Horror – The Drabblecast

Achtromagk shuddered, lost in nightmare images: crimson lightning dotting a wasteland, twilight despair and feeble railings, isolation in a mewling throng. It thrashed and twisted but could not escape, could not stop the unwanted vistas in its mind. It was silent. And soft. And dark… Next up in Lovecraft month, a heart-warming tale of an […]

I have seen the dark universe yawning Where the black planets roll without aim— Where they roll in their horror unheeded, Without knowledge or lustre or name… To kick of Lovecraft Month Norm once again reads an H.P. Lovecraft classic.

Another in the Drabblecast trifecta series. This time, we dip in to the Alphabet Quartet collection.

Cynthia couldn’t explain what she’d just seen in the vegetable patch. She didn’t want to look again. She considered going back into the house, crawling back into bed with Mikey, and putting it down as a beer-inspired dream. But that pinkish dome with the fuzzy down had felt soft under her fingers, and there had […]

And so came Creature out of the wasteland and into the city, bouncing from hilltop to hilltop like a bulbous ballerina skipping across the knuckles of a great hand. He was big as the moon and black as the night, and he came crashing into the city like a silent meteor. The cityfolk watched his […]

A Trifecta is comprised of three similarly themed stories selected by The Drabblecast’s editors. Now for some raucous scary fun! Love means never letting go. And biting..

“Are these fiddlebacks ferns mommy?” Cindy asked. Fiddlehead honey. Margery said absently. “Fiddlebacks are nasty spiders.” It was only later that she would realize Cindy, for once in her vacuous, Barbie obsessed life, was right.” The first episode of Women and Alien’s month 2011 featuring three stories, each exploring nasty, insectile alien menaces. Fiddleback Ferns, […]

I woke to this new darkness, swirling about me. A phrase sticking in my mind — “Lazarus Syndrome.” What happened to people when they had died, but, for some reason, some lack of death’s completion — some unfinished business — had rejoined the living. In this episode of the Drabblecast, with a theme ‘Control,’ Norm […]

As always, he took delight in my interest in the scientific pursuits. ‘My assistant took the journey yesterday, by way of a shot to the heart. Prior to that, our trials on convicts included strangling, drowning, and beheading. By Jove! That reanimation was a sight to see…

The horn blares and the red light floods down over the Cragmer’s Slaughter House sign and thirty feet below me the gates part wide like a huge and starving mouth. Then pours forth the herd…

One day when a surge of dying summer heat roiled through the waterways, spoiling my fishing, I punted home to find Mama running down the grassy swell towards my docking-place. Hope died in her face when she saw my punt empty and I knew then what had happened…

In early December, Brad Miro walked into the office of his partner, Dr. John Estes, and said, “I’ve got our next target. It’s perfect. The public is going to love it.” John closed his eyes. “I haven’t even finished writing the paper about the Mongolian death worm yet” This Christmas Special episode of Drabblecast starts […]

They needed a virgin to make a bargain with the sea monster who hunted the waters off their coast, and they were not willing to sacrifice their daughters… With the theme this week being about freedom, this episode of Drabblecast sees Norm musing about the irony of song about freedom written by a man name […]

His home is in the dense jungle along the banks of the Liverpool River. Should anyone venture into that jungle Garkain, who can fly as well as walk, will wrap himself around the intruder, and smother him with the loose folds of skin which are attached to his arms and legs. —Charles P. Mountford, The […]

Kyle lifted another lightsaber. “Want one? They’re not as random or clumsy as a flamethrower.” “Sh*t. The geek is strong in this one. Sure, Jedi me.” Kyle tossed it to her with a grin. Hang on Grandpa. We’re coming… Norm starts this week’s Drabblecast starts with a bbardle about Phantom Claus, to get us in […]

It started in the cemetery, like these things usually do. Everyone knows being in a cemetery after dark’s a bad idea, which is exactly why Kyle had begged his grandpa to take him… This episode of Drabblecast is a Halloween Special where our (g)host Norm gives us suggestions on how to simultaneously celebrate Breast Cancer […]

A puppet’s words infect. They taint. They do this without ever sounding like a thing, without the listener realizing they have been spoken. A true ventriloquist, as those who are educated and informed may or may not choose to tell you, is an adept in the art of keeping those mouths shut… On this episode […]

You are to imagine, Twigling, the Red Bride to be a human, such as yourself, although she is in truth a creature of the Var...

The note itself simply read, “TUESDAY 7:13 PM”. Unsigned, undated, unadorned. Stuck into my door, just above the latch where I’d be sure to find the note immediately upon my return from my errands about the city…

That’s when I saw it. A thing — no, not even a thing, just an impression of a thing; a momentary imperfection in that seamless blue — that teased at the edge of my vision. My eye flicked toward it, but it either whipped away faster than the eye could follow or it hadn’t really […]

Dexter crouched beneath the toxic fruit trees in his grassless back yard, turning over black earth with the spade he’d taken from the old man, and every shovelful revealed worse things: clumps of cinders and the dust of ashes; rusting nails, practically dripping tetanus; wickedly-curved shards of brown glass; bullets of various sizes, crusted with […]

Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness. Wretched is he who looks back upon lone hours in vast and dismal chambers with brown hangings and maddening rows of antique books. Such a lot the gods gave to me – to me, the dazed, the disappointed; the barren, the […]

Trifecta 13, oh yeh, the end of all things

Two years ago it must’ve been. Me and Manny and a couple of the other boys — Carlos and T-Bone — met up at the last Dairy Queen outside of Lompoc. Manny was going on at me about that shortcut I liked, Route Nine. “I’m telling you that place is God-awful weird, Joe.”

If the snowman, whose name was Wink, had known that the meat man would invent such a rotten thing, he never would have built the man in the first place… 3rd Annual Nigerian Scam Spam Contest Ducks are Bastards: Part I: