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The Devil’s Wood Project Nears Completion (Phase One)
I haven’t been this obsessed with writing and creating a project in a very long time. Something took old of me the first time I touched the walking stick that inspired all this. The book is set to release in September, and in tandem I’ve been almost frantically creating an entire world for the Devil’s Wood: book, videos, a separate journal being written after the fact by an anonymous source, and even a game!
Check it all out at TheDevilsWood.com
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Fearsome Fiction Podcast: The Devil’s Wood Journal Begins
A walking stick. A skull. A bullet. A curse.
Buried for in the Pennsylvania woods, something has been waiting. When a young boy uncovers what’s been hidden beneath the leaves, he sets loose a curse that’s about to find its way back into the world — and into the hands of a man who has no idea what he’s just brought home.
Enter the Devil’s Wood.
Two new entries drop every week, exclusively on the Fearsome Fiction Podcast — subscribe so you don’t miss the story as it unfolds.
Discover more of the mythology, characters, and world of Devil’s Wood at TheDevilsWood.com
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True Crime Tuesdays on the Fearsome Fiction Podcast: Belle Gunness, The Black Widow of La Porte
It’s another True Crime Tuesdays on Fearsome Fiction. This episode heads back to the turn of the last century, to a farmhouse at the end of a quiet road in La Porte, Indiana — where a Norwegian immigrant named Belle Gunness placed lonely-hearts ads in the newspaper, invited her suitors to bring their savings and “come prepared to stay forever,” and made sure they never left. This is the story of the Black Widow of La Porte.
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The Twist Podcast 332: Yes-o for Yasso, Food Show Fanatics, and Kentucky Fried Karma
In this week’s show Mark extolls the virtues of Yasso’s frozen Greek yogurt—creamy, low-cal, and still delicious. Then we confess to a food show addiction, and why people can’t stop watching contestants cook, bake, careen around in food trucks and compete on screen. Plus: the Twist takes a look at the end of Mitch McConnell’s long, dubious career.
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The Twist Podcast 331: America Turns 250, the Cherry Tree Murders, and Profanity Goes Mainstream
This week your co-hosts dig into the significance of America’s semiquincentennial and what it means to celebrate a milestone birthday in a country that feels as divided as it does hopeful. Then it’s on to Washington, DC, where the beloved cherry trees are threatened by another pointless golf course. And finally we regret the rise of profanity in public life and wonder when politicians and TV pundits stopped minding their language.
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Fearsome Fiction Podcast: Bram Stoker’s Classic ‘The Judge’s House
This week on Fearsome Fiction we’re sharing a rare gem. “The Judge’s House” buy Bram Stoker follows Malcolm Malcolmson, a student who rents a remote, cheap old house in the fictional town of Benchurch to study for exams in isolation. Locals warn him the house has a bad reputation, but he ignores them and moves in.
The house once belonged to a notoriously cruel hanging judge. As Malcolmson settles in, he notices strange things: a persistent rat that keeps drawing his eye to an old alarm bell rope, and an oppressive sense of being watched. Eventually he realizes there’s a chair in the room that seems to move on its own toward the fireplace whenever his attention lapses.
The story builds toward a chilling climax involving the judge’s portrait, the bell rope, and Malcolmson’s fate. It’s a classic “isolated scholar in a cursed house” setup that plays well for a horror reading, with Stoker’s knack for slow dread. And now, The Judge’s House.
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Subscriber Freebie: Hell To Pay – A House in the Woods 1 & 2
Prepare to scream. “Hell to Pay: A House in the Woods 1 & 2” are free for subscribers to my site, and “Devil’s Wood” is coming soon. I’ll be giving away 25 free Kindle editions to the new book, so subscribe now if you haven’t yet. Epub and PDF via BookFunnel. -
True Crime Tuesdays on the Fearsome Fiction Podcast: The Case of the Giggling Granny
Welcome to True Crime Tuesdays on Fearsome Fiction. Today we’re going to talk about “The Giggling Granny,” a woman who baked prune cake, read romance magazines, giggled at her own arrest, and murdered at least eleven people—most of them her own family.
Her name was Nannie Doss. The press called her the Giggling Granny, the Lonely Hearts Killer, the Black Widow, and Lady Bluebeard. She was a small, cheerful, grandmotherly woman from Alabama who seemed like the last person in the world you’d suspect of anything. Which, of course, is exactly why she got away with it for so long.
Her weapon of choice was arsenic—rat poison, mostly, the kind you could pick up at any hardware store in the American South in the 1920s through the 1950s. She put it in whiskey, in coffee, in stewed prunes, in prune cake. She put it in the food of husbands, grandchildren, her own mother, her sister, her mother-in-law. She did it over and over again for nearly thirty years, and nobody suspected a thing—until the very last one. Because Nannie Doss was always smiling. And you don’t suspect the woman who’s smiling.
This is her story. Narration provided by Wondervox.
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Journaling Workshop at the Grundy Library, August 1 (Bristol, PA)
I was delighted to hear from the Grundy Library again. I did a fiction writing workshop there a year ago, and I’ve been invited back for a journaling workshop in
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Fearsome Fiction Podcast: A Very Strange Bed, by Wilkie Collins
This week we present “A Terribly Strange Bed” by Wilkie Collins, first published in 1852 in Household Words, the celebrated literary magazine edited by Charles Dickens. A young Englishman in Paris visits a disreputable gambling house, breaks the bank at Rouge et Noir, and makes the mistake of accepting a bed for the night. What follows is one of the most gripping sequences in Victorian fiction—methodical, claustrophobic, and chilling in the way only the best suspense can be.
Wilkie Collins is best remembered for The Woman in White and The Moonstone, but this early story reveals the master at work long before those landmarks. He thought enough of it to adapt it for live readings later in his career. Once you’ve heard it, you’ll understand why.
No ghosts. No monsters. Just a room, a bed, and the slow, silent certainty of something descending.
Narrated in the Fearsome Fiction tradition—atmospheric, unhurried, faithful to the original text.
Story: “A Terribly Strange Bed” by Wilkie Collins (1852) — Public DomainSubscribe for new episodes every week.
