Showing results by author "Clay McLeod Chapman" in All Categories

Richard doesn’t have a past. For him, there is only the present: a new marriage to Tamara, a first chance at fatherhood to her son, Elijah, and a quiet but pleasant life as an art teacher at Elijah’s elementary school in Danvers, Virginia. Then the body of a rabbit, ritualistically murdered, appears on the school grounds with a birthday card for Richard tucked beneath it. Richard doesn’t have a birthday - but Sean does.... Sean is a five-year-old boy who has just moved to Greenfield, Virginia, with his mother.

The body of Glenn Partridge’s 15-year-old son was discovered in a vacant lot nearly forty years ago. The police are still no closer to finding the murderer decades later. Glenn refuses to let the memory of his son fade—or let anyone else within this small working-class community forget. His long-suffering wife signs him up for an amateur fiction-writing workshop at the local library, just to get him out of the house and out of his own head.

At sixty-six years old, Winston Kemper has always been a nonentity. No one notices him. His simple existence barely registers for those who come into contact with him. Some call him feeble-minded. He is a janitor at the local church, a groundskeeper by default, and that’s it. No friends, no family. When he’s done with work, he returns home—a remote, single room apartment located above a garage—and that is where his true work begins.

After striking out on her own as a teen mom, Madi Price is forced to return to her hometown of Brandywine, Virginia, with her seventeen-year-old daughter. With nothing to her name, she scrapes together a living as a palm reader at the local farmers market. It’s there that she connects with old high school flame Henry McCabe, now a reclusive local fisherman whose infant son, Skyler, went missing five years ago. Everyone in town is sure Skyler is dead, but when Madi reads Henry’s palm, she’s haunted by strange and disturbing visions that suggest otherwise.

A father returns from serving in Vietnam with a strange and terrifying addiction; a man removes something horrifying from his fireplace, and becomes desperate to return it; and a right-wing news channel has its hooks in people in more ways than one. From department store Santas to ghost boyfriends and salamander-worshipping nuns; from the claustrophobia of the Covid-19 pandemic to small-town Chesapeake USA, Clay McLeod Chapman takes universal fears of parenthood, addiction and political divisions and makes them uniquely his own.

Gathering ten modern masters of the strange and unsettling, Unquiet Guests sets fire to the blueprints and reimagines the haunted house from the foundations up. From dreamlike visions of an abandoned future mansion to a sentient building grown tired of its owners, these rooms echo with whispers of the disenfranchised and the lost.

Noah Fairchild has been losing his formerly polite Southern parents to far-right cable news for years, so when his mother leaves him a voicemail warning him that the “Great Reckoning” is here, he assumes it’s related to one of the many conspiracy theories she believes in. But when his own phone calls go unanswered, Noah makes the long drive from Brooklyn to Richmond, Virginia. There, he discovers his childhood home in shambles, a fridge full of spoiled food, and his parents locked in a terrifying trance-like state in front of the TV.

Ever since their on-again, off-again college romance, Erin hasn’t been able to set a single boundary with charismatic but reckless Silas, who has been chasing the next big high since graduation. When he texts her to spring him out of rehab, she knows enough is enough. She is ready to start a career, make new friends, and meet a great guy—even if that means cutting Silas off. But when Silas turns up dead from an overdose, Erin’s world falls apart.

This collection contains all-new stories of coulrophobia (fear of clowns) from some of the most talented horror writers alive!

A twisted and thrilling genre-bending novel that shines a light on the terrors of the U.S. opioid epidemic, Clay McLeod Chapman has written an instant classic about a mysterious new drug plaguing a small town and the haunting side effects. At sixteen, Kyra is still haunted by the horrors she saw...

A man who’s back from the dead meets a woman who’s from somewhere even worse in Clay McLeod Chapman’s new horrormance about love, possession, and just a little murder. After a traumatic accident that almost cost Jordan his life, he’s finally starting to feel normal again. Well, maybe not...

After a small coastal town is devastated by a hurricane, the survivors gravitate toward a long out-of-service payphone in hopes of talking out their grief and saying goodbye to loved ones, only for it to begin ringing on its own. As more townspeople answer the call, friends and family believed to have been lost to the storm begin searching for a way back home.

Ella Louise has lived in the woods surrounding Pilot's Creek, Virginia, for nearly a decade. Publicly, she and her daughter Jessica are shunned by their upper-crust family and the Pilot's Creek residents. Privately, desperate townspeople visit her apothecary for a cure to what ails them - until Ella Louise is blamed for the death of a prominent customer. Accused of witchcraft, both mother and daughter are burned at the stake in the middle of the night.

A sleazy entrepreneur tries to make love and money out of the back of his van in downtown LA.

A writer reveals his dark past to an unfortunate stranger on a long walk up a snowy mountain at dawn.

An author visiting The Stanley Hotel writes a tale of two families in duress speeding toward a tumultuous encounter on a winding wintry road.

Larry Fessenden and Glenn McQuaid created the acclaimed "Tales from Beyond the Pale," audio theater inspired by the vintage radio shows. In “Like Father, Like Son” by Clay McLeod Chapman, a scientist loses his five year old son in a car accident after losing control of the wheel. Wracked with grief, he refuses to let his boy go-choosing to bury himself in his work instead: Reanimating human tissue. On the brink of a major breakthrough, he’s determined to have a family reunion, no matter how many body parts it takes.

Conceived during a fog-drenched car ride with nothing beyond the windshield but a horizon-less void, Larry Fessenden and Glenn McQuaid created the acclaimed Tales from Beyond the Pale, audio theater inspired by the vintage radio shows of Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles. Having previously released 10 studio-recorded tales for Season One, Fessenden and McQuaid decided to up the ante and stage a second season of Tales before a live audience at the performance venue Dixon Place in downtown New York City.

Winner of 3 NRC Radio Awards for best audio dramas that "push the state of the art to the next level" (Slate Magazine), Tales from Beyond the Pale is the daring series of audio dramas created by Larry Fessenden and Glenn McQuaid for Glass Eye Pix.

Bestselling author Clay McLeod Chapman hosts FEARMONGERS, featuring interviews with and readings by horror fiction’s biggest stars. Produced in cooperation with Verso Studios at the Westport Library.