I know. It’s been quiet around here for a while. But I’ve finally got some news.

A new Halloween anthology is coming out this coming autumn season from Dark Ink, the publisher who released my collection The End of Summer: Thirteen Tales of Halloween, and it will feature a new story by yours truly. This was a story I kicked around for a few years — something I’d originally written for a book of short horror stories geared toward younger readers that has yet to come to fruition and probably never will. Something about this particular story had me coming back to it more and more to gussy it up, and soon the themes within it became more mature. Once that happened, the gore quotient was upped a little bit as well. I love me a good story or flick where someone’s head falls off, but that’s not something I normally prefer to write. However, for this one, I wanted to push the envelope it a little. By the end, I realized I’d inadvertently written an homage to films like Phantasm, Dead & Buried, and Stephen King’s IT (but no fear all you coulrophobics — the story is clownless.) It also made me realize that I like to write stories about people telling stories, which was an interesting development and it’s left me wondering why.

The title of this new collection is Ghosts, Goblins, Murder, and Madness: Twenty Tales of Halloween. There’s no firm release date as of yet, but it’s tentatively planned for late summer/early fall.

Naturally, there will be updates to this as they are available.