Showing results by author "Ronald Kelly" in All Categories

The rural town of Old Hickory. Tennessee was a quiet, picturesque community...until the O'Sheas came to town. Becoming the new proprietors of the town's only funeral parlor, with the help of their charming patriarch, Square McManus, the Irish family was wholeheartedly accepted by the local town folk. The thing began to happen. Strange things...horrible, unspeakable things...in the dead of night. The sighting of wolfish beasts congregating around an open grave in the town cemetery.

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....

Seven tales of terror that could only beat in the dark, diseased heart of Dixie.

Josiah Craven had been all but forgotten for nearly a hundred years. To his descendants, he was nothing more than an imposing image in an old tintype photograph and the subject of stories told in hushed tones before the fireplace at night. A traveling mountain preacher who had returned from his wanderings and died under mysterious circumstances - buried in an unmarked grave with a wooden stake through his heart. Dudley Craven had heard the tales, but never believed them...until his plow unearthed an ancient coffin in the center of a lonesome mountain pasture.

It was a legend in Fear County. A hideous, flesh-eating creature - part snake, part earthbound demon - that feasted on the blood of innocent children in the cold black heart of the Tennessee backwoods. But 10-year-old Jeb Sweeny knows the horrible stories are true. His best friend Mandy just disappeared. He also knows that no one has ever had the courage to go after the monster and put an end to its raging, bestial hunger. Until now.

The bloody War Between the States and a harrowing confinement in an enemy prison camp had turned Joshua Wingade into a broken man. His nerves and spirit shattered by the barbarity of battle, and demoralized by a cause that his heart secretly despised, Wingade returns home in hope of finding peace and healing.

When you first enter The Halloween Store, things seem normal. Fun and frightful decorations, ghastly costumes and masks of the season, and bags of candy galore. Then, as you travel farther into its shadowy depths, things begin to change. The air smells of damp autumn leaves and candle-scorched pumpkin. The shelves of All Hallows’ Eve fare grow darker and more disturbing. Strange and unsettling things of Halloweens past and present lurk amid the cobwebs and dust....

From out of a shadowy backwoods hollow echoes a dark threat from the past, nearly a century lost and forgotten. The rural town of Harmony, Tennessee, possessed a disturbing secret; a secret so ancient that most of its residents were completely unaware of it. Even the last survivors of a vigilante raid long ago have filed the tragic events of that autumn night away, totally unaware of the evil that remains, dormant, but forever patient, among the tall pines and thick-leaved kudzu of a place known only as Hell Hollow.

Repulsive. Disgusting. Beyond the realm of good taste...A serial killer records the abominations he has committed...on the only journal he has in his possession. All stem from a voodoo curse cast upon the unfortunate survivors of a Louisiana family...This is the sick stuff.

After his family is killed by a pack of rabid wolves, Jefferson Gray survives the horrid disease himself, with the aid of a Cherokee medicine man. But, unfortunately, he can not banish the hatred that dwells within him: an animosity toward dangerous game, particularly timber wolves. Fifteen years have passed. Timber Gray is known throughout the western territories as a seasoned tracker and hunter. But can Timber tackle his greatest challenge - a pack of 50 wolves led by the legendary Cripplefoot?

He’s back! That was the first thought that crossed Cindy Biggs’ mind when she heard of the brutal triple-murder in her hometown of Coleman. Yes, the awful crime was nearly identical to the one performed during her hard-scrabble childhood at the time of the Great Depression. But this was 2014, not 1936. Cindy was no longer an innocent nine-year-old child, but an elderly woman who used her gift of second sight to assist the police every now and then.

Below the pale orb of a full moon, a lone boat navigates the dark channels of the Louisiana bayou, moving between ancient cypress and the heave mats of Spanish moss that dangle from their gnarled limbs. Who are the two who brave the swamp at night? One is a lanky Cajun man by the name of Pierre, while the other is his visiting cousin from Tennessee. The man folks call...the Old Storyteller.

Previously available on audio cassette from Darkscribe Press, this collection was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1992. Dark Dixie collects the following works of southern horror by author Ronald Kelly. This audiobook includes all the stories from the original audio and several more: Introduction by Ronald Kelly (2010); "Yea, Though I Drive", previously published in Cold Blood (1991); "Miss Abigail's Delicate Condition", previously published in Noctulpa (1988); "The Cistern", previously published in Cemetery Dance; and five more.

Little Cindy Ann knew things no one else knew and saw things no one else saw. Ever since she'd nearly died of fever, the gift of second sight had been hers. Only, it didn't seem like such a gift when the other children called her a witch and wouldn't play with her. Or, when her visions resembled nothing so much as her worst nightmares.

The summer of 1932 was a troublesome one for Jack Alder. His grandmother's health was fairing poorly, they were having a difficult time making ends meet during the Great Depression, and the town banker was threatening foreclosure on the family farm. The future seemed dismal and help was nowhere in sight. But Grandmama's faith in God brought renewed hope in the form of a childhood toy lost decades ago in an abandoned cave; an antique toy that could earn enough to drive the wolf from their door. It would take a journey across three rural counties to get them there...

It usually happens by chance. You are alone in a deserted parking lot or at an interstate rest stop, when a man approaches you out of nowhere. An average-looking fellow with a good-natured smile; a man who, in your opinion, certainly couldn't harm a fly. Then, in a flash, it happens. The pepper spray, the duct tape, the forceful imprisonment in the oily darkness of a car trunk.

Webster's Dictionary defines the word "appetite" as: a) any of the instinctive desires necessary to keep up organic life; specifically: the desire to eat, or b) an inherent craving; an insatiable appetite for nourishment. Of course, there are other terms for appetite as well. Craving, coveting, hunger, lust, gluttony, ravenousness, want, yearning, and passion, just to name a few. South of the Mason-Dixon Line, we call it a "hankering". When thinking of appetite, two supernatural beings come instantly to the minds of horror fiction readers: vampires and werewolves.

It was passed down from generation to generation. The legend of The Dark'Un, the strange beast that roamed Pale Dove Mountain. The dark monster that no one had ever seen - at least not and lived to tell about it - except, so it was said, old Fletcher Brice who lived at the foot of the mountain. No one really believed in The Dark'Un. It was just a story to make a child's flesh crawl.

Halloween is more than a holiday; more than a fun time of candy and costumes for the young. It is inoculated into our very being at an early age and there it remains. As we grow old, it grows dormant… but it is still there. For the lucky ones, such as us, it emerges every year, like a reanimated corpse digging its way out of graveyard earth to shamble across our souls. And we rejoice… oh, if we are the fortunate ones, we most certainly rejoice.

Ronald Kelly returns to the land of his ancestry and explores the dark superstition and frightful folklore of Ol’ Éire. Seven stories of Celtic gothic terror… tales to quicken the beat of the heart and chill one’s bones to the very marrow.