Showing results by author "Kathryn Meyer-Griffith" in All Categories

Midnight. Some call it the witching hour. Others call it the devil’s hour. Here in the graveyard, midnight is a very special time. It is a time when ghostly spirits are at their strongest, when the veil between our world and theirs is at its thinnest. Legend has it, that while most of the world is asleep, the lack of prayers allow the spirits to communicate under the cover of darkness, among the headstones, their whispers rustling in the leaves of the old oak trees. But if you’re here in the graveyard, you can tell yourself it’s just the wind....

That’s what 27 writers want you to consider, here in this collection of the strange and terrible, the shocking and amazing, the frightening and awe-inspiring. Assembled here for easy perusal are some of the finest tales of ghosts, zombies, witches, cryptozoological freaks, monsters, and aliens of the past year.

Ex-cop Henry Shore has been Chief Park Ranger at Crater Lake National Park for eight years and he likes his park and his life the way it's been. Safe. Tranquil. Predictable. But he's about to be tested in so many ways. First the earthquakes begin, people begin to go missing, then there's some mysterious water creature that's taken up residence in the caves below Crater Lake and it's not only growing in size, it's aggressive and cunning and very hungry.

Abigail Sutton's beloved husband walks out one night, doesn't return, and two years later is found dead, a victim of a long ago crime. It's made her sympathetic to the missing and their families. Starting her new life, Abigail moves to small town and buys a fixer-upper house left empty when old Edna Summers died. Once it was also home to Edna's younger sister, Emily, and her two children, Jenny and Christopher, who, people believe, drove away one night, thirty years ago, and just never came back.

Amanda Givens is careful how she uses her benevolent powers. She doesn't want the people of Canaan, Connecticut to know they have a witch among them…even a good white witch. For years, she's lived quietly in a remote cabin with Amadeus, her quirky feline familiar. At first with her husband, Jake, the love of her life, until a car accident; but now alone after his death. But when she's wrongly blamed for a rash of ritualistic murders committed by a satanic cult, she knows she can no longer hide.

Chief Park Ranger Henry Shore has dealt with and fought real live dinosaurs at his beloved Crater Lake National Park for over six years. With the help of his rangers, a few brave FBI friends, and army soldiers, he'd been victorious over a prehistoric lake creature and years later some particularly fiendish, and clever, specimens of the flying variety. He and his newspaper publisher wife, Ann, thought their park was finally rid of the monsters and they could reclaim their tranquil life in a place they cherished. Not so.

Discover 23 tales of terror, flavors of fear. Here for your twisted culinary delight, we present some of the best horror fiction of 2018. We sincerely hope you survive it.

Prehistoric creatures have again invaded Crater Lake National Park - and this time there's more than one. Henry Shore has been Chief Park Ranger at Crater Lake National Park for thirteen years now and thought the days when he'd had to fight a rogue dinosaur that lived in the caves below the lake were long over. Until one of his park rangers, to save a visitor's life, is in a deadly struggle out in the woods with a new breed of dinosaur worse than the last one.

Ten years ago Frank Lester, a Chicago homicide detective, thought he had rid himself forever of the Mud People Killer who'd kidnapped and murdered six people. Frank had shot him as he'd fled through a snowy night; had killed him, he believed, though a body was never found. But the killer wasn't dead. He'd only been waiting to take his revenge on Frank and those he cares about now...10 years later. Frank retired early and is living back in his hometown of Spookie when the killer resurfaces to take up where he left off.

Henry Shore has spent the last decade hunting for, fighting, protecting people from, and exterminating rogue dinosaurs in his beloved Crater Lake National Park, and the towns around it. Once the chief park ranger there, now he’s retired and, since all the dinosaurs are supposedly gone, he’s trying to live his best retirement life. Except, for Henry, that doesn’t seem to be possible…because of a new sorrow he’s had to shoulder, and a new insidious breed of super-smart, highly intuitive dinosaurs that have suddenly emerged to again menace humanity.

For seven long years, chief park ranger Henry Shore has been dealing with and fighting anachronistic dinosaurs in his beloved Crater Lake National Park and in the surrounding town of Klamath Falls. It began with one lone leviathan, the one he tongue-in-cheek called Godzilla. Henry and his band of heroes defeated it but others followed: the flying varieties he named gargoyles, the mutant t-rexes and roaming velociraptors that were so much smarter than their ancient ancestors.

The humans' dinosaur killing serum and extermination practices had worked far better than anyone had prayed. The Earth belonged to the humans once more, and all its lands were safe - or so the world, Henry Shore, former Chief Park Ranger at Crater Lake National Park, and his wife, Ann, had believed...until one day, years later, two new dinosaurs, craftier than any the Earth had ever seen, appeared. One of them was benevolent, a friend to mankind, and the other was not. It was blood-thirsty, eerily intelligent, and unbelievably vengeful. This dinosaur wouldn’t be so easy to kill.

Jenny and Jeff Sanders become the victims of a bizarre crime, leaving Jeff dead, Jenny in a temporary coma. She returns to her children. With Jeff's death she must move back to her childhood home in Summer Haven, Florida, where once they destroyed a family of vampires. Her brother, Joey, a local diner owner, helps them.

For years, the vampire family lived in the shadows, hidden by the night and people's disbelief; feeding on animals or throw away people who would never be missed. But as the family moves into an old theater, and uses it to cover up their crimes, the youngest of them are restless and determined to live as they like. Recklessly. Killing and feeding when and where they want. Feeding on who they want. Only the parent vampires have managed to keep them in check. But no longer.

Maggie Owen is a beautiful, spirited Egyptologist...but lonely. While staying in Egypt on a grant from the college, she searches for an undiscovered necropolis she’s certain lies below the sands beyond the pyramids of Giza. Even this discovery doesn’t give her the happiness she had hoped it would. There has always been and is something missing. Love.

A good witch must face and defeat an evil witch from another time. There are witches in the world...some are good and some of them are downright evil. Amanda Givens is careful how she uses her benevolent powers. She doesn't want the people of Canaan, Connecticut, to know they have a witch among them...even a good, white witch. For years, she's lived quietly in a remote cabin with Amadeus, her quirky feline familiar. At first, she'd lived with her husband, Jake, the love of her life, until a car accident; but now alone after his death.

Amanda has been told her 10-year-old witch child, Lizzy, is fated to someday become one of the planet’s most powerful witches. If she lives. If the world survives. Because the world is being threatened by an Antichrist called Reuben who is prophesied to bring the end of the world by destroying everyone and everything good - including the white witches and warlocks of the world - unless he can be stopped.

Someone is terrorizing the elderly and vandalizing their homes in a certain neighborhood in Spookie. As usual, Abigail Sutton, a freelance artist, and her boyfriend, Frank Lester, a retired homicide detective, are called in to help find out who's doing these awful acts. The two seem to have an uncanny knack for unraveling mysteries and getting to the bottom of such strange happenings. Some of the old people think it's ghosts in their basements, in their homes, doing these destructive deeds, but Frank doesn't believe in ghosts while Abigail isn't so sure.

The Fifth Spookie Town Murder Mystery is finally out. Who wouldn’t want to find a chest of buried treasure, ancient gold coins, and exquisitely priceless jewelry on their land? A treasure a sailor dead for over 70 years once found in the shallow waters of a distant island and later buried, hid, the remnants of at the end of his tragic life. The townspeople of Spookie have been searching, fighting, and killing each other over it for decades, and no one has ever unearthed it.

Twenty years ago psychic Sarah Summers fled from the evil that lurked in the woods behind her childhood home after it killed most of her family, but a nasty divorce and financial hardships forced her back when nothing else could have. With her son, Jeremy, she returns to her grandmother's dilapidated house and tries to begin a new life.