Showing results by author "Isaac Thorne"

 Road Kills is a collection of short tales of dark comic horror from the mind of Isaac Thorne. These stories are all connected to travel, to the road. After all, it is always lurking there, quiet and dark, just waiting for you to come out for a drive or a walk or a jog.  

Meet Diggum, the local graveyard caretaker who lives in a small cottage at the edge of the lot. Diggum has spent most of his life angry with god, whom he blames for the devastating house fire that cost Diggum his family. But Diggum has a secret. It is a secret he will carry to his own grave. It is a secret that he hopes will finally get him his ultimate revenge on god.

It's easy to become overwhelmed to the point of paralysis these days. Just ask grade-schooler Tina. Better yet, ask Tina's granny. Her granny has had a rough time of late. One afternoon Tina finds herself helplessly captive in the backseat of her granny's Lincoln. She can only watch as the pressure of daily decision-making forces away the last of her granny's sanity. Meanwhile, the Lincoln speeds and careens wildly down the streets of Tina's hometown with Tina trapped in the backseat and her granny paralyzed behind the wheel.

In a near future of zero tolerance, Big Brother is not entirely born of the government. He is also your local news, your social media friends and followers, your neighbors. Everything you say and do is monitored - and judged. Almost overnight, the fabric of society has dissolved into a culture of carrions: a murder of crows.

Mike Bragg is a man you can trust. He'll fix your car up right. He might even drive it home himself, just to make sure it's running exactly the way he thinks it should before you get it back. But when he accidentally runs over a small brown rabbit on his way home from work one day, Mike chalks up the incident as just another insignificant rodent casualty.

There are monsters in this world. They look like us. They behave like us. They even have dreams and ambitions like us. But they are not us. At least, we do not like to think so. Sometimes, as is the case with traveling family man Reed Reese, we are confronted by these monsters. Usually when we are most vulnerable. They might not even view it as a confrontation, but we do.

It's easy to tell yourself there's no such thing as ghosts, at least until you meet one face-to-face. Then it becomes a matter of convincing yourself that you are not seeing what you think you are seeing. If you happen to be Jake, a barely school age child who awakens one night to find an elongated abomination in female form floating by his bedside, there is no amount of daylight or parental soothing that can convince you that ghosts are not real.