Trigger Warning Short Fiction with Pictures

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Trigger Warning Short Fiction with Pictures

Sci fi fantasy, horror, noir in under 5000 words.

18/12/2022

Roy William Neill!

18/12/2022

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Here's horror screenwriter ("Wishmaster" and multiple Hellraiser sequels) and novelist Peter Akins signing copies of "All Our Hearts Are Ghosts" (Shadow Ridge Press) today at Dark Delicacies bookstore in Burbank. I'm only halfway through it and can assure lovers of macabre fiction they'll flip for primo short stories like: (check out the noir pun title) "Z.O.A.," a tasty twist on zombie fiction, "Eternal Delight" (a possession shocker about a creature with a coal black sense of humor who literally worms its way into a host body) and the title story with an old Hwood Western vet who can take a bullet and keep on ticking.

30/11/2022

TriggerWarningShortFiction.com's ends with the grand finale — artist and co-editor John Skewes’ multi-colored, graphic novel caliber salute to Masque of the Red Death. Scroll down through multiple illustrations in this ambitious, haunting send off, with its grim fairy tale flavor.
It echoes both Poe’s plague classic and, cineapals, director Roger Corman’s brilliant, Bergmanesque 1964 film. As jaded, decadent Prince Prospero, Vincent Price gave among his starkest, less showy performances, auteur-to-be Nicolas Roeg manned the camera and master horror scribe Richard (I Am Legend) Matheson penned the most incisive of his many scripts from Corman’s Poe cycle.

21/11/2022

on TriggerWarningShortFiction.com swings on with "The Pit & The Pendulum" with a "moving" illustration from John Skewes.

Ye gorehounds I’ll wager many of you fell under Poe’s spell via Roger Corman’s thrilling 1961 film version. The swooshing, razor sharp pendulum, edging ever closer to John Kerr’s belly, caused many a sleepless night as did Vincent Price’s speech to his intended victim by peerless screenwriter Richard Matheson (“You are about to enter Hell/ the neither regions, the abode of the damned.”). It aired in prime time on ABC (which required five more minutes of footage to be shot, by a Corman assistant, to fill the two-hour slot). Less well known there’s an equally powerful version from 1991 by Stuart (“Re-Animator”) Gordon with an intense performance by Lance Henriksen as the Inquisitioner and exquisite period detail.

Universal buffs are well acquainted with “The Raven” (1935) which also features the dreaded pendulum. We’re honored to have renowned Bela Lugosi expert Christopher Gauthier, author of the new Rondo-winning Lugosi speculative novel “Dracula Never Dies” (Arcane Shadows Press), describe it:

“Lugosi dominates as the sophisticated, respectable surgeon, Dr. Richard Vollin who is completely obsessed with the Genius and macabre literature of Edgar Allan Poe and harbours in the furtive cellar a morbid museum of instrumental torture devices, beneath his grand Gothic threshold. There, he tricks an escaped repentant criminal Bateman (Boris Karloff) into transforming his face into a hideously repulsive immovable expression in order for him to do his biding in exacting revenge on those who have driven Vollin over the edge of love-sick insanity. Lugosi as Vollin basks in his sinister genius and glory, feeling a sense of superiority over the mediocre criminal Bateman. “A most unique museum of torture. Rare, old pieces all of them. But I warn you ready for use.” The film is predominantly a Lugosi feature and one of his finest screen characterizations of the 1930’s. He was exceedingly proud of this film.”

— Eric Lindbom/Trigger Warning co-editor and a horror film critic for Scaretube.com

12/11/2022

lurks on with “The Cask of Amontillado” with another original John Skewes illustration. How many lost souls are lured to their doom by enemies who full well grasp their victims’ vices (s*x? drugs?) and casually dangle them as bait? The joke is on Fortunato (ably garbed in jester clothes) whose bottle shock gives way to a ‘premature burial,’ a favored Poe trope.

07/11/2022

Ye Readers: Bury any post-Halloween blues (and orange and blacks) and welcome to !

Each week this month, TriggerWarningShortFiction.com will post two different, haunting stories from that master of macabre Edgar Allan Poe. As always, each story will be accompanied by an eye-popping, blood curdling illustration by TriggerWarning co-editor and artist John Skewes.

We commence with "The Black Cat" not only because it’s one of Poe’s most harrowing tales but it helped spawn our site. It lurked in my subconscious when I wrote a short story that also included a narrator who also kills a cat (several in fact) and the title “Cause and Effect” turns up several times in Poe’s story. John Skewes illustrated it and off we went.

"The Black Cat," first published in 1843 in an early incarnation of The Saturday Evening Post and then Poe’s faithful hometown paper The Baltimore Sun, remains a shocking, potent work. Even by today’s standards, the PETA-inclined may blanch as its guilt-ridden narrator plucks out the eye of his cat Pluto and then hangs it. Demon alcohol and probable insanity (the narrator tips his dipsomanical hand in the first paragraph protesting too much that “Yet, mad am I not – and very surely I do not dream.”) turns this pet lover into a monster (“who has not a hundred times found himself committing a vile or stupid action for no other reason than because he knows he should not?”).

A screenwriter pal recently shared a quote from Aristotle that should be tattooed on the brain of any short story writer and absolutely applies to "The Black Cat" : an effective ending should be "surprising and inevitable." -- Eric Lindbom/Co-Editor

31/10/2022

Happy Halloween! As our trick, treat yourself to new scary story -- that's elegantly economical: The Sand Dollar's Final Words by Cecilia Kennedy.

28/10/2022

Scare fans: While you deck the dungeon Sunday (10/30) before Hween Monday, check out a radio salute to horror film music. At 7:30 pm ET/4:30 pm PT visit WFMT.com and hear Chicago Tribune film critic Michael Phillips play selections from Psycho (Bernard Herrmann), the Argento version of Suspiria (Goblin), Sorry Wrong Number (Franz Waxman), Get Out! (Michael Abels) and more. The 1 hour show includes jarring never used trailer music from The Exorcist and Jerry Goldsmith's alternate score for Alien.

25/10/2022

TriggerWarningShortFiction.com is back this monster month with Jon Michael Kelley's "Wednesday's Child" a grim fairy tale illustrated by John Skewes. If spooky tales are your cup of Earl Grey, look for another new story Monday in honor of Halloween.

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