’s not hopeless, by the way. It’s just different. And maybe the work now is finding that same sense of meaning in the ordinary that younger me found so naturally.

So what do you do when you have nothing to blog about?

Tonight, my answer is: you write exactly this. You write the struggle. The blank screen. The 10pm desperation. The surprising philosophical detour about hope and aging and what it means to document a life.

Turns out, “I have nothing to write about” is itself something to write about.

As for the rest of tonight, I’m signing off for a long hot bath and a book. I’m torn between the horror ARC I’m working through and a possum shifter romance I picked up on Kindle Unlimited. (Yes, that’s a real genre. Yes, I’m reading it. No, I’m not sorry.)

Then bed. Because I really am a thrill a minute.

Do you ever blog through the blank? If you’ve ever stared down writer’s block and published anyway — or have your own theory about why we run dry — I’d love to hear it in the comments. And if you have a nighttime ritual more exciting than mine, please share. The bar is genuinely on the floor.

Review: Pumpkin Seeds: The Indie Horror Debut That Almost Made Me DM the Author at Midnight

/ Winona Morris / 10 Comments

Pumpkin Seeds by Tyler Downs

Release date  April 9, 2026Series  Standalone (for now)Format  ARC Review

Tyler Downs is a relatively new face in the indie horror community, but the trajectory is already unmistakable. His debut collection, Fifteen Eyes, delivered on every promise of its eye-catching cover by containing sharp, memorable short fiction that announced a writer with real instincts. Now, having read an advance copy of his debut novel, Pumpkin Seeds, I can say with confidence: Downs is about to start running with the big dogs of horror, indie and traditional alike.

Pumpkin Seeds follows Ed, Wren, and Sam who are paranormal investigators operating out of Salem with a rather unusual complication: one of them is dead for 51 weeks of the year, one is essentially a ghost, and one is a teenager. For the final week of October, they band together to solve Salem’s supernatural crimes. This year’s case is the worst yet: a family dead, a small child missing, and the 31st bearing down on all of them like a freight train.

Ed and Sam anchor the story, and while the setup is technically “private investigators,” the dynamic reads far more like a boy and his reluctant father figure and I mean that as the highest possible compliment. It’s warmer, stranger, and more affecting than any buddy-cop pairing could have been.

What Downs does especially well is characters. Even the side characters carry main-character energy, each one of them fully realized, scene-stealing, and deeply deserving of their own spotlight. I’d love to see him follow the cozy mystery model: a series set in this Salem, each book pulling a side character forward. You’ll know exactly who I mean once you read it.

Fair warning: this book made me cry. Twice. It’s the kind of story that lands harder than you expect, sneaks past your defenses, and leaves a mark. In the best possible way.

I had to fight the urge to send Mr. Downs a midnight DM just to call him an asshole. I didn’t, cause he’s actually a pretty chill guy. The book, however, is not.

The verdict

5-Stars

Read Pumpkin Seeds now, so you can say you were there before Tyler Downs went mainstream. That day is coming, and probably sooner than he expects.

The 3am Lie (And What the Sun Shows)

/ Winona Morris / 10 Comments

Yesterday was April Fool’s Day, and the universe took that personally.

My body decided to mark the occasion with a hormonal symphony (the kind that only people with uteruses truly understand) and paired it, generously, with a manic peak. Then I forgot to take my melatonin. So 2am, 3am, and even 5am found me flat on my back, blinking at the ceiling, drafting blog entries in my head and mentally crafting things I’ll never actually make.

Every time I drifted off, my brain jolted me back awake like it had something very important to say.

It did not.

Somewhere in those restless hours, I was struck by a profound and generous thought: I should embrace life’s circumstances. Take the bad, alchemize it into good. Lean in.

Nighttime lies to you like that.

There’s something about the dark, whether you’re in pain, sick, sleepless, or just running on scrambled brain chemistry, that warps your perception in both directions. When you’re suffering at 3am, everything feels catastrophic and permanent. But when your mind is buzzing with too much serotonin at midnight, you feel invincible. You feel chosen. You draft manifestos. You solve problems. You decide, with full conviction, that you are finally going to become the person you were always meant to be.

Then the sun comes up.

And the sun is honest in a way the night never is.

In the daylight, the catastrophes of 3am shrink back to their actual size so they feel more manageable, ordinary, and survivable. But the grand plans? The invincibility? That shrinks too. The world, it turns out, does not reorganize itself around your 3am epiphanies. The world just keeps going, indifferent and unimpressed, and now you have to put on pants and participate in it while running on three hours of sleep and whatever is left of your dignity.

Last night, the world was my oyster.

This morning, my neighbor’s dog will not stop barking, and I am fantasizing about consequences.

The gap between the 3am visionary and the 9am wreckage is one of the more humbling places to live. But maybe that’s the actual insight that survived the night: you don’t have to be the person who has it all figured out in the dark. You just have to be the person who shows up when the sun comes up anyway.

Pants and everything.

My “Morning Ritual” (Or: How to Fail at Being a Morning Person)

/ Winona Morris / 4 Comments

To call anything I do at any point of the day a “ritual” is a bold statement. Ritual implies ceremony and layers symbolic meaning onto mundane habits, bestowing reverence on something that probably doesn’t deserve it. Not the way I do things, anyway.

I like the idea of being a morning person.

In some parallel dimension, there’s a version of me who rises before the sun. She takes her coffee out to the porch and watches the sky turn pink. She reads a little, maybe journals a bit, all before the rest of her household stirs. That version of me wakes up refreshed. No gunk in her throat. No sleep crusted in her eyes. No gravitational pull back toward the pillow.

I love that woman. I will never be her, but I love her.

I’m an owl. Years of closing shifts spent not getting home until 10pm or later have rewired my brain to believe that nighttime is my time. So I’m often up until 1 or 2am, hunched over my laptop, clicking out horror stories into the dark.

Then I sleep until 10am. Later, if I’m lucky.

My “morning” routine starts closer to lunchtime. I begrudgingly surrender to consciousness, plod to the bathroom (because let’s be honest, that’s where everyone’s morning actually begins) then shuffle to the kitchen to start the coffee. And wait. Because the chemical salvation isn’t instant. That is one of life’s great cruelties.

Eventually I make it to my desk, where I do a little work for The Butchered Writers, the horror writer collective I’m part of. I post the daily writing prompt to the group, then update our Pinterest page with whatever new articles we’ve published.

Glamour, thy name is morning routine.

By the time that’s wrapped up, it’s usually time to leave for my day job, where I’ll spend the next 8 to 11 hours being emotionally battered by the general public, courtesy of a career in retail.

Ritual? Sure. Let’s call it that.

Daily writing prompt
What are your morning rituals? What does the first hour of your day look like?
View all responses

Chills Without the Gore: Reviewing the Horror Anthology A Twinge of Terror

/ Winona Morris / Leave a comment

Horror doesn’t always have to shock, gore, or terrify you into sleepless nights. Sometimes, the most enduring chills come from subtle unease, clever twists, and eerie atmospheres instead. A Twinge of Terror embraces that gentler side of horror with 16 light horror stories. These tales offer stories that are more about shivers than screams. Each story in this anthology tiptoes along the line between the unsettling and the whimsical, proving that fear can be delivered without blood or brutality. Sometimes, the most haunting stories are the ones that play with your imagination rather than your stomach.

The stories in this collection were gathered by The Butchered writers as part of their first anthology that wasn’t written by group members alone, so it offers up some new and different horror talent from their past collections.

Originally aimed at a young adult audience, A Twinge of Terror might not have anything for the splatter loving horror fan, but is good for someone just easing into the genre.

The stories inside include.

  1. TAPPED IN – First things around her house start being destroyed under mysterious circumstances.  Then the trees start tapping…..
  2. THE CANDLE IN THE WINDOW – An old fashioned haunted house story where one girl becomes a self appointed guardian.
  3. A GILDED BUTTERFLY – A woman on the run from her husband finds herself living in a boarding house with some unusual occupants.
  4. THE BELDAM OF BEDLAM – A man set on disproving the existence of witches visits an accused witch in the asylum that houses her.
  5. BLANKY – A unique take on a child’s favorite blanket and the monster in the closet.
  6. CRUISING WITH HONEY DOWN DIABLO ROAD – A young man on the hunt for his estranged mother finds her, on Diablo Road.
  7. FRIEND – A girl bullied by her older brother asks her imaginary friend for help, only to find out it might not be that helpful after all.
  8. SALLY’S RIDE – A classic radioactive creature feature, and the family dog gone wrong.
  9. THE FEBRUARY PACT – An old family curse means someone is lost every February. Leah is determined to break the curse, but will the price be too much to pay?
  10. THE GIRL WITH THE FLOWER BONNET – When a family acquires an antique painting, and the family dog immediately hates it, you know it’s not going to end well.
  11. THE GOOD PEOPLE – A man becomes a census taker in an attempt to escape a more dangerous job, only to find there are some jobs you can’t get away from.
  12. THE HANDPRINT – There is civil unrest among the humans and the paranormal citizens and a proposition on stronger rights is up for vote. But people keep turning up dead, and solving the case might be the turning point in the vote. 
  13. THE HANDS OF OTHERS – A man purchase a place he worked at once, to revisit a tragic past.
  14. THE PERFECT WORLD DOESN’T NEED YOU – In a future where strong emotions are forbidden, a teenager must face the consequences of hers.
  15. THE SURPRISE PASSENGER – A young man picks up a very surprising hitchhiker.
  16. THE TENNENT – The moral of this story might be, be careful what you invite in with a Ouija board.

Taken together, the stories in A Twinge of Terror show that horror doesn’t always need blood and brutality to work. Sometimes a strange knock on the door, a cursed painting, or an imaginary friend that might be a little too real is more than enough to raise the hairs on the back of your neck. If you’re looking for a collection that leans into eerie concepts and classic spooky storytelling rather than graphic scares, this anthology is an easy and entertaining read.

The Butchered Writers is a global writing collective with over thirty members who explore many different corners of the horror genre. When you open a volume from The Butchered Writers Presents (formerly Terror Monthly), you might encounter quiet psychological horror, creature features, paranormal stories, or splatterpunk. There’s a wide range of styles and themes, ensuring that each volume offers something different for horror fans.

Readers can also sample the group’s work through the free stories available on their Patreon.

Dark Web Horror Done Right: Reviewing Caught in the Web

/ Winona Morris / Leave a comment

If you enjoy dark web horror stories, extreme horror anthologies, and disturbing internet-themed fiction, Caught in the Web from The Butchered Writers dives deep into the most terrifying corners of the online world. This collection explores the hidden side of the internet through brutal, unsettling stories perfect for fans of dark fiction and splatterpunk.

Caught in the web book cover

Most of the internet we use every day exists on the visible “surface web.” These are sites easily found through search engines like Google. Beneath that lies the far larger Deep Web, made up of private databases, email accounts, and password-protected pages. Deeper still is the Dark Web, a small but infamous corner of the internet accessed with tools like the Tor Browser. Designed to allow anonymous communication, it has become surrounded by rumors of secret markets, hidden communities, and disturbing content—making it the perfect setting for modern horror stories about curiosity, anonymity, and the dangers of clicking the wrong link.

The Butchered Writers deliver all of that and much more with Caught in the Web: A Dark Web Anthology. This collection contains fourteen stories exploring the darkest corners of the internet, along with a bonus story that takes the idea of the “dark web” a little more literally.

This anthology goes extremely dark, and readers should be aware that it contains graphic horror, extreme violence, and sexual assault.

The stories included are:

ROOM_404.EXE – A sneak peek at a brand-new virtual game turns out to be far more real than expected.
HIGHEST BIDDER – After a night of partying with friends, a young man wakes up strapped to a trolley and caught in a bidding war.
THE DEVIL’S FOOT FETISH – Malcolm is tired of his girlfriend nagging him to find a job, so he discovers a way to make money from one of their shared interests—even if she doesn’t know about it.
CUNT HUNT – Wealthy men pay to hunt women for sport. But what happens when the hunters become the hunted?
NIGHTGLASS – A college student steals a tablet from a thrift store, only to find it has one mysterious app that will change his life forever.
UNICORN – A man searching for a new high orders a designer drug from the dark web, with devastating consequences.
DEAD MAN LIVE – A father will do absolutely anything to keep his family alive.
THE FACILITATOR – The perfect family man hides a dark side hustle.
HOW DARK CAN IT GET – Two young girls believe they’re meeting boys from a dating app. They couldn’t be more wrong.
THE BABY MAMA SHOW – A man discovers a way to profit from his pregnant girlfriend—without her knowledge.
IDENTITY THEFT – Digital stalking and revenge show how the dark web can both harm and help.
DANNY BOY – A once-in-a-lifetime trip to Hawaii might turn out to be a journey “to die for.”
JEFFREY – An epicurean traveler searches the world for the ultimate taste. This story reveals what happens when he finally finds it.
PAY IT DARKWARD – A novella-length story and one of my favorites in the collection. What happens when the dark web gets under your skin… literally?
THROUGH RUSTLING WILLOWS THE SPIDER MAN COMES – Inspired by the dark web from a different perspective, this tale follows a young man’s grim fate and his encounter with Anansi, the trickster.

Overall, Caught in the Web delivers exactly what fans of dark web horror, and extreme horror in general, are looking for: unsettling, inventive, and unapologetically grim stories. From psychological terror to shocking splatterpunk, there’s something in this anthology to disturb and captivate every kind of horror reader. If you’re ready to dive into the darkest corners of the internet, this collection is not to be missed.

The Butchered Writers is a global writing collective with over thirty members who explore many different corners of the horror genre. When you open a volume from The Butchered Writers Presents (formerly Terror Monthly), you might encounter quiet psychological horror, creature features, paranormal stories, or splatterpunk. There’s a wide range of styles and themes, ensuring that each volume offers something different for horror fans.

Readers can also sample the group’s work through the free stories available on their Patreon.

In Vine and Other Swamp Stories – A Review

/ Winona Morris / Leave a comment

In Ink Vine and Other Swamp Stories, Elizabeth Broadbent take us on a trip to Lower Congaree. A poverty-stricken South Carolina town surrounded by swamp and sadness. Lucky for me, I was able to read an ARC copy, and meet the inhabitants of Lower Congaree early.

There are 9 stories and one novella in this collection, and it would be worth it for the novella alone. In Ink Vine, we meet Emmy Joiner, an exotic dancer who desperately wants nothing more than to be allowed to be herself and not whoever everyone expects her to be. That one is also a sapphic romance that is achingly beautiful and tragic all at once.

Each of the other 9 stories have that same beauty and ache to them. Southern gothic to the core, and embodies a wistful nostalgia for anyone who may have grown up in that type of small town.

You’ll see recurring characters moving in and out of the stories, each one making you wish you could follow them a little bit longer and get to know them a little bit better.

The only story in here that wasn’t a perfect 5 star from me was To Sing is to See. While it was a perfectly wonderful story of its own (which kept the book as a whole a 5 star read), it just doesn’t have the same feel (to me) as the rest of the tales in this collection.

If you like a good southern gothic style story, I highly recommend you grab this book when it becomes available on March 6, 2026. You will not be disappointed.