Showing results by author "Andersen Prunty" in All Categories

Doug Backus is a normal young man trying to lead a clean Christian life. But when mysterious and gruesome deaths begin occurring in his town of Clover, Kentucky, he learns that his life can never be as wholesome as he wants. Along with his heathen friend Crank and pariah neighbor Whitney, he becomes involved in an exploration of the town's secrets that will either lead them to their doom or answer all the questions Doug has about almost everything.

From Dust Bowl freakshows to modern day existential horror, Deathtripping collects thirty-five short stories written over a twenty-year period. Disturbing, provoking, surreal, absurd, and bitingly morbid, these stories are invitations to a world that wants to swallow the reader whole. Contains the following stories: ROOM 19 • MARKET ADJUSTMENT • THE DUST SEASON • THE MAN WITH THE FACE LIKE A BRUISE • THE PHOTOGRAPHER • THE FUNERALGOER • THE NIGHT THE MOON MADE A SOUND • THE JACKTHIEF • THE SCREAMING ORCHARD • GLOWERS POINT • CRUEL WOMEN WITH WHIPLIKE SMILES • THE SMOKE...

Boy meets girl. They fall in love. They move in together and start a new life. They're beautiful and they have new things, expensive things, the best of everything, whatever they want. But that's only the surface. Beneath the surface is something much different. Something much darker. Theirs is a love like no other and only one of them will survive it.

Social networks can be used for a number of things such as finding out what friends and family members are up to, trying to get girls to take their clothes off on camera, raising awareness, and organizing protests, revolutions, and relief efforts. But what if one man decided to use a social network for one of the most idiotic causes in human history? Join the hopeless and brain damaged Andy Boring in his quest to Fill the Grand Canyon and Live Forever!!!

Barton King is young, rich, out of control, and planning the most awesome party he’s ever thrown. The theme: Mexico Frat Funland. There are going to be khaki cargo shorts, red cups, even a piñata. Maybe sombreros. Team Klaus will be there to DJ the event. But it won’t be without its challenges. People are canceling left and right. No one seems to be acting the way they should and space birds are ripping the sky apart. What is intended to be the social event of the summer totters on the brink of becoming a violent nightmare.

After 10 years, Hansel Nothing returns to his boyhood home, unable to remember anything that has happened to him since he left. Back home, he stays in Zerostrata, a treehouse in the backyard. The Nothing family is as dysfunctional and depressed as ever. His mother keeps a cat on her head and incessantly munches prescription medication. His father has left the house to pursue a career as a superhero. His brother wants to be the dad's superhero sidekick and thinks he can fly. Hansel's life is changed forever when he meets Gretel, a free-spirited woman who runs naked through the woods every night....

A slag is what survivors are calling the slug-like maggots raining from the sky, burrowing inside people, and hollowing out their flesh and their sanity. Slag Attack features four visceral, noir stories about the living, crawling apocalypse. The Devastated Insides of Hollow City - Hack detective Shell joins in the insane search for a girl named Pearl, who just might hold the key to restoring order. Vincent Severity - A woman is taken hostage by a very severe man in a sleazy El Camino.

Seven-year-old David Glum watches as his grandfather is abducted by a legendary herd of elephants. Twenty years later, David returns to his parents' home to focus on growing a beard, a goal he feels sure he can accomplish. Once the beard reaches a respectable girth, uncontrollable things begin happening around him. His mother dies. Maybe. His father might really be a man named Gary Wrench. David is sure of one thing: His family is cursed.

Mason Becker is a self-published writer suffering from mild success. After the death of his girlfriend, he quits his job, moves into a tiny apartment in a small town in Ohio, and spends the next several months convincing himself to leave for anything other than food, beer, or cigarettes. He doesn't even really consider himself a writer. He's a guy who cashed in his 401(k) and is quietly biding his time until he has to find another job. On the night he finally forces himself out to a local bar, he comes back to the apartment to find his twin brother, Doug....

Clint is a laughable stalker who lives in a hoard with his decaying mother. Stella is his current fascination, but Clint has no idea what kind of woman Stella is. She’s playing a lifelong game and only she knows the rules. Now she’s made a wrong move and finds herself at Clint’s house, victim to his perverse attentions and bizarre behavior. Is it the perfect place to hide from her past or an insane prison from which she may never escape?

It is a world where men wake up with laser beams for eyes and wives play sadistic practical jokes. It is a world where body parts randomly fall off and fathers turn into antelopes. In this world, vampires and spontaneous combustions are a constant threat. The Overwhelming Urge is a collection of bizarro flash fiction, containing ridiculous characters and absurd stories reminiscent of David Lynch and Franz Kafka.

Saul Dressing is a flabby middle-aged librarian who just wants to be left alone to listen to jazz, watch porn, and cultivate his toenails. All of this changes when a soldier in a camouflage sweat suit shows up to draft him into the army of the United States of Everything. His mission is simple: Go to a foreign country no one has ever heard of and incite the opposition to strike first. All alone in the middle of a desert with no enemy in sight, Saul must come to terms with the absurdity of his situation. Thus begins a surreal journey into the politics of war, consumerism, and giant robots.

Brad's mostly been a loner, content with his job and his tiny apartment. He's never thought much about being part of something. He's never really thought about the bigger picture. Until he meets a beautiful (and possibly psychotic) girl named Dawn. Dawn leads Brad into a vicious world as hedonistically carnal as it is brutal, forcing Brad to decide if he's going to dig deep within himself and continue to resist the community he's remained apart from his entire life or embrace it and accept his new reality.

This darkly offbeat novel opens with the narrator, Wallace Black, as the target of the school bully's violence. After suffering a horrendous beating, Black goes home to his equally abusive family. As a punishment for fighting at school, his mother straps a set of grotesque horns to the top of his head. He is unsure of where the horns came from. They have always been in the house. And they contain a power no one could have expected.

In the spirit of the shot-on-video horror of the '80s, Meat Photo is a transgressive, absurd horror comedy and the love child of Andersen Prunty and C. V. Hunt. Meat photos are the hottest trend. Everyone has one or is willing to do anything to get one. It’s all anyone can talk about on social media. Grab your meat photo. Wear it like a mask. Join the Great Migration to the local Dollar General.

The papers call it “The Suicide Virus.” The teenagers of Gethsemane, Ohio, are killing themselves at an alarming rate. Steven Wrigley is trying to survive his senior year of high school, still reeling from the death of his mother and adjusting to life with his father. Along the way, he meets a girl who becomes another kind of obsession: Elise Devon.

Seven bleak stories from Andersen Prunty, including: The Jackthief, The Screaming Orchard, Glowers Point, Cruel Women with Whiplike Smiles, The Smoke of Samuel, Sad Clown and Kentucky.

When Emma and Kip Dupree bought their first home together, they got a lot more than they bargained for. They wanted to get out of the city and get on with their lives on the quiet cul-de-sac. Instead, an object of obsession brings their lives to a screeching halt. Who is the woman living next door? Why does she do the curious things she does? Why do Emma and Kip feel like their lives have been so disrupted? How do they get her to stop? The Duprees are only sure about one thing: the social contract must be upheld at all costs.

Things went wrong for Alvin and April Blue. In a hospital at night, April sits next to Alvin, bandages covering his burned skin, listening to his heartbeat on a monitor, and wonders how they ended up here. But she can never imagine the world of insanity, drugs, and crime that Alvin has fallen into. A place where fetuses are used to create simulacra, radiation victims prowl the streets looking for sacrifice, houses are arbitrarily detonated, and the police force is more like a marauding gang of thugs. A place where it's always dark and morning is dead....

Zombies. Werewolves. Vampires. Mummies. Satanic cults. Unspeakable cosmic horror. Andersen Prunty welcomes you to Twin Springs, Ohio, in his latest collection of horror stories.