• Fearsome Fiction Podcast,  NEW

    Mark McNease’s Fearsome Fiction Special Edition: Short Story ‘Jawbone’ from 5 of a Kind

    May 13, 2026 /

    Today in this special feature of the Fearsome Fiction Podcast we’re offering another short story from Mark McNease’s collection, ‘Five of a Kind.’

    Jawbone tells the story of young Richard who was eighteen years old when a head-on collision on a snowy Indiana road took the lower half of his face. He survived — and that, in many ways, was the cruelest part.

    We Richard Krump across the decades after his accident: the surgeries that promised normalcy and delivered nothing, the friends who never showed up to his homecoming party, the little girl in a drugstore who gave him his name, and the slow, steady retreat of everyone he ever loved — until only his books, his silence, and finally his paintings remained.

    A haunting, deeply human story about disfigurement, isolation, and the particular cruelty of surviving intact on the inside while the world refuses to see past the outside. Jawbone begins where a young man’s life as he knew it ends.

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  • Fearsome Fiction Podcast,  NEW,  TRUE CRIME TUESDAYS

    True Crime Tuesdays – A Fearsome Fiction Feature: Shot By a Killer Clown

    May 12, 2026 /

    True Crime Tuesdays — A Fearsome Fiction Feature: Shot by a Killer Clown

    It was Memorial Day weekend, 1990, in Wellington, Florida. Marlene Warren answered her front door to find a clown holding flowers and balloons — and was shot in the face at point-blank range. The clown got back in the car and drove away. Marlene died two days later.

    The case had a suspect almost immediately. It had circumstantial evidence. It had motive. What it didn’t have — for twenty-seven years — was enough to make an arrest. This week on True Crime Tuesdays, we follow one of the most bizarre cold cases in American history from a quiet Florida neighborhood in 1990 all the way to a courthouse in 2023, and a prison release that left a victim’s family without the justice they deserved.

    Fearsome Fiction is produced by MadeMark Media. New episodes every Tuesday.

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  • NEW

    This Week’s Subscriber Giveaway: A Vivid Press Edition of Genre Classic ‘The Circular Staircase, by Mary Roberts Rinehard

    May 6, 2026 /

    The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehard
    A Vivid Press Edition

    SUBSRIBE AND DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE COPY

    Welcome to another LGBTSr subscriber giveaway!

    This is the story of how a middle-aged spinster lost her mind, deserted her domestic gods in the city, took a furnished house for the summer out of town, and found herself involved in one of those mysterious crimes that keep our newspapers and detective agencies happy and prosperous.

    So begins one of the most entertaining and shrewdly constructed mysteries in American fiction.

    Rachel Innes has no intention of playing detective. She simply wants a quiet summer at Sunnyside, a sprawling country house rented while its owners are away in California. But the first night brings strange sounds on the staircase. By the third, the servants have fled. And by the fourth, there is a dead man at the bottom of the circular staircase — a man her niece and nephew knew all too well.

    What follows is murder, a vanished nephew, a bankrupt bank, hidden rooms, buried secrets, and a house that refuses to surrender its dead. Through it all, Rachel Innes — sharp-tongued, clear-eyed, and utterly unwilling to be frightened off her own lease — refuses to leave until she knows the truth.

    First published in 1908, The Circular Staircase launched Mary Roberts Rinehart to national fame and sold over a million copies. It pioneered the “Had-I-But-Known” school of mystery writing, inspired the Broadway sensation The Bat, and gave Bob Kane one of the early sparks for Batman. At the peak of her popularity, Rinehart was more widely read than Agatha Christie.

    She deserves to be read again.

    A Vivid Press Annotated Edition of a Genre Classic vividpress.com

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