Showing results by author "Ronald Kelly" in All Categories

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.

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....

Vile, unstable, brimming with ill intent, like pus on the verge of eruption. Repulsive to gaze upon and even more disturbing to comprehend. It reaches out and discovers that the others—its siblings—have abandoned this cancerous womb long ago. Angry and alone, it thrashes violently…tearing, clawing its way from dormancy into daylight…and onto the dark playground of your bookshelf.

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....

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.

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.

They were called diablos hoyos. Vicious black-furred beasts that fought in the pit with the raw fury and savage ferocity of Satan himself. For their owners, they were a lucrative investment. For the people of Sulphur Springs, Texas, they were the best entertainment they'd had in a long while. For Bowie Kane, they were his darkest nightmare come true.

Following the brutal murder of former Confederate officer Joshua Wingade, the pursuit for the renegade vampire Jules Holland and his hellish followers continues across a war-torn South. The newly resurrected gunfighter Dead-Eye, accompanied by Louisiana mojo man Job, find themselves hot on the trail, eager to rescue an abducted child and put an end to the death and destruction the outlaws and the dark witch Evangeline have conjured with the aid of Necronomicon and the otherworldly Hole Out of Nowhere.

Driven by the desire to rescue his abducted son and a relentless thirst for retribution, the zombified gunfighter, Dead-Eye, continues his search for the renegade vampire, Jules Holland, and his unholy entourage. Accompanying him on his journey is the Louisiana mojo man, Job, who is hellbent on putting an end to his daughter Evangeline's wicked shenanigans. As long as she possesses the demonic tome, Necronomicon, and holds the ability to open the otherworldly Hole Out of Nowhere, no territory is safe from the infinite evil the dark enchantress has at her fingertips!

Institutionalized is the latest anthology from the creators of The Better Off Dead series. This installment brings you stories of the mentally unbalanced, the damaged and disturbed, and the criminally insane. Some are locked up. Some are not. We recommend you sleep with one eye open.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Following the bloody showdown in Hellbound, the zombie gunfighter Dead-Eye and the Louisiana mojo man Job continue their pursuit of the renegade vampire Jules Holland, the Unholy Three, and the dark enchantress Evangeline. They soon find themselves in the middle of a Utah desert, drawn into a conflict between a wealthy gold baron and a mysterious entity with a supernatural hunger for vengeance and violence. Soon, they find themselves descending into the dark depths of the Earth to confront the immortal brute and the master who controls it!

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.

Down below the Mason-Dixon Line, deep in the shadowy hills and hollows of Tennessee, lives a teller of terrifying tales and a spinner of dark yarns unlike any you have ever heard before. Stories to chill your bones and pepper your flesh with goose bumps. What his true name may be, no one knows for sure. But, if you listen closely, you can hear his voice ringing through the dead of night!

In this collection of harrowing holiday tales, Ronald Kelly leaves 10 frightful and horrific gifts in the Christmas stockings that hang from the mantle of your cheerful fireplace. Ghastly and gruesome presents that slowly unwrap and burst into life while you are tucked, snug and warm, in your bed and take on nightmarish form in the icy winter hours of Christmas Eve, turning comfort and joy into terror and dread.

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.

This audiobook features two books: Black Christmas and Bloody Legacy. Also includes the short story "Killing Time". The citizens of Cedar Bluff, Tennessee, have never recovered from the Christmas Massacre of 1978 - that tragic day when Richard McFarland, armed with a shotgun, abandoned his wife and son and selected a local church as the stage for a bloody, murderous rampage. McFarland paid for his crimes in the electric chair. Yet, not even death will stop him from finishing what he started.