horror

A Dark and Dreary Review

/ Winona Morris / 1 Comment

There’s just something about basements (and attics) that makes them feel inherently haunted. Maybe it’s the darkness, the damp and dusty corners, or the sense of being tucked beneath the world, closer to whatever might crawl up from below. Whatever the reason, they’re perfect settings for horror.

Dark and Dreary: A Basement Horror Anthology, edited by Cassandra O’Sullivan Sachar, taps into that collective dread with 20 basement-centered tales. Each story is written by a different author with their own distinct voice, giving readers a wide range of reasons to fear what lurks beneath the floorboards.

My absolute favorite entry is “It Whispers From the Void” by Kathleen Palm. An exhausted wife and mother discovers a black spot on her basement floor that only she can see. It grows larger every day, and strange creatures, again visible only to her, crawl out and cling to her, draining what little energy she has left. The horror here is quietly devastating. Its depiction of burnout and depression is painfully real, making the supernatural elements hit even harder.

A few other standouts for me:

  • “Your First Night in Hell’s Kitchen” by Besu Tadesse
    A young up-and-coming cook learns the disturbing truth behind the restaurant’s secret ingredient.
  • “Every Piece Up and Up” by Caleb Jones
    A man watches his entire home, except the basement, vanish into the sky, leaving him alone with the dread of whatever will return for the rest.
  • “Dust” by Elizabeth S. Devecchi
    A casual fling becomes dangerously interested in what a young woman keeps hidden in her basement, unearthing all of her family’s darkest secrets.
  • “Make a Wish” by Kat Gutterman
    A family discovers a wishing well in their basement that grants their desires, at a price no one is prepared to pay.

It took me a little while to finish the anthology, but that’s on me, not the stories. I genuinely enjoyed every one of them. Five full stars from me.

Dark and Dreary: A Basement Horror Anthology is availabe on Amazon on kindle, including Kindle Unlimited, and in Paperback. And remember, you don’t have to have a kindle to read kindle books. The Kindle App is FREE and available for most devices.

And if reading this leaves you wondering whether your basement might be haunted, don’t miss How To Tell If Your Basement Is Haunted and Other Matters by Nora B. Peevy. It walks you through the steps of determining whether you’re experiencing something supernatural… or just battling your fear of dark and dreary places.

The 31st Trick-or-Treater

/ Winona Morris / Leave a comment

You know what you need at the end of November and only 3 days away from Thanksgiving? You need me to tell you about a book that’s all about Halloween!

Ben Farthing, probably best known for his “I found horror” series, gave us a Halloween Advent Calendar this year in the form of The 31st Trick-or-Treater. It was set up so that if you started reading the book on October 1st, and read one chapter a day, you would finished it on Halloween night, which is also when the book concludes.

In it there is a small community who love and celebrate Halloween with great gusto. Then, 30 children disappear all at once on Halloween night.

A year passes, during which time our main character, Bob, never stops looking for his missing daughter. Then, just as suddenly as they disappeared, the children stat Reappearing, one child a night. The children, seeming to be 100% the same as they were the moment they disappeared a year ago, come back terrified and talking about a mysterious “31st Trick-or-treater” who will arrive on Halloween night.

While Bob waits nightly to see if his daughter will return, he still keeps looking for her around the town. Where he has not managed to find her for 365 days, but whatever floats your boat dude.

I hated Bob. HATED him. He looked own on all the other people in the community for “giving up” on the missing children, was absolutely self absorbed to the point of neglecting his wife and remaining children, and still had the audacity to complain that neighbors weren’t “neighborly” anymore.

Make it make sense my dude.

I did enjoy the book in the beginning enough that I accidentally read more than one chapter at a time and had to wait for the month to catch up with me. (When a story is good, chapter breaks cease to exist for me). There were some scenes that were definitely giving Stranger Things/Upside down vibes.

But the my interest fell off, and I had to catch up several chapters to reach the ending on Halloween.

The ending….

The ending couldn’t have fallen flatter for me if it had tried. I was left with a feeing of “That’s it?”

I ended up feeling generous with a 3 star rating.

I do recommend Ben Farthing, but not this book. The Twitching House and It Waits on the Top Floor were both good reads.

Week End Review – 11-9-25

/ Winona Morris / Leave a comment

Happy Sunday friends! This week seems to have gone by amazingly fast, and horribly slowly all at the same time. Its all a blur I don’t remember too much of. Not that I do much anyway. I work. I sleep. I get up and do it again.

Lets face it though….I’m in it just to make the faux newspapers every week. Look! This week there are cow jokes:

  1. I was interviewed by Nora B. Peevy.
  2. I wrote a story for an upcoming Christmas special for The Butchered Writers. Ya’ll have to wait ’til December to read it.
  3. I read 4 Thanksgiving themed short stories and wrote a little bit about them: 4 Short Reads Filled with Family, Fear, and Feast Gone Wrong
  4. I’m still plugging away at The Butchered Writers Pinterest board. Its dropping in impression since the 31 Days of Free Horror ended. But even the best of us can’t put out a story a day infinitely (at least not if we want them to be any good.)

I have no major plans for the upcoming week really.

I have a doctors appointment tomorrow. Hopefully it will end up with me being able to come off my diabetes medicines. Or at least one of them. My at home tests have all been in range for a while now.

I want to write a story for the Horror flash fiction contest since I skipped the last 2 months. And there is a Butchered Writers anthology that a story is due for I need to get knocked out. (As soon as I get an idea)

Due to working several 6 day stretches and not having 2 days off in a row my mental health isn’t where it out to be. That means with my AuDHD I have an onslaught of doom piles growing, an I plan to tackle those this week, so you might have some before/after blogs coming up.

I also need to start working on crafting projects. I’ve started a TikTok that I hope to dedicate to my “Feral Crafts” and want to have at least one day a week here where I share what I’ve made, which means I actually have to make something. I have SO much craft stash built up I need to use it all.

Cemetery Tacos and Other Delights

/ Winona Morris / 1 Comment

Cemetery Tacos and Other Delights is a new collection from author Nora B. Peevy. It’s currently slated to arrive in November from JournalStone Publishing, but I was lucky enough to get my hands on a coveted ARC copy.

Since the author self described it as a “weird little collection” I went into it fully expecting it to be full on bizarro, and was broadsided when the first story, “Knock, Knock,” turned out to be a straightforward grief centered horror that might or might not have made me tear up a little1. I blame it on the fact that the story revolves around a stuffed animal that plays music when wound up, and I have a musical teddy from my childhood.

That moved into the second story, “The Telling Place.” That one was another straightforward horror involving a family therapist.

By this point I concluded that this “weird little collection” was actually a strong horror collection that I could sink my teeth into.

In the end, Cemetery Tacos and Other Delights did end up serving a couple of weird tales, like “Carnivorous Cows from Outer Space” and even some with a more fantastical or sci-fi element, like “How Romeo and More Saved the World” and even a little humor with “Murder Hornet man Saves Milwaukee (Sort of)”, but those little gems of light serve a pallet cleansers before diving back into the more meaty horrors.

At 14 stories long, it felt way to short to me in the end.

The Author, Nora B. Peevy, has already released a novel, Flesh eating Turtles and a novelette For the Sake of Brigid. Both are currently available on Amazon. She is also a syndicate author for Thrill Ride eZine and The Butchered Writers, and editor for Baynam Books Press and a freelance narrator and editor.

  1. (Let the records show that the defendant cried like a baby….) ↩︎