The Ladies of Horror
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The Creepy Old House 
by Marge Simon 

For as long as the boy could remember, his family had lived in a scary looking old house. In fact, it looked exactly like the haunted houses full of slimy monsters you see in the movies. The kids at school always teased him and his sister about it. “Their mom is a witch and their daddy’s a warlock!” Of course, only the part about their dad was true.

October had been a very bad month for them. The boy was worried. His little sister wouldn’t stop crying, and both of them were very hungry. His father had left last week, dressed in a long black cape with red velvet lining and tall leather boots. Ostensibly, he was going to a Halloween party at the office, but he never came back. Their mommy went to sleep and he couldn’t wake her up. When her ghost showed up around midnight, he knew she was beyond help. No electricity meant the cell phone was dead, so he couldn’t call the school or the police. When he went outside, the winds were so great he barely made it back to the house. Boards began creaking on their own, and the tree branches looked like giant claws in the moonlight. Finally, the boy found a stale pumpkin spice pie. He made his sister wait until he said grace and then they split the moldy old pie About an hour later, they both died of food poisoning, and joined their mom in haunting their scary looking old house

At last, the village had its very own haunted house. For most of the children, it was the best Halloween yet!

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Fiction © Copyright Marge Simon
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com 

More from Marge Simon:

Victims
by Marge Simon and‎ Mary Turzillo

The title of this collection sets you up for the surprise of lyrical stories of victimizations with unexpected endings for the villains. Be ready to have your heart opened and cheer for perceived victims, human (made and unmade) and other life forms, victorious in the hands of these two award-winning poets. —Linda D. Addison, award-winning author, HWA Lifetime Achievement Award recipient and SFPA Grand Master.

Across histories and cultures and from Auschwitz to Babylon this book leaves you questioning who are the victims, and regardless of your conclusion you’re likely to get throat-punched. This is horror where everyone has a knife, and is ready to deliver this message: “Remember, you are always guilty. —Herb Kauderer, author of Fragments from the Book of the After-Dead.

Simon and Turzillo have only gone and startled me again. What a collection! Brutal. Beautiful. This quiver of poems strikes with the unflinching truth of persecution and oppression as seen through the lens of feminism. Prepare to come away bruised and yet strangely bolstered by Victims, a symphony of sadness orchestrated by two masters of dark poetry. —Lee Murray, Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson Award-winner.

This is one of the braver dark poetry collections I’ve seen in a while. Horror poets generally employ victims in their work, but the focus is generally on the Evil. Turning the camera the other way is unusual, unsettling, emotionally risky, and surprisingly effective. From their stark opening take on Pygmalion, to the ending poem about the wasted life of Stateira of Persia, this powerful collection teases apart an impressive number of the threads of victimhood. Some are the usual cases, but quite a few are surprises, or reversals, or cases with unexpected layers. There is nothing repetitive about this collection. —Timons Esaias, winner of the Asimov’s Readers’ Award and the Winter Anthology Contest

Available on Amazon!