Gomer Pyle cut to commercial and a voice boomed out, louder than the show had ever been, “Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! Come out to the agricultural arena for the most bone-shattering display of monster trucks to ever grace the...

Darius got the Beetle from his cousin for a few hundred bucks. Darius needed a car and his cousin’s interest had moved on to other projects—and the Beetle was absolutely one of his cousin’s projects. The interior of...

“The lightning flashes,” Jonathan breathed into the mic, “and you are bound here with us for another tale of terror in The Closet of the Castle of Dr. Calamity.” David shook the metal sheet for thunder while Rachel...

The Book, like all books, wanted to be read. That was its purpose, its mission, but it was a task so difficult to achieve because a book cannot do anything on its own. The reader is responsible for...

In this story we start with a group of scrappy kids who are convinced that an older man in their town is a vampire. Initially Monster Squad or Fright Night vibes. They enlist a neighbor to help in...

The man arrived in town a little after the spring thaw. He’d come in anticipation of the summer piecework—shucking corn, landscaping, and general carpentry—and wanted to put out feelers in the community. He was a large, shaggy man...

When I was little, my mom told me that I wasn’t her son. When her real son was a baby, the Faeries had come and swapped her precious little baby with me and that’s why I was always...

Leslie went running through the woods, following the path to the bonfire pit without thinking about it. Her fight-or-flight response had kicked in and all she knew was the way behind her was blocked so she had to...

The central library was two blocks south of the main downtown thoroughfare, the one the town used for holiday and homecoming parades. It was a Carnegie Library and its architecture had all the early-to-mid-century pomp and grandeur the...

Tipper Gore’s concerned parent shtick begins with a simple story that is both obviously crafted and clearly false. She claimed she became radicalized for the cause of censoring music when she heard her daughter listening to “Darling Nikki”...

Arthur’s two disappearances shadowed everyone in town. The first—his kidnapping to be sent to the de-punkification boot camp—resulted in him coming back a changed person, a change consistently played up by Pastor during service. Arthur was used as...

The directions kids gave to the bonfire was “Follow the mushrooms,” as though there was a distinct route marked by the fungus. It was a semi-prank, a snipe hunt suggested by people who weren’t completely confident that there...

The summer was rough on Judith, anyone would say so. She and Frank had sent little Arthur to that de-punk boot camp the year before. She hadn’t wanted to. Arthur was such a sweet boy even if he...

[I’m participating in Monstrous May, a daily art-prompt challenge started by Johannes T. Evans. I’m mostly use the prompts to develop a story about a small Indiana town in 1987 where evangelical overreach leads to myriad personal tragedies...