Harvey Click's Blog - Posts Tagged "vampires"

Night Conjurings: Tales of Terror

I’m very pleased to announce my new book, Night Conjurings: Tales of Terror, is now available for pre-order at Amazon. For a limited time the price is just 99 cents.

This one is a collection of horror stories. I poured my villainous heart and a tremendous amount of time into these tales, trying to make them all very different from one another in tone, premise, voice, and effect. Most of them are not as grisly as my novels, though I warn you two or three of them have some squirm-worthy moments and all of them, I hope, will inspire deep chills even if your thermostat is cranked up.

Short stories aren’t as popular now as they were in the heyday of the pulps. That’s a shame, especially in the horror genre. Certainly it’s possible to maintain suspense and mounting tension in a full-length horror novel, but the overall effect is much different from the concentrated frisson of a well-crafted horror story that can be read in one terrified sitting. Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, and so many other horror masters used the short story form to focus their terrors like sharp pins in the tender psyche, but today most horror writers spread their dark tidings over hundreds of pages in sprawling novels. That’s all well and good, but reading a 400-page novel with 20 major characters is a whole different experience from reading a story with two or three characters trapped claustrophobically inside one brief but fearsome drama. To be fair, some horror writers today are working hard to reinvent and revitalize the short story form. A good example is Laird Barron, one of the current masters of horror short stories, and I hope at least a few of my new tales will be allowed to stand with his in the same haunted cemetery.

Some cousins and old friends who knew me as a child like to remind me of how I used to scare the crap out of them by spinning spooky tales when we sat around a campfire with the darkness closing in around us. I hope each yarn in this collection contains at least a spark or two of that campfire. I’m sure they contain some of the same darkness.

Here’s the blurb:
For fans of Clive Barker and H. P. Lovecraft… Ghosts, vampires, demons, serial killers, and other deadly denizens of the dark haunt this collection of chilling short stories by horror master Harvey Click.
• An unhappy and unloved boy summons a substitute mother—with sharp teeth.
• Two teenage boys learn it’s better to leave a spooky abandoned house alone.
• Can ghosts kill? Denise is about to find out the hard way.
• When her creative writing teacher offers to teach Kathy how to write a horror story, she finds herself trapped inside one.
• A man discovers he may be a killer, though he can’t remember the murders.
• A man with a terrible past, a wizard from the dark side of the moon, and a pitchfork perform a dark drama of murder and madness.
• A time traveler attempts to bring his dead fiancée back to life.
• Many people wish to be ageless, but what happens when an immortal woman begins to lose her mind?
• An artist literally draws a dead woman out of her grave.
• An elderly woman seeks to recover her forgotten past, but some things are better left forgotten.
• A petty swindler tries to buy good luck but ends up with the sort of luck nobody would want.
• And finally, a brief fable about a box of very sharp silence.