“What kind of man?” She wasn’t sure what Sarah was saying, because she was still shaky from crying. For a few moments, Sarah was inconsolable, but eventually she began to calm and looked up at Crystal with her huge brown eyes. Her daughter was sitting up in her bed crying, eyes shut tight, little hands gripping the stuffed gorilla she’d favored since she was an infant.Ĭrystal crossed the room in two steps and scooped up her daughter. She opened the old, creaky door and looked in on her three-year-old. Making an exaggerated groan for no one in particular, she pulled herself out of the warm nest of blankets and padded across the cool tile floor of the hallway between her bedroom and their daughter Sarah’s room. She instinctively turned to Alex’s side to give him the “you see I’m busy so please deal with this” eyes, but of course the spot was empty. She was sitting in her bed, work papers strewn about and her tension headache ramping up, when she heard the crackly cry come over the baby monitor. Things always seemed to go to shit when Crystal Meyer’s husband, Alex, was out of town. What Lives in the Woods by Nick Watts has a fairy tale quality and like those contains a moral – heed the warnings! What it may Hold by Sammi Leigh Melville feels initially like a story we’ve all heard before – until you realise exactly where the person (or entity) is a nice twist. Soul Stealers by Alyson Faye is a wonderfully dark poem which carries elements of folk horror alongside its chilling ghostliness. The use of a child’s voice, the expression of their fears, is something which always ups the sense of dread in a story. Our first story this week in Trembling with Fear is The Jangly Man by Dana Vickerson gives us a child’s nightmare. If you want a quick read, why not grab a copy here. If you’ve read his work in TWF, you will know he is a great writer and this continues in Seeing, a haunted house with a touch of southern gothic.

I recently had a chance to read Patrick Winters novella, Seeing. I’m currently reading John Connolly’s A Book of Bones, a supernatural crime which is ticking quite a few folklore boxes. Nor are we averse to a touch of noir or a dark thriller. Submissions don’t have to be horror, they can be dark sci-fi or fantasy or some other aspect of the speculative fiction field. We publish both new and established writers with many becoming familiar faces and being an ongoing open market, we are always after material. Welcome back to Trembling with Fear, our online flash zine.

Foundlings by Cindy O'Quinn